In a Sky Dark With Arrows, Death Rained Down

Peter Gutmann pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz
Sun Nov 7 21:47:55 PST 2004


"James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> writes:
>Peter Gutmann wrote:
>>Nobles expected to surrender to other nobles and be ransomed.
>>Commoners didn't respect this, and almost never took prisoners.
>>Henry's orders didn't make that much difference, at best they were a
>>"we'll turn a blind eye" notification to his troops.
>
>The english army was well disciplined, and in battle did what it what it was
>told.  About half way through the battle of Agincourt, King Henry decided he
>could not afford so many troops guarding so many prisoners, and told them
>kill-em-all.   Nobility had nothing to do with it.   It did not matter who
>took you prisoner.

As I said in my previous message, this is the topic of endless debate, and in
particular the high death toll among the nobles could arisen from any number
of causes.  For example at Crecy the French king (Philip the something'th) had
the oriflamme (French war banner indicating that no prisoners could be taken)
displayed because he was worried that the gold-rush for enemy nobles to ransom
would screw up the French battle order, resulting in huge losses when the
French ended up at the losing end.  There's speculation that they did the same
thing at Agincourt, because no French chronicler of the time raised even a
murmur about the killings.  So something like that could have been just as
much the cause as any order given by Henry V to dispatch leftovers after the
battle (for example the mass slaughter of the first and second lines
("battles") of French, bogged down in mud (the battle was fought in a rain-
soaked freshly-ploughed field), by English commoners occurred very early in
the battle, while the killing of stragglers under Henry's orders didn't happen
until the following day, or the very end of the battle for prisoners).  If you
really want to continue this, please do it in soc.history medieval, there are
already thousand-odd-message threads going over every nuance of this.

Peter.





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