Agincourt or Azincourt? Victory, Defeat, and the War of 1415 Transcript Date: Thursday, 22 October 2015 - 6:00PM Location: Museum of London 22 October 2015 Agincourt or Azincourt? Victory, Defeat and the War of 1415 Dr Helen Castor I would like to begin this evening with a brief glimpse of a book that seems to be exactly the kind of historical digest we have all been waiting for. HISTORY'S GREATEST HITS, it is called: Famous events we should all know more about. The premise of that stern subtitle is probably unarguable; there are certainly plenty of famous events I, for one, should know a great deal more about. But my particular reason for starting with this book today is that it raises the question of what exactly history's 'greatest hits' are, and how they might be chosen. Let us take a look at what the contents page offers us from the five hundred years of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It is a select bunch, starting with 1066 and the battle of Hastings, moving swiftly through the Crusades and past Magna Carta in 1215 before encountering the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. And then, right in the middle of the list, comes 1415 and the battle of Agincourt. Agincourt, if we look closely, is one of only two battles that make it into this medieval hit parade. The first, Hastings, was the last successful invasion of England – a battle that changed the course of this country's history for ever. The second, Agincourt, did not. So why is it there? The answer, in one word, is Shakespeare. In the English-speaking world – and we know we are in the English-speaking world because on this list is 1431, the execution of Joan of Arc, not 1429, the victories of Joan of Arc, which would be the more likely French selection – Shakespeare's play Henry V, written in 1599, has fixed this battle in our collective imagination, inserted it into our cultural DNA. And that is not just because of Shakespeare's genius with words, though there is plenty of that on display in Henry V. As the play moves from 'O for a muse of fire…' via 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends' all the way to 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers', it is packed with gorgeous lines. But it is also a play with an almost mythical narrative arc. A young man – a young king, newly come to his throne – is determined, after a misspent youth, to live up to the weight of dignity and responsibility he has now inherited. An ancient enemy does not take him seriously. (You may remember that at the very beginning of the play, the French send a gift to suit his temperament: 'Tennis balls, my liege' is a line that somehow always pairs itself with Lady Bracknell's 'A handbag?' in my theatrical memory.) But this young king has charisma, integrity, moral purpose and a vision of his country's destiny. He launches a great invasion of the kingdom across the sea which he claims as his. He takes the port of Harfleur, and marches on, only to be confronted by the might of the French army, an army made up of huge numbers and led by the princes of the blood who – with supreme disdain and condescension – assume victory is rightfully and naturally theirs before a blow is struck. (Another wonderful scene, the night before the battle, opens with the Constable of France declaring languidly, 'I have the best armour of the world!) Back in the English ranks, on the eve of battle Henry confronts a long dark night of the soul, and comforts his men with a 'little touch of Harry in the night'. But then, when battle is joined, this turns out to be the tale of David and Goliath. The proud and arrogant French are brought down, against all the odds, by the courage and heart, the resilience and endurance of the English army. And then, after this astonishing triumph, this moment of catharsis, at the end of the play Henry receives his just reward: the hand of a French princess – sweetly wooed across the divide of language – and is recognised as heir to the French throne. But of course, glorious as it is, this is a drama. And what I want to do today is to take a closer look at what we think we know about Agincourt, to consider whether the way we think about the battle is an accurate reflection of fifteenth-century reality; and to ask – Shakespeare aside – does it really deserve its place among history's 'greatest hits'? I ought to make clear first of all that I am not, in the specialist sense, a military historian; but of course it is impossible to write about any period of human history without writing at some stage about war. And in tackling the subject of my most recent book – Joan of Arc, the most famous female soldier ever – not only was war inescapable as the defining context of her life and her brutal death, but, when I came to write, it was Agincourt that presented itself as my starting-point. In doing so, my focus was not principally on troop movements and topography, battle plans and tactics – and not just because of my own lack of expertise, but also because, in dealing with the middle ages, those neat diagrams with rectangular blocs moving across battlefields under the leadership of large black arrows can be significantly misleading, in a context where it can be tricky even to establish how many soldiers fought on each side to the nearest couple of thousand, let alone where they stood and exactly what they did. Instead, what fascinates me is the psychology and the politics of war. So what I am going to start with, in talking about Agincourt today, is not the battlefield: it is the naming of things. The labels we attach to the past shape the way we think about history, and they do it so profoundly that we need to keep a close eye on what that process does to our understanding. Let us think for a moment even about the name of this battle: we call it Agincourt, but there is no such place on the French map. Over there, it is Azincourt – and a large part of what I want to talk about today is the French experience of the dreadful defeat of Azincourt, rather than the victory of the happy few at Agincourt. Straight away, it is clear that we might be dealing with two different stories, depending on where we stand to view the fighting. But Agincourt – or Azincourt, either way – forms part of a grander narrative, one that also deserves our attention for a moment: the narrative of the Hundred Years' War. If we want to understand the past, we have to understand how our protagonists saw themselves and the world in which they lived. We need to understand the choices they faced as seen through their eyes, knowing only what they knew when they formed their judgements and made their decisions, because once hindsight comes into play, we are no longer understanding the past in its own terms. The Hundred Years' War is a good example of why that matters. It only takes a moment, once we stop ourselves to think, to realise that those who fought in it had no idea it was the Hundred Years' War they were fighting. For them, it was not over till it was over, and they did not know when that would turn out to be. In fact, it is a term first coined in the nineteenth century, like so many of the other neat and evocative formulations we use about our medieval past – the 'Wars of the Roses' being another, although the 'Hundred Years' War', unlike the 'Wars of the Roses', was first coined in French, as 'La Guerre de Cent Ans'. The first usage recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1874, by J.R. Green in his Short History of the English People. In 1453, he declares, 'The Hundred Years' War … ended'. What Green (and the others who first used the term) was suggesting was that the many phases of conflict between England and France that took place between 1337 and 1453 – so, a period of 116 years, rather than a round 100 – had a unifying principle, a connecting cause; and that cause was the English claim to the French throne first made by Edward III in right of his French mother Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France. This was a claim that Edward and the English kings who succeeded him tried to make good by military means until the moment in 1453 when all English lands in France were finally lost, bar the fortified town of Calais, which lasted one more century until the French recaptured it in 1558. So, put like that, it is entirely possible to see the case for treating this century of conflict as a whole, or at least as having some kind of continuity at its core. But if we look a little more closely, the picture gets more complicated. Kings of England had held territory in France ever since the Conquest of 1066. They held the Conqueror's own duchy of Normandy, until it was lost by King John in 1204; but by then the English also held the duchy of Aquitaine in south-western France that had been brought to the crown by John's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, when she married Henry II in the middle of the twelfth century.