Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop here at
the Wallace Collection with Dr. Toby Capwell We're here on behalf of
Medieval Myth Busting, the arrows versus armour series, really just to have a bit more
of a chat about the history of Agincourt, what happened on the day of that
battle, the order of events and really just to go through it, in
more detail, so Toby really, started us off. How did it go? One of the reasons we
chose Agincourt is because it's actually really well documented there are English
official accounts there are French chronicle accounts based on eyewitness
testimony, we know the ground, we know more about this battle and we have a
better chance of understanding it than most and that's good because it's also
one of these you know mythologized battles but perhaps the most
mythologized of all battles and I mean the whole process of how Agincourt got
mythologized and why is fascinating and much more complex than we might think
but we also have the battle you know I'm personally although I am interested in
myths and and stories telling and things like that I want the facts say you know
I'm the Duke of Brabant I wake up at nine o'clock in the morning they have
the battle I have my nice little hot posset and my bread roll then what? Right
well... yeah okay... the Battle of Agincourt is the end result of a
military campaign henry v had invaded Normandy with the ultimate goal of
becoming King of France and taking a right that he felt had been his. After
having taken the port city of Harfleur he took his army across country through
northern France moving from west to east from Harfleur in Normandy all the way
through to the the pas-de-calais it's hard to know why he was doing this and
different historians have different ideas but it it certainly seems like
he's trying to get a fight he needed a decisive victory to promote his
cause and it actually took quite a while for the French to respond and ultimately
they they had the French had different armies coming from different places and
all trying to intercept him and trap him and he crosses the Somme and then moves
north but they're already in front of him and there was a lot of maneuvering
to begin with but the point was when they got to Agincourt
Henry was a bit trapped but he was still in a position to choose the ground and
he's and he's got one highly organized very well disciplined army made up of
people who've been fighting and living together for weeks and he's facing a
conglomeration of several different French armies all pulling together and
the problem with the French side was that nobody was really in charge there
were several princes of the the royal blood there and of course each of them
all thought they should be in charge they also had other veteran military
commanders who should have been listened to perhaps but weren't so much. The
English had also captured the French battle plan which is an important thing
so yeah yeah yeah they there was a lot of clandestine stuff going on with
Scouts intercepting other Scouts and there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff
happening before the armies actually met and you know, a French messenger got jumped
by some English in the woods and they got the actual written battle plans
which survives. The battle plan is a window onto what the
French intended to do. Their original plan was really good. But Henry's
response, knowing what they're thinking, is to put himself in a place where they
can't do what they wanted to do they wanted to use big detachments of cavalry,
not in a frontal attack like at Crécy or earlier battles, but they wanted to
pincer movement and hit him in the flanks with
the cavalry which would have been really effective. That is the right thing to do
against massed archers, that's what they were gonna do. And then advance on foot.
They always had this this plan to use cavalry and heavy infantry together.
Because by that point they had established that going in on horses
against arches and a frontal assault was always a very risky risky thing and
you're much better off by being on foot. Right, I mean it's
important to mention that none of the individual French people at the battle
had fought the English before in a major battle. You know the French at Agincourt
are not the same French people as the ones at Crécy the ones that Agincourt
are new to this and they haven't fought a major field battle against the English
before so Marshal Boucicault, one of the military commanders at Agincourt had a
lot of fighting experience but this was still the first time in this situation.
They had a good plan and it made perfect sense on paper but and Henry found out
about it and placed himself in an area that was closely hemmed in with dense
growths of trees on both sides so that was a lot of protection for his archers
from the sides and that's like archers in battle 101 you got to protect them
yeah you don't deploy your archers unless they're protected, they've got to
to be protected by trees, stakes, ditches, heavily armed knights, rivers, whatever,
your archers have got to be protected. If you put them out in an open plain
without protection they're going to get annihilated and they did on many
occasions. There's plenty of battles in this period that the English lost and
the English archers and men-at-arms weren't able to do what they wanted to
do so the French have a have a record of winning to at this point and let's not
forget that. It is easily forgotten because you think that the English
won every time, or the longbow won every time, that it was like victory, victory, victory and you do
forget that there are losses as well because of course they don't sit high in
the mythology. Right well you don't talk about those because it it it you know it
it spoils the myth that you're trying to build
and so it's a you know it's it's typical selection...
