Editing Battle of Agincourt (section)

==Fighting==
===Opening moves===
[[File:Morning of the Battle of Agincourt, 25th October 1415.PNG|thumb|[[John Gilbert (painter)|John Gilbert]]{{spaced ndash}}''The Morning of the Battle of Agincourt'' (1884), [[Guildhall Art Gallery]]]]
On the morning of 25 October, the French were still waiting for additional troops to arrive. The [[Anthony, Duke of Brabant|Duke of Brabant]] (about 2,000 men),{{sfn|Mortimer|2009|p=449}} the [[Louis II of Anjou|Duke of Anjou]] (about 600 men),{{sfn|Mortimer|2009|p=449}} and the [[John VI, Duke of Brittany|Duke of Brittany]] (6,000 men, according to Monstrelet),{{sfn|Mortimer|2009|p=416}} were all marching to join the army.

For three hours after sunrise there was no fighting. Military textbooks of the time stated: "Everywhere and on all occasions that foot soldiers march against their enemy face to face, those who march lose and those who remain standing still and holding firm win."{{sfn|Barker|2015|p=290}} On top of this, the French were expecting thousands of men to join them if they waited. They were blocking Henry's retreat, and were willing to wait for as long as it took. There had been a suggestion that the English would run away rather than give battle when they saw that they would be fighting so many French princes.{{sfn|Barker|2015|p=291}}

Henry's men were already weary from hunger and illness and from their ongoing retreat. Apparently Henry believed his fleeing army would perform better on the defensive, but had to halt the retreat and somehow engage the French before a defensive battle was possible.{{sfn|Mortimer|2009|pp=436–437}} This entailed abandoning his chosen position, in which the longbowmen were defended from cavalry charges by long sharpened wooden stakes set in the ground and pointed towards the French lines. These stakes had to be pulled out of the ground, carried to the army's new position, and reinstalled to defend the English lines.{{sfn|Keegan|1976|pp=90–91}} The use of stakes was an innovation for the English: during the [[Battle of Crécy]], for example, the archers had been instead protected by pits and other obstacles.{{sfn|Bennett|1994}}

The tightness of the terrain also seems to have restricted the planned deployment of the French forces. The French had originally drawn up a battle plan that had archers and crossbowmen in front of their men-at-arms, with a cavalry force at the rear specifically designed to "fall upon the archers, and use their force to break them,"{{sfn|Barker|2015|p=275}} but in the event, the French archers and crossbowmen were deployed ''behind'' and to the sides of the men-at-arms. The French archers seem to have played almost no part, except possibly for an initial volley of arrows at the start of the battle. The cavalry force, which could have devastated the English line if it had attacked while they moved their stakes, charged only ''after'' the initial volley of arrows from the English. It is unclear whether the delay occurred because the French were hoping the English would launch a frontal assault and were surprised when the English instead started shooting from their new defensive position, or whether the French mounted knights instead did not react quickly enough to the English advance. French chroniclers agree that when the mounted charge did come, it did not contain as many men as it should have; Gilles le Bouvier states that some had wandered off to warm themselves and others were walking or feeding their horses.{{sfn|Barker|2015|p=294}}

===French cavalry attack===
The French cavalry, despite being disorganised and not at full numbers, charged towards the longbowmen. It was a disastrous attempt. The French knights were unable to outflank the longbowmen because of the encroaching woodland; they were also unable to charge through the array of sharpened stakes that protected the archers. [[John Keegan]] argues that the longbows' main influence on the battle at this point was injuries to horses: armoured only on the head, many horses would have become dangerously out of control when struck in the back or flank from the high-elevation, long-range shots used as the charge started.{{sfn|Keegan|1976|pp=92–96}} The mounted charge and subsequent retreat churned up the already muddy terrain between the French and the English. Juliet Barker quotes a contemporary account by a monk from [[Saint Denis Basilica]] who reports how the wounded and panicking horses galloped through the advancing infantry, scattering them and trampling them down in their headlong flight from the battlefield.{{sfn|Barker|2015|p=297}}

