Introduction

For over a hundred and fifty years, the location of the Battle of Agincourt has been known with 100% certainty. The two best, most reliable chronicles - by eyewitnesses, no less - give it a very precise location. That is, in the fields between the villages of Azincourt and Tramecourt. The terrain even matches the description of the battle, with the French being "funneled" from the wider northern end to the narrower center of the field and becoming so compressed as a result that they couldn't use their weapons.

So, the question is, if we know everything there is to know about the Battle of Agincourt and it all matches up perfectly, why has Michael Livingston chosen to dispute these well known facts? After all, he says himself in a recent podcast that he has no desire to go around being contrary about the location of battles just for the sake of it. The answer to this question is that there are actually a number of inconsistencies between primary sources, physical evidence and issues such as the area needed to fight a battle on the scale of Agincourt, and Michael Livingston is not the first to raise some of the problems, which have been slowly gaining attention since the mid-2000s.

With that said, I can't say that I agree with Michael Livingston's interpretation and I think that the traditional location is much closer to where the battle was fought. Livingston does bring up a number of good points, in particular the issue surrounding the length of the English line, and I think these are enough to render the precise traditional location invalid, but I ultimately don't think the bulk of the evidence supports his proposal. But more on this and my own alternative site later. Let's start with where current scholarship agrees the Battle of Agincourt was fought.

The Development of Tradition

By and large, the placement of the Battle of Agincourt between the villages of Azincourt and Tramecourt is down to Jean Le Fevre’s chronicle of the 1460s and the close collaboration or copying by Jean de Waurin at around the same time. They are very specific that the French a) camped between Azincourt and Tramecourt and b) that the battle was fought there the next day. Although Waurin was only 15 at the time and not an active participant, both he and Le Fevre (a herald) had strong connections to the English and Burgundian factions and both were well versed in war. Waurin would even fight less than a decade later at the Battle of Verneuil, which has been described by some as a "second Agincourt".

These two authors, along with Enguerrand de Monstrelet, whose chronicles both authors relied heavily upon, have become the main accounts used to reconstruct the battle, with other sources being used to supplement, rather than inform, the narrative. This is most a result of the clear, non-nonsense style of the authors and the fact that Le Fevre and Waurin, being eyewitnesses and steeped in the military culture of the period, must have been offering their own considerable experience to the mix.

Broadly speaking, the result of this is that the traditional location has been regarded as well established and unambiguous. While there have been minor modifications to how the armies were arranged and the exact place where the English halted their advance (compare J.H. Round to Clifford J. Rogers, this has had no effect on the consensus. And this is where Tim Sutherland and Michael Livingston come in.

The Heretical Archaeologist

In 2002, battlefield archaeologist Tim Sutherland was hired to survey the traditional location of the Battle of Agincourt as part of a Battlefield Detectives documentary on the battle. To his surprise, virtually no medieval artifacts were found in the fields surveyed and no arrowheads at all. Having worked previously on the site of the Battle of Towton, Sutherland expected there to be many arrowheads as well as other medieval finds - buckles, broken pottery, coins, etc. The lack of these, combined with a lack of the alleged mass graves after a 2007 survey, started him thinking seriously about alternative sites for the battle.

His initial proposal was a site to the north, with the French positioning themselves near Ruisseauville and the English taking up position several hundred meters north of Agincourt, with a small valley between them. He drew this conclusion from a combination of the oldest maps placing the battle to the west of Agincourt, a number of chronicles referring to the battle as being close to Agincourt and Ruisseauville, some references to the land the English were standing on being much firmer than the land the French were standing on and his reading of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, which he suggested said that a small valley lay between the two armies on the 25th of October.

The major problem with this interpretation is that the valley between the armies was only a factor in the stalemate of the 24th of October, and it was also equally clearly near Blagny, not Ruisseauville. The Gesta is clear that, as the English made their way up from Blagny and the Ternoise river valley, the detected the arrival of the French army on the other side of this small valley, which runs from Tramecourt to the Ternoise. After a stand off, the French moved off towards the English left (i.e. towards Tramecourt) and the English changed position to remove any chance of their being outflanked.

Subsequently, Sutherland has suggested that the valley in question might have been a small valley to the west of Maisoncelle known as the "Morival" (the "Valley of Death"), based on the Chronique de Normandie's specific statement that the battle was fought in a valley, the attested closeness of a valley in the Gesta and an area known on the 1825 as L'Anglais ("The English") that would be appropriate for an English camp if the French were on the western side of the Morival. This is where Michael Livingston comes into play.