Kill the poys and the luggage! ’Tis expressly against the law of arms. ’Tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offert, in your conscience now, is it not?

Fluellen, Shakespeare's Henry V, Act 4 Scene 7

This aspect of the film is made up from whole cloth -- it's an adaptational change drawing on Shakespeare's play, which was itself diverging from the historical record for the purposes of drama. Contemporary 15th century chronicles attest to a raid on the English baggage during the battle of Agincourt, resulting in the theft of English property by French troops that included a number of horses and other valuable articles like bejeweled swords and one of Henry V's crowns. French chronicler Pierre Fenin puts a name on the perpetrators of the raid and links it to the killing of French prisoners:

Whilst the battle of the French and English was going on and the English were almost on top, Isambart d’Azincourt and Robert de Bournoville accompanied by some men of low rank launched an attack on the baggage of the English making great affray. As a result the English feared that the French would come upon them to do them harm. Thus the English killed many of the prisoners they had. Isambart and Robert were later much blamed for this and also they were punished by Duke John of Burgundy.

This is the closest we get to the murderous scenario depicted in Shakespeare. Shakespeare introduces the killing of boys as part of the French raid on the English baggage train, and uses this act of arrant knavery to precipitate and perhaps justify in his audience's eyes the killing of French prisoners as a more proportional response to lethal violence rather than simple horse-theft and havoc. Putting the above exchange in the mouth of Fluellen, a well-meaning pedant fixed on what he perceives to be proper military procedure, eliminates any doubt that the French actions are irregular at least on paper -- in the kind of orderly literary treatises that sought to set down the disciplines of war, with which 16th century audiences would have been as familiar with as modern audiences are with the concepts and purpose of the Geneva Convention. Whether such an irregular action merits an irregular response (the killing of French prisoners) or even whether these events are meant to be understood as cause and effect is a question for the audience in a play that's very much preoccupied with justice and proper action in war.

Shakespeare would have been writing his account of Agincourt from the accounts given by 16th century chroniclers like Holinshed and Polydore Vergil, who in turn drew on 15th-century sources; other incidents from his account of Agincourt can be traced through this chain of origin, like the account of the execution of a soldier found to have looted sacred objects from a French church. Most significantly, none of these accounts mention the murder of servants or soldiers during the baggage raid, whether as a taunt aimed at Henry V or for any other reason. Why did Shakespeare make this adaptational choice? Why did the filmmakers elaborate on it the way they did? It's possible Shakespeare was drawing on the stage traditions of other extant plays dramatizing the life of Henry V, texts which have since been lost, but with no special insight into the author's creative process, it strikes me as a consciously ambiguous choice.

If the dauphin had done something as ostentatiously brutal as the film depicts and lived to tell the tale, he would have faced consequences from his aristocratic peers after the event of a French defeat -- at the least some form of censure for actions which brought about the massacre of his own country's prisoners. In the aftermath of the French loss at Agincourt, accounts of the French army's own transgressions in the course of making war such as the pillaging of monasteries and the sexual assaults of women and girls served to explain through a Christian worldview why the French were defeated -- as punishment for their sins as well as their poor discipline. Such a deliberate public provocation resulting in the deaths of valuable French prisoners would be understood as both a dishonorable act and a tactical error.

The film placing the guilt for the boys' death not simply on French stragglers but on the Dauphin himself is a more major change than even the specificity of how the boys are killed or why; it eliminates a degree of ambiguity to present a more stark contrast between Henry and his aristocratic French counterparts. Edgerton and Michod's Dauphin razzes Henry a lot more directly than his Shakespeare counterpart, and in general serves as a much nastier character than the play's Dauphin, who's a comedic figure mostly just preoccupied with his fancy horse and whose greatest crime is underestimating Henry V's turn from wanton prince to warlike king. Within the film, the killing of the boys serves as a narrative turning point for the personal antagonism that prompts Henry to make war on a wicked prince, rather than the nominally political justifications for England to go to war against France to capture certain territories or claim certain titles -- steely revenge for unbearable wrongs, rather than aggressive actions undertaken on potentially spurious legal pretexts.

*“His whole purpose is to be a jerk and to just torment Timmy [Chalamet],” Michôd said. “So I kind of needed him to be a larger-than-life jerk. He needed to be ridiculous. He needed not to have a lot of substance underneath him. He’s just there to annoy." *

From a filmmaking perspective, the beheading of the boys in The King serves to amplify the moral and personal threat posed by the French dauphin -- to take him from flippantly vulgar villainy to personal sadism in one short scene. It reflects an escalation of the Agincourt narrative's stakes to comply with shifting (or perceived-to-be-shifting) audience sensibilities regarding acceptable and unacceptable actions in wartime. If the film had retained the play's depiction of English crimes against civilians -- Henry's threats before the surrender of Harfleur in Act 3, Scene 3 describe English soldiers spitting babies on pikes while their screaming mothers watch -- the presentation of acceptable vs. unacceptable actions in wartime might have been muddied. This filmmaking decision is an appeal to modern sensibilities rather than drawing from the historical record -- not because 16th century theater audiences had no qualms about the murder of children and young people but because of shifting expectations on the part of writers and audiences regarding what makes an armed conflict justified.

• On the topic of the Shakespeare play's depiction of boy-murder and boys at war, I liked "‘Kill the poys and the luggage!’. Were there boys at the battle of Agincourt?", written by Anne Curry.

• Princes, Pirates, and Pigs: Criminalizing Wars of Conquest in Henry V, Janet Spencer