“This day is called the Feast of Crispin.
He that outlives this day and comes safe-home will stand a tiptoe when this day is named,
and rouse him at the name of Crispin.
He that shall see this day and live old age will yearly, on the vigil, feast his neighbors and say,
tomorrow is Saint Crispin’s.
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, and say these wounds I had on Crispin’s Day.
Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot but he’ll remember with advantages what feats he did that day,
mention our names, familiar in their mouths as household words,
Harry the King, Biddeford and Exeter, Warrick and Tolbert, Salisbury and Glouster be in their cups freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son, and Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by from this day to the ending of the world
but we in it shall be remembered.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,
for he today that sheds his blood with me this day shall be my brother be he ne’re so vile
but this day shall gentle his condition
And gentlemen in England now abed will think themselves accursed they were not here!
and hold their manhoods cheap! whilst any speaks, who fought with us! upon Saint Crispin’s Day!
William Shakespeare, Henry V
Arguably the greatest motivational speech of all time. If you’re ever inclined to pay for a motivational seminar you should save your money and listen to Kenneth Branagth’s fantastic rendition [link below] instead. For hundreds of years, English school boys learned this speech by heart. I hope they still do. It’s worth reciting every year.
October 25, 1415: Changed the course of European history, elevated the common man, and sealed the fate of Chivalry when Henry’s army; sick, emaciated , 1/3 had died since entering France-most of them from dysentery-, outnumbered five to one, demolished the flower of French knighthood. Our ‘V’ for victory hand sign with index and middle finger held up harks back to this era as an insult to nobility. Those are the fingers that draw the bow. It was the bowman’s way of telling the rich guy, “I may be poor, but I can take you out!”
The particulars of this battle are still hotly debated six hundred years later.
*Numbers on both sides, especially the French, are contested. Should the French who arrived to join the battle late, just in time to be slaughtered piecemeal, or the third line that didn’t fight, be counted as part of the main force?
*Was there a doubt of the outcome given English longbow’s superiority in the field? Issac Asimov calculated how many arrows the English army’s 6,000 bowmen could launch per minute and concluded the French didn’t have a chance. It was literally raining arrows. Others counter that men with mediocre or no armor would be killed but arrows would glance off the best plate armor of the day (except weak points in the limbs or helmet). To which still others respond that a majority of English arrow damage was to French war horses who were not so heavily armored, and who, mad with pain and perhaps riderless, trampled French knights and footmen alike as they tried to escape the field.
*Sick and hungry as they were, the English yeomen, trained from childhood to draw their great yew war bows, some with a draw weight over 100 pounds, were incredibly strong by today’s standards. When they ran out of arrows, they charged the French knights with axes, lead mauls, and war hammers which they used to, as Winston Churchill put it, ‘open them up like a lobster.’
*The French knights burdened with heavy armor, bogged down in the mud, trampling over piles of the bodies of their own comrades who’d fallen in front of them, unhorsed by the rain of arrows, gasping for air in their helmets, were reduced to staggering forward as the English, most of them unencumbered by heavy armor, easily ran around them, knocking them down and killing them as described above or stabbing them with a knife in the eye slit of their helmets.
*Henry took advantage of the forest the pressed the field from both sides so the French had to attack up the middle of the field. Henry had sent bowmen and yeomen into the forest to shoot and attack the French flanks.
*French knights trying to join the battle pushed their unfortunate comrades into the English defenses creating a stalled crush, like a mob at a soccer game, where men suffocated in the mass or drowned in the muck.
*Is Henry a war criminal for killing hundreds of French knights after they’d surrendered? (During the battle the English had captured so many French they were outnumbered by their prisoners and they could make the case that the French might take advantage of this by picking up weapons on the field and renewing their attack). Victory, as far as Henry knew, was by no means certain, and he still had to reach the coast through a hostile country if he lost.
Henry’s speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM
Of all the hundreds of medieval battle scene on film, this from Henry V is, to me, most evocative not just of how brutal, but how personal was war in that era of hand to hand combat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBH4hyiF1Lo
At 16 years old Henry, who wasd Prince Henry then, was hit in the face with an arrow during the Battle of Shrewsbury (1403) The wound went just under his eye and six inches into his head. He’d have died except his royal surgeon John Bradmore had developed a remarkable 2-piece arrow head extraction tool which followed the path left by the arrow, screwed down into the arrow head then expanded enough to grab the point and pull it out without making things worse. Link below shows what it looked like.
