Today is the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt in 1415. Probably no other comparable battle, no other comparable victory, has fixed itself, and did so even before Shakespeare, in the collective n English national self-consciousness. One result of that is a continuing range of publications about the battle and about King Henry V.
This autumn has seen the much publicised appearance of Dan Jones! new biography of the King. I have not so far looked at it, but in an online conversation Jones made a point about the injury suffered by the future King when Prince of Wales at Shrewsbury in 1403. He argues John Bradmore may have been an even more skilled surgeon than modern commentators give him credit for. This is a point I have made for several years. We also agree that surviving such an injury gave, or reinforced, a personal sense of destiny, of Divine favour, with the future King.
King Henry V
Image:MeisterDrucke
YouTube offers a range of features in Agincourt and on the life of its victor. Two of the best are an excellent pair of podcasts by the now well-established duo of Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook about the events leading up to the battle fought 609 years ago at Agincourt.
They can be seen at Hundred Years' War | Henry V's Invasion of France | Part 1 and at Hundred Years' War | The Road To Agincourt | Part 2
Besides being a battle, like Waterloo, which we won largely due to overnight rain, resulting in mud on the battlefield, Agincourt is the first example of a paradoxical feature I've noticed of several British military victories: They were preceded by a retreat!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if Henry V's march down the Somme was a retreat, or simply an effort to find a crossing and give the French a thrashing at the first opportunity! But later examples (to which a historian could probably add) include the retreat from Quatre Bras before Waterloo, the retreat to the Marne at the start of WW1, and the retreat to Dunkirk early in WW2 (although of course winning those two wars was a long drawn out process rather than a single battle).
So the moral to any potential adversaries reading this is don't be too complacent if we run away to start with, because that is just a curious national tradition, and the chances are we will turn around and ultimately win! :-)
Cheers
John R Ramsden (jrq@gmx.com)