How Accurate is the Battle of Agincourt in The King?

the king is a Netflix film telling the story of King Henry the fifth of England who was King in the early 15th century especially about his campaigns in France the 1415 campaign that ended in the now infamous Battle of Agincourt but in this video I want to ask the question how historically accurate and authentic is the Battle of Agincourt in the film the king well let's have a look the first thing I'd like to pick up on is the actual terrain of the battlefield which was fought in the northeast of France in the region of the pas de calais a region which if you've ever been isn't exactly famous for its rolling hills and mountains as we see another thing I'd like to pick up on is that the actual terrain that they fought on and this is crucial to the battle and the outcome of the Battle of Agincourt is because of the weather conditions beforehand though it was fought on the 25th of October and actually there were very heavy rains before the battle now we do see that in the film which is very good because that was crucial to the way that the battlefield was laid out on the day of the actual battle another thing that was crucial that we don't see at all actually is that the field had been plowed beforehand meaning that all the earth had been turned up and it meant that the battlefield was already a slippery muddy mess before either of the armies actually got to fight each other and during the battle of course this only got worse and this is very important to bear in mind of course in the depiction in the king this is clearly just a kind of meadow probably not even in the north of France by the looks of things and clearly hasn't been plowed so that's one point to take into consideration what I did really liked was the speech that he gave they thought it was a very powerful speech the score in this scene is incredible as well so I might be taking points about the historical accuracy here and saying that they're not being very accurate but that didn't mean that I didn't enjoy the battle scene in fact there were bits of it that I thought were really really well done and I actually really enjoyed watching it as a film but him to be sitting here with my historical helmet on I'm gonna talk about the accuracy and actually the speech it wasn't accurate either in a way because we do actually know what Henry talked about and he talks about the former French defeats at the hands of the English actually interestingly enough a Burgundian source tells us that he warned the archers that if they were captured they were going to get there too is cut off which actually is a fun bit of trivia that I think I'm gonna make another video about in the future but stay tuned for that one I also really like the shots before the battle kind of the the nervous waiting in between the speech in the actual fighting I think that must have been a very nerve-wracking time for anyone standing in either of the armies waiting for the advance to come when it finally does as well some of the shots in this prelude to the battle were really gloriously done so I think the cinematography was was really brilliant even if the accuracy lacks detail and authenticity sometimes now one thing I'm gonna pick up on now is the formation of the English and there's a lot to say here so we see that the men-at-arms are in the center and this is true to history but not quite in the way that they portray it as well we have then that there are the two flanks sort of waiting in the woods that this is meant to be some kind of surprise attack when you see the shots they are clearly just behind the treeline the French would obviously see them and this isn't what happened at the Battle of Agincourt now we can see here again to look at the formation that you have the men-at-arms in the center but the archers way outnumber them this is very accurate as I'll go on to say later on but the archers are not at all protected in fact one of the really important things at the Battle of Agincourt was the fact that the archers all hammered stakes into the ground and as you can see here from this diagram of the layout of the battlefield the English formation was rather different as to what is shown in the king so you had in the center three battles now today when we say the word battle we think of a military engagement a fight what it meant back then and what it still is used to refer to a military history a lot of the time is actually deployments of an army so there were three battles in the English formation one in the centre was under the command of Henry himself Henry was very much a leading from the front and did fight during the Battle of Agincourt as the film portrays but then obviously in the film it shows him hiding in the forest and then running out to some kind of counter-attack but this isn't what actually happened and the others being led by some of his commanders meanwhile the archers were on the flanks they had their backs to the forest and so their flanks were protected by the forest which turned out to be a genius move because the French cover actually initially tried to attack the archers but they couldn't because they couldn't outflank them now why couldn't they attack from the front because they put stakes into the ground Henry before the battle had each of the archers make a stake and Hammer it into the ground with mallets now the mallets are going to come back later but the stakes protected the arches and also funneled the French attack onto the men-at-arms now of course if you can see the from the formation this also meant that at a certain point the French men-at-arms couldn't get at the arches but the archers were at point-blank range to the guys that they were shooting out when they were attacking the English line with the men-at-arms and this really is a crucial ingredient to the Battle of Agincourt that I think it's a real shame that they didn't show this in the film because this is one of the reasons that makes this battle so interesting and actually the possible in inspiration for this might have been the Battle of Nicopolis which was fought in 1396 by a joint Crusader army you had Hungarians valakians the French and several others fighting against the Turks and the Turks to protect their archers also put stakes in the ground to great effect so it's possible that the English had read about this and and therefore that they thought we're gonna try this tactic and