The Battle of Agincourt (/dnkr(t)/ AJ-in-kor(t);[a] French: Azincourt [azku]) was an English victory in the Hundred Years' War. The historian Suetonius, writing about Augustus Caesar, says the emperor expelled [the entertainer] Pylades . Probably each man-at-arms would be accompanied by a gros valet (or varlet), an armed servant, adding up to another 10,000 potential fighting men,[7] though some historians omit them from the number of combatants. [69] (The use of stakes was an innovation for the English: during the Battle of Crcy, for example, the archers had been instead protected by pits and other obstacles. 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. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Before the battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French proposed cutting the middle finger off of captured English soldiers rendering them incapable of shooting longbows. Update [June 20, 2022]: Updated SEO/social. It may be difficult to pinpoint exactly when the middle finger gesture originated, but some historians trace its roots to ancient Rome. Battle of Agincourt, (October 25, 1415), decisive battle in the Hundred Years War (13371453) that resulted in the victory of the English over the French. [109] Juliet Barker, Jonathan Sumption and Clifford J. Rogers criticized Curry's reliance on administrative records, arguing that they are incomplete and that several of the available primary sources already offer a credible assessment of the numbers involved. Rather than retire directly to England for the winter, with his costly expedition resulting in the capture of only one town, Henry decided to march most of his army (roughly 9,000) through Normandy to the port of Calais, the English stronghold in northern France, to demonstrate by his presence in the territory at the head of an army that his right to rule in the duchy was more than a mere abstract legal and historical claim. The decorative use of the image of Priapusmatched the Roman use ofimages of male genitalia for warding off evil. Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com. [38], The French army had 10,000 men-at arms[39][40][41] plus some 4,0005,000 miscellaneous footmen (gens de trait) including archers, crossbowmen[42] (arbaltriers) and shield-bearers (pavisiers), totaling 14,00015,000 men. The effect of the victory on national morale was powerful. [34] The rearguard, leaderless, would serve as a "dumping ground" for the surplus troops. The 'middle finger salute' did not derive from the defiant gestures of English archers whose fingers had been severed at the Battle of Agincourt. because when a spectator started to hiss, he called the attention of the whole audience to him with an obscene movement of his middle finger. Morris also claims that the mad emperor Caligula, as an insult, would extend his middle finger for supplicants to kiss. There was no monetary reward to be obtained by capturing them, nor was there any glory to be won by defeating them in battle. It seems it was purely a decision of Henry, since the English knights found it contrary to chivalry, and contrary to their interests, to kill valuable hostages for whom it was commonplace to ask ransom. This famous weapon was made of the . The Battle of Agincourt is an iconic moment in English military history. The next day the French initiated negotiations as a delaying tactic, but Henry ordered his army to advance and to start a battle that, given the state of his army, he would have preferred to avoid, or to fight defensively: that was how Crcy and the other famous longbow victories had been won. [88] 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. The English King Henry V and his troops were marching to Calais to embark for England when he was intercepted by forces which outnumbered his. Several heralds, both French and English, were present at the battle of Agincourt, and not one of them (or any later chroniclers of Agincourt) mentioned anything about the French having cut off the fingers of captured English bowman. To meet and beat him was a triumph, the highest form which self-expression could take in the medieval nobleman's way of life." According to research, heres the true story: Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Barker, Sumption and Rogers all wrote that the English probably had 6,000 men, these being 5,000 archers and 9001,000 men-at-arms. After the battle, the English taunted the survivors by showing off what wasn't cut off. Thus, when the victorious English waved their middle fingers at the defeated French, they said, "See, we can still pluck yew! Battle of Agincourt, (October 25, 1415)Battle resulting in the decisive victory of the English over the French in the Hundred Years' War. [93] Entire noble families were wiped out in the male line, and in some regions an entire generation of landed nobility was annihilated. Agincourt came on the back of half a century of military failure and gave the English a success that repeated victories such as Crcy and Poitiers. Some historians trace its origins to ancient Rome. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future. Very quickly after the battle, the fragile truce between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions broke down. The legend that the "two-fingered salute" stems from the Battle of Agincourt is apocryphal Although scholars and historians continue to debate its origins, according to legend it was first. [37], Henry made a speech emphasising the justness of his cause, and reminding his army of previous great defeats the kings of England had inflicted on the French. [23] The army of about 12,000 men and up to 20,000 horses besieged the port of Harfleur. The two candidates with the strongest claims were Edward III of England, who was the son of Charles's sister, and Philip, Charles's paternal . [citation needed], Immediately after the battle, Henry summoned the heralds of the two armies who had watched the battle together with principal French herald Montjoie, and they settled on the name of the battle as Azincourt, after the nearest fortified place. When the French rejected Henrys substantial territorial demands, he arrived in Normandy in August 1415 with a force of about 12,000 men and laid siege to the city of Harfleur. The Burgundians seized on the opportunity and within 10 days of the battle had mustered their armies and marched on Paris. And where does the distinction between one and two fingers come from? Keegan, John. [130] Critic David Margolies describes how it "oozes honour, military glory, love of country and self-sacrifice", and forms one of the first instances of English literature linking solidarity and comradeship to success in battle. The field that the French had to cross to meet their enemy was muddy after a week of rain and slowed their progress, during which time they endured casualties from English arrows. As John Keegan wrote in his history of warfare: "To meet a similarly equipped opponent was the occasion for which the armoured soldier trained perhaps every day of his life from the onset of manhood. Winston Churchhill can be seen using the V as a rallying call. When the first French line reached the English front, the cavalry were unable to overwhelm the archers, who had driven sharpened stakes into the ground at an angle before themselves. Some historians trace its origins to ancient Rome. [26] He also intended the manoeuvre as a deliberate provocation to battle aimed at the dauphin, who had failed to respond to Henry's personal challenge to combat at Harfleur. The idea being that you need two fingers to draw a bow, which makes more sense, and thus links up a national custom with a triumphant moment in national history! [34][d] The French apparently had no clear plan for deploying the rest of the army. Contemporary accounts [ edit] [52] The dukes of Alenon and Bar led the main battle. [106] This lack of unity in France allowed Henry eighteen months to prepare militarily and politically for a renewed campaign. It was often reported to comprise 1,500 ships, but was probably far smaller. The Hundred Years War was a discontinuous conflict between England and France that spanned two centuries. [94][10][11] The list of casualties, one historian has noted, "read like a roll call of the military and political leaders of the past generation". [44] There was a special, elite cavalry force whose purpose was to break the formation of the English archers and thus clear the way for the infantry to advance. [97] According to the heralds, 3,069 knights and squires were killed,[e] while at least 2,600 more corpses were found without coats of arms to identify them. Juliet Barker quotes a contemporary account by a monk from St. Denis 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. Jones, P. N. (1992). Although an audience vote was "too close to call", Henry was unanimously found guilty by the court on the basis of "evolving standards of civil society".[136][137][138]. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. The body part which the French proposed to cut off of the English after defeating them was, of course, the middle finger, without which it is impossible to draw the renowned English longbow. A BBCNews Magazinereportsimilarlytracesthe gesture back toAncient Greek philosophers ( here ). After Henry V marched to the north, the French moved to block them along the River Somme. Wikipedia. [93] In all, around 6,000 of their fighting men lay dead on the ground. But frankly, I suspect that the French would have done a lot worse to any captured English archers than chopping off their fingers. The pl sound, the story goes, gradually changed into an f, giving the gesture its present meaning. Singer Robbie Williams insults the viewer. [81] 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 article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. 1.3M views 4 months ago Medieval Battles - In chronological order The year 1415 was the first occasion since 1359 that an English king had invaded France in person. This claim is false. In the Battle of Agincourt, the French threatened the English Soldiers that they would cut off their fingers and when they failed the Englishmen mocked them by showing their fingers. (Its taking longer than we thought.) Departing from Harfleur on October 8, Henry marched northward toward the English-held port of Calais, where he would disembark for England, with a force of 1,000 knights and men-at-arms and 5,000 archers. According to most chroniclers, Henry's fear was that the prisoners (who, in an unusual turn of events, actually outnumbered their captors) would realise their advantage in numbers, rearm themselves with the weapons strewn about the field and overwhelm the exhausted English forces. Upon his death, a French assembly formed to appoint a male successor. One final observation: any time some appeal begins with heres something that intelligent people will find edifying you should be suspicious. 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. 