you know selection bias. So we've got to watch out for that. So the the French
had a good plan but Henry outmanoeuvred them and they couldn't do what they
planned to do and because they didn't have a rigid or clear command structure
they couldn't effectively change what they were gonna do and essentially they
tried to do it anyway even in a topographical environment where it was
inappropriate is it essentially that the the French were smaller armies if you
like that come together each with their own agendas under their own noblemen and
the overarching cause was sort of forgotten about for their own individual
aims? Yeah, I mean they all wanted the same thing they all were deeply
affronted that the you know the English King is marching through northern France
with big fleur-de-lis on his helmet you know it's and the you know the English
code of art the English royal coat of arms itself is an affront because it's
quartered with the arms of France it's a visual promotion of of the agenda but
they all wanted that but they all there wasn't a command structure no you know
there wasn't clear who was in charge and it wasn't clear what the approach was
going to be and you know the opportunity to kill the English king in hand-to-hand
fighting it's sort of something that you know quite understandably everybody
wanted and Henry was you know in in arraying himself in the middle of his
battle line with this crown on his helmet and the royal coat of arms and
the gilded armor he's like he's like an anglerfish you know dangling himself out
in front of them and what that does is it makes them when they make their main
advance on foot you know nine thousand heavily armored Knights or something
like that they all go for the center and they ignore the flanks which was fine in
the original plan because in the original plan they were going to
destroyed the flanks with the cavalry but they hadn't achieved that they went
ahead anyway and you imagine this it's these extended flanks of the English
army with you know hundreds and hundreds of
archers in them and the and and the French are marching straight past them
to get to the center and so there's there's a lot of opportunity in the
battle to shoot people from the sides and of course from the front and
ultimately even possibly from from behind. So once they're past you've
got these, the French Knights, are going to be literally the focus of arrows
coming in from every direction. And that's the important point this is a
story of an English army that as we've said has a very clear command structure
very high morale very well disciplined they have force diversity they have
archers and fully armed nights and men in arms who are used to working well
together to to capitalize on each other's strengths and and and and
compensate for each other's weaknesses and they've got their King on the field.
The French don't have their King on the field. They don't have force diversity
because they're all fully armed Knights and Men-at-arms.
They had archers there but they didn't use them. You can only count the ones
that engage. The ones who are actually doing the fighting if they don't engage
they do not count and it was a force made up entirely of guys in full armor
on the French side now those guys have advantages they have their strengths
when they hit the English line they still push the whole English line back a
spears length as some of the accounts say so even despite all their problems
the the thick gluey pas-de-calais mud that they're having to march through the
fact that they're wearing their armor in the heaviest configuration because they know they're going to be getting shot at. The lack of command
structure all of that. The fact that their enemy is determining everything
about this fighting situation that's a bad situation to be in you don't want
your enemy deciding how this is going to go but that's what's happening and even
then they're met they managed to make a really significant impact
with the English line and there's a lot of fighting so that's that's the core
thing and and the the role of archery in that, I've always suspected, is much
more complicated than just mowing people down did I just take you back a little
bit during the day you were talking about how the French had a plan that the
cavalry was going to come in from the sides of the Archers and that even though
effectively their plan was stymied by the layout of the English forces they
still went for that anyway they still try to do that so there was a marshaling
of cavalry and and the cavalry went forward in the early stages of the
battle and then what there was long-range shooting from the English to
sort of disrupt them? Or target the horses? Or what we know about that? I
mean I haven't read all the comments but I read as many of them as I could and
the whole question of range came up and the whole question of horses came up and
you know those kind of have to be addressed together but also individually
as far as the role of cavalry in the battle it's important to stress that
although there was cavalry action at Agincourt it wasn't really the
meaningful stage of the battle they tried this thing it didn't work they
moved on with their main advance and that's important because there were
earlier battles Crecy being the obvious example where it really was Armored
Cavalry versus the English on foot and the archers having to repulse frontline
cavalry charges and I think in the mythologising of this we tend to forget
that Crecy and Agincourt are completely different battles they didn't they
didn't go down the same way at all yeah and the role of the cavalry were there
and archers were shooting at horses in both battles but it was two very
