BOOK OF THE DAY: Edward Jamesreviews Azincourtby Bernard Cornwell
THE BATTLE of Agincourt has been recognised by military historians as one of the most fascinating of European battles. It is one of the three conflicts, all in the same part of northern Europe, featured in Sir John Keegan's classic book The Face of Battle(the others being Waterloo and the Somme). And although my former colleague Anne Curry has argued that the French and English forces arrayed on muddy fields near the village of Azincourt (anglicised to Agincourt) on the feast-day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian in October 1415 were pretty evenly matched, other historians of the battle are inclined to take the traditional line: that about 6,000 English and Welsh soldiers faced a French army of about 30,000. English losses may have been as low as 200; French losses were perhaps in excess of 5,000, and included some of the great men of France. Other French magnates ended up in English prisons, waiting for their ransom to be assembled; the Duke of Orleans, imprisoned for 25 years, wrote poetry in jail, which included the line, understandable in the circumstances: "I hate war. It should never be prized."
The historical novelist Bernard Cornwell, best known for his Napoleonic War novels featuring Richard Sharpe, follows Juliet Barker's recent history of Agincourt rather than Anne Curry's, accepting the traditional picture of the English underdog's dramatic victory. It was more than that, of course: it was also the victory of ordinary folk against the heavily armoured military aristocracy of France. Bad leadership and the mud contributed to the French defeat, but the English and Welsh archers tipped the balance. Cornwell gives us an archer as our window into this episode of the Hundred Years War: Nicholas Hook, who falls in love with a French woman he rescues from the sack of Soissons, and who begins to hear the voices of the two martyred patron saints of that city, Crispin and Crispinian.
Cornwell does not prize war any more than the Duke of Orleans; or, at least, he does not glamorise it. "It's blood," says Nicholas Hook, "and men crying for their mothers, and too much screaming, and pain and bastards in metal trying to kill you." The action of the novel takes place between the horrendous sack of Soissons by the French in 1414, when nuns were raped and most of the inhabitants killed, through the more magnanimous (but still very bloody) siege of Harfleur by Henry V, and ending with the slaughter at Agincourt four weeks later. Cornwell does not spare us any of the bloody details: the English archers mutilated, tortured and killed at Soissons, or the French men-at-arms hacked to pieces in the mud of Agincourt. If you want to know how to inflict fatal wounds on a well-armoured soldier who is barely able to move in the sticky mud and can see almost nothing through a helmet devised to keep out arrows, then this will be instructive. This book is not for those who flinch at the vivid descriptions of blood or spilt brains; but it is, therefore, ideal for those who still harbour misplaced romantic notions about medieval warfare and chivalry.
Cornwell's research is first-rate, and his descriptions of warfare almost too vivid and realistic to bear. He conjures up a picture of a hellish world in which humanity shines out fitfully through a red mist of venality, lust and murderous aggression, and in which survival could only be achieved through ruthless self-interest.
Whether it is a true picture of the 15th century is another matter, but it is a corrective to the usual image. The next time the reader hears Olivier's or Branagh's Henry V chime out about "we happy few, we band of brothers", he or she will remember Nicholas Hook's nightmare experience.
• AzincourtBy Bernard Cornwell HarperCollins 435pp, £18.99
• Edward James is professor of medieval history at University College Dublin. His next book, Europe's Barbarians, will be published by Longman in April.