Agincourt: Henry V and The Battle That Made England, by Juliet Barker

Agincourt, like Crecy and Potiers before it, was a glorious battlefield victory for outnumbered Englishmen. Did it really make England, though? By the time of Agincourt, England already had a pretty well-developed political system that combined royalty (in the Lancastrian branch of the Plantagenet family that had ruled over England for centuries) as well as an active and generally patriotic Parliament. England had been in the process of consolidating its rule over Wales for at least a couple of centuries as well, although there were still many rebellions ongoing. As is generally the case when we examine battle studies, it behooves us to ponder how exactly this battle was decisive and what the long-term effects of the battle were. In the short term, Henry V was able to consolidate rule over a large amount of France and to gain a treaty that would have allowed him to claim the French throne had he lived longer, but he did not. Despite the calamity suffered by the French were the flower of their nobility was cut down or captured and held for ransom, or ran away as cowards, or were killed but unrecognized, and so their fate was unknown, the French within 40 years had nearly completely pushed the English out of France altogether. The book even mentions these things, though still persists in considering the battle to be one that made England, although it is not clear how this is to be viewed.

This book is more than 350 pages long and is divided into three parts and eighteen chapters. The initial portion of the book is taken up by a short preface, a note to the text, and various maps and charts that set up the first part of the book, which discusses the road to Agincourt (I), including maps of Aquitaine (English Gascony), the route of the Agincourt march from near Harfleur to Calais, the French royal succession and Edward III’s claim to the French throne, as well as the French and English royal lines. The first part of the book then contains eight preliminary chapters, including Henry V’s attention to his just rights and inheritances, as he phrased them (1), his apprenticeship as a leader during his father’s lifetime and reign (2), his deeply Christian faith (3), the diplomatic effort to both deceive the French and to obtain a good offer (4), dealing with the Scots and a plot to sabotage the invasion (5), Henry’s preparations for war (6) with Parliament, the expenditure of money and the logistics of the invasion effort (7), and the gathering of the army (8). The second part of the book then discusses the Agincourt campaign itself (II), with chapters on the sailing of the army to France (9), Harfleur (10), the successful conquest of the city (11) after a siege, the march to Calais (12), the difficult crossing of the Somme (13), the eve of the battle (14), and the English first move on the day of battle to advance their lines (15). The third part of the book then briefly discusses the aftermath of the battle (III), with a discussion of the roll of the dead, mostly on the French side (16), the return of King Henry V to England (17), and the ephemeral rewards of victory (18), after which the book ends with acknowledgements, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

While the author’s account of the battle itself is sound, and that of the campaign as a whole worthwhile, to be sure, this book is far longer than it needs to be. A great deal of time is spent dealing with mundane details about how it was that the English king managed to pay for his army, and how it was that even with a fair amount of loot from ransom and generous taxation from a supportive Parliament, that many soldiers were unpaid for long periods of time. Far too much of the book is spent on detailing the bastard feudalism that allowed the English to finance their effort to invade France, and far too little space is devoted to the battle itself, what people are reading this book for. It is to be lamented that there are so many attempts by authors to make their writings more interesting by including more context, but this book manages to fall into a familiar space of going all the way back to 1066 to discuss the context of the Hundred Years’ War as well as the unsuccessful efforts of Edward III to turn his battlefield victories into longstanding conquests of massive territories in France, to say nothing of the failures in achieving a personal union between England and France. It is not certain whether the author’s claim that that the squabbling French leadership hated each other more than the French, but if that was the case, that state was short-lived when the French regime itself was threatened by the results of Agincourt and by the continued hostility between the Armagnacs and Burgundians, each of them vying for control of a kingdom while the English did the same.