The Battle of Agincourt has caught the imagination of many writers over the centuries and it was one of the inspirations behind my novel, Longbow Girl. Why does it have such power?
Along with the battle of Crécy in 1346 and the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 was one of the three legendary victories for the English against the French during The Hundred Years’ War. This long-running war was a series of conflicts waged from 1337 to 1453 by England against France as the English Kings tried to win French territory and the French throne for themselves
In the lead up to the Battle of Agincourt, it looked as if King Henry V was leading his army to disaster.
Two months earlier, the King had crossed the English Channel with 11,000 men and put siege to Harfleur in Normandy. After five weeks the town surrendered but half of Henry’s men had died in battle or of disease. Henry needed to flee back to England. He headed northeast to Calais where he aimed to meet the English fleet and sail home. But on the way he marched into a trap! At Agincourt, a massive French army of twenty thousand men were waiting, hugely outnumbering the exhausted English archers, knights, and men-at-arms.
And it wasn’t just any old army waiting for him. The cream of the French Aristocracy had gathered to inflict what they thought would be a massacre on the English. The great prize was to be King Henry himself who they aimed to capture and ransom for a fortune.
Only it didn’t work out that way.
Against all the odds, King Henry V triumphed over a fresh army four times bigger than his own because, arguably, King Henry’s forces had the longbow. The massively powerful longbows were the medieval equivalent of modern machine guns. They could wound at four hundred yards, kill at two hundred and penetrate armour at one hundred yards. The five thousand longbowmen, each loosing fifteen arrows a minute, let fly a total of seventy five thousand arrows in one minute: an arrow storm that was said to have blocked out the light of the sun. It caused thousands of casualties directly but also indirectly, by maddening the French horses, which trampled the close-packed ranks of French foot soldiers.
So if one thing could be said to have won the “unwinnable” Battle of Agincourt, it was the Anglo-Welsh Longbowmen. Traditionally, the glory of victory had always been assumed by the aristocracy, the Knights and the Men-at Arms, not by the yeomen or peasant archers. The Battles of Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt changed the martial balance of power between the nobility and the yeomen, or peasant farmers who wielded the longbow. The idea that strength and skill could triumph over wealth and status was a revolutionary one.
I loved the idea of these humble men changing the course of history with a simple piece of wood. Particularly since from the age of eight, I’d been practicing with my own simple piece of wood.
That was when my father gave me my first longbow. I loved shooting at targets, honing my skill. There’s something very visceral about shooting a bow and hearing the thwack as your arrow hits the bull’s eye (or the Gold as archers call it.) As an adult, shooting my bow, I wondered about a young girl, a longbow girl, and what it would have been like for her to have had to use her weapon for real, maybe to save her life, maybe to save her whole family’s life. And so began Longbow Girl.
Five facts about the Battle of Agincourt and the longbowmen who fought there:
- The longbows had a draw weight of 140 pounds. That’s 10 stone. Can you imagine picking up a 10 stone person with one arm, a person who was fighting back against you, resisting you?
- Longbowmen needed to be phenomenally strong and skilful. They had to train from around eight years of age (some children started at five) in order to be able to develop the necessary strength to master a full-sized longbow, or Warbow as it was known then, in battle.
- It was such a legendary victory that Shakespeare wrote his play, Henry V, about it. There’s a memorable speech with a quote that is still used to denote camaraderie on the battlefield: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”
- The Archers were paid six pennies a day. That’s nine pound a year.
- The Black Archers of Llantrisant fought at Agincourt. These archers were the descendants of the famous Black Archers who saved the life of the Black Prince at the Battle of Crécy. The grateful Prince gave them a parcel of land in Llantrisant to belong to them and their descendents in perpetuity – forever! This is a theme of my novel Longbow Girl but I didn’t discover it until long after I had written the book. And the weird thing is, Llantrisant is 2 miles from where I grew up.
Language of the Longbow
Expressions and gestures intimately connected with the Longbow that were used over 500 years ago are still used today, only most of us don’t know it:
Have you ever heard of someone described as highly strung? Comes from the longbow. If the string is too short when you draw the bow it will be too highly strung and could snap. Horribly disfiguring you!
Have you heard of someone who likes to keep things under their hat, someone who keeps things hidden? That is what the archers did with their bowstring to protect them from the rain which would affect the way they shot their arrows. They would keep them safe and dry under their hats.
Have you ever heard the expression, used when someone makes a real mess of things, often referred to as a cock up? This refers to the position of the cock feather on an arrow, which should face sideways but if the arrow were loaded onto the string incorrectly faces up and then doesn’t fly properly. That is a cock up.
Then, finally, the V SIGN!!!! I’m sure you will have seen this gesture. This gesture comes to us from 700 years ago, from the Anglo Welsh archers at Crécy. What the French did if they ever captured our archers was to cut off these two fingers so they would never shoot an arrow again. They would often kill the archers as well but as a minimum they cut off those two fingers. So when the enemy armies faced up the archers had a habit of showing the French that they had their two fingers, that they were ready to shoot arrows, ready to wage war and this is what they did.
THE LEGACY OF THE LONGBOW LIVES ON. THWACK!!!
Linda Davies’ book Longbow Girl is out now.