different situations So at Agincourt, the full
frontal cavalry charge was never intended. It was never
attempted. It was not delivered. right they wanted the original battle plan
said and you know attacked them from the sides fast and hard
break up those archers destroy their ability to shoot on a mass scale or at
least deplete you know downgrade the effectiveness of the mass shooting by
killing and disrupting as many of them as you can from the sides where they're
weak and vulnerable and then move the main force in on foot and that first
part of it just didn't work out so the English did have the full power of their
massed shooting which was ultimately really damaging to the French advance on
foot so the crucial thing about this battle is the advance of large numbers
of armored knights and men-at-arms on foot and what the English are doing
about that at long-range medium range and short range and let me just say one
thing about about the range because in in our first main film i referred to the
archers shooting at short range that's why I said I kept saying short range and
I you know I've realized that I've got into the habit of talking about shooting
at short range over you know talking about this stuff for a number of years
and I've gotten into that habit because I'm at pains to stress that the
distances are shorter than we might imagine. A longbow might be able to throw
an arrow 400 yards or whatever but that's well beyond maximum effective
range. I think. That's hypothetical. Well we will
come back to that. We're gonna get to that. So when I when I've been stressing
short range short range short range I mean short range in a modern sense I
don't mean what the medieval archer regarded as short range. Short range in
the age of you know high-powered fire arms is 150 metres, 150 meters is
short a pretty short range. But that might very well be a much longer range
for the English archer you know we need to determine that so I just want to put
that proviso in that I I'm not saying they didn't shoot at what they regarded
as long range. What I'm saying is that that's shorter
than what we might imagine it to be and you know obviously there's a lot more
work to do on that I would love to be able to do more experimental work
working on a number of different levels to be able to say more about what is the
maximum effective range of Joe's 160 pounds Yew longbow, because the
archers have to make choices about that the archers have got a limited number of
these arrows so they have to always make a judgement I might be able to get the
arrow that far but is it going to do anything when it gets there
do I feel confident that when I shoot my arrow has the best chance of doing some
damage now if you're shooting it you know a cavalry charge coming at you and
you can see all the way down range that those horses aren't wearing very much
armor then you might go for the longer range. You know your arrow is losing
energy the second it leaves the bow but is that acceptable at this range or that
range depending on what I'm shooting at and it depends what you're trying to
achieve. But with that subject of range, so but my understanding is that
there would have been or was some long-range shooting at the cavalry as
they started to come in I mean do we know that for a fact?
Well there it seems that the in the original lines of battle the French and
the English sat there staring at each other for a while
and nobody did anything and this was fine for the French because the longer
they wait the more troops arrive and they've got more people coming in all
the time Henry's got who he's got and the longer
he waits and the longer the French just sit there the more and more dangerous
it's getting for him so it was hugely important that the English somehow goad
the French into attacking them and it's so what they did was they they up sticks
literally and they advanced their whole line and I think what they were doing is they were advancing their line
into maximum effective bow range now what is that? we need to we need to work
on that. They advance to that maximum effective range and they start shooting
and at the maximum effective range they might not be doing you know the maximum
damage but it's gonna be enough damage too just to make the French go. And the
expectation of that is not going to be ten shots a minute from every archer
pump them out, you're sending one or two shafts a minute or whatever
it might be enough to annoy the French and to make them go you know what, "let's go deal with this". It's all about making your enemy fight on your
terms you know if if King Henry could make the French attack him he is
deciding what they do he is dictating the the play of this
thing you know the French could have attacked them when they were still
setting up when they're putting their stakes in and things and the French
could have decided to try and get the jump on them but they didn't and they're
lucky that they didn't. Who is deciding what happens when and the archers have a
role to play in that so when they begin shooting at maximum effective range at
the beginning of the battle there's a certain effect that they're after
they're just trying to get to that tipping point when the French allow
themselves to be dictated to and they go and then once they go you've still got
150 metres of of these guys in 35 kilos of armor slogging through thick mud it's
going to take them three minutes five minutes maybe even ten minutes to get to
within axe range of you that's still a whole lot of time to be shooting away at
them. And so the early long-range classic Hollywood elevated bow is about
harassing goading the enemy getting them to start coming forward and then you put
