Bring Me My Bow Of Burning Gold

Facing a volley of arrows, falling like steel sleet at nearly 200mph, is not for the faint of heart, discovers Graeme Fife, as he relives the role of the English archers at Agincourt.

- Paul Sanders

Then call we this the field of Agincourt.’ The field on which Henry V disposed his army at dawn, that chilly late October day, had recently been sown with winter wheat, its bare earth turned to glutinous mud by heavy downpours of rain, which also drenched his weary men. On the march across northern France towards Calais, the archers had subsisted on nuts and berries. There were some 5,000 to 6,000 of them, positioned in four groups in the English front line, extending over about 900 yards: two massed at either wing, two wedge-shaped formations in the centre.

The French, about 1,000 yards distant up the narrow defile, refused to be lured to engage them. After three hours of inactivity, shivering in the dank cold, Henry ordered his men forward to arrow range, about 250 yards. The archers prepared their bows— the silk or hempen strings kept dry under their hats (origin of the expression keep it under your hat)—and planted their two sheaves of 24 arrows. They stood in lines four deep, in chequerboard formation, the foremost with clear view of the enemy, those behind with intermittent sight.

By whatever process of coordinated command their senior men deployed, the bows pointed skyward in unison to the angle that would deliver maximum trajectory. In one movement, the archers spread their shoulders to open the bow to full extent and together unleashed, in a sudden, fourfold cloudburst of volleys, nearly 6,000 arrows. A word or signal of command, probably, but these men had trained together and, like a flock of geese taking flight simultaneously, almost certainly had a sort of inner pulse of recognition—‘now, boys’.