), And even if killing prisoners of war did not violate the moral code of the times, what would be the purpose of taking archers captive, cutting off their fingers, and then executing them? King Henry V of England led his troops into battle and participated in hand-to-hand fighting. It was often reported to comprise 1,500 ships, but was probably far smaller. Soon after the victory at Agincourt, a number of popular folk songs were created about the battle, the most famous being the "Agincourt Carol", produced in the first half of the 15th century. Inthe book,Corbeillpoints to Priapus, a minor deityhedatesto 400 BC, whichlater alsoappears in Rome as the guardian of gardens,according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Greece and Rome( here ). [82], The surviving French men-at-arms reached the front of the English line and pushed it back, with the longbowmen on the flanks continuing to shoot at point-blank range. Details the English victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt. "[129], The play introduced the famous St Crispin's Day Speech, considered one of Shakespeare's most heroic speeches, which Henry delivers movingly to his soldiers just before the battle, urging his "band of brothers" to stand together in the forthcoming fight. [8] These included the Duke of York, the young Earl of Suffolk and the Welsh esquire Dafydd ("Davy") Gam. 138). The legend that the "two-fingered salute" stems from the Battle of Agincourt is apocryphal Although scholars and historians continue to debate its origins, according to legend it was first. Rather than retire directly to England for the winter, with his costly expedition resulting in the capture of only one town, Henry decided to march most of his army (roughly 9,000) through Normandy to the port of Calais, the English stronghold in northern France, to demonstrate by his presence in the territory at the head of an army that his right to rule in the duchy was more than a mere abstract legal and historical claim. In the Battle of Agincourt, the French threatened the English Soldiers that they would cut off their fingers and when they failed the Englishmen mocked them by showing their fingers. A Dictionary of Superstitions. The decorative use of the image of Priapusmatched the Roman use ofimages of male genitalia for warding off evil. [51] Albret, Boucicaut and almost all the leading noblemen were assigned stations in the vanguard. Barker states that some knights, encumbered by their armour, actually drowned in their helmets.[64]. The terrain favoured Henrys army and disadvantaged its opponent, as it reduced the numerical advantage of the French army by narrowing the front. The king received an axe blow to the head, which knocked off a piece of the crown that formed part of his helmet. The middle finger gesture does not derive from the mutilation of English archers at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. Moreover, if archers could be ransomed, then cutting off their middle fingers would be a senseless move. Without the middle finger, it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow; and therefore, they would be incapable of fighting in the future. In such a "press" of thousands of men, Rogers suggested that many could have suffocated in their armour, as was described by several sources, and which was also known to have happened in other battles. The English men-at-arms in plate and mail were placed shoulder to shoulder four deep. Military textbooks of the time stated: "Everywhere and on all occasions that foot soldiers march against their enemy face to face, those who march lose and those who remain standing still and holding firm win. And where does the distinction between one and two fingers come from? In the words of Juliet Barker, the battle "cut a great swath through the natural leaders of French society in Artois, Ponthieu, Normandy, Picardy. Although it could be intended as humorous, the image on social media is historically inaccurate. The Duke of Brabant (about 2,000 men),[65] the Duke of Anjou (about 600 men),[65] and the Duke of Brittany (6,000 men, according to Monstrelet),[66] were all marching to join the army. October 25, 1415. It may be in the narrow strip of open land formed between the woods of Tramecourt and Azincourt (close to the modern village of Azincourt). Although an audience vote was "too close to call", Henry was unanimously found guilty by the court on the basis of "evolving standards of civil society".[136][137][138]. Why not simply kill them outright in the first place? The play focuses on the pressures of kingship, the tensions between how a king should appear chivalric, honest, and just and how a king must sometimes act Machiavellian and ruthless. A BBCNews Magazinereportsimilarlytracesthe gesture back toAncient Greek philosophers ( here ). By most contemporary accounts, the French army was also significantly larger than the English, though the exact degree of their numerical superiority is disputed. John Keegan argues that the longbows' main influence on the battle at this point was injuries to horses: armoured only on the head, many horses would have become dangerously out of control when struck in the back or flank from the high-elevation, long-range shots used as the charge started. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. When Henry V acceded to the English throne in 1413, there had been a long hiatus in the fighting. [47] Although it had been planned for the archers and crossbowmen to be placed with the infantry wings, they were now regarded as unnecessary and placed behind them instead. In March 2010, a mock trial of Henry V for the crimes associated with the slaughter of the prisoners was held in Washington, D.C., drawing from both the historical record and Shakespeare's play. In Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome, Anthony Corbeill, Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas wrote: The most familiar example of the coexistence of a human and transhuman elementis the extended middle finger. [127], Shakespeare's play presented Henry as leading a truly English force into battle, playing on the importance of the link between the monarch and the common soldiers in the fight. (There is an Indo-European connection between the p-sound and f-sound see the distinction between the Latin pater and the Germanic Vater/father but that split occurred a long time ago.) [50] Both lines were arrayed in tight, dense formations of about 16 ranks each, and were positioned a bowshot length from each other. [56] Some 200 mounted men-at-arms would attack the English rear. Nonetheless, so many readers have forwarded it to us accompanied by an "Is this true?" [25] The siege took longer than expected. In pursuit of his claim to the French throne, Henry V invaded Normandy with an army of 11,000 men in August 1415. Its up there with heres something that they dont want you to know.. These numbers are based on the Gesta Henrici Quinti and the chronicle of Jean Le Fvre, the only two eyewitness accounts on the English camp. PLUCK YEW!". The Agincourt Carol, dating from around this time and possibly written for Henrys reception in London, is a rousing celebration of the might of the English. [116] Rogers, on the other hand, finds the number 5,000 plausible, giving several analogous historical events to support his case,[112] and Barker considers that the fragmentary pay records which Curry relies on actually support the lower estimates. It did not lead to further English conquests immediately as Henry's priority was to return to England, which he did on 16 November, to be received in triumph in London on the 23rd. [105] Other benefits to the English were longer term. [21] On 19 April 1415, Henry again asked the Great Council to sanction war with France, and this time they agreed. It took place on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day) near Azincourt, in northern France. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Adam Koford, Salt Lake City, Utah, Now for the facts. The two armies spent the night of 24 October on open ground. The battle remains an important symbol in popular culture. Snopes and the Snopes.com logo are registered service marks of Snopes.com. The f-word itself is Germanic with early-medieval roots; the earliest attested use in English in an unambiguous sexual context is in a document from 1310. The Roman gesturemadeby extending the third finger from a closed fist, thus made the same threat, by forming a similarly phallic shape. Its origins can be traced back to 1066 . [139] The museum lists the names of combatants of both sides who died in the battle. One popular "origin story" for the middle finger has to do with the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The recently ploughed land hemmed in by dense woodland favoured the English, both because of its narrowness, and because of the thick mud through which the French knights had to walk. This claim is false. The Gesta Henrici places this after the English had overcome the onslaught of the French men-at-arms and the weary English troops were eyeing the French rearguard ("in incomparable number and still fresh"). But frankly, I suspect that the French would have done a lot worse to any captured English archers than chopping off their fingers. [18] A recent re-appraisal of Henry's strategy of the Agincourt campaign incorporates these three accounts and argues that war was seen as a legal due process for solving the disagreement over claims to the French throne. Certainly, d'Azincourt was a local knight but he might have been chosen to lead the attack because of his local knowledge and the lack of availability of a more senior soldier. They might also have deployed some archers in the centre of the line. Keegan also speculated that due to the relatively low number of archers actually involved in killing the French knights (roughly 200 by his estimate), together with the refusal of the English knights to assist in a duty they saw as distastefully unchivalrous, and combined with the sheer difficulty of killing such a large number of prisoners in such a short space of time, the