Agincourt

6 min read

Reevaluating

Michael Livingston offers a fresh perspective on this brutal, landmark battle

Interview by Jonathan Gordon

Like Hastings, Waterloo and Trafalgar, the Battle of Agincourt has a large and venerated place in military history. Considered to be one of the greatest English military victories, the recently crowned Henry V led his numerically smaller force to an unexpected triumph against the Kingdom of France. Taking place on 25 October 1415, in the later half of the Hundred Years’ War, it was a battle that cemented the already growing reputation of the young English monarch. The underdog story, its place within history and the heroic image of Henry have combined to make Agincourt one of the most analysed and discussed battles from history, but do we understand it correctly? Historian Michael Livingston has gone back to the ground itself to reevaluate the facts, discovering some fascinating new details along the way, for his new book Agincourt: Battle Of The Scarred King.

What drew you to reevaluate Agincourt, an iconic battle that has obviously had a great deal written about it in the past?

I spent many years investigating the case of the Battle of Crécy in 1346, and anyone doing that work can hardly prevent thinking about Agincourt in 1415. Though separated by nearly seven decades in history, these two great English victories are separated by only a half hour or so on the ground today. Visiting one, it was easy to visit the other, and what I found quite quickly was that the traditional story of Agincourt, like the traditional story of Crécy, didn’t seem to fit with what we were being told about the battlefield. And in both cases, attempts to find archaeological evidence to back up the traditional story had come up painfully short: in the case of Agincourt, Tim Sutherland, one of our finest conflict archaeologists, had already raised the question of whether we had the battle in the right spot. So as I closed the case on Crécy, it seemed only natural to open the case on Agincourt. Perhaps I’d find that everything we’d been told was right after all. Perhaps not. The only way to know was to dive in.

**BELOW** A miniature from a French manuscript on Charles VII, 1484

Did any of your work researching the Battle of Crécy for your previous book help to inform your research for the Battle of Agincourt?

It absolutely did. When I was putting together my latest account of my research on the events of 1346, Crécy: Battle Of Five Kings (Osprey, 2022), I was finding new ways of using modern technologies like LiDAR to not just see the landscape as it is today but to reconstruc

This article is from...

All About History Magazine

2 November 2023

Fortean Times

Thelevitationsofst josephofcopertinoexplained?

The idea of human levitation is, by its very nature, subversive and surreal. The phenomenon – if we temporarily accept such a thing in order to examine it – involves events that imply that our underst

BBC Wildlife Magazine

On thehunt

S ince 2009, Amy Dickman has come across some horrific sights on the edge of Ruaha National Park in Central Tanzania where she studies, and tries to resolve, conflict between people and predators. The

History of War

‘sink the bismarck!’ churchill's revenge

The Allies were stunned when in 1941 Germany’s largest battleship sank the pride of the Royal Navy… but the hunter quickly became the hunted

BBC History Magazine

The empire’s last hurrah?

In the summer of 1924, Scientific American’s ‘Special Correspondent in Great Britain’ warned his readers that, “the size and scope of the British Empire Exhibition, like the British empire itself, is

Family Tree

Dna test comparison guide

I thought about taking a DNA test for years. My paternal grandfather was illegitimate and so was a great-grandmother and her mother! But I hesitated. If I’m honest I wondered whether spending that amo

BBC Sky at Night Magazine

Touching thesun

On 12 August 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station into the pre-dawn Florida sky on a mission to become the first-ever spacecraft to ‘touch the Sun’.