On this day, 600 years ago

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

25th October 1415..so six hundred years ago to the day.
Not a good time to be French

 

 

[Milktrout 9]

It never is.

[Caesar 305]

Matt Easton did a couple videos with Dr. Toby Capwell (curator of arms and armor at the Wallace Collection) on the subject.  Toby's perspective is always great; he's one of the few PhD's I know of with practical experience in armor.

 

Part 1 of 3

[Capitaine Vengeur 263]

Oh, damn, I guessed that old UK 'John Bull' Widowmaker would not let the day pass without pouring some limey lime juice on old wounds. At least, the terrible Crispin's Day was more a shock therapy to the French than all of the previous defeats had been. They had fought their previous battles with one century of technological backwardness, with mounted knights against entrenched longbowmen. Now they would fight the next ones with blatant technological lead, relying more on more on newborn field artillery to support their knights now fighting dismounted, while the 'Godons' neglected this potential advance, and stayed stuck to their longbowmen who had brought them astounding victories - that were appearing further and further away in old times as the English captains were routinely wiped out by the 'New Model' French army. So in the long term, Agincourt can be seen as a kind of French victory, as Iena had been to Prussia or Pearl Harbour to the States: that's what the shock therapy is.

 

Regarding that period, any Englishman knows the blazing names of the Black Prince and Henry V. Any Frenchman knows who Du Guesclin and Joan of Arc were. But not one Englishman or Frenchman out of 10,000 would know the name of Jean Bureau, and personally, I did not until recently. He was no blazing warlord in armor, just a dull manager and administrator, But he can be considered as the father of the French artillery. He took a prominent part in the victory at Formigny (1450), where the English Army of Normandy was wiped out, letting Normandy French for ever. And at Castillon, the last and decisive battle of the War in 1453, Jean Bureau the pen-pusher defeated and killed John Talbot, a remarkable warlord and a perfect knight, annihilating his army of longbowmen under a rain of cannonballs. This was symptomatic of what warfare was becoming, and the true exit from the Middle Ages. And from then to this day, artillery has always remained, for better or for worse, the most favoured arm of the French Army.

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Nice vid Caesar..thanks 

I was waiting for you Capitaine! :P

 

You never disappoint Sir! :)

[Hauksbee 103]

In this episode of "Battlefield Detectives" they succeed in casting serious doubt on the efficacy of the English longbow in facing down armored, mounted knights.

 

[Olham 164]

The "Frogs" and the "Limeys" - what a wonderful friendship that should be! The French know a lot about

good cooking, good wine and good cheese, and the British about good beer, good pop music and good

humour! In two world wars the "Tommies" helped the French - now, John Lennon would say:  come together!

 

Well, I have seen tests where the longbowmen fired their arrows high up in the air, like modern artillery fires.

These bowmen were well trained and fast - they could shoot arrows every 3 - 5 seconds, so a terrible rain

of arrows sank on the armored knights. Coming down from some height, the arrows with their metal heads

were armor-piercing. And even if they hit the horse instead of the rider - it must have been devastating.

[Caesar 305]

I did like the Battlefield Detectives episode for the fact that explained the battle's outcome was much more reliant on terrain and horrendous execution of tactics on the French side than because of specific weapon systems used, but it did fall short on the assessment of the warbow (longbow).  Matt Strickland and Robert Hardy's book "The Great Warbow" mentions that episode specifically as having massively underrepresented the bows and arrows used at Agincourt.  In their own experiments, Strickland and Hardy used a much heavier arrow (108g vs 63g) fired from a much heavier bow (150lb) creating an initial velocity of 52m/s vs 37.9m/s.  This provides a KE of 146J at release.  With an estimated drop in velocity of 15-30% over a travel range of 220m, depending on where the arrow is in flight, impact energy might be between 105.4 and 71.5J. Based on the evidence Dr. Alan Williams found on the effectiveness of armor, even a so-called "armor piercing" arrowhead would have had little chance of defeating either the helms or breastplates worn by the men-at-arms of the day.  

 

With only 2mm of low carbon steel, a warbow lacks the KE required to defeat the armor system (assuming moderate quality low carbon steel, the arrow needs about 131.5J to defeat the 2mm of metal with a zero-degree angle-off direct hit, and another 40-50 to defeat the arming clothing, totaling about 171-181.5J to defeat the armor system; even 150lb bows did not generate this much KE at point blank range.)  Heat treated medium carbon steels provide significantly improved resistance (total defense of 2mm of armor and arming clothing could be over 300J against arrowheads if the metal were quenched and tempered, or about 232J for slack-quenched steel with arming clothing based on Williams' figures), but this was probably much less common at the time of Agincourt (Williams records the use of such metals in armor as early as the 1340's, but it does not seem to be in regular use until much later).  Note that penetration does not mean defeat - 100J of energy is enough for an arrowhead to penetrate a 2mm flat piece of 0.2%C steel, but does not allow for enough penetration to defeat the metal (~18mm penetration vice the 40mm needed to defeat the unshaped metal alone).