the longbows into play as we saw in the film with Joe of getting them shooting
flat at the maximum killing effectiveness which you're not doing at
an elevated shot. So the fact is though that there isn't any medieval image that
shows an archer in a field battle shooting up in the air in this period
and you could say that while medieval art isn't realistic but it still gives
you a good sense of what the artists think this stuff looks like and we know
from the mythologizing of Agincourt in you know modern children's books of the
19th 20th centuries of the Olivier film, the Kenneth Branagh film, you know that
when an archer does that it's so iconic you know and it's and it it's definitive
so if they were doing it you would see it in the art even if the distances are
weird and the backgrounds are weird and and the the armies aren't showing enough
people whatever there's that body shape and it just isn't there except when
they're in in sieges and they're shooting at people almost then they show
it they drive when they know it's supposed to be this sieges and naval you
do see it, and I agree with that, but where I'm a bit lost about this the
elevated shooting in a field context would have uses, it would have uses for
annoying a body of cavalry 250 metres out something like that just to move
them from that little spot there to move them slightly further away or whatever
it may be to say that they steer around the stream that they can't see from
where they are whatever is there would have been times you would have done that
maybe it just isn't worth the arrows maybe whatever you could achieve is not
worth the expenditure of your valuable arrows so so one question might be in
the future for Joe for example is how much can you elevate before it looks
like you're elevating and how far your arrows go when you do that and then how
much energy have you retained from the total potential energy of the shot. Well
that is without a doubt that is something that we have to look at is
what energy is maintained and what momentum because momentum
has a very strong relationship to to penetration yeah so what energy and what
momentum is retained at what distances yeah and that's one
that we have to come into that again and and I just think it motivates us to you
know at some point do more work on the ranges of longbow shooting and you know
what can you achieve at shooting at different ranges yeah and and what
choices are they making when they do that and that relates to you know the
rate at which they're shooting and lots of other things as well. it's it's interesting
you were saying that the French Knights actually passed the English lines which
meant these shooting lines which meant that they could actually know any shoot
from the front but shoot from the sides and in fact possibly even shoot from the
back which of course is leaves you far more vulnerable. At a late stage in the
battle there is a suggestion in some of the French accounts that they felt that
they'd been entirely surrounded yeah and it's not been it's not beyond the realm
of possibility well the main thing is that if you imagine the English arrayed
like a V and the French are you know going for the center to kill Henry and
the nobles then the guys that the wings have lots of opportunity to shoot at the
sides and some of them are hiding in the woods and they can run round the back
and shoot from the back probably at a later late stage in the battle. That'd make
you uncomfortable. So obviously in in our first film we're shooting the breastplate
plum on from from the front, and it comes down to a time issue frankly
with the filming of it what we'll do is we'll come and have a look at shooting
from the side as well I mean it's got to be a given yeah and yeah I mean you were
making a good point earlier about how were people, hurt you know people
were hurt. How were they hurt? As it's a response film I guess my main
you know the main other point I want to stress in all of this because when
you're focusing on specific things as you have to it's very easy to
overemphasize what you know what you're concentrating on to the exclusion of
everything else and this is a very complex physical situation that we're
dealing with we got to pull it apart we got to test certain things methodically
you know it's easy then to say what if this what if that
what if this well we're working on it but we got a you go we got to be kind of
methodical about it if we get nothing out of this from me in this film I want
to stress that nobody is saying the longbow is an ineffective weapon. That's
not what we're saying at all. It's very clear from all the sources at Agincourt
on both sides that lots of French Knights and men at arms got killed by
archers shooting arrows at them and the arrows are killing them and hurting them
and doing damage that's nobody's questioning that at all
what we're saying is it's perhaps not happening the way we might imagine it
happening. We know that they are able to kill these people even though they are
wearing good equipment so what is really going on? You know how are they able to
get past really good armour and that doesn't and that doesn't make the French
stupid for wearing the armor because it would have been a whole lot worse if
they hadn't been wearing it there there aren't actually that many battles in
medieval history where you can show English archers shooting at people who
don't have armor but there are a couple of instances the Battle of Stoke Field
in 1487 is a good example of that where the Yorkists army has a lot of Irish
fighting men in it who don't have any defensive armor really and it's an
absolute massacre so wearing the armor is a good idea even though it's not of
