Dan Snow (5:30)
The story of Agincourt, it really stretches back nearly 350 years before the battle itself, right to that moment when the Dukes of Normandy, particularly William Duke of Normandy, became King of England after that Norman conquest after 1066. Well that triggered a bit of a problem in the internal politics of France because you now have a subject of the King of France who is also King of England, so he's the subordinate to the King of France as the Duke of Normandy, but he's also sort of his equal as King of England, depending on which hat he's wearing. So it's all very, very tricky. And given that the internal politics of the space that we now call France was pretty complicated already, this was just adding fuel to a very combustible situation. The Dukes of Normandy were constantly campaigning. They're constantly fighting against their neighbouring counts and dukes in Brittany and Maine and Anjou and Flanders, and those conflicts are being intensified. Now. The Dukes of Normandy had the resources of England behind them. They also pose a much greater threat to France than the kings of France would have liked. And quite quickly, it becomes a central aim of French strategy to drive the English out of Normandy to dispossess the King of England of his Norman and his other territories in France, incorporate all those into France proper and, you know, slightly rationalize their relationship. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. King John of England, Duke of Normandy. An incompetent, cowardly, weakling King John was driven out of Normandy by the French and then was on the verge of being toppled by his own magnates, helped by a French invasion of England, before, thankfully, he died of dysentery, dysentery which saved his dynasty. His son, Henry iii restored Plantagenet fortunes within England with the help of the legendary William the Marshal. More on that in another podcast. But King Henry ruled over just a tiny little rump of his family's patrimony in France. He ruled over the area of Gascony in southwest France. And from Henry onwards, there was a desire among his English successors, his descendants, to seize back their lands from France, particularly the Dukedom of Normandy, which was so important to that ruling family. That's where they'd come from. Henry's son, Edward I, was pretty warlike. Now, Edward's grandson, Edward III, was also a very effective warrior. And Edward III's situation was transformed by an unlikely and untimely series of deaths. In 1314, the French king Philip died, and then three of his sons and one of his grandsons all died one after the other over the next 14 years. It was one of those spectacular and catastrophic inheritance crises in Western European history. The Capetian line, the French royal line, which had been so successful in producing reasonably healthy, tolerably competent boys, was now out of juice. And the nearest surviving male relative was the last king's nephew, who was, unfortunately, Edward III of England. His mother, Isabella, had been a daughter of Philip I. Of France, she's known rather unfairly, but in a fantastically cool nickname, the she Wolf of France. But it's like one of those insults that actually becomes a badge of honour. But like Margaret Thatcher being called the Iron lady, the she Wolf of France's son was now coming for the French crown. And that, folks, well, that's really the start of the Hundred Years War. And that explains why Henry V, who was Edward III's descendant, that explains why he was campaigning in France in the early 15th century. The English royal line hadn't had an entirely smooth time. During the course of the Hundred Years War, Richard II was deposed. He was murdered by his cousin, Henry iv. Henry IV then got embroiled in a lengthy civil war, a huge uprising in Wales, the revolt of the mighty Percy family in the north, problems with Scotland. It all kicked off in a battle. During that civil war. His young son, Prince Henry, fought at his side the Battle of Shrewsbury. He fought very bravely. He was terribly disfigured by an arrow in the face. And he commanded his own forces in Wales. Rarely has a royal heir, the Prince of Wales served such a brutal and effective apprenticeship as Henry V on his way to the throne. The man was a warrior through and through, and he had a vision. He wanted to unite England, he wanted to breathe life into the ambitions of his predecessor, Edward iii, to. He wants to resurrect that claim to the French throne and unite England with a common enemy. It's the old trick, folks, a big foreign military invasion trying to unite everyone at home as well as all that. Henry V was really the first king that started to embrace the English language. Obviously, since William the Conqueror, the official language of the English ruling elite had been Norman French, but English is now used. Henry writes sort of proclamations on how his campaigns are going and he writes them in English and he has officials read them out in all the shires. Henry has this vision of an England united of his people coming together to fight to restore his lawful rights as King of France. On foreign fields, gathering as much booty along the way as they can. He uses that vision to inspire parliament. The MPs vote him the taxation required to launch an invasion. And so Henry V, in 1415, age 29, launches his invasion of Normandy. And it's very important. He did land in Normandy, he didn't land in Calais, which at that stage was an English possession. It was a heavily fortified garrison town. He landed in Normandy because that was the place to re establish his rights as Duke of Normandy, secure the Duchy of Normandy and Then perhaps even use that as a springboard to take the crown of France. So he lands with about 12,000 men, we think. There's a very brilliant Professor, Anne Curry, she's calculated that it was about 12,000 men. It was a bigger army than any assembled in the 14th century. So this was a national enterprise. 25% of those men we might loosely call knights. They wore heavy armor, they had a horse, they had all the equipment required. They were men at arms. They were paid a shilling a day if they were ordinary men at arms, two shillings a day. Though if they were of higher status, people like Jukes got a lot more money. You were paid not on your military prowess, but where you fitted into the social hierarchy of England at the time. Now, the other 75% of the army are the famous archers. They're paid just six pence a day, so you can take a lot more archers than you can take men at arms. It's more cost effective and it helps that they're a gigantic force multiplier. They're armed with what's been described as the medieval machine gun. They're armed with the longbow, a viciously potent weapon that Henry would have learned all about on his campaigns in Wales in the early 15th century and on the fields of Shrewsbury. That almost cost young Henry his life. He'd have been left in no doubt as to the effectiveness of the longbow. They could shoot arrows rapidly over long ranges with great accuracy, with huge stopping power. It was such an effective weapon. But the campaign didn't start that well. For six weeks, Henry's force was bogged down, besieging the town of Harfleur. Harfleur now is a little town most people would have heard of. It's been superseded by the giant artificial harbour at Le Havre, just across the Seine estuary. But it fulfills the same strategic purpose. It's the port at the mouth of the Seine, that giant river that runs into the heart of France towards Paris, and thus it's a hugely important position for trade and defence. Harfleur eventually surrendered, but it was a nightmare of a siege. Henry himself directed the whole thing. He was in the trenches, for example, edging his artillery ever closer forward. Cannon, that artillery, that's reasonably new in this period. Henry had used them to batter some of the castles held by Welsh rebels 10 years before, so he knew about sieges and he knew about the potency of cannon. Apparently. He sighted them himself, he inched them closer. He eventually opened up a breach in the wall, actually battered down a stretch of Wal. Now, the citizens of Harfleur did not fancy the prospect of English troops storming their city, the place being left to the mercy of rampaging Englishmen intent on theft, rape and the other horrors of war. So they surrendered. Instead of all that, there was an orderly transfer of power. Henry V was back in at least this one corner of Normandy. But it was much later than he'd hoped. It was now September. The campaigning season was coming to an end. He'd lost troops in the siege. He'd lost troops through dysentery and disease, which is always the inevitable consequence of large gatherings of soldiers in poor sanitary conditions, all staying together without a basic knowledge of drinking water and removal of human waste. And so Henry had a problem. He was running out of time. He was running out of troops. But even so, he decided to march back through Normandy to Calais and return from Calais to England. Now, why did he do this? I don't think we can be sure. It may have been that he was wishing to demonstrate that as a man who claimed to be Duke of Normandy, he was moving through his duchy with impunity. It may have been that he was looking for a fight. He wanted to take on the French. He was daring them to come out and fight him as he carelessly marched across French terrain. It may have been that he wanted to emulate the terrifying raids launched by Eber III and his son, the Black Prince, in the early phases of the Hundred Years War. We know that you wanted to get up in the faces of the French because he challenged the Dauphin, the Prince, the other candidate for the French throne, the heir to the House of Valois, he challenged this Dauphin to single combat. Now, the Prince, the Dauphin never showed up. For fairly obvious reasons. Henry V was a lean, mean killing machine. He'd won his spurs on countless battlefields and in countless skirmishes in the hills of Snowdonia or facing down the rebels at Shrewsbury. The Dauphin, by comparison, was a fat, lazy muppet. He got up at 4 in the afternoon. He banqueted all day. In fact, to be honest, he sounds like potentially a more attractive character. However, he was not suited, let's say, to one on one combat at the height of the Middle Ages against one of Europe's premier warrior kings. He once collapsed when he was crossing from one side of Paris to another. It was so exhausting. So let me say he's not going to pick up a sword and fight Henry V. It's just not going to happen. So Henry launched himself across Normandy, heading for Calais and Currie again. That historian thinks he put around 1200 men into the garrison at Harfleur, and he'd lost around 2,000 men. Either they went home to England or they died or became casualties during the siege. So we think he's got perhaps 8,000 men. We know there's dysentery in the ranks. We know they've got to march 260 miles in the space of about two and a half weeks. The French initially played it quite tactically. Like Edward III before him, Henry needed to cross the great water barrier of northern France, the River Somme. Now the French army quite cleverly blocked off the various crossings of the Somme from the north side, and Henry V was forced to go ever further inland to find a crossing that he could use. He was being pushed further and further away from Calais. His supplies were being eaten up. His troops were getting more exhausted. This would not be the last time the Somme played an important part in British military history. You listen to Dan Snow's history. More Agincourt coming up. AI had the time of my life. Hey, I never felt this way before.