[MR] YouTube: Myths of Agincourt

[Garth Groff and Sally Sanford]

Noble Friends,

It's been a slow news week, and so today I dug around through YouTube for
an interesting video to share. I came up with this interesting brief
lecture by Tobias Capwell a curator at the Wallace Museum in London, famed
for its arms and armor collection.

Capwell challenges us to re-examine our conceptualizations of historical
events by comparing written sources with surviving artifacts. His example
is the Battle of Agincourt, which he notes has been colored by political
and social conditions in more modern times. He particularly questions the
story that English archers dropped volleys of arrows shot on a high arc
onto French knights. He claims that their arrows were shot at close range
on a flat trajectory.

Now I don't claim to have the historical knowledge of this or any other
battle that Capwell has, I have read a number of books that describe
Agincourt in various conflicting ways. Still, Capwell seems only concerned
with French knights, not the much more numerous common French infantrymen
who were less well-armored, and thus more vulnerable to volleys of arrows
into their packed ranks. Most accounts of Agincourt are clear that there
were volleys shot by the English in the early phase of the battle. He also
misses the claim by several authors that arrows were used to blunt charges
by the French knights by striking their horses in their rumps and flanks,
which were only protected by barding. While I agree with his basic
tenet that history has to be understood by comparing both written and
physical evidence, I see no reason to doubt that the archers at Agincourt
fought using several techniques as the battle progressed.

You can see the lecture film, and some glorious examples of armor at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uxHYQW2Nio .

A brief biography of Capwell himself is worth a read, since he is an
important figure in medieval scholarship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Capwell .

Yours Aye,


Mungo Napier, Laird of Mallard Lodge  🦆