course a hundred percent protection what I like about this project is that we can
start to replace some of that supposition with some with some fact and
we you know it's it's never perfect but we can we can do our best and we can do
something useful I mean especially with the practical work you know practical
investigation of you know arms and armor and medieval fighting and so forth has
has gone places in the last 10 years nobody could ever have expected
and when you put yourself in the practical situation you find out new
things but sometimes you can just make sense of weird things in the existing
evidence that were hard to understand before yeah and in that way you then
make a connection and suddenly that isolated bit of evidence and this
isolated bit of evidence are suddenly singing from the same page. 15, 20 years
ago certainly, there weren't people really shooting heavy bows and if they
were shooting heavy bows they weren't traditional English longbows. The
whole sort of warbow archery style that you see in all the pictures and that Joe
was exhibiting in the film is something relatively new and so you go back
certainly 20 years and that very test that we did today
even if you had the breastplate, even if you had all of us standing there and
doing all the same things, would not be possible because there was nobody like
Joe. Right, and similarly with the armour and there's lots of people now who have
lots of experience fighting in full plate armor and that starts to give you more
of a window on the the perspective of the people who were really there. 20 years
ago you would not be able to say for example that the armour that the
French were wearing when they advanced towards the English could be worn in a
number of different ways depending on the situation and even though it is
configured in different ways it might not look appreciably different from the
outside from the point of artists you know depicting depicting it but
essentially the same equipment could be worn in a configuration where it's 20
kilos total weight or 35 kilos total weight and I know as someone who
fights in armour and a lot of other people know the same thing that even if
you change the weight of your armor by 3 kilos it's a meaningful difference and
it changes what you can do for how long and so forth. So our
understanding of the physical environment just through that the
proliferation of of practical interests has really
transformed. And the basic history is still catching up
there's loads of people out there who are fighting an Armour at the weekends
who have a much better sense of what that French advance might have felt like
but they're you know they're not the people that are you know charged with
professionally writing stuff down or yeah you know they don't end up on You
Tube films all the time although probably some of them do but you know we
get a catch up with where we are with our investigative abilities and it
feels like that's what this project's about. That's one of the things actually
I like about this is, however many people watched the last film, two and a half
million or something, there's two and a half million heads out there
thinking, commenting, bringing up sources, talking about stuff and it's opened up
the world to people like me who are not professional academic historians I mean
I alluded in in my last response film that I'm just a bloke by shed and
we're gonna go and see Dr Toby Capwell to get some better answers and
and the bottom line that's true. I benefit from the work that you and your
colleagues do on on writing this the books that you write and researching and
and developing our knowledge to the whole area so when we talk about primary
sources and when people put in a comment about a source that they've got I mean
how should this all be approached really from an academic point of view yeah I
mean there's a number of different kinds of evidence that we can work with I
think one of the limitations of this kind of historical inquiry historically
has been is that any any given scholar or researcher has tended to work with
one kind of evidence so you're a textual historian or you're an art historian or
you're an archaeologist and the good ones always look at other types of
evidence to give color and perspective and context to what they're primarily
concerned with but I think it's only been fairly recently that you know most
universities most academic bodies generally
have really started to encourage interdisciplinary research where you are
actively pulling different kinds of evidence together and trying to build a
better representation of the reality that you're concerned with so you know
we've got to be dynamic with the way we use the evidence and we have to be very
precise about how we use the evidence you know if we're if we're working with
documents and written accounts of this eye witness says this happened at
the Battle of Agincourt we have to be very careful for example of working in
translation it's useful a lot of times to work with translations but sometimes
you can get the wrong idea if you don't check it against the actual words that
the original author used so I think I think precision is really important and
being clear about what's in the evidence versus what you're what you're making of
it and the hypothesis is important you have to have an idea of what you think
is going on and then you've got to use the evidence against that and you've got
to be prepared for for being wrong and you and you've got to change your idea
in the face of good evidence and it's sometimes easy when you've worked with
with a subject a long time to forget to go back to the basics.
