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Book Review -
600 years ago the battlefield of Agincourt must have looked very much the same as
it does now. There’s still barely a house in sight, and no doubt then, as now, a
couple of village church towers poked their spires above trees on the skyline. In
the wide landscape of the plateau between Hesdin and Fruges, at around 500 feet above
sea level, the weather often seems wetter, windier and colder than it is in the valleys
just a few miles away. If you drive up from Blangy on a wet autumn day, following
the route taken by Henry V’s army, it’s not hard to imagine how shattered and defeated
the English soldiers might have felt as they crested the hill at Maisoncelle, after
17 days of hard marching, to find a huge, well-
In Bernard Cornwell’s new novel ‘Azincourt’ the campaign that culminates in the famous battle is related from the point of view of one of the 5000 archers who made up around 80% of the English army. As usual Cornwell’s central character is a man apart, a misfit in conflict with most of those around him, but whose fighting ability, loyalty and tactical instinct endow him with an importance beyond his low rank when it comes to a battle. Nobody describes battles better than Cornwell, and his technique of relating events from several different points of view is highly effective both in clarifying the overall strategic picture and in focusing sharply on key moments and crucial events in the general mêlée.
Good generals make their own luck, but Cornwell’s Henry V pushes his to the limit.
His campaign, which starts with the siege of Harfleur does not go well. Then, he
commits his English army, already weakened by fatigue, sickness and the casualties
sustained in the hard-
It is clear that Agincourt was a battle that should never have happened had the English King the good sense to sail straight home from Harfleur, or the French commanders the good sense to starve the English out, instead of attacking. Fortunately for English history, Shakespeare, Bernard Cornwell, and for tourism in the modern day village of Azincourt, a remarkable victory was plucked from the jaws of near certain defeat because, on that St Crispin’s Day in 1415, Henry made all the right decisions, and the French made every mistake in the book.
Cornwell weaves a gripping tale around historical events, combining elements of feud, vengeance, religion, lust, courage, sex, comradeship and extreme violence into a story that keeps the reader involved throughout the campaign, but it’s the battle itself, and the crucial role of the English archers in it, that this book is really all about.
You will like the book for it’s well-
Bernard Cornwell
Patrick Hay has lived 8 years in the Pas de Calais, 6 of them in a village close to the battlefield of Agincourt.