Myths of Agincourt

Started by Cheimison, October 26, 2017, 02:39:08 PM

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Cheimison

One point I wanted to bring up is that basically no human operated bow can penetrate plate armor. It's very difficult to do it with a melee weapon, even one designed to be a can opener. The idea that English longbows can just punch through plate armor is ridiculous. They can, however, kill horses if they are not totally armored. But, in this case, any bow would work - a Mongol bow, a child's practice bow with a real arrow, anything.

In my opinion (and that of Jean Juvenal) was that it was muddy ground, defensible terrain and hastily erected spike hedges that really lost things for the French, plus some stupidity on the latter's part.

There is also an article that came out last year involving some research that says even the reports of French numbers are exaggerated quite a bit, probably for the same reason the Greeks exaggerated the number of Persians: propaganda.

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2016/05/the-truth-about-agincourt.page
Quote"Agincourt typified the struggle of little England against the world and heroism, particularly of the common man. For example, Dickens wrote that we won because of the 'good, stout archers' who were fighting against the French aristocrats and it has become tied up in the national identity of Britishness," says Anne.
Shakespeare's Henry V has been very powerful, she explains. "The image of the battle that people have in their minds is Shakespeare's Agincourt, and this has affected our written culture ever since." The battle of Agincourt was initially not well known, but wars with France brought it into the public consciousness, Anne explains; in the first and second world wars, speeches from the play were used to boost the troops' morale. "We tend to get caught up in the Shakespearean idea of Henry as a warrior king and forget the fact that the battle happened on the back of a failed campaign; Henry was intercepted at Agincourt on the way home after a siege and was fortunately able to redeem this situation through victory in the battle," says Anne.
Quote"Families thought they would get credibility if they were linked to Agincourt, and this had led to many spurious claims about people's ancestors being at the battle," says Anne.
Quote"From the muster rolls, we know the names of the 500 Welsh archers and the few men-at-arms who accompanied them. I suggest there were a total of 8,500 British men on the campaign, so the Welsh only made up a small proportion."
QuoteDr Rémy Ambühl, a lecturer in medieval history, has examined around 100 contracts for the ransom of prisoners during Agincourt, which show that a wide spectrum of society, rather than just knights, were held for ransom after the battle. "This questions the idea of the famous massacre at the end of the battle: the massacre, if it took place, was not discriminatory; greater soldiers were not spared at the expense of the lower ranks," he says.
QuoteIt is widely claimed that the French army outnumbered the English by five to one, but Anne's research questions this. "The French couldn't have had the size of army that is claimed. This is just out of context for medieval history and if you look at the battle site, so many troops simply wouldn't have fit into the space." In her previous research, Anne has suggested that the English had 8,500 troops and the French had around 12,000. "This has been controversial because people are very attached to the notion that the French vastly outnumbered the English," she adds.
The fleet of ships that took Henry V's soldiers across the English Channel has long been thought to number around 1,500 foreign vessels. Southampton historian Dr Craig Lambert's research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, suggests there were far fewer – around 700 ships – and that they were mainly English ships. Craig examined issue rolls from the National Archives, which record money issued by the exchequer. From these records, he worked out that Henry was hiring ships at a rate of three shillings, four pence per tonne and that he hired around 250 foreign ships, as well as requisitioning around 400 vessels from English merchants. "It was previously thought that most of Henry's fleet consisted of foreign ships, but we have shown that the larger proportion was actually English, says Craig, who has also confirmed a theory that Henry had around 50 ships to protect the transport fleet as it crossed the Channel.

Is there any part of Limey popular history that's actually true? I'm starting to doubt it (not that the Chinese are any better - always unified my ass!)

undercovergeek

We're English, we beat the French - it could have been 20 yobbos from Southampton versus 2 schoolboys on a donkey from Paris - doesn't matter, we won

bob48

Just a couple of points;

Plate armour in those days was very poor quality, and I'm pretty sure that I saw a demo on TV a while back that demonstrated a longbow of the type used, actually penetrating a metal plate.