I was just looking at some of the the textual sources for Agincourt again this
morning and I was very struck again by how they talk
about the effectiveness, and that people are being killed by those arrows, and
everybody agrees it's a great weapon nobody contests that but how does it
really work and what was so effective about the way that Henry V
specifically was using his archers If there's graduate students
working on 15th century sources out there and you find something that you
think is important tell us but don't just tell us oh I read somewhere that
this you know we need to know where our evidence is coming from and that's why
footnotes are important but if you've got them
absolutely we want to know about them I mean I do think it is important it's
especially important for this actually because let's just say we're still
making these films in five years time which would be great we're going to look
back on earlier stuff an go "oh we got that wrong" and it is to be accepting of
when you're wrong and to be accepting of what you don't know and you can strive
to improve on both of those things well but to say that you don't get things
wrong and that you know everything are too meaningless statements you know you
got to start somewhere and as you do it as we do these shooting tests we'll get
better at it and then we might you know and then we'll go back and and and try
to revise but you know you got to start somewhere. We've got a few minutes spare
now with Dr. Toby Capwell so we're just going to run through some of those
stupid questions or not so stupid questions that I have wondered for years
or I've heard about all my mates have talked about and claimed a fact so we're
just going to go through it in a very informal unstructured way so right at
the end of the battle I've heard the English archers took all the prisoners
and then ended up having to slaughter them basically losing all their ransoms
is a version I hear. True, not true, in between? Partially true. They did kill
some prisoners because they were worried at one stage that they had so many
prisoners they couldn't guard them and continue to fight the battle at the same
time and King Henry ordered that the prisoners should be killed because it
was it was a tenuous position initially a lot of a lot of his troops refused to
do it and then they did kill some of them but then they stopped so they
killed some but they didn't kill all of them
so so when his troops refused to do it presumably that's from a financial point
of view or a moral point of view or do we not know? Well I don't want to say
what was in the minds of these people but there was certainly a financial hit
to be taken when you've got a really valuable nobleman who you can sell back
to his family for a lot of money and then you're just going to cut his throat
I mean if you just take the human element out of it completely there's a
major financial disincentive to do this not there were rules of war but the
rules of war were broken by the English on that day really or were there
precedents? I mean was it just something that was just not done and was
looked down on as my understanding is was looked down on by the rest of Europe
as pretty dirty day. Well you know it's a it's a fluid thing and it depends how
it gets spun later on a basic human level it seems like it's you know
morally reprehensible to kill unarmed people who you've taken prisoner in
good faith and I think this is undoubtedly a level of that where the
medieval people would acknowledge that on the other hand it was a potentially
desperate situation and some of these prisoners might have been making
indications that they were going to violate the prisoner captor contract by
getting up and attacking them yeah which you're not supposed to do either you
know when you take a prisoner there's an agreement on both sides
you know you get kept in an open prison with the agreement that you won't try to
escape so it's a tricky thing so but it still looks bad there's no question that
it looks bad. Pointed stakes... So... this is an interesting one. I'm gonna pull you
up on this, we mentioned the word pointed stakes and you went... as if you're
knocking it in the ground. Now there are accounts aren't there
correctly that the archers had to carry a pointed stake? Right, again it's
this thing about needing to protect your archers and if you can't count on having
hedges for them to hide behind or a river or a ditch or forest or whatever
it's a good idea to carry your fortification with you so the archers at
Agincourt had each a long wooden stake that were set up in front of them. Now
the thing about this is I ponder things on rainy days when haven't got anything
to do and I've always wondered because you see the the artwork and it's always
a pointed stake with the point outwards and if you hammer that in if it's got a
point on it, you knock the point off and OK you can whittle it
back on but then when you removing big chunks of timber you've got to do that
with an axe and and if it's buried not that deep in boggy ground the whole
thing is gonna be flopping around by the time you've done it with an axe or a
billhook so you can't sharpen them afterwards so I've always wondered about
this and the only conclusion I can come to is that you have the point that is
driven into the ground and then the flat end down I might be the only person out
here who goes yeah well of course it's like obvious but actually in every
portrayal you see it's a pointed end coming out the ground and I can't see
how they can achieve that I I have been worried about the the idea of hammering
a sharp point quite apart from ruining the point it's not going to be very
effective and it's fiddly it's just it's the weird thing to be doing it doesn't
seem to make sense I have worried about it but I haven't
thought that much about it you know one one has to think about the diameter of
the stakes - I mean they're not giant great tree trunks, are they? Or but how
narrow can they be before they're not effective yeah and really all you need
is a deterrent for the cavalry and if it's inconvenient for infantry advancing
into you as well so much the better but it's really an obstacle it's not a spear
I I think that's the point in my head I always think of it like a sharpened
stake sticking out at the ground and I suspect it's just quite simply an
