Alas, that confidence has vanished, if not for the events, at least for the numbers engaged. In 2005 Professor Anne Curry, who is among the most respected authorities on the Hundred Years’ War, published her book Agincourt: A New History, in which, after detailed argument, she proposed that the numbers engaged on either side were much closer than history has ever allowed. The usual consensus is that about 6,000 English faced around 30,000 French and Dr. Curry amended those figures to 9,000 English and 12,000 French. If true, then the battle is an impostor, for its fame surely rests on the gross imbalance between the two sides. Shakespeare could hardly be justified in writing “we few, we happy few” if the French were very nearly as few.

Now Sir John Keegan was right in describing any attempt to assess numbers engaged in a medieval battle as beset by “wild uncertainty.” We are fortunate that a number of eyewitnesses wrote descriptions of the battle, and we have other sources from writers who left accounts shortly after, but their estimates of the numbers vary enormously. English chroniclers assess the French forces as anything from 60,000 to 150,000, while French and Burgundian sources offer anything from 8,000 to 50,000. The best eyewitnesses cite French numbers as 30,000, 36,000, and 50,000, all contributing to the wild uncertainty that Dr. Curry made even wilder. In the end I decided that the generally accepted figure was correct, and that around 6,000 English faced approximately 30,000 French. This was not, I must stress, the result of close academic study on my part, but rather a gut instinct that the contemporary reaction to the battle reflected that something astonishing had taken place, and what is most astonishing about the various accounts of Agincourt is that disparity of numbers. An English chaplain, present at the battle, estimated that disparity as thirty Frenchmen for every Englishman, an obvious exaggeration, yet strong support for the traditional view that it was the sheer numerical inequality of the engaged forces that persuaded folk that Agincourt was truly extraordinary. Still, I am no scholar, and rejecting Dr. Curry’s conclusions seemed foolhardy.

Then, in the same year that Dr. Curry’s history appeared, Juliet Barker’s book, Agincourt, was published and proved to be a vivid, comprehensive, and compelling account of the campaign and the battle. Juliet Barker acknowledges Dr. Curry’s conclusions, yet courteously and firmly disagrees with them, and as Juliet Barker is as fine a scholar as she is a writer, and as, like Dr. Curry, she had done her research among the French and English archives, I felt more than justified in following my instinct. Any reader who wishes to know more about the campaign and battle would do well to read all three of the books I have mentioned: The Face of Battle by John Keegan, Agincourt: A New History by Anne Curry, and Agincourt by Juliet Barker. I should also acknowledge that, although I used many many sources to write this novel, the one book to which I turned again and again, and always with pleasure, was Juliet Barker’s Agincourt.

What is beyond contention is the disparity within the English army. It was primarily an army of archers who, when they left England, outnumbered the men-at-arms by about three to one, but by St. Crispin’s Day had a preponderance of nearly six to one. You can find still more argument, endless argument, about how those archers were deployed, whether they were all on the flanks of the English army, or were arrayed between or in front of the men-at-arms. I cannot believe archers were placed in front, simply because of the difficulty of extricating them through the ranks before the hand-to-hand fighting began, and believe that the vast majority were indeed on the left and right of the main line of battle. A good discussion of archery in battle can be found in Robert Hardy’s terrific book, Longbow: A Social and Military History.

I have tried, as far as possible, to follow the real events that took place on that damp Saint Crispin’s Day in France. In brief it seems certain that the English advanced first (and it seems Henry really did say “let’s go, fellows!”) and re-established their line within extreme bowshot of the French army, and that the French, foolishly, left that maneuver uncontested. The archers then provoked the first French attack with a volley of arrows. That first assault was by mounted men-at-arms who were supposed to scatter and so defeat the feared archers, but those attacks failed, partly because horses, even wearing armor, were fatally vulnerable to arrows, and because of the stakes that formed enough of an obstacle to take any impetus out of the charge. Some of the retreating French horses, maddened by arrows, appear to have galloped into the first advancing French battle, causing chaos in its close-packed ranks.

That first battle, probably consisting of about 8,000 men-at-arms, already had severe problems. The fields of Agincourt had recently been plowed for winter wheat and it is true, as Nicholas Hook says, that you plow deeper for winter wheat than for spring wheat. It had also rained torrentially the previous night, and so the French were trudging through sticky clay soil. It must have been a nightmare. No one could hurry, and all the while the arrows were striking and, the closer the French came to the English line, the more lethal those arrow strikes were. There is more argument about the effect of arrows, with some scholars claiming that even the heaviest bodkin, shot from the strongest yew bow, could not pierce plate armor. Yet why else would Henry have so many archers? The arrows could pierce plate, though the strike had to be plumb, and undoubtedly the best plate, such as that made by the Milanese, was better able to resist. If nothing else the arrow-storm forced the French to advance with closed visors, severely restricting their vision.

A good archer could shoot fifteen accurate arrows in a minute (I’ve seen it done with a bow that had a draw-weight of 110 pounds, some twenty to thirty pounds lighter than the bows carried at Agincourt, but far heavier than any modern competition bow). Assume that the archers at Agincourt averaged a mere twelve a minute and that there were 5,000 bowmen; that means in one minute 60,000 arrows struck the French, a thousand arrows a second. It also means that in ten minutes the archers would have shot 600,000 arrows and the conclusion is that they must have run out of arrows fairly quickly. Yet what that storm of arrows achieved was to drive the flanks of the disordered French advance inward, onto the waiting English men-at-arms. That shrinking of the French line must have exposed the flanks of the English army, both composed of archers, to the French crossbowmen, but there is no evidence that the French seized the opportunity. Apart from a few volleys at the very beginning of the battle the French archers appear to have taken no part, a fatal error that must be ascribed to the abysmal lack of leadership on the French side.

The battle lasted between three and four hours, yet it was probably as good as over in the very first minutes when the leading French battle struck home. The French men-at-arms were weary, half blinded, disordered, and mud-crippled. What seems to have happened is that their leading ranks went down quickly and so formed a barrier to the men behind who, in turn, were being pushed onto that barrier by the rearmost men. So the French stumbled into the English weapons and the English (with some Welsh and a few Gascons) had more freedom to fight and to kill. That first French battle had contained most of France’s high nobility, and so it went to the slaughter and the great names fell; the Duke of Alençon, the Duke of Bar, the Duke of Brabant, the Archbishop of Sens, the Constable of France, and at least eight counts. Others, like the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Bourbon, and the Marshal of France, were captured. The English did not have it all their own way; the Duke of York was killed, as was the Earl of Suffolk (his father had died of dysentery at Harfleur), but English casualties seem to have been remarkably slight. Henry undoubtedly fought in the front rank of the English and all eighteen Frenchmen who had sworn an oath of brotherhood to kill him were killed instead. Henry’s brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was badly wounded in the fight and it is said that Henry stood over him and fought off the Frenchmen trying to drag the injured duke away.