The Battle of Agincourt stunned France
On this day · 25 October 1415
On Saint Crispin's Day 1415, Henry V's mud-bound, outnumbered English longbowmen tore apart the cream of French chivalry.
On 25 October 1415, near the village of Azincourt in northern France, King Henry V led a tired, hungry English army to one of the most lopsided victories of the Hundred Years’ War. His force was small — only a few thousand fighting men, of whom roughly 80 percent were archers wielding the English longbow — yet it faced a French host several times larger, packed with armored nobility.
The ground did the rest. Recent rain had turned the narrow, freshly plowed field into a quagmire. As French men-at-arms advanced on foot, they bunched together, sank in the mud, and were cut down by arrows and then by lightly equipped archers who closed in among them.
The flower of French knighthood drowned in mud as much as it fell to English arrows.
The defeat was catastrophic for France and cleared Henry’s path to the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which briefly named him heir to the French crown. Shakespeare later immortalized the day in the “band of brothers” speech.
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