 Thank you. Thank you very much Steven. It's a great honour for me to come here. I'm a fellow of the Society and a few weeks ago we had a rather splendid study day. If you weren't able to get to that, look at it online because all of the papers and indeed some songs, I'm not going to burst into song here, Mae'r cyfwyr, mewn meddwl, yn gweithio lleigio oedol, oedol yn gyda'r drwng ymlaen, a efallai i'n rhai sy'n ddim yn fwy o'r gweithio lleigio. Mae'r cwrs yn fawr, mae'r ein ddysgu sy'n meddwl. Mae'r cyfrifftl. Mae'r cyfrifftl yn gweithio'r rhannu yma, mae'r cyfrifftl yn ddysgu'r cyfrifftl yn ddysgu'r rhannu, ac mae'n ddysgu'r rhannu ar y cyfrifftl yn ddysgu'r rhannu o'r clywbeth o gyfnod. Rwy'n hwn yn grwynhau i'n rhanau bod llawer o'r clywed. Mae'r parfodau ffaith o'i clywbeth. Rydyn ni wedi'u mynd i ni, mae'n mynd i'ch meddwl gyda'r rhanau. Rydyn ni wedi'u mynd i'ch meddwl gyflym wedi dwych i'ch meddwl gyflwynt. Rydyn ni'n hollwch y cysylltu panes시�wyd i'r cysylltu yn gyflym. Mae'n 유�w yma o cascyfyddau'r cyhoedd. Mae cynnyddio hyn, mae ni'n cymdog o ddweud The other famous myth about Agincourt is the V-sign. The V-sign was invented there. I can't find the origins of that story. We know that one of the chronicles of the time actually gives a battle speech for Henry. There are many battle speeches incidentally given for Henry and it says that if the archers are caught then her fingers cut off. I think again it's an early 20th century myth. The First World War has a lot to do with this interest in Agincourt and in things military because after all the battle was fought not very far away from the Somme and as you're going to see George V actually visited nearby twice during the First World War. But it just shows also how quickly history moves on. You may not remember the origin of this cartoon by Matt in the Daily Telegraph. It was concerning Ed Ball's suggestion that when shadow chancellor that maybe you should or should not give receipts for workmen when you paid them in cash. It just shows this sort of enduring myth though of the V-sign and Agincourt. And of course the bottle is still used politically today when George Osborne announced a million pounds to go to Agincourt as also to Waterloo in the budget in March. He had the battle showing a strong leader. I think we know which political party was meant for him that. Defeating an ill-judged alliance between the champion of a united Europe, the French force implied there, and a renegade force of Scottish nationalists. Not true. There are no Scots involved in the battle of Agincourt that didn't stop us having a piper at the battlefield on Sunday to great success. The piper actually piped in the French on that occasion. But do have a look at the website Agincourt600.com for more material. Now the campaign of Henry in 1415 is actually quite well known and pretty easily described. Henry set off from Southampton in the middle of August and he landed at Haar Fleur here. He'd signed up his army for 12 months so this was intended as a campaign of conquest and he'd really began to besiege the town of Haar Fleur, a very important port from which there'd been quite a lot of raids on the south coast of England. Unfortunately it proved quite a difficult place to take. It took six months from his initial landing for it to surrender and for various reasons that I'll show you some documents linked to later. He decided to cut the campaign short. He therefore left Haar Fleur with his army around the 6th or the 8th of October, intending to get out of France as quickly as possible. To do that he walked March of his army up here to the crossing of the Saint-Marc Blanche-Tac where his great-grandfather, Edward III, had crossed in 1346. When he got there he heard from French prisoners that there was a great French army on the other side of the river and he didn't dare to chance a crossing. Therefore he brought his army southwards along the Somme being shadowed by the French all the way along until he eventually found a crossing point on the 19th of October. So this long march is a characteristic of this campaign. The French came out of Peron where they'd been gathering and the herald summoned him to battle. So Agincourt is also a tree of ranged battle although we can't be sure whether they arranged it for Azancourt or for another place, Obini on Artois. A couple of French panicles imply that that was the place they had appointed for the battle to take place. Now there's something very interesting about this. Everything in this route here suggests Henry was battle avoiding. Henry won his story in the American Clifford Rogers who's argued otherwise. Henry therefore was trying to avoid an engagement with the French. Here if he was heading for Obini you can see he turns in a completely different direction. Was he again trying to avoid battle? Whatever the case he then moves forward northwards here towards Calais and he has intercepted the French get to Azancourt ahead of him on the 24th of October and battle is given on the 25th of October. One thing that's often forgotten about this, we go on about this march which incidentally was about 23km a day, that's about as fast as an army could move at that point, is that the French are also moving long distances. Most of their troops are gathering in Rouen in late September, early October, although the king himself, Charles VI and his son do not coat to Rouen until Henry has left. You've got to remember that relations between the English and the French had been bad for quite a long time now. The Hundred Years War had begun in the previous century and Henry V very much reopened the war because he knew of divisions in France. He was also trying to strengthen his own position in England where he is after all the son of a usurper, Henry IV that usurped the throne in 1399. We've got to remember that relations had