There's a scene in the West Wing where one character claims that the Battle of Agincourt was "like a polo match" -- that soldiers who surrendered by laying down arms were treated humanely and that neither side targeted the commanders of the other for attack.
Is that accurate? Would a French knight really have allowed an English archer to just drop his bow and walk away?
As /u/DanKensington has posted, I've responded before to how incorrect and absurd pretty much everything Admiral Fitzwallace says. It's so comprehensively incorrect that it's like Sorkin set out to deliberately convey the opposite of reality in every line. My previous answer focuses on the discussion of Agincourt itself, but I would also like to point out that this strict notion of a separation between "peace" and "war" would be pretty absurd to the people living through the HYW, especially the civilians caught in its path. Even during truces and years of "peace," local garrisons heavily taxed and exploited surrounding communities in order to sustain themselves (their wages were never enough, even if their masters, whether English or French, coughed up the cash to begin with). Soldiers, put out of work by peace, would sometimes continue the same activities of raiding and looting as they had as when they were part of a larger force. The line between banditry and soldiering was nearly indistinguishable in many cases.
Additionally, the notion that people of the HYW would have found the deliberate targeting of individuals "ridiculous" is patently absurd and easily disproven. On the field of Agincourt itself, a group of French knights swore to take down Henry V of England personally (they all died). Off the battlefield, the politics of the war were heavily shaped by a pair of very famous and high profile assassinations, the 1407 murder of Louis, Duke of Orleans on the orders of John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, and the eventual payback killing in 1419 of John himself. Unlike what is often portrayed in media, these assassinations were not acts of subtlety, but brutal rushes involving numerous armed men wielding swords, poleaxes, and daggers- mostly the same weapons these men would carry on the battlefield. In contrast to Fitzwilliam, I would argue that people in the HYW quite readily understood the idea of assassinations and individual targeting, and if they had access to cruise missiles and fighter jets like President Bartlett commands, they would have been even more enthusiastic about it. The admiral putting forward this farcically wrong argument and President Bartlett (a tenured Dartmouth professor!) failing to call him out on it suggests that both men are quite ignorant both of real history and of Shakespeare, whose Henry V has for centuries been one of the most famous war stories in the English language.
I love Aaron Sorkin's writing, but oof, this makes Fitz look like he only knows the Pop History Understanding of Agincourt. Hope he's better informed with more recent military history. There's three claims that Fitz makes here:
These following previous answers address these: