Most people who know one thing about Agincourt know that a small English army of archers beat a great French host on Saint Crispin’s Day, and that Henry V rallied his men with a speech about a band of brothers. Fewer know what the king did when the fighting was, for a moment, in the balance: he ordered that the French prisoners be killed.
The Horror
The battle was fought on October 25, 1415, near the village of Azincourt in northern France. Henry’s army, on its way towards Calais, met a French force at Azincourt. The numbers are disputed. Modern estimates of the English run from about 6,000 (Barker, Sumption and Rogers) to about 9,000 (Curry), with perhaps five in six of them archers. For the French, Curry offers about 12,000, Sumption 14,000 and Mortimer up to 15,000, while Rogers, counting armed servants, reaches about 24,000. Barker thinks the English were outnumbered by at least four to one. Where the battle was fought is not settled either: the traditional site lies between the Tramecourt and Azincourt woods, but Michael Livingston argued in 2019 for a site west of the village.
Longbowmen made up about five in six of the English, and the French were beaten back with heavy losses. Many French nobles were taken prisoner, to be held for ransom. Then, as the English account in the Gesta Henrici Quinti has it, once the first French assault had been beaten back, the French rearguard was seen to be still fresh and numerous. Le Fèvre and Wavrin describe it moving forward in battle order. Most chroniclers say Henry feared that the prisoners, who outnumbered the men guarding them, would pick up weapons from the field and turn on his exhausted army. The order went out that the prisoners were to be killed.
That much is the documented core. What follows is argued over.
How many were killed? Nobody knows. Wikipedia’s summary of the scholarship says “possibly thousands”, with only the highest-ranked spared because they would fetch large ransoms. The French lost about 6,000 dead overall, and the number of prisoners is put at between 700 and 2,200. A review of the 2015 Curry and Bell volume gives the cautious version: many prisoners died on Henry’s orders, but hundreds did not. Rémy Ambühl’s chapter in that book shows that many survived to be ransomed, usually within a year or two, and that the fate of a prisoner depended largely on rank; great lords such as the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon were taken to England and held for years.
Who did it? The historian John Keegan argued that the killing was done by about 200 archers, that English knights refused to take part because they thought it dishonourable, and that relatively few prisoners died before the French reserves fled and Henry cancelled the order. In his reading the aim was to terrorise the prisoners into submission rather than to murder them all.
Why? The chroniclers who favoured Henry gave military necessity, and none of the contemporary writers whose accounts are summarised in the sources consulted criticised him for it. Modern historians have been less comfortable. Some have called it a war crime, and Andy King has examined how far the laws of war of the period actually forbade killing prisoners who had surrendered. The link to the French attack on the English baggage train, led by Ysembart d’Azincourt, is unclear: the sources do not clearly tie it to the order, and Barker dates the raid to the start of the battle, not the end.
The English casualties are also disputed: at least 112 named dead in the records, 600 according to Monstrelet and 1,600 according to Wavrin. The French dead included the constable, Charles d’Albret, three dukes, nine counts and an archbishop. Henry returned to England on November 16 and was received in London in triumph a week later.
Two famous pieces of the story are not on the documented side of the line. The “St Crispin’s Day” speech, with its “we few, we happy few”, is Shakespeare’s invention of 1599, not a record of anything Henry said. And the tale that the French had sworn to cut two fingers from the right hand of every archer comes from Burgundian sources, which report Henry telling his men of the boast; whether the French really said it is open to doubt. The two-finger gesture that popular tradition attaches to it is legend, with no contemporary record to confirm it.
The Modern Relic
Azincourt is a village of about 300 people in the Pas-de-Calais, and the field is still farmland. A visitor to the traditional site finds mostly grass, with a small memorial and some explanatory plaques, and a circuit of about four kilometres can be walked or driven. It does not look like a place where thousands died, and the exact ground is itself uncertain, since little archaeological evidence has been found for the site that tradition names.
For the story you go to the Centre historique médiéval d’Azincourt, also called the Azincourt 1415 Centre, in rue Charles VI. It replaced the village’s earlier battlefield museum, which was known for its model knights made from Action Man figures, and its building is shaped like a longbow. It was revamped in 2021 and presents the story in French and English; Professor Anne Curry took part in its design. Its stated aim is to correct some of the myths that Shakespeare and later films set in people’s heads about the battle. Check the opening times and prices before travelling, since they change.