been bad for a long time and therefore the French were hesitant to engage Henry at half flour because battles in the past at Cressy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356 had led to great French defeats and even worse in 1356 the capture of the French king. Therefore, whilst we love this story of the underdog that the English were always at a disadvantage, the newspapers over the weekend have been full of this against all the odds and that kind of thing, we've got to remember that the French were themselves anxious about this, could not get a large enough army together while he was at half flour and even then hesitated about what to do. It's when he crosses the song that they really make up their minds to give him battle. Maybe they think by then that he has marched long distances running out of food by then that battle is actually given. But what I want to put into your minds right from the start is that this is a much more complex event than we might get certainly from Shakespeare but even from some modern popular history books. The army, the English army, is exceptionally well documented. That's nothing to do with that, you could itself, except that this is the first time since 1359 that a king has led an army to France in person, so over 50 years since a king has led an army in person. It is the largest army to leave England since 1346. It is a very large scale event and when Henry went to the city of London for a loan, he got 10,000 marks from them, he said he intended to invade with no small army. So it has a much greater scale to it right from the start. It is meant to be a significant invasion. As I say, these contracts we have one here for Sir Thomas Erpingham to bring 20-minute arms and 60 archers, we know that they were intended to serve for 12 months. Using these documents, I think I've got another one coming up here, this is Thomas Lord Camois, the commander of the rear guard at the battle for retinue just slightly larger. These documents we know that around 320 men engaged to bring troops. It is a huge recruitment exercise here and we know also that most of the retinues were in a special ratio of one man at arms to three archers, like Erpingham's 20 man at arms and 60 archers. Henry had a clear idea of the sort of army he wanted, already quite archer rich. In the late 14th century, the ratio had been one man at arms to one archer, so he's already increased the number of archers. You're going to say, well, that's because he knew he was going to fight a battle at Argincourt and he knew just how useful it would be. Well, no, but archers are useful in all military situations, sieges, skirmishes, sorties, patrolling, as well as a battle situation and Henry had experienced battle in 1403 where he'd been wounded in the face by an arrow, but the beauty of the archer was that he was cheap. You could get two archers for every man at arms. Archers were paid sixpence a day. All the terms and conditions are in these contracts here, whereas a man at arms was paid a shilling a day. A man at arms has the full plate armour and his role then was to fight hand to hand, on foot, usually, but they would be able to fight from horseback as well. These are the well-trained men, the professional soldiers. The archers, many of those came from the households, many of them were servants. For instance, the old marshal had his barber with him and he served as an archer. I think Dalton Abbey, really, for this kind of army. In fact, quite similar to some of the First World War recruitment as well. Men doubled up as servants and as soldiers as well, but they would have needed to have recruited archers locally. No commissions of a reign were used to raise archers, but we would have had archers recruited from communities. This is very interesting in financial terms. Henry did not have enough money to pay his troops. They had to be paid for six-month service before they set out. The money was given to the captain. He then gave it out to his men. But Henry did not have enough. He only had enough for three months. The nobles would not go on this campaign unless they could find some more. So he raided the royal jewel cupboards, got out plate and jewels and then had it weighed and gave the captains the silver, if you like, even though it is in the object form, to them worth three months worth of wages. The idea being that they could deposit it with London Goldsmiths and get the money like a sort of a hawk system and then give it to their men or they could just pay from their own pocket and then Henry would redeem these items and he set up a redemption date in January 1417. So he very much mortgaged the future for this campaign. That also explains a lot as to why he was determined to be successful. Either successful in getting out of France without too much damage or at the battle, winning the battle. I think it explains a lot about the killing of the prisoners. He cannot afford to lose this campaign. We have the testimony of a French spy who says that Henry was weak in England, that there were other people plotting against him and even as he left Southampton there were people trying to seize the throne from him. So, again, the complexity of the political situation is worth noting. This is one of the receipts for payment given to Thomas Lord Cammons by the Earl of Arundel, the Treasurer of England. Now, I've said on many occasions this is war according to accountants. It's all right Thomas Serpingham saying, yes I will bring 20-minute arms and 60 archers but you want to check that he has actually done that and we have these muster rolls before the campaign. This one's taken quite close to my office in Southampton. You can see the 20-minute arms there at the top, the 60 archers at the bottom. They've all been ticked off with a little dot beside their name when they turned up and we've