Agincourt: A New History (review)

Agincourt offers a compelling re-evaluation of the famous battle that is meticulously documented, narratively engaging, and historically provocative. Curry examines Agincourt as the final stage in the English campaign, attempting 'a balanced treatment of Henry's aims and actions and of the French response to them' (p. 10). She seeks this balance through ambitious comparison of a great variety of sources: administrative records, contemporary narrative accounts, images and territorial evidence. Her approach is demythologizing, pragmatic and relentlessly critical in her comparison of materials. Striving to overcome the limitations of narrative accounts, she has recourse to alternative archival materials to build a firmer idea of what happened, how, and why. Bringing to bear her most innovative sources — enrolment records, financial accounts and consideration of territorial conditions — Curry's most radical contentions concern the scale of Henry's victory, the circumstances in which it came about, and the fall-out, military and political, on both sides. She concludes that Henry's forces were not so 'few' as previously supposed: the French outnumbered the English and Welsh, but by a factor of four to three rather than four to one. She highlights the possibility that Agincourt was not the first-choice location; the French selected Aubigny, but Henry defaulted on his promise to engage. Unbeknown to Henry, this unexpected move exposed weaknesses amongst the French that may have been decisive: not all forces were able to reassemble in time, and their commander arrived late; their vanguard was too numerous and too tightly packed, and it had been raining. These factors became crucial given the nature of the opposition: ranks of archers and crossbowmen protected behind stakes who proved uniquely effective against a French cavalry in slippery disarray with no room to raise their arms, and against men-at-arms untrained for this form of combat. Curry concludes: 'in this scenario, it was the French who lost the battle rather than the English who won it' (p. 248). Pointing to the military aftermath, she explains statistics that make Agincourt distinctive: the remarkably high mortality rates on the French side that resulted from Henry's unchivalric though necessary expedient of having prisoners murdered to put pressure on the remaining French to withdraw. She sees this act of savagery as symptomatic of Henry's desperation: his drive to succeed having been thwarted in the campaign hitherto, this fight to the death was essential to consolidate his insecure title at home and build his position on the European stage. Having exposed to scrutiny such battle tactics, Curry strikes a final balance by proposing an uncynical view of Henry's self-promotion as God's chosen warrior who believed with overwhelming gratitude that the French annihilation was his divine reward. To a reader approaching Agincourt as a non-historian, Curry's book is valuable in inducting one into the processes of 'forensic' study. Asking simple yet provocative questions like 'how did everyone know the battle had ended?' (p. 225), she peels back layers of received assumption and considers the event in the nuts and bolts of its déroulement.