The Mud & the Arrows

A Sick Army on a Muddy Road

By October 1415, Henry V’s invasion of France was a disaster. He had landed at Harfleur in August with 12,000 men. The siege of that single town had taken five weeks and cost him nearly half his army — not to combat, but to dysentery. The “bloody flux” had ripped through the English camp, killing thousands and rendering thousands more unfit to fight.

Henry was left with roughly 6,000 men — about 5,000 archers and 1,000 dismounted men-at-arms — starving, sick, and 150 miles from the safety of English-held Calais. He had no choice but to march for it.

The French knew he was coming. They had assembled a massive army — estimates range from 12,000 to 25,000 men, heavily weighted toward armored nobility — and positioned it directly across Henry’s line of march near the village of Azincourt. There was no going around them. There was no retreat. The English would have to fight through or die.

It had been raining for days. The freshly plowed field between the two armies was a churned expanse of deep, sucking mud.

The Field

The battlefield was a narrow strip of open ground between two thick woods, roughly 750 yards wide. This was critical. The woods funneled the French into a confined space where their numerical advantage was negated. They couldn’t outflank the English. They couldn’t spread out. They could only come straight ahead.

Henry placed his dismounted men-at-arms in three divisions across the center of the field, with massive wedge-shaped formations of archers on the flanks and between the divisions. Each archer carried a sharpened wooden stake, which they hammered into the ground in front of their position at an angle — a bristling fence of pointed wood aimed at the chests of charging horses.

The French army was arranged in three great “battles” (divisions), one behind the other. The first two lines were almost entirely dismounted men-at-arms in full plate armor — the flower of French nobility, packed shoulder to shoulder. The third line was mounted cavalry. Their crossbowmen and archers were pushed to the sides and rear, where they were largely useless.

The French plan was simple: advance, absorb the arrow storm, close to melee range, and crush the English with superior numbers and heavier armor. It was a reasonable plan. It had worked before. It would not work today.

The Arrow Storm

For three hours on the morning of October 25, neither army moved. The French were waiting for reinforcements. Henry was waiting for the French to attack into his prepared position. Finally, Henry lost patience — or realized his starving army couldn’t stand in the cold mud forever — and ordered his line forward.

The English advanced to within extreme longbow range — about 300 yards — replanted their stakes, and loosed the first volley.

Five thousand longbows firing at once produced a sound contemporaries compared to a storm. Each archer could loose 10 to 12 arrows per minute. At any given moment, roughly 50,000 arrows were in the air or in flight. The sky went dark with shafts.

The effect on the French was catastrophic. The arrows themselves could not reliably penetrate the best plate armor at range — but they didn’t have to. They killed and maimed the unarmored horses. They found gaps in visors, armpits, groins, and the backs of knees. They created chaos, noise, panic, and confusion in an army that was already packed too tight to maneuver.

The French cavalry on the flanks charged the archers first. The horses hit the stake wall and died on it. The ones that didn’t hit the stakes were shot out from under their riders. The surviving cavalry turned and galloped back through their own advancing infantry, knocking men down and creating havoc.

The Mud

Then the mud did what the arrows couldn’t finish.

The first French line — thousands of dismounted knights in 60 pounds of plate armor — tried to advance 300 yards across a freshly plowed, rain-soaked field under continuous arrow fire. The mud was ankle-deep. In places, it was knee-deep. Men in full plate sank to their shins with every step. They were exhausted before they reached the English line.

The field narrowed as they advanced (funneled by the woods), compressing the French into an ever-tighter mass. Men couldn’t raise their arms to fight. They couldn’t swing their weapons. They were packed so tightly that those who fell couldn’t get up — and the men behind them tripped over the fallen and went down too. Within minutes, the front of the French advance was a writhing, struggling pile of armored men drowning in mud.

The English men-at-arms met the remnants of the French first line and drove them back into the second line, which was still trying to advance. The collision was catastrophic. The French were literally suffocating in their own armor, unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to fight.

The English archers — lightly armored and nimble — abandoned their bows, picked up mallets, axes, and swords, and waded into the pileup. They used rondel daggers to stab through visors and armpits. They used mallets to batter men to death on the ground. It was not a battle. It was a slaughter.

The Butcher’s Bill

The battle lasted approximately three hours. When it was over, the French had suffered one of the most devastating defeats in medieval military history.

Six thousand French soldiers were dead — most of them nobility. The Constable of France, Charles d’Albret, was killed. The Duke of Alençon was killed. The Duke of Bar was killed. Three dukes, five counts, and over 90 barons died on that field. An additional 700 to 2,200 were captured, including the Marshal of France, Jean II Le Maingre.

English losses: approximately 112 identified dead, perhaps up to 600 total. Among them was Edward, Duke of York, who may have been smothered in the crush rather than killed by enemy action.

Henry V marched his army to Calais and sailed for England in triumph. He had achieved what no one thought possible: a starving, diseased army of commoner archers had destroyed the finest heavy cavalry in Europe.

Why It Matters

Agincourt didn’t end the Hundred Years’ War — that dragged on for another 38 years until Joan of Arc and French artillery finally turned the tide. But Agincourt ended something bigger: the idea that armored cavalry was the dominant force on the battlefield.

For 500 years, the mounted knight in heavy armor had been the king of European warfare. Agincourt proved that a well-trained commoner with a longbow could kill a knight at 200 yards for the cost of a shilling’s worth of ash and goose feathers. Armored cavalry would continue to exist for centuries, but after Agincourt, everyone knew they were vulnerable. The age of the knight was ending. The age of the infantryman — and eventually, the age of gunpowder — was beginning.

Shakespeare immortalized the battle in Henry V, writing the St. Crispin’s Day speech that has inspired soldiers for 400 years. But the real speech that mattered was simpler. According to contemporary accounts, when told how many French faced him, Henry replied: “I would not wish a single man more. If God gives us victory, it will be plain that we owe it to His grace. If not, the fewer we are, the less loss to England.”

Five thousand archers with wooden bows and sharpened sticks defeated the greatest army in Europe. The mud helped. But it was the longbow that did the killing.