78-116). As the mle 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. Opie, Iona and Moira Tatem. The longbow. Soon after the battle started, it had thousands of English and French soldiers and horses running through it. (Even if archers whose middle fingers had been amputated could no longer effectively use their bows, they were still capable of wielding mallets, battleaxes, swords, lances, daggers, maces, and other weapons, as archers typically did when the opponents closed ranks with them and the fighting became hand-to-hand.). The middle finger gesture does not derive from the mutilation of English archers at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The English eyewitness account comes from the anonymous author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, believed to have been written by a chaplain in the King's household who would have been in the baggage train at the battle. The English Gesta Henrici described three great heaps of the slain around the three main English standards. The metallography and relative effectiveness of arrowheads and armor during the Middle Ages. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). You would think that anything English predating 1607, such as the language, Protestantism, or the Common Law, would have been a part of Americas patrimony. Most importantly, the battle was a significant military blow to France and paved the way for further English conquests and successes. The Face of Battle. See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays. As the story goes, the French were fighting with the English and had a diabolical (and greatly advertised) plan of cutting off the middle fingers of any captured English archers so they could never taunt the French with arrows plucked in their . Although it could be intended as humorous, the image on social media is historically inaccurate. David Mikkelson Published Sep 29, 1999. A complete coat of plate was considered such good protection that shields were generally not used,[75] 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. It took place on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day) near Azincourt, in northern France. |. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. The third line of the French army, recoiling at the pile of corpses before them and unable to make an effective charge, was then massacred swiftly. The Battle of Agincourt is one of England's most celebrated victories and was one of the most important English triumphs in the Hundred Years' War, along with the Battle of Crcy (1346) and Battle of Poitiers (1356). Apparently Henry believed his fleeing army would perform better on the defensive, but had to halt the retreat and somehow engage the French "[129], The play introduced the famous St Crispin's Day Speech, considered one of Shakespeare's most heroic speeches, which Henry delivers movingly to his soldiers just before the battle, urging his "band of brothers" to stand together in the forthcoming fight. [107], Most primary sources which describe the battle have English outnumbered by several times. The two armies spent the night of 24 October on open ground. And although the precise etymology of the English word fuck is still a matter of debate, it is linguistically nonsensical to maintain that that word entered the language because the "difficult consonant cluster at the beginning" of the phase 'pluck yew' has "gradually changed to a labiodental fricative 'f.'" Then they had to walk a few hundred yards (metres) through thick mud and a press of comrades while wearing armour weighing 5060 pounds (2327kg), gathering sticky clay all the way. In the other reference Martial writes that a certain party points a finger, an indecent one, at some other people. He claimed the title of King of France through his great-grandfather Edward III of England, although in practice the English kings were generally prepared to renounce this claim if the French would acknowledge the English claim on Aquitaine and other French lands (the terms of the Treaty of Brtigny). The archers were commanded by Sir Thomas Erpingham, another elderly veteran. The key word for describing the battle of Agincourt is mud . The one-finger salute, or at any rate sexual gestures involving the middle finger, are thousands of years old. ), And even if killing prisoners of war did not violate the moral code of the times, what would be the purpose of taking archers captive, cutting off their fingers, and then executing them? The trial ranged widely over whether there was just cause for war and not simply the prisoner issue. The Battle of Agincourt took place during the the Hundred Years' War, a conflict which, despite its name, was neither one single war nor did it last one hundred years. The army was divided into three groups, with the right wing led by Edward, Duke of York, the centre led by the king himself, and the left wing under the old and experienced Baron Thomas Camoys. Materials characterization, 29(2), 111117. This battle concluded with King Harold of England dying at the hands of the Norman King William, which marked the beginning of a new era in England. 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. A labiodental fricative was no less "difficult" for Middle English speakers to pronounce than the aspirated bilabial stop/voiceless lateral combination of 'pl' that the fricative supposedly changed into, nor are there any other examples of such a pronunciation shift occurring in English. The image makes the claim that the gesture derives from English soldiers at the Battle of Agincourt, France in 1415. [116] Rogers, on the other hand, finds the number 5,000 plausible, giving several analogous historical events to support his case,[112] and Barker considers that the fragmentary pay records which Curry relies on actually support the lower estimates. It forms the backdrop to events in William Shakespeare's play Henry V, written in 1599. [39] Curry, Rogers[118] and Mortimer[42] all agree the French had 4 to 5 thousand missile troops. Supposedly, both originated at the 1415 Battle of Agincourt, . The fact that Winston Churchill sometimes made his V-for-victory gesture rudely suggests that it is of much more recent vintage. The latter, each titled Henry V, star Laurence Olivier in 1944 and Kenneth Branagh in 1989. 