===Main French assault===
[[File:King Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415.png|thumb|left|upright=1.2|King Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415, by Sir John Gilbert in the 19th century.]]
Despite advancing through what the French monk of Saint Denis described as "a terrifying hail of arrow shot", the plate armour of the French men-at-arms allowed them to close the distance to the English lines after the English longbowmen started shooting from extreme longbow range (approximately {{convert|300|yd}}).{{sfn|Mortimer|2009|pp=436-439}} A complete coat of plate was considered such good protection that shields were generally not used,{{sfn|Nicholson|2004|p=109}} although the Burgundian contemporary sources distinguish between Frenchmen who used shields and those who did not, and Rogers has suggested that the front elements of the French force used axes and shields.{{sfn|Rogers|2008|p=90}} Modern historians are divided on how effective the longbows would have been against plate armour of the time. Modern test and contemporary accounts conclude that arrows could not penetrate the better quality steel armour, which became available to knights and men-at-arms of fairly modest means by the middle of the 14th&nbsp;century, but could penetrate the poorer quality [[wrought iron]] armour.<ref>Nicolle, D. (2004). Poitiers 1356: The capture of a king (Vol. 138). Osprey Publishing.</ref><ref>Loades, M. (2013). The longbow. Bloomsbury Publishing.</ref><ref>Jones, P. N. (1992). The metallography and relative effectiveness of arrowheads and armor during the Middle Ages. Materials characterization, 29(2), 111–117.</ref><ref>Military History Monthly February 2016</ref> Rogers suggested that the longbow could penetrate a wrought iron breastplate at short range and penetrate the thinner armour on the limbs even at {{convert|220|yd}}. He considered a knight in the best-quality steel armour invulnerable to an arrow on the breastplate or top of the helmet, but vulnerable to shots hitting the limbs, particularly at close range.{{sfn|Rogers|2008|pp=110–113}} In any case, to protect themselves as much as possible from the arrows, the French had to lower their visors and bend their helmeted heads to avoid being shot in the face, as the eye- and air-holes in their helmets were among the weakest points in the armour. This head-lowered position restricted their breathing and their vision. Then they had to walk a few hundred yards (metres) through thick mud and a press of comrades while wearing armour weighing {{convert|50|–|60|lb}}, gathering sticky [[clay]] all the way. Increasingly, they had to walk around or over fallen comrades.{{sfn|Barker|2015|p=301}}

[[File:Vigiles du roi Charles VII 57.jpg|thumb|right|Miniature from Vigiles du roi Charles VII. The battle of Azincourt 1415.]]
The surviving French men-at-arms reached the front of the English line and pushed it back, with the longbowmen on the flanks continuing to shoot at point-blank range. When the archers ran out of arrows, they dropped their bows and, using [[hatchet]]s, [[sword]]s, and the [[mallet]]s they had used to drive their stakes in, attacked the now disordered, fatigued and wounded French men-at-arms massed in front of them. The French could not cope with the thousands of lightly armoured longbowmen assailants, who were much less hindered by the mud and weight of their armour, combined with the English men-at-arms. The impact of thousands of arrows, combined with the slog in heavy armour through the mud, the heat and difficulty breathing in plate armour with the visor down,<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Askew |first=Graham N. |last2=Formenti |first2=Federico |last3=Minetti |first3=Alberto E. |year=2012 |title=Limitations imposed by wearing armour on Medieval soldiers' locomotor performance |journal=Proc. R. Soc. B |volume=279 |issue=1729 |pages=640–644 |doi=10.1098/rspb.2011.0816 |pmc=3248716 |pmid=21775328}}</ref> and the crush of their numbers, meant the French men-at-arms could "scarcely lift their weapons" when they finally engaged the English line.{{sfn|Curry|2000|p=159}} The exhausted French men-at-arms were unable to get up after being knocked to the ground by the English. As the melee developed, the French second line also joined the attack, but they too were swallowed up, with the narrow terrain meaning the extra numbers could not be used effectively. Rogers suggested that the French at the back of their deep formation would have been attempting to literally add their weight to the advance, without realising that they were hindering the ability of those at the front to manoeuvre and fight by pushing them into the English formation of lancepoints. After the initial wave, the French would have had to fight over and on the bodies of those who had fallen before them. In such a "[[crowd crush|press]]" of thousands of men, Rogers suggested that many could have suffocated in their armour, as was described by several sources, and which was also known to have happened in other battles.{{sfn|Rogers|2008|pp=95–98}}

