It’s St. Crispin’s Day – Battle of Agincourt October 25, 1415

Today is the 600th Anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, in which the heavily outnumbered, archer-heavy English led by Henry V defeated an army of French knights.

Yet it likely wasn’t the arrow storm that defeated the French, says Bernard Cornwell in a terrific article in The Telegraph.

Legend says Agincourt was won by arrows. It was not. It was won by men using lead-weighted hammers, poleaxes, mauls and falcon-beaks, the ghastly paraphernalia of medieval hand-to-hand fighting. It was fought on a field knee-deep in mud, and it was more of a massacre than a battle. Olivier’s famous film shows French knights charging on horseback, but very few men were mounted.

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Cornwell notes that the English archers could have unleashed an arrowstorm consisting of a thousand arrows a second. Even if you cut that rate by a third, it still is a blistering rate. And yet, Cornwell notes, French advances in armor saved the bulk of the French knights from becoming pincushions:

So the many reached the few, but the many were exhausted by mud, some were wounded and the English, enjoying the luxury of raised visors, cut them down. What seems to have happened was that the front rank of the French, exhausted by slogging through the mud, battered and wounded by arrows, disorganised by panicked horses and by stumbling over wounded men, became easy victims for the English men-at-arms.

At the end, Cornwell addresses the question of why a battle that had such little immediate tactical or strategic value still stirs the blood. Was it Shakespeare? No, Cornwell argues, Shakespeare wrote about Agincourt because it already was legend. Rather:
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 The battle of Agincourt is part of the binding of England, the emergence of the common man as a vital part of the nation. Those common men returned to England with their stories and their pride, and these stories were told in taverns over and over, how a few hungry trapped men had gained an amazing victory. The story is still remembered, even six hundred years later, because it has such power. It is a tale of the common man achieving greatness. It is an English tale for the ages, an inspiration and we can be proud of it.

Read the article. I think you’ll find it interesting, even if you — as am I — are well versed in the details of the battle.

Medieval and Renaissance Flags For Download

The Krigsspil site has a huge number of medieval and renaissance flags available for downloading.

Flags For 14th, 15th and 16th Century European Armies

Vexillia has a selection of free flags for various European armies from the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. These include 100 Years War, Wars of the Roses, as well as Spanish, Swiss, Landsnechts, Savoyed, Venetian and Imperialist.

Look in the right hand sidebar on the page for the links.

Early English Books Online

For people interested in original sources, the University of Michigan, the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries and ProQuest have released some 25,000 texts dated from 1473 to 1700. Content is available in a variety of formats. Available immediately are some 25,000 books, with an additional 40,000 planned for the future.

Samurai Blades Board Game

Samurai Blades is one of a series of board games published in 1984 by Standard Games and by now long out of print. The game was essentially a skirmish game played on a hex board, with cardboard miniatures. Each character in the game was represented by several pieces, each depicting a different level of damage and injury. The web page at the link has lots of resources for the game, including the rules and gifs, tiffs, and jpgs of the pieces and boards. This is really useful if you have the game but have lost one of those aforementioned damage markers.