Crécy and Agincourt: The History of the Hundred Years’ War’s Most Famous Battles

Although it ended over 550 years ago, the Hundred Years’ War still looms large in the historical consciousness of England and France, even if the name of the famous war is a misnomer. The war was more of a series of separate conflicts between the English and French monarchies, interspersed with periods of peace, and its reputation remains an odd one, in part because its origins were based on royal claims that dated back centuries. Furthermore, the English and French remained adversaries for nearly 400 years after it ended.

That said, the war was transformative in many respects, and the impact it had on the geopolitical situation of Europe cannot be overstated. While some might think of the war as being a continuation of the feudal tradition of knights and peasants, the Hundred Years’ War revolutionized European warfare, and it truly helped to usher in the concept of nationalism on the continent. In England, it is remembered as a period of grandeur and success, even though the English lost the war and huge swathes of territory with it, while the French remember it as a strategic victory that ensured the continued independence of France and the denial of English hegemony. The legacy of the war has lived on ever since, helping determine how England became politically severed from the continent, how the knightly chivalric tradition slid into irrelevance, and how battlefield dominance can still leave a nation a loser in war.

Indeed, nothing characterized that dominance quite like the campaign that culminated with the Battle of Crécy, where the English used their diverse forces to maximum effect to defeat the French, a victory that allowed the English to eventually take and hold Calais. For about two centuries, Calais would remain the last foothold England retained on the continent, and the famous Tudor King Henry VIII conducted one of the last campaigns of his life in an effort to maintain it. From a military standpoint, Crécy demonstrated the massive impact the crossbow could have against infantry, and it ensured archers would feature prominently in battle until gunpowder weapons became common.

The village of Agincourt (Azincourt in French) is located in the Pas-de-Calais, around 50 miles south of Calais near the French border with Belgium. It has a population of around 300 and, but for one event, would otherwise be an obscure French settlement. Of course, that one event was the Hundred Years’ War’s most famous battle, the Battle of Agincourt, which served as a fine representative of all the changing trends in warfare and geopolitics in France. By the time the two sides fought at Agincourt, archers formed a special part of the English army, beneath the men-at-arms but above the ordinary infantry. They wore leather body armor, sometimes with metal plates, and helmets or chainmail hoods. For close combat, they carried swords, mallets and daggers, including the misericord, a special type of dagger designed to slip between the armor plates of a fallen enemy and finish him off. The glory days of the heavily armored mounted knight had long since passed, and at Crécy and Agincourt, English longbowmen and men-at-arms would decimate the flower of French chivalry, rendering the medieval cavalry charge little more than a romantic folly.

At the same time, religious fervor played a particularly prominent part in the war under England’s King Henry V and France’s Joan of Arc. Henry had burned heretics in his younger days, and he had his whole army bow in prayer before the Battle of Agincourt, taking French dirt into their mouths in an imitation of the communion wafer and thus mingling religious and nationalist sentiments. Joan claimed to be guided by God, and it was a belief in this that led men to fight so fervently on her side. Her successes were seen as a sign of God's favor, and the English burned her at the stake as a heretic largely to undermine this idea.