actual number of French prisoners put to death may not have been substantial before the French reserves fled the field and Henry rescinded the order. The English and Welsh archers on the flanks drove pointed wooden stakes, or palings, into the ground at an angle to force cavalry to veer off. The battle repeated other English successes in the Hundred Years War, such as the Battle of Crcy (1346) and the Battle of Poitiers (1356), and made possible Englands subsequent conquest of Normandy and the Treaty of Troyes (1420), which named Henry V heir to the French crown. The puzzler was: What was this body part? Henry managed to subjugate Normandy in 1419, a victory that was followed by the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which betrothed Henry to King Charles VIs daughter Catherine and named him heir to the French crown. Agincourt, Henry V's famous victory over the French on 25 October 1415, is a fascinating battle not just because of what happened but also because of how its myth has developed ever since. Medieval warriors didn't take prisoners because by doing so they were observing a moral code that dictated opponents who had laid down their arms and ceased fighting must be treated humanely, but because they knew high-ranking captives were valuable property that could be ransomed for money. On February 1, 1328, King Charles IV of France died without an heir. His men-at-arms were stationed in the centre, flanked by wedges of archers who carried longbows that had an effective range of 250 yards (229 metres). [Adam attaches the following memo, which has been floating around the Internet for some time.] When the archers ran out of arrows, they dropped their bows and, using hatchets, swords, and the mallets they had used to drive their stakes in, attacked the now disordered, fatigued and wounded French men-at-arms massed in front of them. Departing from Harfleur on October 8, Henry marched northward toward the English-held port of Calais, where he would disembark for England, with a force of 1,000 knights and men-at-arms and 5,000 archers. 33-35). In a book on the battle of Agincourt, Anne Curry, Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the University of Southampton, addressed a similar claim prescribed to the V-sign, also considered an offensive gesture: No chronicle or sixteenth-centuryhistory says that English archers made any gesture to the French after the battle in order to show they still had their fingers. As the mle developed, the French second line also joined the attack, but they too were swallowed up, with the narrow terrain meaning the extra numbers could not be used effectively. There is no evidence that, when captured in any scenario,archers had their finger cut off by the enemy( bit.ly/3dP2PhP ). [113] Barker opined that "if the differential really was as low as three to four then this makes a nonsense of the course of the battle as described by eyewitnesses and contemporaries".[110]. 78-116). See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French,anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. What does DO NOT HUMP mean on the side of railroad cars? This symbol of rocking out is formed by tucking the middle and index finger and holding them in place with the thumb. Moreover, with this outcome Henry V strengthened his position in his own kingdom; it legitimized his claim to the crown, which had been under threat after his accession. Since then there had been tension between the nobility and the royal house, widespread lawlessness throughout the kingdom, and several attempts on Henry Vs life. Agincourt came on the back of half a century of military failure and gave the English a success that repeated victories such as Crcy and Poitiers. While numerous English sources give the English casualties in double figures,[8] record evidence identifies at least 112 Englishmen killed in the fighting,[103] while Monstrelet reported 600 English dead. [93] Among them were 90120 great lords and bannerets killed, including[95] three dukes (Alenon, Bar and Brabant), nine counts (Blmont, Dreux, Fauquembergue, Grandpr, Marle, Nevers, Roucy, Vaucourt, Vaudmont) and one viscount (Puisaye), also an archbishop. The third line of the French army, recoiling at the pile of corpses before them and unable to make an effective charge, was then massacred swiftly. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. 