got four in the middle. Lances in addition to the number. Lances are another word for minute arms at this point. These are people who've turned up, want to go on the campaign but are not in the payroll. In a way they're helping for other people to die. So the enthusiasm for this campaign to go on it is quite substantial. This is a big campaign led by a king leading to substantial conquests, to ransoms, to all the benefits that soldiers would get in addition to their daily wage. Erpingham himself was paid four shawings a day. The Duke of York was paid 13 shawings and fourpins a day. There was a lot of benefit in going on with these sorts of campaigns. Archers then are already present in the retinues but Henry also recruited archer companies. This is the famous South Welsh company, some of them here from Cardiwenshire, Carmarthenshire and these ones are from Breck and Pantosili. They can see these names. I can tell you it's extremely difficult putting Welsh names into a computer database. We have done this. They're already on medieval soldier.org but we're doing a special adjunct database which will be finished by the time the funding runs out at the end of March next year. So not only have we got this special 500 from South Wales, none from the north because Glendale is still at large, probably dies in this year, 500 from Lancashire and perhaps 650 from Cheshire. So we've got these extra archer companies there. As I say, Halfflow is a very difficult place to besiege because it could be flooded rather like what happened in Belgium at the beginning of the First World War, the French were able to flood all of this area making it rather insanitary. Men got dysentery and the causes of the time explained by carcasses and animals being thrown into there and that kind of thing. We've got Henry then on this side here. These are hills above the town and his brother the Duke of Clarence on this side here. It seems that this was the sickly camp, though there's quite a number becoming ill in the King's camp as well. This is also the side where mining took place. We have miners from the forest of Dean recruited for that purpose. We also have gunners here. This picture is taken from Matt Bennett's Osprey book. In fact, it says English guns, yes, but German gunners. We did not have expertise in gunnery at this point and the gunners taken on this campaign. My students working on this actually were all German. It was difficult to take Halfflow, but eventually it surrendered on the 18th of September for formal surrender on the 22nd. However, Henry realised that he had lost a number of men at this siege. Others had dysentery and probably couldn't continue on the campaign and would best then send home. He was a control freak, so people had to have a little xayat to get away. This is attached to a list of games. This is stamped with the signature of the Sennish or Chamberlain of the Household. This is the 6th of October. As he starts to move away from Halfflow, he's deciding who can go home. We actually have lists of sick men. These are amazing as well. The ones down at the bottom there are actually some of the Welsh archers here who don't get to Adgincourt. They are actually invalid at home. We've calculated that these two main lists have about 1500 names in them, so we can say that that number were sent home. However, I have a problem because some of these men's names are also in documents saying they were at the Battle of Adgincourt. It is possible that these are lists of sick rather than lists of men invalid at home. Therefore, some of them may be recovered enough to continue with the fight. It's also interesting that in Jonathan Sumpson's recent book, Cursed Kings, he has a chapter on Adgincourt. He says 2000 English soldiers died at Halfflow. I found 50. In fact, there is quite a lot of documentary evidence here. We have another role. This is the Earl of Arundel's muster, and he will see replacements came in there. We shouldn't underestimate how many Henry's still had with him. The reason we know what happened to the troops is because after the campaign there were more financial records drawn up. This is Erpingham's, and we also have the retinue lists that were drawn up. This is Camois. These show how few people actually died at the Siege of Halfflow and so far from about 80 retinues, I can only find 50 men. Now there were 300 retinues, so we haven't got all of the evidence, but to get to 2000 is impossible. So it is a figure taken from chronical evidence rather than from these sorts of sources. Henry, however, did need to put 1200 into garrison. So if he lost 1500 going home, 1200 into garrison, perhaps 50 multiplied by whatever you think we need, perhaps about 300 dying at the bottom altogether, we can see that he still had about 8,500 men with him. But of those, only 1,000 to 1,500 were men-at-arms, about 7,000 were archers. It's just the way the death toll went that Henry now had an even more archer-rich army for the march, and that's going to be very significant for the battle. But I hope you can see from this, we actually have a huge amount of material that we can use. We don't need to use the chronical sources, which we'll see in a minute when we look at the French, are very misleading indeed. You can just see here, virtually the whole of Camoy's retinue was within at the battle. He's the rearguard on the left, so probably engaging less in the fighting than Duke of York's company on the right. So that's how these battles were conducted. But this one here, Samsung Broccas, stayed within the town of Haar Fleur. So we know he was one soldier from the retinue of Camoy's who was detailed into Haar Fleur. If you go to the very good exhibition of the Royal Armouries at the Tower of London, this one's actually up on the wall, and underneath it is a little touchscreen, you can touch it and see