Agincourt's odds may have been far closer than legend says

At the Battle of Agincourt on 25 October 1415, Henry V’s English army may have faced odds of about four to three, not the five to one of popular legend. Historian Anne Curry’s analysis of the surviving pay and muster records suggests roughly 8,500 to 9,000 English against about 12,000 French, though other historians still put the French higher.

The result is not in doubt. Henry was intercepted near Azincourt as he headed home after a siege. French men-at-arms advanced across about 1,000 yards of muddy open ground between two woods, which stopped them spreading out, and they were cut down. Much of what people “know” about the day, though, comes from Shakespeare’s Henry V of 1599 rather than from records. Curry and her Southampton colleagues have tested the best-known claims:

Popular claim	What the records show
The French outnumbered the English five to one	About 12,000 French against 8,500 to 9,000 English
Henry’s army was mostly Welsh	Muster rolls name about 500 Welsh archers
About 1,500 foreign ships carried the army over	Exchequer issue rolls point to about 700, mainly English
English archers invented the two-finger “V” sign	No record from the time; probably a 20th-century myth

Curry argues that the larger French totals are out of scale for any medieval army and that so many troops would not have fitted on the battlefield. She concedes the figures are controversial, because people are attached to the idea of a vast French host.

Other details shift as well. About 100 ransom contracts studied by her colleague Rémy Ambühl show that men from across French society, not just knights, were held for ransom. That complicates the familiar story of the prisoners massacred late in the battle: if it happened, it did not spare the great at the expense of the humble.

Victory did not end the war. Henry raised another large army in 1416 and won the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, but he died in 1422, leaving an infant heir, and the Hundred Years’ War ended with England losing almost all its French lands.