 

That said, this is a lot more energy than the Battlefield Detectives weapon system produced, and hitting the flanks, sides of the visors, and other thinner parts of the armor at close range could have caused significant damage, and defeated the armor system.  Even if it did not, the energy from the impacts, constant battering of arrows against the armor, the off arrow that lands somewhere where the armor is not, would have had terrifying psychological impact, and would have had physical effects as well.  Multiply that by the thousands that would have been in the air every few seconds, and you've got some serious combat effects.  So it is my own thought that while, yes, the longbow has gotten way too much credit over the years, and BFD did an excellent job showing all of the other factors that were more significant, I also think they didn't do the bow justice, either.  It was not the decisive factor in the battle, but it was far from useless!

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

The Weather certainly played a part..and the topography of the landscape

[Hauksbee 103]

The Weather certainly played a part..and the topography of the landscape

True. It had been raining and the field was muddy. The soil at Agincourt had a lot of clay in it. It produced the kind of mud that let you sink in deep and then suck the boot off your foot. Olivier's "Henry V" shows multiple cavalry charges with the French being scythed off their horses. In fact there was only one charge. That day, the bulk of French knighthood fought dismounted. They had been standing in formation all morning in the humid heat getting more and more impatient. After that first cavalry charge, there was a Viennese company of crossbow men is position to launch a few volleys at the English. (These could have done some real damage) But the French had had enough of waiting and pushed the Viennese out of the way and began marching through the mud, heading for the center of the English line. Here is where Henry stood with his knights. It's where men of quality could perform worthy feats of arms; where wealthy men could be taken prisoner and ransomed. Nobody wanted to engage with the loutish commoners on both wings. Soon they were all packed shoulder-to-shoulder where one could scarcely draw a sword, let alone swing it, knee-deep in mud that immobilized them, and if you lost your balance and fell, people walked over you and you drowned, Then the commoners on both wings closed in with sledgehammers and bayonette-length knives.

[JimAttrill 24]

Yes, the longbowmen did well against the crossbowmen but the French were over-armoured and sank in the mud.  It can't have been easy sloshing around in loads of sticky mud while carrying quite a few pounds of iron armour around.  A sort of medieval Paschendaele it seems. 

Are these the same battlefield detectives that worked out that the Spanish armada got sunk because their cannonballs were no good?   They found some genuine spanish cannonballs and made a modern muzzle loader out of an old tank gun.  They proudly set the gun and loaded it with black powder etc and then fired it at foot-thick oak planks.   When the smoke cleared the planks had big holes in them.   Cause of much hilarity and end of that theory anyway. 

 

Of course the Armada was defeated by the English weather as much as anything else. 

[Hauksbee 103]

I find it odd that the bulk of French knighthood (who are inextricably tied to horses) elected to fight dismounted.

 

Widowmaker: I recall that you have a son who took up jousting. Has that association given you any insights into their reasons?

[Wayfarer 5]

The "Frogs" and the "Limeys" - what a wonderful friendship that should be! The French know a lot about

good cooking, good wine and good cheese, and the British about good beer, good pop music and good

humour! In two world wars the "Tommies" helped the French - now, John Lennon would say:  come together!

 

 

 

Olham, would you consider applying to be head of the UN if the job becomes vacant?

Edited October 30, 2015 by Wayfarer

[JimAttrill 24]

I could be a bit wrong here but I would reckon that the knights on both sides spoke the same language which was French.  Being booted out of France later helped the English language a lot as the aristocracy realised that they were English and not French.  At the time of this battle Chaucer had been dead 15 years which was not long. 

 

From Wiki: "French was the mother tongue of the English king until Henry IV (1399–1413). He was the first to take the oath in English, and his son, Henry V (1413–1422), was the first to write in English."   

 

^{So it was a period of transition.} 

[Olham 164]

Olham, would you consider applying to be head of the UN if the job becomes vacant?

 

Naw, better not - I don't have the nerves of steel, to deal with all the conflicting forces in the UN*,

and to bear the ignorance about the fate of others, which I'd have to face in that job.

 

* the name UN = United Nations is irony already. How united are they? Or rather: not?

Edited October 30, 2015 by Olham

[Capitaine Vengeur 263]

I could be a bit wrong here but I would reckon that the knights on both sides spoke the same language which was French.  Being booted out of France later helped the English language a lot as the aristocracy realised that they were English and not French.  At the time of this battle Chaucer had been dead 15 years which was not long. 

 

From Wiki: "French was the mother tongue of the English king until Henry IV (1399–1413). He was the first to take the oath in English, and his son, Henry V (1413–1422), was the first to write in English."   

 

^{So it was a period of transition.} 

The English knights surely spoke French, but the soldiery rather spoke Saxon only with a mix of Norman words that had become usual. I don't know if in 1415, comparing to the previous Century, most of the longbowmen were still of Welsh mother tongue.

 

I did not know that the English monarchy used written French in its official acts, but it may have been a Norman custom rather. In France, the Parisian French did not become the official language in royal justice and central administration before an Act dated 1539. Before that, for an Act to be official, it had to be written in Latin.

[Hauksbee 103]

 In France, the Parisian French did not become the official language in royal justice and central administration before an Act dated 1539. Before that, for an Act to be official, it had to be written in Latin.

Thus, for a United Europe, there should be an across-the-board return to using Latin.