the beleaguered British dealt them a blow never to be forgotten.
Henry’s ragged no-hope army was largely made up of volunteers and vassals, most of them sick with dysentery and exhausted from a summer-long campaign in miserable weather. Harried and hopelessly outnumbered, they prepared to face the flower of French nobility a few miles from Agincourt. The French army, under King Charles VI’s commander, Constable D’Albert, numbered in excess of twenty thousand men, mostly knights. Opposing them, King Henry V commanded around six thousand ragged and starving men—but, of those, five thousand were archers, and most of them Welsh.
On that bright Saint Crispin’s day in October, the great French army was massacred. Accounts of the battle read like a “What Not To Do” handbook of combat. The French produced blunder after blunder in bewildering array, so many as to be almost literally incredible. Even so, it would have taken a military miracle for French horse-mounted knights to succeed when, by some estimates, upwards of seventy-two thousand arrows were loosed in the first fateful minute of the conflict. Of this devastating power, historian Philip Warner writes, “Fear of the longbow swept through France. Its deadly long-range destruction made it seem an almost supernatural weapon.” Prayers against it were offered in churches at the time; this was a last resort, for nothing else came close to stopping it.
Britain’s losses that day in the fields of Agincourt numbered around one hundred—and many of those were noncombatants: unarmed, defenceless baggage boys and chaplains who were slaughtered out of extreme frustration by the already-beaten French who attacked the supply wagons encamped a mile or so from the battle field. On the other side of the equation, the French lost around two thousand counts, barons, and dukes; well over three thousand knights and men-at-arms; and more than one thousand common soldiers for a tally in excess of six thousand dead. These numbers are conservative: some accounts of the time estimate that as many as twelve thousand were killed or captured that day.
In any event, it was a defeat so devastating that it would be a generation or more before France could regain its military confidence against the British. As military historian Sir Charles Oman put it: “That unarmoured men should prevail against men cased with mail and plate on plain, open ground was reckoned one of the marvels of the age.”
Decisive as it may have been, Agincourt was not by a very long shot the first battle to be decided by the longbow, nor would it be the last. But it was, perhaps, the most powerful demonstration of a now little-remembered law of medieval combat—namely, that when two opposing forces met, those with the most archers would invariably win. A sort of corollary stated that when both sides boasted roughly the same number of archers, the side with the most Welsh archers would win. Such was the highly recognized talent of the Cymry with the longbow, and their renowned fighting spirit.
As we are once again reminded by the British chronicle of the Saxon kings, the Brenhinedd y Saesson: “The men of Brycheiniog and the men of Gwent and the men of Gwynllwg rebelled against the oppression of the Ffreinc. And then the Ffreinc moved their host into Gwent; and they gained no profit thereby, but many were slain in the place called Celli Garnant. Thereupon, soon after that, they went with their host into Brycheiniog, and they gained no profit thereby, but they were slain by the sons of Idnerth ap Cadwgan, namely, Gruffydd and Ifor . . .”
This rebellion provoked a reaction: “In that year King William Rufus mustered a host past number against the Cymry. But the Cymry trusted in God with their prayers and fastings and alms and penances and placed their hope in God. And they harassed their foes so that the Ffreinc dared not go into the woods or the wild places, but traversed the open lands sorely fatigued, and thence returned home empty-handed. And thus the Cymry defended their land with joy.”
It was precisely this fierce and tenacious spirit that the Normans faced in their ill-advised invasion of Wales. The unrivalled talent with the longbow—though born in the forests and valleys of Wales—was honed to lethal perfection in the white heat of contention following William II’s decision to extend the dubious benefits of his reign beyond the March. It was a decision which sparked a conflict that was to sputter and flare for the next two hundred years or more, and