Random Things That Went Wrong For French At The Battle Of Agincourt (13 items)

• 

  (#5) The French Knights Were Weighed Down By Their Expensive Armor

  The French knights wore heavy plate armor, as did their horses. With over 100 pounds of metal covering their bodies, they were hampered in terms of swift movement and limited when it was time to get off of their horses and engage in hand-to-hand combat.  The English, for their part, wore lighter leather and chain mail armor, if any at all.
• 

  (#9) The French Knights Were Mired In Mud

  The heavy French armor was an even bigger problem, given the state of the battlefield.  After days of rain, the field at Agincourt was wet, muddy, and difficult to traverse.  When the French knights were on their horses, the horses struggled to get through the terrain.  When the French knights were on foot, they got stuck, weighed down, and even drowned as they sank into the mud.  Once the bottleneck of French troops began to trample each other, the mud further complicated any chance of movement, much less escape.
• 

  (#4) The French Leaders and Soldiers Got Cocky

  The French outnumbered the English with anywhere from 12,000 to 36,000 troops to their 5,000, depending on which source one believes. The English troops were weak and weary, solemn and resolute the night before the battle. The English had been beaten down by disease, lack of food, and threats of French counterattacks since they'd arrived in France in August 1415. On the eve of Agincourt, Henry V ordered his men to remain completely silent, for fear of a surprise attack by the French. Meanwhile, their French counterparts drank and rabble-roused, certain of their impending victory. 
• 

  (#7) The French Leaders Tried To Match The English, But It Was Too Late

  
  Because the French aristocracy, mainly knights on horseback, didn’t allow for their inferiors to have weapons, the French army relied heavily on light and heavy cavalry. At the Battle of Agincourt, the French commander Jean II Le Maingre, also known as Boucicault, had Genoese crossbowmen to accompany his forces, but generally speaking, the French lacked the tactics needed to match their English enemy.

  Boucicault had experience fighting the English and was determined to counter the English longbowmen at Agincourt. He had a plan in place to advance upon the French with his knights while sending crossbowmen around the English flanks. Unfortunately, the battlefield was too narrow for Boucicault to execute his strategy and his knights ended up bottlenecked and trapped.
• 

  (#11) The French Army Was Waiting On More Men

  Boucicault, the Duke of Orleans, and the French army were waiting for reinforcements, despite already outnumbering the English as much as 6 to 1. The brother of the Duke of Burgundy, the Duke of Brabant, got word that the battle had started and immediately set off with some of his men to fight with his French comrades. Unfortunately, he was two hours away and by the time he arrived, the battle was well under way. In a rush, Brabant grabbed the weapons and armor of one of the fallen French men-at-arms and made his way to the battlefield. His men seemed to reinvigorate the French troops briefly, but the English remained dominate. Unfortunately for Brabant, the armor he’d put on was that of a lesser noble and once the battle was over, he was taken prisoner and killed, being deemed unworthy of holding for ransom. 
• 

  (#13) The French Losses Kept On Coming, Even After The Battle

  At Agincourt, the English took thousands of French prisoners. Once the battle was complete, the English had no way to keep all of them alive, nor did they have any use for men that would not get them any ransom. As a result, many of the prisoners were gathered into a nearby barn, locked inside, and burned to death. Hundreds of others were slaughtered by English archers and men-at-arms. The French nobility was all but destroyed.  

New Random Displays    Display All By Ranking