what happened to people. We've put in the retinues they were in, what their rank was, and also what their fate was on the campaign. The player under this will be put it online in due course. So lots of material to draw on, and also on ransoms, this is from Camoy's saying the men in his retinue took ransoms, and out of that Camoy's got a cut and so did the crown, so we know how much was made from ransoms from each retinue. And then just ended this little picture here in the period before metal filing cabinets, what you're even wouldn't once, what you did was put all of Erpingham's documents into a little bag here made from cheap skin essentially, and you tied it up and hung it on a peg with the name Erpingham written over it. So a filing system written for the style. We're back then on the campaign, and we've got to about here just south of Corbyn, and Henry Hears from French prisoners, because he remembers a lot of military activities going on during this all the time, that the French have a coming plan, and the plan is to send cavalry against the archers. So the French already know that the archers could be a threat to them, even though they've not fought a pitched battle against the English for quite a long time. And so Henry famously orders the archers to repair states. I gave a talk at the Wildon Downland Museum down in Sussex, and it was very interesting there, because obviously they do a lot of timber structures there, and one man came up with some very interesting ideas of what dimension the states would be and how it would be part of the coprasing cycle, and how on earth could they do it in the middle of enemy territory. Probably they're not that thick, but they've got to be strong enough to be able to hammer them into the ground and also sharpen them possibly with one of those kind of pruning devices, or bark removing devices there. So this is going to be also very important. It's the first known use of a stake wall in Western Europe, but it had been used by the Turks at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, and there'd been some Englishmen there, so probably it has come into knowledge in the west. Now the other fascinating thing about this is we do actually have the French battle plan. It survives. It was found in the British Library in the 1980s by Christopher Philpots, and we don't know how it got to England. I like to think, because of course I had my hand at the 5th tremendously, that actually was captured during this march. It's not specifically for our Duke, or the French thought they might fight at any point along the Song, and it doesn't have in this plan the Duke of Orleans who's going to end up as commander on the day, or the Duke of Bourbon, so second in command, but it has all of these features. It has the plan to override the arches with a cavalry. It has the plan to have a certain number of French divisions, and also the plan to attack the baggage. So again, I hope you will leave today thinking how sophisticated medieval warfare is, because sometimes the way it's talked about, it's like a stag weekend in the Pada Cale. We've had that whilst we go. Here we are at our Duke court, or probably we don't actually know where the battle was fought, but this is the traditional site, and this is where the monument was erected. In fact, just about there. So the seat of the battle is thought to be in the middle here. As I'm close across here, Tramcourt here, Lucerville there, where the French are supposed to be, and Maison's cell down here where the English are. So you are the English. I would imagine the French are coming out to you there. We've got three groups of men-at-arms, the King in the centre, the Duke of York on the right. It's a little far forward. The Lord Camois on the left. 65 years old, Lord Camois was chosen because he was married into the Royal Family, but also because as an elderly man, he would be able to hold his troops firm while the others started fighting, because they sort of come in one division after the other. You've got some archers in front of you initially, although they're going to fall back when the French men-at-arms come to grips with you in the melee, and then you've got archers flanking. There must be huge flanking, or rather like a horseshoe-shaped flanking there, because one French chronicle comments on the idea have been encircled by the English archers. You remember the number I've said, 7,000 or more, they've got to be accommodated maybe in the woodland on each side, which is also talked about. There are problems with this battlefield. It's not the most obvious place for a battle. It was usually fought on a slightly hilly land, and I'll show you some other possible locations towards the end of the tour. The soil there, as colleagues who are with us at the weekend will testify, is very sort of clawing. There is one there, we call it lecloir. If you get it on your shoes, I still haven't cleaned mine. I didn't bring myself to do it this morning. I did it in a hotel a few weeks ago in France. I actually blocked the sink. You can see why it was a problem. The intriguing thing here is that Henry seems, no doubt from scouting, to have been able to put his men on ground that is less problematic and that the French have to come through this area, maybe also churned up by their horses, exercising in it the night before. It's like a bridal path. You know how terrible it is moving across that kind of terrain. Now we know that some of the French are going to fall over into this and they can't get up again because people are piling on top of them. If you did fall face down into this, it would be very, very difficult indeed. There's a tremendous suction effect and work done by soil scientists in this area has very much shown that. The terrain is significant so you've got to say why did the French choose this ground or how is