As the English arrows rained down on them, the men-at-arms of the French vanguard, closely followed by those in the main body of the army, continued their inexorable march towards the enemy. Those without shields (which were not commonly used at the time) were forced to lower the visors of their bascinets to protect their eyes and faces from the lethal hail falling upon them. Even this was not sufficient to defend them completely, for eye-slits and ventilation holes were vulnerable to the narrow points of bodkin arrowheads, so they had to lower their heads as well.
23
With visor down, the bascinet was like a diver’s helmet, but without the manufactured air supply: it plunged the wearer into a disorientating and isolating artificial darkness. Vision was restricted either to a single slit, half an inch wide, which gave a narrow but unimpeded horizontal line of sight, or to a slightly wider opening of similar length, but with vertical bars to protect the aperture from a sword stroke, which created several blind spots. Though the visor projected outwards, like a pig’s snout, and was punctuated with holes to allow the wearer to breathe, the circulation of air was very restricted and, in the throes of exertion, a panting man-at-arms must have felt almost suffocated by the lack of oxygen. If he dared, or was desperate enough, to raise his visor, he risked receiving an arrow in the face, just as Henry V himself had done at the battle of Shrewsbury.
24
Ironically, had the men-at-arms been professional or lower-class infantrymen, such as the citizen militias of the neighbouring towns in Flanders and Picardy, they might have suffered less. The lighter, more flexible equipment of the ordinary infantryman, combining pieces of plate with mail and
cuir bouilli
, or boiled leather, made them more vulnerable to English longbow arrows, but enabled them to move faster and with greater freedom. The French nobility, clad head to toe in “white harness,” or suits of plate armour, were literally bogged down by the treacherous terrain. In other circumstances the weight of their armour—between fifty and sixty pounds—would have been as irrelevant as carrying his full kit is to a modern soldier: Boucicaut could not only vault onto his horse but also climb up the underside of a ladder in full armour. The French were not vainglorious amateurs playing at war, as they are so often portrayed. They were hardened veterans who had spent their lives in arms: on crusade, fighting in Italy, Spain and Portugal and, most recently, in their own civil wars. They were as used to wearing their armour as their civilian clothes.
At Agincourt, however, the quagmire created by the hooves of the hundreds of horses that had charged over the newly ploughed, rain-soaked earth was literally a death trap for those wearing white harness. Sweating and overheated in the confines of their close-fitting metal prisons, the French men-at-arms were exhausted by the sheer labour of having to put one foot in front of the other as they struggled to extract feet, shins, sometimes even knees from the heavy, cloying mud. The heavy plate armour that marked them out as gentlemen of rank and wealth, and in other circumstances would have made them virtually invincible, had now become their greatest liability.
With heads lowered and unable to see properly where they were going, the French men-at-arms, many of them already wounded by the arrows hurtling down upon them, stumbled and slipped across the battlefield. As they struggled to maintain the solidity of their ranks, they had also to contend with the obstacles in their path: the fallen men and horses of the abortive cavalry strike, some dead, others dying or wounded; the frantic chargers that had escaped the slaughter, some of them riderless and fleeing out of control straight at them; the bodies of their own comrades who had fallen in the mud and were unable to get to their feet again in the crush of men pushing on them from behind.
It says something for the determination and discipline of the French that they overcame these difficulties to close with the enemy lines in such weight and numbers that the English were driven back six or twelve feet with the first shock. At the sight of this setback, the chaplain and the “clerical militia” in the baggage train all “fell upon our faces in prayer before the great mercy-seat of God, crying out aloud in bitterness of spirit that God might even yet remember us and the crown of England and, by the grace of His supreme bounty, deliver us from this iron furnace and the terrible death which menaced us.”
25
Despite being hopelessly outnumbered (and despite the disheartening wails of the terrified clergy behind them), the thin line of men-at-arms miraculously did not break under the French onslaught. Not only did they hold their own, but they recovered quickly and began to push forward again to regain their lost ground. While they closed with the enemy in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, the archers kept up a constant volley of arrows which, in these close quarters, were even more deadly than before, piercing visors and slicing through steel plate as if it were made of cloth. When the arrows ran out—as they must have done fairly quickly—the archers cast aside their longbows and took up their swords, daggers and the lead mallets that they had used to hammer in their stakes. Running out from behind their barricade, they attacked with all the fury of men who knew they could expect no mercy for themselves. Striking down the men-at-arms with their mallets, they plunged their swords and daggers through the visors of the fallen.
26
The battle was now at its height. The chaplain could only marvel at the transformation in the English. “For the Almighty and Merciful God . . . did, as soon as the lines of battle had so come to grips and the fighting had begun, increase the strength of our men which dire want of food had previously weakened and wasted, took away from them their fear, and gave them dauntless hearts. Nor, it seemed to our older men, had Englishmen ever fallen upon their enemies more boldly and fearlessly or with a better will.” The situation was so desperate that there was no time to take prisoners: every French man-at-arms, “without distinction of person,” was slaughtered where he fell.
27
And they were falling in their hundreds, brought down not just by English weapons but also by their own weight of numbers. Their ranks were so densely packed, and the men-at-arms so hemmed in on all sides, that they found it difficult to wield their weapons effectively. Worse still, when those in the front ranks recoiled in the face of the English rally, they came up against those behind them, who were striving to engage with the enemy. These men too were being pressed forward by the ranks behind them, who could not see what was happening at the front. So great was the pressure of the impetus forward from so many thousands of men that those in the front lines, caught between that and an immovable enemy, were simply overwhelmed, pushed over and crushed underfoot
In the chaos and confusion, the living fell among the dead. Great piles of bodies began to build up in front of the standards indicating the presence of Henry V, the duke of York and Lord Camoys, which were the main focus of the French attack. Many of the wounded and those who simply lost their footing in the crush were suffocated under the weight of their compatriots or, unable to remove their helms, drowned in the mud. The ragged archers ran hither and thither, administering the
coup de grâce
to the stricken and helpless. Others, arming themselves with the weapons of the fallen, joined their men-at-arms in clambering on top of the heaps of slain to butcher the hordes of Frenchmen below, who continued to advance relentlessly into the jaws of death.
