I'm Toby Capwell I'm a specialist in Medieval and Renaissance arms and
armor. Warfare, knighthood, related subjects.
I'm also curator of arms and armor at the Wallace Collection in London and I'm
really excited about today. My whole life, professional life kind of revolves
around this subject and I'm constantly encountering the fact that this is a
subject replete with all kinds of myths and misconceptions. It feels like almost
every day I'm reminded that history is not about what happened, it's about what
we wish had happened. How we would like it to have been. We want our history
to be emotionally or intellectually satisfying and that leads us to twist it
and change it around and emphasize certain aspects and downplay others and
I'm fascinated by that process. But I also want to know what really happened, I
want to know more about people's lives in the Middle Ages in the Renaissance so
I worked very hard to try and cut through and sort out
mythologizing from the real hard evidence and that can actually be very
difficult sometimes. So when Tod called me for this when
he was putting this team together to do this experiment I was really excited by
that, but I also made the point that I think we need to be very specific about
a particular moment in history that we're trying to explore. The
longbow is an ancient weapon, the Vikings had long bows or they were used all the
way through the Middle Ages they were used into the 16th century so the
generic issue of long bow shooting versus armor needs to be specific and I
said that I thought we should focus on the Battle of Agincourt and that
specific context because it's the best known in a way but it's also the most
misunderstood. It's also the battle and the period that is most kind of loaded
politically and socially and culturally. So it's particularly hard for us to
separate the myth and the misconception from what really did happen but we know
more about what actually did happen at Agincourt now in the benefit of research
that's occurred over the last hundred years or so.
The Battle of Agincourt took place on the 25th of October 1415, it was
organized as part of a campaign for King Henry theFfifth invading France. He
invaded first and took over the port city of Harfleur in Normandy, before
moving east across northern France. Finally bringing the French to battle at
Agincourt in the in the Pays de Calais. The myth of the Battle of Agincourt is
the set up, that an army of stout English archers defeated a much larger force of
French Knights in a spectacular triumph over the odds. That's the appealing
myth that casts this event as a kind of class war of Commons versus Aristocracy
that appeals to the modern mind but that's not what happened at the battle.
Henry the Fifth certainly had a lot of archers. The army that he had on the day was
4 archers to every one man-at-arms. Henry the Fifth had knights though too, 1500
knights and men-at-arms and that's a crucial point that people often forget
about. But he did have this massive number of archers, 7,000 archers and
1,500 fully armed Knights. He was arrayed against a French army
that was all men at arms. The French had quite a lot of archers who were there on
the day but they were not engaged so they do not matter. Superior numbers
doesn't matter when not all of them engage with the enemy and what we're
concerned with, was who was actually doing the fighting. And on the French
side that was around ten to twelve thousand fully armed Knights. We know
less about the precise make up of the French army,
because the records don't all survive in the way they do in England, but we can
look at past precedent. What were the largest French armies in the last 20
years that the French were capable of fielding? And they were never much bigger
than around 14,000 men in total. So the French had more people probably at
Agincourt but not overwhelming massive odds and that's an important point. The
shooting did matter on the day, but the sources suggest certainly to me, that it
was only one part of the one part of the equation and we need experimentally to
understand more about how medieval English archery actually works and to
try and rebalance our understanding of this of this battle. The example of the
the collision and the conflict in everybody's minds about this battle
between myth and misconception and facts is for example the very popular idea
that the English shot up in the air. There's all this very dramatic Hollywood
footage of archers aiming up in the air and launching arrows high in the air so
that they dropped down at long-range on the enemy. And that's visually
appealing in a film, and the image of a rain of arrows is poetic and everything
but it's not what happened. We have visual sources of the time, pictorial art,
which gives us a sense of what these people looked like and how they shot.
They are shooting straight, not up in the air. We have then the written accounts
there are both eyewitness accounts on the English side and on the French side
and lots of them. Then there are official histories which are based on
interviews with eyewitnesses and some of them are more reliable than others.
The diversity of sources gives us a better chance of balancing out for for bias and
secondhand knowledge and stuff like that. And then we have the material surviving.
There's armor from this period surviving and enough of it that we can get a good
sense of the metallurgy, the construction, the way it's designed. And you combine
all those different sources together, written, material and pictorial, and you
start to get a lot closer that's the real evidence not the Laurence Olivier
film. So I'm really excited about today because you can take all those different
types of evidence and put them together really carefully, but until you get out
into the world and do something physical, there's a piece missing.
You know we what we're doing today is taking all of that study and seeing what
the real physical world has to say about it. You know, how does it actually play
out? What happens when that arrow hits that breastplate? What does it sound like?
And what how much variation in there? What is the reality of it?
That's the final piece of this whole puzzle and that fills out our ability to
imagine the situation of the battle. The results,.... what you learn is only
worth as much as the quality of your setup and Tod is I think in an
especially good position with everybody who's who's helping today, to set up
conditions that are faithful, as far as is practical