it possible that Henry managed to get the better position on the day even though he arrived second on to the battlefield. There's a lot of problems about this. I think the French, it's also intriguing that Henry gets there on the 24th and he sets his men into battle array straight away. He thinks the French are going to attack him straight away and indeed they should have done. That would be to their advantage. They choose not to and that's because they're still hoping more troops will come. This is very difficult, getting everybody to the right place, even more so if some of them had been told it was at Albini. The Duke of Brabant we know arrives late. The Duke of Brittany gets no further than Amiens doesn't get there in time. There are several other troops that don't get there in time. I'm estimating around 12,000 French and I'll say a bit more about the numbers in a minute but just to show you then what is going to happen. The first attack then would be the cavalry on each side against the archers and yet the French cannot get enough men to volunteer to be in that cavalry. And it shows really the command problem. The king is mad, the dofa is not on the campaigns, they're worried about the English. So the leading commander is a 21 year old, the Duke of Orleans, who's never been in a pitchfackled before. Maybe then he can't command the troops to do this but this is a pretty bad indictment if the commander cannot force men to do these military actions. And the other things said, maybe they don't like fighting against archers because what honour is there to be gained in that? You're not going to get ransoms that way. But I reckon they're also very worried about their horses, extremely expensive, well trained horses, extremely vulnerable to arrow shot. They're not fully armoured and therefore I think there was a disinclination to engage in that manoeuvre in the battle. But it is a disaster for the French because instead of the archers being overridden by the French cavalry, instead the French cavalry cannot penetrate, that's what the stakes were about to stop the horses getting at the archers. Archers have no plate armour, they have helmets and reinforced jerkings but they are not suitable for fighting in the melee, therefore they've got to be wholly protected and they are by the stakes. But also the shot which I think is in volleys, I don't think we need to know how many an archer can shoot in a minute because I think they are more like Zulu if you know that very famous shooting thing where one lot shoots then the other shoots. I think it's that kind of situation and that's even more scary. Can you imagine, pretend to be the French for a minute or two, imagine you're walking along and then all of a sudden there's hundreds of tennis balls being thrown at you. And some of you get knocked down, some of you fall over, others fall on top of you. The rest of you keep going and you think is there going to be another one? Yes there is but you don't know when it's going to be. And it's not so likely that the archers will be loosening all the time because research by Tom Richardson at the Royal Armouries says that archers, arrows coming groups of 24, 48 were issued for the campaign. So it's not wholly clear how many they had and you don't need to have lots each if you've got 7000 archers there. The other thing that happens with arrow fire, arrow shot I should say is that it has the effect of particularly for the men-at-arms moving forward on foot of making you crowding on each other. It's a natural reaction, a work done on crowd control shows this too, that you would all bunch together. You get so close you cannot raise your weapon arm. And it's also right for falling over, others falling on top of you and the heaps that are mentioned, the heaps of dead in which some people are living and then you're pulled out later, are a characteristic of the narratives of this account. So how much actual fighting there is, how many actually get through to fight with the English men-at-arms on foot is quite dubious. Maybe you wouldn't want to be the Duke of York slot on his side because you are the ones who are going to suffer. We know that at least 90 people in the Duke of York's retinue died and the Earl of Suffer, whose father had died at half-flade, only recently inherited died at the battle as well. So the right gets the full force but Camois retinue as far as I can see has no dead in it at all. So what we also see from this helpful diagram is it's not clear how many of these further French divisions, I don't know quite well if they have two divisions or three, but we see here that quite a lot of them have run away. Also means it doesn't really matter how many men you have in an army if they do not all engage and that's essentially what happens at Argincourt. So treason and cowardice are a feature of French narratives. Now brings me to the question of the French army sizes. Chronicles are a common source we use, they are sort of narrative accounts, it's on history if you like as it was written at the time. We have about 28 chronicles written within 50 years of the battle, most famous for the gesture Henry Quinty written by 1417 in Latin. Quite a lot of these texts are written by monks, very few by eye witnesses but they follow a tradition of historical writing, they're not unique to Argincourt. You can look at things for the 14th century. Walsingham, who was listed there, wrote a chronicle that went from the 1370s through to 1422, so they are general histories in which Argincourt features. Walsingham's account of Argincourt is very interesting because he knew very little about the battle and so he just put in lots of quotes from classical texts instead. Now you can see here that the figures they give on the English chronicles for the French army are huge. Absolutely huge. 60,000 seems quite small doesn't it really? Now the problem with the 60,000 is it's a very popular number with medieval chronicles, it means a large number. How many peasants were there from Kent in London in 1381? 