obstacle I think but I have to check if we're gonna get into this seriously I
think there are depictions of stakes being used and the points are sharpened
but you'd have to judge the artwork and is this some 100 years later
illustrating a text that they've been given and they they make the same
assumption I don't know how you'd investigate that because I don't know
what the primary evidence is going to be No but that is it's just one it's one of
these things it's part of the myth of Agincourt is we all know that they
have sharpened stakes and hammered the sharpened stakes in, but actually do we
know that? Yeah I mean there's a long history of first the Scots building
obstacles to use against the English heavy cavalry you know during the the
Wars of Independence in the 13th early 14th centuries and the
English actually get this idea of fighting the way they fight because of
the way they were they've that the experiences against the Scots and the
Scots supposedly did sharpen stakes and plant them in the ground you know
more like you know you know punji sticks or something you're meant to step on
them and they're smaller but you know there is a sharpened stake thing in the
repertoire but on the other hand if it's a big even whether it's sharp not or
otherwise if it's projecting at an angle level with a horse's chest or whatever
it's still gonna be effective it doesn't need to be sharp yeah to do a job needs
to put the horse off, that's the point it just needs to keep them from smashing
through your line you know with impunity yeah. So "reenactorisms" you will have
heard the phrase okay yeah so I'm an occasional reenactor sitting around the
fire we all love a good story and we tell it to the people who come round. The
English were threatened with having their fingers cut off by the French so
that's why we greet the French like that sorry French people. True, not? I don't
know I am vaguely aware of problems with this
story... that the whatever this insulting
gesture is comes from archers that sounds to me like something that isn't
true it's a good story it's fun to tell at parties it's a clever thing to know
and that's precisely why I would be skeptical of its validity. Moving on
quickly? Yes keep going, let's get past that The English had
dysentery so badly yeah they didn't want to stop marching that they cut the arse
out of their hose so that they could basically just "void their bowels", they
could go to the toilet at the side of the road without having to take their
britches down. Completely untrue. Lovely Alright.. You so disappointed me.
Okay can I explain... okay
it's completely untrue there is there is some of the accounts of the battle say
that the archers had were wearing their hose low but that none of them had
dysentery this is a major major part of the myth it's a it's a
device that's used to exaggerate the the the danger of the English position the
Jeopardy that they're in they're up against it they're not only are they
outnumbered ten to one they also are all sick and you know and
it just makes the whole victory that much more amazing right but they didn't
because all there was a real problem with dysentery and Harfleur at the siege
of Harfleur and people died of it and a but everybody who had it was sent
home right Anne Curry's got the documentation we know who was sent home
and the people were sent home were all the people with dysentery the people at
the battle were the people who weren't sick. Dysentery is not a part of the
battle it's a part of the campaign the two different things. Dysentery is more
about staying in one place not about being mobile. Now it's not to say you can't
get dysentery when you're mobile but it is that long-term toilets
in one place lack of hygiene. They can't have those people on you know on
their progress across France when they might have to fight a major battle at
any time that's just it's better to send them home and work with fewer healthier
men we've got their names it's all written down. Forget it. Good. Bad.
That was a great story, ruined, sorry everybody. That's the whole point of this,
great story ruined by ugly facts but the reality I think is still more interesting.
Okay, the rate of infection from English arrow wounds are so high the French thought
that we poisoned our arrows. Theory being the arrows were stuck in the ground so
there was mud, defecation from being in the shooting lines and all that kind of
malarkey. Even heard that before? I'm looking from the face you haven't even
heard that... I have heard stuff about English archers rubbing gunk on their
arrows for purposes of biological warfare or whatever I think it's a
stretch I mean maybe... I would put that out
to the world go out and find us evidence for this if there is evidence for it I'd
really like to know but we can't work with just the supposition of oh yeah
they do it I would do it if I was there you know. It would work. It would work
but I think they're more concerned with putting arrows in people's bodies and
you know the wound being the focus if they get infected and die later that
doesn't do you any good in the one hour or whatever of the battle you know what
happens after the battle is not your immediate concern. Sorry the joy of my
face there is I've just thought of another one that's not even on my list. Right, I haven't read Roger Ascham in years so I can't quite remember but
somebody put reference saying that he said he put a blob of beeswax on the end
of your arrow and that will make it go through the armor. Modern anti-tank
rounds often have a sort of a washer around the head which I don't know
stabilizes the head when it impacts the armour, or something I frankly don't
understand, heard anything similar in arrows crossbow bolts putting a lead
washer or a ball of beeswax, or... I've heard it in living history chitchat but
I've never seen any primary source for it on the other hand I've never looked
for it so I'll say I don't know but I'm sceptical yeah okay. Well thank you
very much for that Toby I'm sorry to put you through that because there was some
nonsense in there but it's great actually because I have learned things
that I thought I knew for a fact and if nothing else that's gotta be what it's for
so thank you for spending the time and thank you for having us here at the
Wallace Collection, a fantastic place and thank you for watching and
we'll see you again soon. We've got good stuff coming