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. "[102], Estimates of the number of prisoners vary between 700 and 2,200, amongst them the dukes of Orlans and Bourbon, the counts of Eu, Vendme, Richemont (brother of the Duke of Brittany and stepbrother of Henry V) and Harcourt, and marshal Jean Le Maingre.[12]. Originally representing the erect phallus, the gesture conveyssimultaneously a sexual threat to the person to whom it is directed andapotropaicmeans of warding off unwanted elements of the more-than-human. ( here ). Barker states that some knights, encumbered by their armour, actually drowned in their helmets.[64]. [50] Both lines were arrayed in tight, dense formations of about 16 ranks each, and were positioned a bowshot length from each other. In the ensuing negotiations Henry said that he would give up his claim to the French throne if the French would pay the 1.6million crowns outstanding from the ransom of John II (who had been captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356), and concede English ownership of the lands of Anjou, Brittany, Flanders, Normandy, and Touraine, as well as Aquitaine. The Battle of Agincourt was immortalized by William Shakespeare in his play Henry V. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. The brunt of the battle had fallen on the Armagnacs and it was they who suffered the majority of senior casualties and carried the blame for the defeat. The military aspects of this account are similarly specious. The puzzler was: What was this body part? The Battle of Agincourt was a major English victory in the Hundred Years' War.The battle took place on Friday, 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day) in the County of Saint-Pol, Artois, some. The . Agincourt 1415: The Triumph of the Longbow: Directed by Graham Holloway. After several decades of relative peace, the English had resumed the war in 1415 amid the failure of negotiations with the French. In Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome, Anthony Corbeill, Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas wrote: The most familiar example of the coexistence of a human and transhuman elementis the extended middle finger. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1991 ISBN 0-471-53672-5 (pp. With Toby Merrell, Ian Brooker, Philip Rosch, Brian Blessed. Rogers, Mortimer[117] and Sumption[41] all give more or less 10,000 men-at-arms for the French, using as a source the herald of the Duke of Berry, an eyewitness. Some notable examples are listed below. In the ensuing campaign, many soldiers died from disease, and the English numbers dwindled; they tried to withdraw to English-held Calais but found their path blocked by a considerably larger French army. [22], Henry's army landed in northern France on 13 August 1415, carried by a vast fleet. The French, who were overwhelmingly favored to win the battle, Continue Reading 41 2 7 Alexander L By most contemporary accounts, the French army was also significantly larger than the English, though the exact degree of their numerical superiority is disputed. If the two-fingered salute comes from Agincourt, then at what point was it reduced to one finger in North America? [33], Early on the 25th, Henry deployed his army (approximately 1,500 men-at-arms and 7,000 longbowmen) across a 750-yard (690m) part of the defile. When the English won the battle the soldiers waved their middle fingers at the French in defiance, thus flipping the bird was born The English army, led by King Henry V, famously achieved victory in spite of the numerical superiority of its opponent. [27], During the siege, the French had raised an army which assembled around Rouen. On 25 October 1415, an army of English raiders under Henry V faced the French outside an obscure village on the road to Calais. PLUCK YEW!". Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French,anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Corrections? Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore [soldiers would] be incapable of fighting in the future. On February 1, 1328, King Charles IV of France died without an heir. They had been weakened by the siege at Harfleur and had marched over 200 miles (more than 320 km), and many among them were suffering from dysentery. The battlefield was a freshly plowed field, and at the time of the battle, it had been raining continuously for several days. Turning to our vast classical library, we quickly turn up three references. [74], The plate armour of the French men-at-arms allowed them to close the 1,000 yards or so to the English lines while being under what the French monk of Saint Denis described as "a terrifying hail of arrow shot". [48] On account of the lack of space, the French drew up a third battle, the rearguard, which was on horseback and mainly comprised the varlets mounted on the horses belonging to the men fighting on foot ahead. [b] The unexpected English victory against the numerically superior French army boosted English morale and prestige, crippled France, and started a new period of English dominance in the war that would last for 14 years until France defeated England in the Siege of Orlans in 1429. Tudor re-invention, leading to the quintessential Shakespearean portrayal of "we happy few", has been the most influential, but every century has made its own accretions. Since then there had been tension between the nobility and the royal house, widespread lawlessness throughout the kingdom, and several attempts on Henry Vs life. It may be in the narrow strip of open land formed between the woods of Tramecourt and Azincourt (close to the modern village of Azincourt).
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