Starving, Sick and Outnumbered: How Henry V Won at Agincourt (1415)

On 25 October 1415, a hungry, sick English army that had marched some 260 miles across France found the road to Calais blocked by a far larger French force. By the end of the day, a generation of French nobles lay dead in a muddy, ploughed field near the village of Agincourt. ▶ The 60-second version:    • Agincourt 1415: How England Won Against Im...   ▶ Watch next: They Dragged Warships Over a Hill to Take Constantinople (1453)    • They Dragged Warships Over a Hill to Take ...   ▶ Playlist:    • Great Battles of History   This animated documentary tells the full story: a French king's madness and a civil war, the young Henry V and the arrow that struck his face at sixteen, the treason plot at Southampton, the siege of Harfleur and the dysentery that ravaged his army, the desperate march for Calais, the silent night before the battle, the stakes, the longbows and the mud, the order to kill the prisoners, and the homecoming in London. Chapters 0:00 Cold open 0:34 Title 0:40 1. A Kingdom Divided 1:33 2. The Young King 2:46 3. Treason at Southampton 3:27 4. The Siege of Harfleur 4:44 5. The March to Calais 6:53 6. The Night Before 7:46 7. The Field 9:05 8. Now Strike! 10:16 9. The Killing Ground 11:42 10. The Order 12:46 11. The Reckoning 13:52 12. Homecoming 14:22 13. After the Mud 15:22 Outro A note on the history: army sizes are fiercely debated. Modern estimates put the French at roughly 12,000 to 24,000 and the English at roughly 6,000 to 9,000. The number of dead, the killing of the prisoners, the exact site of the battlefield and several famous lines come from chroniclers whose accounts differ, and the video says so. Shakespeare's St Crispin's Day speech is fiction. Sources include the Gesta Henrici Quinti, Jean Le Fèvre de Saint-Remy, Enguerrand de Monstrelet and Jean de Waurin, and modern historians including Anne Curry, Juliet Barker, Jonathan Sumption, Clifford Rogers, Ian Mortimer and Michael Livingston. Which battle should we cover next? Tell us in the comments. Subscribe to Drawn Through Time for animated history: @DrawnThroughTimes #BattleOfAgincourt #HenryV #HundredYearsWar