this work to great effect in the battle washing cool but as you can see in the film you can see that the French cavalry clearly could just go straight into those archers and those archers would would be absolutely wiped out in this case also what's interesting is that none of the French cavalry are using the Lancers at this point which if they're going for a full-on headlong charge as heavy cavalry you would expect there to be lances there which perhaps is not very accurate in this case and as I said the archers were the largest part of the English army now most estimates there is disagreement about numbers but I think the most accurate numbers that I've seen for the English army puts them around 6,000 men and out of those 6,000 men about 5/6 is often the number given for the amount of archers to merit arms what's interesting is that the archers would have been both English and Welsh there had actually been a lot of trouble with the Welsh at the end of the 14th century he had owned glinda and the fighting in the Welsh Marches but the Welsh at this point were also being used in the English army now of course the English longbowmen were the more peasants they weren't the nobles the nobles were the men at home so it makes sense that you had less of the men-at-arms than the arches but the arches proved to be an absolutely devastating force against the French and perhaps this is something that the film could have played on that the French really underestimated the English they thought they have so many arches the arches are useless tall the French were they had lots of men-at-arms so these were all the nobles the highest-ranking noble nobles and aristocracy in the land and the archers were all the common people so they really looked down upon them and that's part of the reason they might have been so rash at the Battle of Agincourt now it's really shame because in the film the archers really don't get much of the spotlight whereas in actual fact they were really crucial to the victory as I said they were 5/6 of the army so you're not going to say that they weren't an important part of the English tactic but in the film we only see them firing sort of two volleys off now something that has also been mentioned and I would highly recommend going and watching videos by the Metatron and shallow versity as well about this is that in the film we see them sort of firing straight up and then they come straight down and this really is not an efficient method of firing at all the archers had limited arrows especially because they were so outnumbered by the French so the way that they would fire as we can see in this depiction is straight on rather than going up and then down you lose a lot of the momentum of the arrow as well whereas if you fire straight you have a lot more punch power and punch power is what they wanted now there is a lot of debate as to whether the english and welsh arrows could have gone through plate armor but most people would agree that the answer is no especially for the better made steel plate armor which is what the majority of the french lines would have been using at this point because they were especially the front lines were the absolute top creme de la creme of the nobility perhaps the arrows could have gone through some of the poorer wrought iron if they really had a good solid hit but probably the aim wasn't actually to go through plate armor now we do see some of the Knights going down here but I think the shots are quite ambiguous I have watched the scene several times and I haven't seen any arrows going that you can see go straight through plate armor maybe I haven't looked carefully enough but I think quite a few of the shots kind of go in the neck of course one way that you could wipe out a knight is by going for the eye slots because the eye slots in the visor with the weaker parts of the French when they were charging actually they would bend down crouched over the horse so that they'd be in a sort of a hunched over position and then it would be much harder for the arrows to hit the I slots but of course if you're firing straight up and straight down in the film you you don't get that effect at all and it's or bounces off the top of the helmet which is the strongest part of the helmet because that's where you're going to get blows so that doesn't make any sense some historians like John Keegan have actually suggested that the main point of arrows at this point of having archers firing at cavalry was to kill the horses because horses weren't that armored at this point from what I've read and which you can see in the film but that there's quite a lot saying that they weren't very well armored and so actually the point was to wipe out the horses to create a disorganization in the charge and that really weakens the charge and this appears to have happened at Agincourt in fact something that the film gets totally wrong is that the cavalry never actually made it to the english ranks what the cavalry were trying to do in the first charge was to get at the archers on the flanks but they they found they couldn't outflank them because they they deployed with the forest to their back because they had the stakes to their front and so they tried to charge the field that been plowed remember it had rained it was muddy and it was a mess and they churned up the battlefield and so they had to dismount then the next charge that came in was on foot but it meant that the men and the French men-at-arms had to slog through the mud and the clay and everything to actually reach the English ranks and so they were tired they were being shot at constantly by arrows and these arrows might not be killing them but they were knocking them over and if you get knocked over when you have thousands of men in full plate Armour trying to push through and get there quite a lot of them will have been knocked onto the ground and potentially trampled to death something okay I'll too later it's quite quite gruesome but what I did really like is the the really rough brutal in-your-face combat of the men at arms I think the film did that really well and we see kind of the brutality of it of course this is this is meant to be the height of the age of chivalry but this is really just people going at each other in full plate arm you see people stabbing each other through the visors with with daggers and in the armpits and everywhere and sort of choking each other on the ground and beating each other with their fists and with maces and axes and and and actually this is sort of suggested from some of the sources we have we have to guess there henry key which is about the life of henry and it reads for when some of them killed when battle was first joined fall at the front so great was the undisciplined violence and pressure of the massive men behind them that the living fell on top of the dead and others falling on top of the living were killed as well so you can imagine this is like having a game of rugby but with a few thousand people on the rugby pitch and they're all wearing played armor and trying to kill each other which is just a really gruesome thing to think about we also have which i think the film did really well the the role that the mud plays in the battle and actually Juliet Barker and I and I read a book of heures conquest as well as a battle ax Jing qu and I went to one of her talks when I was I think it was 1415 and it was really great matter at the end really really lovely and great historian and she described in her book how some of the Knights probably drowned in their helmets literally drowned in the mud because if you had bodies falling on top of you and and also as we see later on with Henry people actually physically trying to drown you in the mud there was just no getting her pure exhausted you had a crush of bodies on top of you it's really really gruesome but it's one of the things that makes this battle really really memorable what I also really like is they show the the pack of men that this isn't you can't do finesse you're not doing think fancy things with swords that's one of the the issues I think shallow is that he mentioned with the duel earlier in the film against Harry Hotspur that they're trying to sort of fight like they're dueling with with fencing or or with sorts despite that actually being quite an accurate depiction of how they would have used swords with plate armor that doesn't work you're not getting for it through so you can see in this scene this absolute crush here that there's no space this was just a brutal kind of hacking and pushing and trying to push someone to the ground essentially so that they'd be trampled to death and this again is mentioned from the eyewitness account of a French monk at San Denis who wrote their Vanguard composed of about 5,000 men this is the French he is speaking about found itself at first so tightly packed that those who were in the third rank could scarcely use their swords so again after this we see that the French are mounting for another aurilla salt again this wasn't a cavalry assault this was an assault on foot because the ground had been churned up and plowed and was muddy and wet and so there was no way that cavalry were charging across and also the fact that there was now a battle line engaged with the central battle line of the men-at-arms of course the men at arms in the actual battle didn't sort of walk slowly towards this huge French cavalry force they stood behind their stakes flanked by the ouches and the French came to them I should say however that the English actually redeployed very very quickly just before the start of the battle kind of to egg the French on perhaps but the French didn't actually make advantage of this if they'd have charged at the right minute they could have called the English off guard and sliced through the army but they didn't and actually when the French charged the archers were already able to get shots off at them and this is when the cavalry had to dismount to regroup and then attack on foot which is what the main battle was now again we see the French charging with their cavalry towards the English position to sort of add to the crush that had already happened this isn't a good tactic and this isn't what happened but they did charge on foot and what actually this resulted in was that they just became pummeled with archers as I said the archers were on the flanks protected by their stakes and so it meant that as the French came forward this there was this huge crush a Frenchman that started to attack the front of the English battles of the men-at-arms and they were getting arrows poured into them from point-blank range from the arches on the sides and again even if they aren't killing them with these arrows this is causing confusion it's causing mayhem it would hurt getting hit by an arrow and and it meant that the French had to keep their visors down because if you lift up your visor that's a big target for an archer who's not very far away so it meant that visibility was limited and actually it's possible some have suggested and we know that this happened in other battles that quite a few men probably suffocated in their armor through this press of the French trying to get into this really narrow corridor where they could actually attack the Englishmen at arms because they couldn't get at the archers that were firing at them now of course in the film we see the scene of the men coming out of the forest in this this ambush that the French really never saw coming and it's it's yeah it wasn't great what this is reminiscent of what actually happened at the Battle of Agincourt however which i think is a real real shame that they didn't do this accurately or true to history is that the archers ran out of arrows and remember that the archers were five sixths of the army so that there are crucial force to be reckoned with here but of course they're the archers so what you can see here is these are these are lightly armed men now here they are kind of bills men you see them with polearm and all sorts but in the battle these would have been the arches they would have had things like knives perhaps a couple of maces swords and the mallets that they used to whack the stakes into the ground and they actually ran out of arrows at this point and this was a crucial point because they had been pummeling the French army with arrows the entire time throughout the battle to great effect as I mentioned causing confusion and the so forth but what happens now is that they ran out of arrows so they dropped their long bows they picked up any weapons they had including the mallets and they ran through the field of stakes and basically hit the French army from the sides now remember the French had trudged through this plowed field of mud they'd been pummeled with arrows and they were climbing over the bodies of their dead and dying suffocating in their Armour drowning in the mud and all of this and then suddenly you get thousands of very angry very nimble archers who are coming at you with daggers and maces and swords and mallets and they basically just went in and started to beat up the French Knights that were in the center of course the men-at-arms English men at arms were having the same trouble as the French they were fully plate armored so not none of this stripping down nonsense that you see in the film but they then join in the melee and they then get to these exhausted French Knights and basically start hitting them through all the slots so we do see there's a bit with Henry of course Henry's wearing his mail and something and you see him with his I think he's got some kind of Warhammer there that he's going in for the I slots he's going into the shoulder so these are all places that they could take down Knights here he's takes this I really like this scene with the night that he first sort of hits him in the one knee and then in the other because you could those were the weak points in the armor and this is what the archers would have gone for in the melee they would have gone for these weak points in the visor the groin hind the knees the shoulders in the armpits places like this now of course the culmination of the battle is quite controversial they sort of stop fighting in classic Hollywood style everyone respects the call of the horn despite the fact that the adrenaline must have been through the roof you were busy beating people and tried to drown them and and not have the same happen to you but I thought it was quite well done in the way that they set up this big chivalric fight I think this is a theme throughout the film that they set up you know these things have honor and one on one Jewel and you think oh it's gonna be a really climactic thing and they're going to be doing all these fancy swordsmanship and then the hero's gonna get wounded and then he's gonna kill the the dough fine in one last stroke of genius but each time they set something up like this also with the jewel with Harry Hotspur they kind of send that crashing down and show you just how brutal this actually was which i think is a really good thing about the film and obviously he then tries to come towards Henry but the ground has been churned up in it's way too slippy and he sort of slips and falls and then Henry sort of sends his men over to to stab him to death now of course this didn't happen this is actually Louis the duke of Gihon he was the door for France and he actually died several months later probably of dysentery he wasn't at the Battle of Agincourt and clearly he wasn't killed at the Battle of Agincourt also for all Henry's maverick behavior especially with the execution of the prisoners afterwards which actually as much as I hate to say you can justify killing prisoners for Henry's position this was actually the fact that they had so many prisoners at that time he was worried that if they picked up their arms again they were behind the English line they could turn the battle in the favor of the French so it's a very controversial thing to do that Henry did especially at the time with the whole code of chivalry and all of this but clearly you would not kill an enemy Prince just like this they obviously would have captured him because the ransom would be incredible that's why they they much preferred to capture men-at-arms rather than kill them because of ransoms and also the codes of chivalry that would be a great bargaining piece in any future negotiations with the French but despite all this I really really enjoyed the film I thought it was an interesting take on the period there was a wrong with it even if we're seeing that this was a film based on the Shakespearean interpretation of Henry the fifth rather than anything else clearly with the battle formation I think they could have done a much better job and I don't understand why they changed the battle because it wouldn't have taken that much more effort to make it actually like the real battle which was you know gritty there's great elements to the story there you have the French charging in this funneled field the arches on the sides you know you could have the whole dynamic with the Welsh in the army with the archers being from the lower classes and kind of the French nobility looking down on them and thinking this is so easy that we've got the English trapped and then charging and then actually finding that the English were holding their own and the Welsh archers were holding their own against the French and then that they dropped their their bows and that there must be that moment where the archers sort of see the combat and think oh this is terrible you know there's people drowning in the mud and beating each other and full plate armor and we're just here in our Jerkins and maybe some gamba sands and what are we going to do and then them kind of finding their courage and running through the stakes with knives and mallets and what Lance or clocking the French on the heads with with whatever weapons they have in some kind of desperate last-ditch attempt to turn the tide I think they've really missed the trick with that but at the same time I thought the the man-at-arms on man-at-arms combat was was really well done really gritty Costra phobic it's a hard watch and and I think that they did that really great especially with the the role of the mud as well and the kind of intensity of of that I thought they did a really good job so all-in-all I I did really enjoy the King I'd recommend to give it a watch it's not particularly historically accurate I think they could have done so much of a better job with this film although there were certain parts that I I really did enjoy so I would recommend giving it watch and letting me know what you think anyway thank you very much for watching I've been in history with Hilbert and I will see you all again very soon

Channel: History With Hilbert

Views: 446,823

Keywords: Agincourt, Azincourt, The King, Netflix, Outlaw King, HUndred Years War, Henry V, TImothee Chalamet, timothee chalamet the king, The King Agincourt, Battle of Agincourt, English Longbow, Henry V Agincourt, Agincourt Battle Scene, Agincourt Review, The King Review, English History, French History, La France, England, British History

Id: jonNAqHkXcI

Length: 22min 1sec (1321 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019