So first of all, thanks for asking that ! I have finally watched the King and I’m now ready to fire all trébuchets and coulevrines at it. As a disclaimer : the film is absolutely horrendeous regarding any historical accuracy. It is a shame, too, because this period really was ripe for the adapting, so to speak, and very little needed to be changed or adapted to make a convincing and Hollywoodian movie. The source material had it all.

So now, regarding Azincourt, what are the problems ?

First of all the context.

Henry V landed in France with the very real intention to restart a conquest war. He was not some idealist or young and naive prince wrongly influenced by his advisors and provoked to war by French insults. He went to war knowingly and with the intention of reconquering Normandy and, if possible, challenge the French kings for the crown.

Now, even though that’s not really clear in the movie, the siege of Harfleur is a strategic defeat. He did capture the town, but only after a negociated surrender which happened on september 22nd. Considering he landed in France on august 14th and the fact he left the city the 8th of october, his military campaign is coming to an end. Winter is coming, and no one wants to wage war in an ennemy country, accross the sea, in winter. Futhermore, his army being encamped around the city suffered terribly from dysentry. Consider this : he landed on august 14th with around 30 000 men and fought in Azincourt with 6-8 000 men on october 25th. Sure, he left a garrison in Harfleur, but his army is in shambles. The great offensive and conquest is over. Now, he needs to go back to England. And he needs to do it fast, because he lost a whole month besieging Harfleur and the French Ost, the royal army, has mustered. He tries to make it to Calais, managing to cross the Somme river, with the Ost hot on his heels, until he is finally caught on october 24th. He can’t escape anymore and he has to negociate, and fight if negociations turn south.

Then, before the battle.

No comically evil Dauphin, no jaw dropping tauting. The Dauphin, future Charles VII (the one crowned thanks to Joan of Arc), isn’t even close to the battle. The French have learnt the hard way, in 1356 at the battle of Poitiers, that you don’t bring a king to a knights fight (or, well, you can, but that’s a terrible risk). Instead, negociations take place. Henry asks for safe-conduct for Calais, offering to give back his fortresses and possessions in northern France, including Harfleur he just took. The French negociators are adamant that he must renounce his pretentions over the crown of France. No agreement can be reached, the battle is now about to begin.

Now, deployment and battleplan.

Although I like Shakespeare, I really hate what he did with Henry V. Because it has had so much influence in both French and English culture that it has gutted all form of realistic representation of the battle on both sides of the Channel.

TheFrench might have been a bit cocky, but certainly not as much as they were portrayed. And for good reason, too, as Anne Curry estimates they were only around 13-14 000 strong, which means a 2-to-1 fight. And the French have already lost such fights before. They know that and do not enjoy to die pointlessly. They do have a battle plan, and not a bad one either (although it has its flaws, as we’ll see).

The French plan to divide the army in 4 or 5 corps. First, two cavalery units with a simple task : turn the English and flank them. Charging head first into English longbowmen has already proved to be a bad idea, so let’s flanks them. Then, three main corps, or « Batailles », composed of dismounted men at arms. They will take the middle and march on the English army, engaging it in close combat before the heavy cavalry comes for the juicy flank charge. It’s all wrapped up, right ?

Well except for the flaws in the plan. It is great in itself and has certainly worked in other battles, and recent ones too. But it does not take the terrain in consideration. The muddy area is hard to walk and exhausting and, most importantly, the English have advanced toward the French and took position between two woods. The cavalry won’t be able to charge through the woods and flank.

The English are disposed according to their classic deployment of the time : dismounted knights in the center, longbowmen on the flanks, protected by wooden pikes.

The French plan is ready to be set up in motion, and fail.

I suppose you could say that there are two elements at play: was the depiction of Agincourt accurate in the film and, if so, was Agincourt itself typical of medieval battles?

To answer the first question: no, not at all. From the planning stages - where dismounting to fight is portrayed as some genius level move that had never previously been tried - through to the disposition of forces and the course of the battle, the movie gets almost nothing right. The terrain is wrong, being a sloping hill instead of mostly flat stretch of farmland with steep sides, the method of attack by the French is wrong (with all of them being mounted instead of ~400), the depth of the English formations is wrong (6 deep instead of 4) and the number of men waiting in ambush is completely off, being thousands instead of 200.

The course of the battle is similarly wrong. The French men-at-arms sent to disrupt the English archers were repelled, but none of the sources suggest they took any real casualties from the arrows and, since French men-at-arms would repeatedly charge through English archers in the years to follow, the mud had probably just slowed them down enough that the horses became too spooked by the impact of arrows. They then broke up the vanguard of the French, knocking some men down and causing others to flee, and this did result in the closest situation to what the movie portrays. The French vanguard, scattered into "little groups" as a result of the effects of advancing through muddy ground and the horses charging through them, were surrounded and overwhelmed by the archers attacking from the sides. Although this almost certainly was not the Braveheart or Outlaw King style of mass melee with the two lines intermixed, with the French formed into distinct knots of defence and the archers attacking from the outside, this is the closest to what the movie portrays.

The main battle, on the other hand? That was more or less intact. Some gaps in the line would have opened up during the advance, and some portions might have been slower than others, but it ultimately reformed into a single solid line and fought against the English men-at-arms, with the archers merely nibbling away at the outside. We know this, because the press became so dense as the French attempted to break through the English men-at-arms while also moving inwards away from the archers that many men in the center of the formation were suffocated in the press and died without receiving a wound. Although some lip service was paid to this in the movie, it seemed to effect the intermingled French and English equally, rather than the French alone.