28
The English did not have it all their own way. Had the men-at-arms not recovered so quickly from the first assault and held their line, the English position would have collapsed immediately, with disastrous consequences. And for some considerable time afterwards there was a real danger that the French would overwhelm them with sheer numbers. There were desperate moments, too, in the hand-to-hand fighting. Every French man-at-arms worth his salt wanted the honour of striking a blow against the king of England and, in the grand chivalric tradition, a group of eighteen Burgundian esquires in the company of Jehan, sire de Croy, formed themselves into an impromptu brotherhood before the battle and swore to strike the crown—with its provocative fleur-de-lis—from the king’s head, or die in the attempt. “As they did,” le Févre reported drily—all eighteen, to a man, were killed (as were the sire de Croy and his two sons), though not before one of them had got close enough to Henry to sever one of the fleur-de-lis from his crown.
29
In what may have been part of the same incident, Henry’s brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was wounded by a sword-thrust in the groin and fell at his brother’s feet. Careless of his own safety, the king stood astride his body and fought off his attackers until his brother could safely be carried away out of the mêlée.
30
For three long hours the slaughter continued, as the English hacked and stabbed their way through the vanguard and the main body of the French army. At the end of that time, the flower of French chivalry lay dead on the field. The oriflamme, the sacred banner of France round which they had rallied, was also lost in the battle, probably trampled underfoot when its bearer fell; it was never recovered. The English now felt secure enough to begin searching through the mounds of dead and wounded to take prisoners for ransom. In this way, some of the grandees of France fell into the hands of the ordinary Englishmen whom they had so foolishly despised. The duke of Bourbon was captured by Ralph Fowne, a man-at-arms in the retinue of Sir Ralph Shirley, and Marshal Boucicaut by a humble esquire named William Wolf. Arthur, count of Richemont, brother of the duke of Brittany and younger son of Henry V’s stepmother, was discovered alive, with minor wounds, under the corpses of two or three knights; their blood had so drenched his surcoat that his coat of arms was barely recognisable. Charles d’Orléans was found by English archers in similar circumstances.
31
At this moment, when victory seemed assured and the English were preoccupied with taking as many prisoners as possible, a cry went up that the French had rallied and were about to launch another attack. In this crisis, Henry gave the only order possible. His men were physically and emotionally exhausted after three hours’ intense fighting, they were about to face an assault by an unknown quantity of fresh troops and they had in their midst large numbers of the enemy who, although they were prisoners, could not be relied upon to remain inert and neutral during renewed fighting. He therefore commanded his men to kill all except their most eminent prisoners, “lest they should involve us in utter disaster in the fighting that would ensue,” as the chaplain explained.
32
In humanitarian terms, Henry’s decision was indefensible: to order the killing of wounded and unarmed prisoners in such a cold and calculated way violated every principle of decency and Christian morality. In chivalric terms, it was also reprehensible. “It is against right and gentility to slay the one who gives himself up,” Christine de Pizan had written a few years earlier. The law of arms stated that a man who surrendered should be treated with mercy, “this is to say that his life should be spared, and, more important, the master [that is, the captor] is obliged to defend his prisoner against anyone else who would harm him.” On this reading, not only the king but the men to whom the prisoners had surrendered were in breach of their chivalric obligations. In military terms, however, Henry’s decision was entirely justified. The safety of his own men was his overriding priority. Even Christine de Pizan had admitted that a prince had the right to execute an opponent who had been captured and handed to him if he was convinced that great harm would befall himself and his people if he allowed him to go free.
33
The prisoners might have had their bascinets removed on capture and be unarmed, but the battlefield was littered with the armour and weapons of the fallen, and it would not have required much ingenuity or energy for the French to re-equip themselves while their captors were preoccupied in fighting off a renewed attack. And to be attacked on two fronts at once would spell death to the little English force.
It is impossible to know how many French prisoners were killed as a result of Henry’s order, not least because we have no idea how many had been taken at this stage of the battle. The eyewitness accounts of how the executions were carried out are contradictory, which adds to our difficulty because they also imply a lengthy process that cannot have been practical in the crisis of the moment. The chaplain says that all the prisoners, “save for the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon, certain other illustrious men who were in the king’s ‘battle,’ and a very few others, were killed by the swords either of their captors or of others following after.”
34
Who decided which prisoners were sufficiently illustrious to be spared? How were they and the “very few others” separated from the rest condemned to die?
Our other eyewitness, le Févre de St Remy, says that when the order was given, those who had taken prisoners did not wish to kill them—a reluctance that he, rather uncharitably, attributes to a desire not to lose their ransoms, rather than to any sense of chivalric duty towards the captives themselves. Faced with this insubordination, the king was compelled to appoint a single esquire and two hundred archers to perform the mass execution. “So the said esquire fulfilled the king’s command; which was a very pitiable thing. For, in cold blood, all the French nobility were there killed, and their heads and faces were cut off; which was a shocking thing to see.”
35
Again, this raises the question of how quickly a body of two hundred archers could be raised to carry out the slaughter and how they could be spared from the imminent battle. If there were perhaps several thousand prisoners, as some modern commentators have suggested,
36
then how long must it have taken to behead them all? And if there were so many, why did they not resist when they had nothing to lose?