Aging Disgracefully

1. The English archers made much less of a direct difference (ie by killing heavily armed French nobles outright) than many think. Agincourt occured at a major turning point in the history of armor (the transition from iron to steel having begun in earnest only a few years before). Their iron-tipped arrows simply could not pierce the new steel armor many of the wealthy French knights were likely wearing. So much for that theory.

2. Where they did make a difference was by killing the horses on which those nobles rode (thus forcing them to fight on foot) and then heading out on the field (ie leaving their line of fire at the edge of the field and entering the field itself) to fight them along with other ordinary English foot soldiers already on the field.

3. How did such lightly armed ordinary folk make a difference in hand to hand combat with the human Panzer that was the typical French (or, for that matter, any other kind) knight? First, the field was soaked and thus muddy. The mud made the heavy French knights far less mobile. Moreoever, the suction at their feet made the shear act of walking an exhausting prospect. They were likely too encumbered and physically exhausted to fight effectively a far more mobile and energized foe (the cloth uniform of ordinary British troops was far better suited to walking through a muddy field). Second, and in all likelihood much more importantly, the French approach to Agincourt appears to have occurred in some kind of freakish natural geological funnel: bottlenecks formed as the field narrowed and some knights became bogged down in the mud. For the ordinary French knight the advance became an even more exhausting struggle against the crowd dymanics, etc. Many knights suffocated as they fell into the wet mud and the crowd surged over them. What compounded all of this is that the battle was dragging through lunch time and beginning to invade the afternoon siesta. As a result of this crowd funnel dynamic and missing lunch (and all they had for wine was some Bordeaux vin de table from a less than stellar year, for God's sake), at any given point in the battle the French could thus bring only a tiny proportion of their forces to bear-and those men were exhausted, thirsty,... cycnical, sarcastic, lascivious,....French. You had all of the makings of a great French defeat (or a classic Who concert, had the battle occurred in the late Seventies).

4. If the arrow didn't work against the French knights, why didn't the French bring their own light artillery/machineguns (arrows, cross-bows, etc.) to bear against the lightly armed English before entering this funnel? For one thing, they probably failed to anticipate the funnel dymanic. The French were so ill prepared for this battle that they hadn't even formed a surrender plan in advance. More importantly, they did not let loose volleys of arrows for the same reason that all of the French knights stormed the field en masse: each knight wanted to capture one of the nobles/knights among the English for ransom. That is why they fought. They feared their arrows might kill potentially lucrative prisoners. The English nobles/knights had roughy the same objective. Nobles at the time had come to expect surviving capture: they were worth something. The worst they had to worry about from captivity was perhaps a Texas Titty Twister. The ordinary English troops had a different concern: they knew that they were worth nothing in terms of ransom, and would thus be killed it their side lost and they were captured. They were the ones with a clear incentive to fight for victory. (I guess that, along with crowd dynamics, I could have said something about screwed up incentives in the title of this post.)