The French men-at-arms were taken prisoner or killed in the thousands. The fighting lasted about three hours, but eventually the leaders of the second line were killed or captured, as those of the first line had been. The English ''Gesta Henrici'' described three great heaps of the slain around the three main English standards.{{sfn|Curry|2000|p=37}}
According to contemporary English accounts, Henry fought hand to hand. Upon hearing that his youngest brother [[Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester]] had been wounded in the groin, Henry took his household guard and stood over his brother, in the front rank of the fighting, until Humphrey could be dragged to safety. The king received an axe blow to the head, which knocked off a piece of the crown that formed part of his helmet.{{sfn|Mortimer|2009|p=443}}

===Attack on the English baggage train===
[[File:King Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt.jpg|thumb|upright|1915 depiction of Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt : The King wears on this surcoat the Royal Arms of England, quartered with the Fleur de Lys of France as a symbol of his claim to the throne of France.]]
The only French success was an attack on the lightly protected English baggage train, with Ysembart d'Azincourt (leading a small number of men-at-arms and [[Squire|varlets]] plus about 600 peasants) seizing some of Henry's personal treasures, including a crown.{{sfn|Curry|2006|pp=207–209}} Whether this was part of a deliberate French plan or an act of local [[brigandage]] is unclear from the sources. Certainly, d'Azincourt was a local knight but he might have been chosen to lead the attack because of his local knowledge and the lack of availability of a more senior soldier.{{sfn|Barker|2015|p=311}} In some accounts the attack happened towards the end of the battle, and led the English to think they were being attacked from the rear. Barker, following the ''Gesta Henrici'', believed to have been written by an English chaplain who was actually in the baggage train, concluded that the attack happened at the ''start'' of the battle.{{sfn|Barker|2015|p=311}}

===Henry executes French prisoners===
Regardless of when the baggage assault happened, at some point after the initial English victory, Henry became alarmed that the French were regrouping for another attack. The ''Gesta Henrici'' places this after the English had overcome the onslaught of the French men-at-arms and the weary English troops were eyeing the French rearguard ("in incomparable number and still fresh").{{sfn|Curry|2000|p=37}} Le Fèvre and Wavrin similarly say that it was signs of the French rearguard regrouping and "marching forward in battle order" which made the English think they were still in danger.{{sfn|Curry|2000|p=163}}

Henry ordered the slaughter of most of the French prisoners, possibly numbering in the thousands. He ordered only the highest-ranked prisoners to be spared, presumably because they were the most likely to fetch a large ransom under the chivalric system of warfare. The prisoners outnumbered their captors; according to most chroniclers, Henry feared that the prisoners would realise their advantage in numbers, rearm themselves with the weapons strewn about the field, and overwhelm the exhausted English forces. Contemporary chroniclers did not criticise Henry for ordering the killing.{{sfn|Barker|2015|pp=305–308}} In his study of the battle John Keegan argued that the main aim was not to actually kill the French prisoners but rather to terrorise them into submission and quell any possibility they might resume the fight, which would probably have caused the uncommitted French reserve forces to join the fray, as well.{{sfn|Keegan|1976|pp=107–112}} Such an event would have posed a risk to the still-outnumbered English and could have easily turned their victory into a mutually destructive defeat, as the English forces were now largely intermingled with the French and would have suffered grievously from the arrows of their own longbowmen had they needed to resume fighting. The English knights refused to assist in the killing of these prisoners due to their belief that it was unchivalrous. Keegan, estimating that only around 200 archers were involved in the task and recognizing the difficulty of killing thousands of prisoners quickly, speculates that relatively few prisoners were actually killed before the French reserves fled the field and Henry rescinded the order.{{sfn|Keegan|1976|p=112}}