I saw an interesting documentary on this. It had been claimed for many years that the English won due to the long bowmen. However its been scientifically proven that the English arrowheads used at the time were not able to penetrate the French armour used at the time. The theory now is that the French got stuck in the mud at the bottom of the hill with their heavy armour
I have read they won't penetrate armour unless at very close range, but, a storm of 21,000 arrows landing on or around you must have unnerved them and the horses probably threw some riders off. Horses were also injured which would have brought down more riders.
The longbow couldn't penetrate the expensive steel armour the knights wore but it went straight through the cheaper soft iron armour the men at arms wore. The crux of the battle was the concentration of heavy French armour in the centre. The English funnelled them into the centre because of the landscape and the dead knights brought down on the flanks by archers. The centre ended up so strewn with dead that those behind made it worse trying to push to the front. Then the cavalry tried to push into the centre and it was just a mess. The archers being lightweight and not affected as much in the mud then attacked with mallets and swords
A lot of arrow injuries are by sheer volume of numbers. The English were sending 7000 arrows through the air consistantly. A lot of injuries were through the armour joints, through poorly made chainmail, horses took a lot of flesh wounds because they weren't fully armoured to the floor.'Real life' Arrow v Armour testing including Gambeson , mail and plate.
Once the enemy are on you, archers are useless, so they didn’t need to sustain it for long.
And the Welsh archers finished them off with knives.
Agreed. But if you can use your archers to maximum effect while they approach its a definate advantage. Look at the battle of Crecy earlier on in 1346. It pissed it down before battle so the English destrung their bows. The Genovese crossbow men couldn't and it weakened their weapons. The English restrung their bows and cut them to pieces. They then cut the cavalry to pieces then half the men at arms. Edward finished them off.
I can laugh in French
I agree with you that the real evidence lies in the soil. Crop marks in the general area need to be checked out, and the lack of casual finds is significant. One would have expected a sudden spike in those after WW2, when the increased use of mechanical traction geenerally resulted in deeper ploughing than was previously possible. Field finds are still surfacing from other human activities from a wide range of dates.
Some good points.I agree with you that the real evidence lies in the soil. Crop marks in the general area need to be checked out, and the lack of casual finds is significant. One would have expected a sudden spike in those after WW2, when the increased use of mechanical traction geenerally resulted in deeper ploughing than was previously possible. Field finds are still surfacing from other human activities from a wide range of dates.
On the other hand, I don't find it particularly rational to build too much on discussing the modern photographed landscape for possible battlefields because of the magnitude of changes that may have occurred. Roads probably tend to be stable, if only because some local landowner is going to kick off if someone starts beating a new path through his patch - but woodlands... after four, five hundred years, the result of traditional timber and firewood harvesting would be pretty indistinguishable from similar activities prior to Agincourt. A n arrow gap between copses could increase massively over a century or two
Remember Wellington's reaction when he revisited Waterloo - "My God! They've destroyed my battlefield!" (And converted most of the casualties into bone meal in the process...)
Not looking for argument - just registering a viewpoint