Alright, so the movie wasn't particularly accurate to the Battle of Agincourt. How similar was Agincourt to other battles of the Middle Ages?

In some ways, Agincourt was an exceptional battle. The thick, cloying mud that the French marched through in order to reach the English was definitely not typical of a medieval battle, and the French had made it worse by exercising their horses in the area they would later cross in order to reach the English. Similarly, the vanguard being so badly broken up but still going on to attack was not particularly common, although we do know that it wasn't uncommon for them to be disordered to some extent when advancing. At Crecy a vaguely similar situation occurred, where the French vanguard became snarled up in the crossbowmen and infantry who had been sent forward to duel with the English archers and the English men-at-arms advanced to surround and slaughter the French, but even there the French managed to reorder themselves to some degree and fight well enough that archers had to make a flank attack and possibly even a small mounted contingent from the main army was sent to break the French and prevent the English vanguard from being overwhelmed.

On the whole, though, medieval battles were fought between two opposing, more or less ordered, lines of men. Even if we didn't have the writings of veteran military men like Lopez de Ayala and Jean de Bueil or those such as Froissart and Christine de Pizan who drew their knowledge from such men, writings which stress that a line must be as ordered as possible in order to win, the very notion of formations and descriptors such as "wall", "formation" and "hedge" demonstrate that medieval people conceptualised battles as being fought between distinct formations, rather than the intermingled mess of movies. As Ardant du Picq so succinctly put it a hundred and sixty years ago:

And so we repeat, in a melee, with intermingled combatants, there would be mutual extermination but no victors. How would they recognize each other?

Imagine two confused masses of men or groups, where everyone engaged face to face can be struck with impunity from the side or the back?

That is mutual extermination, in which victory belongs only to the survivors, because in the confusion, in the melee, no one knows where to escape.

Are not mutual casualties a sufficient demonstration that there was no real melee?

The word is therefore misplaced; the imagination of painters and poets created the melee.

Beyond this, there's not much that we can say for certain about how medieval battles were fought. The medieval "Face of Battle" is largely obscured by the fact that very few men wrote about how it felt to be in combat, let alone the mechanics of it. This is much the same as with most pre-modern warfare, and a lot of work has gone into trying to work out how battles were fought using what information we do have, limits on human physiology and speculations on psychology of pre-modern warriors. Some of it, and here I specifically include those works which use the strongly discredited work of S.L.A. Marshall as their foundation, is deeply flawed, but a few plausible reconstructions for different periods have been developed over the last three decades.

Most models of combat start with the work of Ardant du Picq. du Picq was a mid-19th century French infantry officer who attempted to understand combat from the point of view of a soldier in order to find better ways to deploy men and fight battles. He was to a large extent self-educated on the topic and conducted surveys entirely on his own, and his theories and approach wasn't well appreciated until long after his death. Nonetheless, his model of ancient warfare, in which men do not fight constantly but clash until the physical or moral strain becomes too much for both sides and the separate and defeat comes when those in the rear ranks lose their nerve, has formed the backbone of almost every theory of pre-modern warfare since John Keegan's The Face of Battle. The one theory that doesn't use it, the slowly dying literal othismos school of thought, is applicable only to a single period and is not adaptable outside of it.

Adrian Goldsworthy took du Picq's work, modified it slightly with the work of S.L.A. Marshall and his own understanding of the Roman sources, and created what is called the "pulse" theory of combat. Phil Sabin, not long after, also created his own version centered around the Second Punic War, drawing more on the Roman sources and descriptions of combat from the English Civil War to modify du Picq, and Sam Koon has since refined Sabin's model through a rigorous study of Livy and Julius Caesar. Comparatively little study has been done on how High and Late Medieval warfare was conducted, although a good amount of re-enactment and scholarly speculation exists for the Early Middle Ages, which is interesting because that's where the best evidence exists in the texts.

In the first place, at least for the High and Late Middle Ages, shields were not overlapped with any great frequency during battle. Quite apart from the shields mostly being too narrow for any overlap if the men were to fight well (kite shields were generally about 50-70cm wide, and 60cm is the minimum width needed for a man to fight unhindered), we hear from the mid-13th century Norwegian King's Mirror that the "field" formation was "loose" and the descriptions of combat provided by English and Spanish sources in the 14th and 15th century indicate that grappling was a part of combat in the front lines and that men in the front lines could fall back through the ranks if injured. So, except when facing serious missile fire - as at Neville's Cross or Poitiers, and even there the soldiers may simply have been rim-to-rim - men were probably spaced about three feet apart, as was the practice in the 16th century.

In the second place, fighting most often took place at a distance. The King's Mirror I mentioned before is clear that spears are the weapon of most use in the "field" formation where most of the fighting is done, and James I of Aragon mentions that during an assault of Majorca the infantry on both sides was reluctant to fight because they were so close that they were within sword range of each other. Similarly, the spear or shortened lance is the most common weapon that 14th and 15th century chroniclers mention being used by dismounted men-at-arms. In a few instances, such as the Battle of Nájera, the fighting rapidly became so intense that both sides dropped their spears and engaged with axes, swords and daggers, but this behaviour is more typical of last ditch efforts to break the enemy, as the Black Prince did at Poitiers in 1356 when it became clear that his exhausted, spent force was about to be engaged by a largely fresh division of soldiers.

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