60,000. Clever because the population of Kent using the poll tax was only about 51,000. And we assume that women and children didn't turn up, indeed not every peasant turned up. So these are not credible numbers, they mean something. There's quite a strong biblical influence as well in these kinds of things. So we really cannot use them except comparatively. So if for instance the gesture had said 30,000 for something else, what we're seeing is he thinks that's smaller than that. But we cannot use them for their actual figures. And that's true of all battles, it's not unique to this. I've done it on Bosworth, it's exactly the same problem. Notice also that the French chronicles give much lower figures for their troops. Well of course you bound to say it's like fishermen isn't it? It was this big, really the English were bound to say that the French were in very large numbers. So the French already are producing a difficulty including two down here, the Barry Herald and the point de Richemont, which was actually present at the battle, was written by one of his servants, actually say that the English are outnumbered the French. So again it is not at all clear on the French side how many were there. I've used some financial records, they've got very similar sources for the French side except just not as many of them. Only the third bullet points the most important, but after the English invaded, Chancellor Six raised a tax to cover the cost of 9,000 men. We know that they then issued a summons of the nobles and people would have turned up for that, but they turned up with very small companies, so I've allowed another 3,000 to get a total of 12,000. OK, it might be a few thousand more than that, but we're in that kind of territory here. And I can also compare with the reforms of the 1440s, very much modelled on the English success, where we know that Chancellor Seventh raised 7,200 men at arms group and 8,000 archers. So we know what the French got to by the 1440s, it couldn't really have been there already in 1415. I'm starting now to do the same with the French muster rolls as I can with the English, just to show you the sort of thing. These are mustering on the 22nd of September, but we've got quite a lot of documentation. For instance, we know that the Duke of Berrie had 1,500 men, he wasn't at the battle but we can assume most of those were there. Now that's interesting because the Duke of Clarence is the peer on the English side of the largest company, 960 men. So if the Duke of Berrie has 1,500 men, we're sort of seeing roughly speaking the relationship perhaps between the two armies. But many companies, as in England, were very small. And also, something I've done is look at later French armies. And if we were to say that the French had 60,000 at Argincourt, then we're in the reign of Louis XIV. It is impossible that the French had that number, they could not with their population base. Furthermore, they couldn't because this is a regional battle, imagine life without a mobile phone. You can't phone down to Neon and say we're planning a battle at Argincourt, but there's a very good TGV. If you get on it, you'll be there. It is a very cool battle. And this is where the dead and the prisoners came from. It is entirely from the society in Piccadillartois and up in Normandy there. It's a very nice French version of this, it just appeared on the website. So, if I look at casualties as well, the chronicles tell us 3,000 to 12,000 people died. Monstrelay, if I'm not mistaken, French countries 5,800. Yet, he only names 273. There we are, they're ringing to tell you where to go for the battle. In fact, we can only identify 500 people who died at this battle. Now, you've got to put a multiplier to that. Like the dead-at-half-lugs, we haven't got all the records. But it cannot be the sorts of figures given, maybe 2,000, 1,500 to 2,000 would be credible. The same with the prisoners, we've been able to identify for a few more reasons, about 320 prisoners now. But these are the credible figures. I just want to end with a few things about why Argincourt has still lingered on in the English speaking. It was not a decisive battle. The Duke of Orleans, there was no effort to, he was the main prisoner, no effort to ransom him, or no serious effort, because France was divided and his enemy, the Duke of Burgundy, not at the battle, had no intention of redeeming his enemy. In fact, the Burgundians were able to get control of the government essentially through what had happened at Argincourt. The King was not captured, although there were some valuable prisoners, some of those 300. It was a bit like winning the lottery at the time for the soldiers themselves. It did not have an effect on international diplomacy. Rather like at Cressy, the French were so humiliated by this defeat that they didn't want to come to the negotiating table at all. There were efforts of mediation in 1416, but essentially they didn't take up any opportunities, and Henry invaded again in 1417. In fact, he raised an army of 7,000 to save Half Fleur in 1416 in a naval battle, and he invaded again in 1417 and took all of Normandy, as he'd probably been intending to do. In 1419, there was an assassination by the Dolfan, then the leader of the Orleanist party in the absence of the Duke of Orlians, murdering the Duke of Burgundy. That's going to be a radio programme about this, I think, next week, on Radio 4. What this means is that the English then ally with the Burgundians, and Henry is accepted in 1420 as heir to the throne of France. Shakespeare, of course, rushes us straight from the Battle of Agincourt to the Treaty of Trois in 1420 in