78-116). The fact that Winston Churchill sometimes made his V-for-victory gesture rudely suggests that it is of much more recent vintage. Its not known whether one displayed the digitus infamis in the same manner that we (well, you) flip the bird today. (Storyline based on the play by William Shakespeare "The Cronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Batt. These heralds were not part of the participating armies, but were, as military expert John Keegan describes, members of an "international corporation of experts who regulated civilized warfare." The Battle of Agincourt was dramatised by William Shakespeare in Henry V featuring the battle in which Henry inspired his much-outnumbered English forces to fight the French through a St Crispin's Day Speech, saying "the fewer men, the greater share of honour". This famous English longbow was . Barker, Sumption and Rogers all wrote that the English probably had 6,000 men, these being 5,000 archers and 9001,000 men-at-arms. query that we are duty bound to provide a bit of historical and linguistic information demonstrating why this anecdote couldn't possibly be accurate: The 'Car Talk' show (on NPR) with Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers have a feature called the 'Puzzler', and their most recent 'Puzzler' was about the Battle of Agincourt. Then they had to walk a few hundred yards (metres) through thick mud and a press of comrades while wearing armour weighing 5060 pounds (2327kg), gathering sticky clay all the way. There is a modern museum in Agincourt village dedicated to the battle. [104] Henry returned a conquering hero, seen as blessed by God in the eyes of his subjects and European powers outside France. Eventually the archers abandoned their longbows and began fighting hand-to-hand with swords and axes alongside the men-at-arms. David Mikkelson Published Sep 29, 1999. [108] While not necessarily agreeing with the exact numbers Curry uses, Bertrand Schnerb, a professor of medieval history at the University of Lille, states the French probably had 12,00015,000 troops. Shakespeare's version of the battle of Agincourt has been turned into several minor and two major films. Legend says that the British archers were so formidable that the ones captured by the French had their index and middle fingers cut off so that they . The Hundred Years War was a discontinuous conflict between England and France that spanned two centuries. The original usage of this mudra can be traced back as far as the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The Battle of Agincourt is well documented by at least seven contemporary accounts, three from eyewitnesses. The 'middle finger salute' is derived from the defiant gestures of English archers whose fingers had been severed by the French at the Battle of Agincourt. All quotes delayed a minimum of 15 minutes. The French monk of St. Denis describes the French troops as "marching through the middle of the mud where they sank up to their knees. It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows that the gesture is known as giving the bird. And yew all thought yew knew everything! The approximate location of the battle has never been disputed, and the site remains relatively unaltered after 600 years. After several decades of relative peace, the English had resumed the war in 1415 amid the failure of negotiations with the French. Why is the missionary position called that? The one-finger salute, or at any rate sexual gestures involving the middle finger, are thousands of years old. Unable to cross the Somme River because of French defenses, he was forced to take a detour inland and cross farther upstream. Common estimates place the English army at about 6,000, while the French army probably consisted of 20,000 to 30,000 men. And for a variety of reasons, it made no military sense whatsoever for the French to capture English archers, then mutilate them by cutting off their fingers. Fighting commenced at 11:00 am, as the English brought their longbows within killing range and the first line of French knights advanced, led by cavalry. Shakespeare's portrayal of the casualty loss is ahistorical in that the French are stated to have lost 10,000 and the English 'less than' thirty men, prompting Henry's remark, "O God, thy arm was here". A truce had been formally declared in 1396 that was meant to last 28 years, sealed by the marriage of the French king Charles VIs daughter to King Richard II of England. [27], During the siege, the French had raised an army which assembled around Rouen. The insulting gesture of extending one's middle finger (referred to as digitus impudicus in Latin) originated long before the Battle of Agincourt. This use of stakes could have been inspired by the Battle of Nicopolis of 1396, where forces of the Ottoman Empire used the tactic against French cavalry. It supposedly describes the origin of the middle-finger hand gesture and, by implication, the insult "fuck you". Despite the numerical disadvantage, the battle ended in an overwhelming victory for the English. Increasingly, they had to walk around or over fallen comrades. The French, who were overwhelmingly favored to win the battle, threatened to cut a certain body part off of all captured English soldiers so that they could never fight again. The cavalry force, which could have devastated the English line if it had attacked while they moved their stakes, charged only after the initial volley of arrows from the English. But frankly, I suspect that the French would have done a lot worse to any captured English archers than chopping off their fingers. [126], Shakespeare's depiction of the battle also plays on the theme of modernity.
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