Its been an accepted fact for many years that the mud and wooden stakes contributed in no small part to the French defeat.

So, on that basis, you have decided that all English history is bunk?

I stick my two Agincourt fingers up at you.
'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'

'Clip those corners'

Recombobulate the discombobulators!

Cheimison

#3
Quote from: bob48 on October 26, 2017, 03:06:10 PM
So, on that basis, you have decided that all English history is bunk?
Both World Wars are why I'm convinced English history is bunk. Most history is bunkum, though. 90% of the time it's a morality tale based on some atavistic tribal nonsense written by people who neither know nor care about the messy reality of things. Any time there is a 'bad guy' and a 'good guy' you know you're reading a story, not history.

Plate armor in those days was certainly not Renaissance plate, but it was more than sufficient to stop an arrow at any kind of range. Roman armor was typically good enough for that. The really cruddy suits of plate are actually much later than this period - the mass-produced stuff from the Italian and Languedoc regions that mercenaries were running around in was not fitted and not particularly well bloomed.

Bows that are significantly more powerful than English longbows have been tried against plate armor, and failed.

bob48

Well, you're obviously an expert, so I'll leave you to it.
'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'

'Clip those corners'

Recombobulate the discombobulators!

undercovergeek

Bob, did we not win the 2 world wars or am I missing something?

bob48

'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'

'Clip those corners'

Recombobulate the discombobulators!

Cheimison

Quote from: bob48 on October 26, 2017, 03:12:55 PM
Well, you're obviously an expert, so I'll leave you to it.
Hardly, but I do know that many of the 'experiments' of the sort the Armouries of England like to pull off have been revealed as based on erroneous manufacture techniques, and often border on hoaxes. There was a similar case involving chain armor, to show it could be split by hand, but the chain armor was not made correctly either in technique or the type of steel used. Of course, plate armor and chain armor do crack sometimes, and even cave in, but it's typically based on repeated blows, which is why armor would be repaired between battles if one could afford it. A fresh breastplate or helm, though, is going to be extremely hard to damage unless you're using some kind of pole-hammer.

Cheimison

Quote from: undercovergeek on October 26, 2017, 03:16:10 PM
Bob, did we not win the 2 world wars or am I missing something?
Started both of them, too.
After all, you need a world empire to make a 'world war'. An almost landlocked country in central Europe is going to have a hard time doing that, no matter how mean and autocratic one deems them to be.

"We stand for freedom, except when we try to conquer the entire planet and enslave millions of men into our conscript armies of non-English hordes!"

bob48

Interesting, and here's me thinking that training as a metallurgist and 50 years in the metals industry gave me some knowledge. Clearly I have been disillusioned.
'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'

'Clip those corners'

Recombobulate the discombobulators!

Cheimison

Quote from: bob48 on October 26, 2017, 03:19:47 PM
Interesting, and here's me thinking that training as a metallurgist and 50 years in the metals industry gave me some knowledge. Clearly I have been disillusioned.
Apparently so.

bob48

I'll leave you to your illusions.
'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers'

'Clip those corners'

Recombobulate the discombobulators!

mirth

"45 minutes of pooping Tribbles being juggled by a drunken Horta would be better than Season 1 of TNG." - SirAndrewD

"you don't look at the mantelpiece when you're poking the fire" - Bawb

"Can't 'un' until you 'pre', son." - Gus

Cheimison

Quote from: bob48 on October 26, 2017, 03:24:09 PM
I'll leave you to your illusions.
Fine with me, anyone who believes Court Historians is essentially in a madhouse of his own construction.

magnus

Sorry, had to add my two cents.

We as humans, excel at killing one another. I am sure even someone has been killed by a spork.

If the long bow did not work it would have been regulated to the trash bin.

The problem with bows is that the user has to be trained for a good number of years to be any good.

They have found skeletal remains that show the archers body actually deforms after years of practice.

Hell, if you could get 20,000 archers in 1815 they probably would have killed all three armies at Waterloo.

What one blacksmith would make could possibly be nowhere near as well done as another.