the marriage to Catherine. In fact, there's a lot of fighting in between, and a lot of political divisions within France, which is what gets Henry the airship in 1420. Shakespeare has a lot to answer for, both in terms of the fame of Agincourt. It's a battle we've all seen, alarms and excursions. It doesn't actually give much battle scene in it. It's a comic scene with Monsieur Lefer and Pistol, and then there's French rush on. That's what excursions means. They rush on the stage and say, all these last, all these last and then rush off again, probably to take another part. That's how these plays worked. But this play, probably the first produced at the Globe in 1599, is really what everybody remembers about Agincourt. Ironic, because there were no archers in Shakespeare's Home of the Fifth. This portrait has a lot of interest in the medieval past in the Tudor period, and this portrait is one of a number of factors, one in this building here from the 16th century. 1599 meant for Shakespeare, but this coincided with a period of great activity by the heralds and men claiming that they were gentlemen. James I, after all, was fanning this later with the idea of creating baronetsies and all of that sort of thing. The heralds were copying out lists, and this is the Agincourt role. It exists in three copies, one in the College of Arms, one in the Bodlein Library and one in the British Library. These were copied out by Robert Glover in the 1580s. He was Somerset Herald. The idea being that when he and the other heralds went out into the counties and people said, I should be a gentleman, and they said, what grounds have you for that? They said, well my ancestors served at Agincourt. Not just Agincourt, Henry VIII's campaigns were wheeled out in the same way, the Battle of Wakefield in 1460. So there are certain battles that they thought would help in their claim to get a coat of arms, so that's what this is. Now interestingly, this is from a lost original. There was a medieval role of this sort. It doesn't seem to survive. Glover only copied out, or the text he copied it from, only named the men-at-arms, because of course archers couldn't possibly be gentlemen, so there was no need to take those names down. For many years people said that we do not know the names of the archers at Agincourt. In fact we do by using the materials in the National Archives. So this role here has actually misled quite a lot. It occurs a cutting number of websites as a sort of secret. You almost imagine the Templars are behind this list. It's only by certain families in America and for a small sum you can check whether your ancestors served at Agincourt. In fact it is something done by heralds in the late 16th century. But it did, the whole situation of this gentility led to spurious claims. If I look at the visitations, heraldic visitations for Kent between 1592 and 1619, between those two dates the Waller family added the little coat of arms at the top there on their walnut tree from the name Waller, and that's the coat of the Duke of Orleans. The idea being they'd captured the Duke of Orleans at the battle. Now Richard Waller was there but he didn't capture the Duke. He had in his custody John Count of Angulam, the younger brother of the Duke of Orleans. We would say that these French peers are all much of a muchness, except it was a hostage deal of 1412. It has nothing to do with Agincourt. It gets worse in the 19th century. The earls of Kimberley, the woodhouses invented this tremendous coat of arms here with Agincourt, the motto at the bottom, the drops of blood. And the cudgel at the top that John Woodhouse is supposed to have used at the battle going on clonking people on the head with it and shouting, frack four to get hard. Now Woodhouse was not at the battle and that story actually comes from a poem by Michael Drayton written in 1627. So it's part of this medievalism in the late 16th and early 17th century. Woodhouse's Drayton's poem, The Battle of Agincourt, written in 1627 is amazing really. It is a very violent poem. It has some crazy things in it like they stop fighting to besiege a castle halfway during the battle. At the end of the battle the French are defeated and the English force them to carry them on their backs. It's just weird really. He'd already written a shorter poem in 1606 which is The Fest of the Wind for France and it's a pseudo medieval poem. So this interest in Agincourt is certainly around in the early 17th century. And this is when Davy Gamm comes into the story. Davy Gamm is mentioned in The Chronicles as dying at the battle. We're not sure why that's the case but he had indented for it himself and three archers. The first mention of him is in Walter Raleigh's history of the world and he's sent a spy and he comes back with this. There's a Frenchman though enough to be killed, enough to be taken prisoner, enough to run away. Now we don't know why Raleigh inserted this as he's talking about Hannibal at the time. So we don't know where the story came from but it gets copied into all of the subsequent histories of Wales and Goodwin's history of the reign of Henry V. So it is a story made up in probably the early 17th century. Over the course of the 18th century we were at war with the French so often that it was convenient to wheel out Agincourt, really to say we've knocked the hell out of them in the past, we can do it again lads. It's that sort of feeling and here we are in the war of Austrian succession. British valor has always been a notice that it didn't create a problem moving from English to British. That probably becomes a British victory even though technically it is English. So suddenly it was during that war that the princesses of the royal family paid for productions of Shakespeare's Henry V. When Henry V starts going to perform very, very frequently it gets more