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S i d e b a r
Henry V:
Not the Branagh Version
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This Rock
Volume 18, Number 5
 May-June 2007 
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By invading France, King Henry V of England violated the 1396 Truce of Paris and revived the Hundred Years’ War. His pretense to make war was a flimsy claim to the throne of France. Indeed, as the grandson of a usurper, Henry’s claim to the throne of England was itself slender.
On October 15, 1415, Henry led his army to victory against the French on the muddy fields at Agincourt. The much-celebrated victory was a dramatic upset: Henry’s underfed, dysentery-ridden, and exhausted army brought down the full might of French heavy cavalry, who outnumbered the English more than three to one. The battle was a triumph for the English longbow. Though difficult to master, this weapon was superior to the short Norman bow in every way. Its rate of fire was faster, its range was greater, and its power to penetrate stronger.
French knights fell from their horses only to become mired in and suffocate in the mud. Thousands of French prisoners were captured, and Henry ordered many of them slaughtered. The English herded prisoners into houses and barns and set them ablaze. English soldiers combed the battlefield for booty, slitting the throats of the French wounded. Of the atrocity, historian Desmond Seward writes:
English writers attempt to whitewash this piece of Schrechlichkeit [horror] by Henry with reference to the "standards of the day," but in fact by medieval criteria, it was a particularly nasty atrocity to murder unarmed noblemen who had surrendered in the confident expectation of being ransomed. (The Hundred Years War, 168-69)
Henry returned to London a conquering hero. He had little difficulty raising the funds needed for his next raid into Northern France. Sheriffs throughout England enforced his order to have six feathers plucked from every goose in the realm to supply flights for his archers’ arrows.
Insisting on his birthright, Henry invaded France again two years later. He faced little opposition as France was ravaged by civil war. Henry’s army swept across Normandy, failing only to take the seaside monastery fortress of Mont Saint Michel.
The cities of Caen and Rouen were taken after lengthy sieges during which the citizens were starved. At Caen, Henry’s heavy artillery blew holes in the city walls. His soldiers poured through the breach, corralled the citizens into the marketplace, and hacked them to death: children, elderly, nursing mothers. Those who were spared this first terror suffered plunder and rape at Henry’s order, "Havoc!"
Rouen was better armed and better defended, with a garrison of 4000 and abundant artillery. There the citizens held out against siege as long as they could. In time, they too faced starvation. They ate horseflesh, cats, dogs, rats, mice, and rotted vegetable peelings. The starving poor attempted to flee the city, but Henry refused to let them pass. He confined them to the ditch outside the city walls to starve in the winter mud. A contemporary chronicler described the scene: three-year-old children whose parents had died, begging for bread among the starving throng.
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