so in the Seven Years War. This idea also coming in the radical fortitude, we were morally and politically superior to the French but it was their Irish stones, they were bound to have a revolution sooner or later and we were already men of the soil of that kind of thing. The first indication of the anniversary newspaper, the first reminder that today is the anniversary of the battle, is in 1757 during the Seven Years War, found by the fact that George III actually acceded to the throne on 25th October in 1760. When we continued fighting in the Revolutionary Wars we get the same sort of thing there. The French preserved that character, they're the same in 1415 as they are now. In 1805, the year of Trafalgar, you could pay a shilling to see this huge painting in the Lyceum. One was done of Serringa Patam as well. You could evoke the memory of Agincourt at the Lord Mayor's show in 1815, we've got a float this year. They looked at both Waterloo and Agincourt as great victories. Shakespeare continued to be tremendously popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is from the 1850s. The production's got more and more lavish. You had real horses on the stage. You even had dancing girls in the French camp the night before the battle to show the battle to general that they were. It also got women on the stage instead of playing, otherwise there's very few opportunities. In 1915, of course, we were allies. These are marvellous scenes of the French welcoming British troops. This was in the Illustrated London News and also the French newspaper. They shook hands over this place of previous conflict but now we're allies, as they said. They were shown round the field by this French Lieutenant Colonel. I'd love to get hold of those handouts that the British officers are holding. I haven't been able to find them. But intriguingly, this chap here said that the English had 28,000 men at this battle. Finally, where was it? Well, the earliest map actually shows it to the west of the village of Azancourt there. But the area I showed you before is actually there between Azancourt and Tramacourt. So we do have a problem because the first book about the battle in 1827 did the same. It put it to the west of Azancourt. But the traditional site was first surveyed in 1818 when we occupied that area after the Napoleonic Wars. You can see here how the two hours ago the French up there and then the English are put here. Various other features are marked on here such as grave pits, that kind of thing. Now, the surveyor, John Woodford, actually did carry out some excavations, but nothing of those now survives. Victorian excavations are often very difficult to rediscover. And there is some possibility that this map, with its burial of 5,800 knights, remember that's what Monsterlade said, is more like Tolkien's map of Middle Earth. It is imposing the battle on to an actual terrain. We've excavated here around the Calvair where Woodford marked the graves. Nothing there at all apart from an oil drilling rig from the 1870s. It's possible this field would handle more, but the French have not been very keen on excavation recently. A new plaque was put onto this calvair, which dates originally to around the Franco-Prussian War. There are some bodies. These were in the Church of Ulce de Hedon, where the ceremony was held on Sunday morning. And this one of these is Gala de Fougère, the Provost-Marshall, who is deemed by the French to be the first gendarme. So the ceremony at the weekend had a lot about the history of the gendarmery. It was organised by then. And this body was dug up in the 1930s and is now at the bottom of the gendarmery monument in Versailles. We know where 54 people were buried on the French side. We know where they were taken to. At these, so far, the only ones that have been dug up, we haven't found grave pits. Tim Sutherland has suggested that this could be the site of the battle. With a road through the middle, we're never going to get that excavated. Because somebody has talked about a valley. If you remember what I showed you before, it was totally flat. So is it this valley here? It's nearer to Risseville. I imagine it's down through there. Another possibility is this position here. We're looking at that. It's the centre of the battlefield there. But we're looking at it obliquely from Maison. So, and again, it is much more likely to be the sort of terrain that battles were fought in, where armies adopted a hill, a sort of hilly-up position. Borealising it is also interesting. In 1963, this was put up on St Joan of Arc's feast day, to show that the French won the war, if not the battle. The Saint-Historic was built in 2001, with European money, very nicely done with a sort of longbow frontage to it. Then finally, on Sunday, Ajucourt 600 paid for this rather splendid monument to the dead, both sides with no known graves. In fact, this was part of the ceremony. It was a very interesting event, I thought, although it showed the characteristics of the French, I think, which some of which, in a way, you can date back to Ajucourt as well. There were nine speeches. At every level, our French local government has to contribute. I was honoured to be invited to speak. I've done a lot of work for the Saint-Historic over the years. We wanted to read it in French and in English, so mine took even longer. It's very interesting, but it was lovely to see on the following day, which was when this picture was taken, a lot of people going to have a look. The museum will be refurbished next year. They've got quite a bit of money to do that, and we're hoping there will be excavation. As you can see, we know a lot about Ajucourt, but there's still a lot more to know, from the point of view of the French Army and the archaeology of it. I hope you will continue your interest in the future. Thanks very much.