Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French,anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Henry V and the resumption of the Hundred Years War, That fought with us upon Saint Crispins day, https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Agincourt, World History Encyclopedia - Battle of Agincourt, Warfare History Network - Miracle in the Mud: The Hundred Years' War's Battle of Agincourt, Battle of Agincourt - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). T he battle of Agincourt, whose 600th anniversary falls on St Crispin's Day, 25 October, is still tabloid gold, Gotcha! Henry would marry Catherine, Charles VI's young daughter, and receive a dowry of 2million crowns. This material may not be reproduced without permission. After a difficult siege, the English forces found themselves assaulted by a massive French force. The Battle of Agincourt is an iconic moment in English military history. [32] In 2019, the historian Michael Livingston also made the case for a site west of Azincourt, based on a review of sources and early maps. Contemporary chroniclers did not criticise him for it. This battle concluded with King Harold of England dying at the hands of the Norman King William, which marked the beginning of a new era in England. [59], The field of battle was arguably the most significant factor in deciding the outcome. [85], The French men-at-arms were taken prisoner or killed in the thousands. Most importantly, the battle was a significant military blow to France and paved the way for further English conquests and successes. Soon after the victory at Agincourt, a number of popular folk songs were created about the battle, the most famous being the "Agincourt Carol", produced in the first half of the 15th century. [104] Henry returned a conquering hero, seen as blessed by God in the eyes of his subjects and European powers outside France. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future. It seems it was purely a decision of Henry, since the English knights found it contrary to chivalry, and contrary to their interests, to kill valuable hostages for whom it was commonplace to ask ransom. After several decades of relative peace, the English had resumed the war in 1415 amid the failure of negotiations with the French. [53] A further 600 dismounted men-at-arms stood in each wing, with the left under the Count of Vendme and the right under the Count of Richemont. At least one scholar puts the French army at no more than 12,000, indicating that the English were outnumbered 2 to 1. Whether this was true is open to question and continues to be debated to this day; however, it seems likely that death was the normal fate of any soldier who could not be ransomed. 1.3M views 4 months ago Medieval Battles - In chronological order The year 1415 was the first occasion since 1359 that an English king had invaded France in person. Your opponent is not going to pay you (or pay you much) for the return of mutilated soldiers, so now what do you do with them? With Toby Merrell, Ian Brooker, Philip Rosch, Brian Blessed. [citation needed], Immediately after the battle, Henry summoned the heralds of the two armies who had watched the battle together with principal French herald Montjoie, and they settled on the name of the battle as Azincourt, after the nearest fortified place. The next day the French initiated negotiations as a delaying tactic, but Henry ordered his army to advance and to start a battle that, given the state of his army, he would have preferred to avoid, or to fight defensively: that was how Crcy and the other famous longbow victories had been won. Made just prior to the invasion of Normandy, Olivier's rendition gives the battle what Sarah Hatchuel has termed an "exhilarating and heroic" tone, with an artificial, cinematic look to the battle scenes. After the battle, the English taunted the survivors by showing off what wasn't cut off. French knights, charging uphill, were unseated from their horses, either because their mounts were injured on the stakes or because they dismounted to uproot the obstacles, and were overpowered. The English army, led by King Henry V, famously achieved victory in spite of the numerical superiority of its opponent. This famous English longbow was . People who killed their social betters from a distance werent very well liked, and would likely have paid with their lives as did all the French prisoners, archers or otherwise, whom Henry V had executed at Agincourt, in what some historians consider a war crime. The Duke of Brabant (about 2,000 men),[65] the Duke of Anjou (about 600 men),[65] and the Duke of Brittany (6,000 men, according to Monstrelet),[66] were all marching to join the army. If the two-fingered salute comes from Agincourt, then at what point was it reduced to one finger in North America? The effect of the victory on national morale was powerful. [130][131] Partially as a result, the battle was used as a metaphor at the beginning of the First World War, when the British Expeditionary Force's attempts to stop the German advances were widely likened to it.[132]. What it is supposed to represent I have no idea. The English eyewitness account comes from the anonymous author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, believed to have been written by a chaplain in the King's household who would have been in the baggage train at the battle. Supposedly, both originated at the 1415 Battle of Agincourt, . King Charles VI of France did not command the French army as he suffered from psychotic illnesses and associated mental incapacity. Contemporary accounts describe the triumphal pageantry with which the king was received in London on November 23, with elaborate displays and choirs attending his passage to St. Pauls Cathedral. In the Battle of Agincourt, the French threatened the English Soldiers that they would cut off their fingers and when they failed the Englishmen mocked them by showing their fingers. PLUCK YEW!". Turning to our vast classical library, we quickly turn up three references. When the French rejected Henrys substantial territorial demands, he arrived in Normandy in August 1415 with a force of about 12,000 men and laid siege to the city of Harfleur. There is a modern museum in Agincourt village dedicated to the battle. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Moreover, with this outcome Henry V strengthened his position in his own kingdom; it legitimized his claim to the crown, which had been under threat after his accession. On October 25, 1415, during the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) between England and France, Henry V (1386-1422), the young king of England, led his forces to victory at the Battle of . Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore be incapable of fighting in the future. The impact of thousands of arrows, combined with the slog in heavy armour through the mud, the heat and difficulty breathing in plate armour with the visor down,[83] and the crush of their numbers, meant the French men-at-arms could "scarcely lift their weapons" when they finally engaged the English line. The English finally crossed the Somme south of Pronne, at Bthencourt and Voyennes[28][29] and resumed marching north. Thinking it was an attack from the rear, Henry had the French nobles he was holding prisoner killed. Sumption, thus, concludes that the French had 14,000 men, basing himself on the monk of St. Denis;[119] Mortimer gives 14 or 15 thousand fighting men. Military textbooks of the time stated: "Everywhere and on all occasions that foot soldiers march against their enemy face to face, those who march lose and those who remain standing still and holding firm win. (Its taking longer than we thought.) Rogers, Mortimer[117] and Sumption[41] all give more or less 10,000 men-at-arms for the French, using as a source the herald of the Duke of Berry, an eyewitness. In Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome, Anthony Corbeill, Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas wrote: The most familiar example of the coexistence of a human and transhuman elementis the extended middle finger. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured soldiers. On February 1, 1328, King Charles IV of France died without an heir. [18] A recent re-appraisal of Henry's strategy of the Agincourt campaign incorporates these three accounts and argues that war was seen as a legal due process for solving the disagreement over claims to the French throne. It supposedly describes the origin of the middle-finger hand gesture and, by implication, the insult "fuck you". "[67] On top of this, the French were expecting thousands of men to join them if they waited. [88] In some accounts the attack happened towards the end of the battle, and led the English to think they were being attacked from the rear. [50] Both lines were arrayed in tight, dense formations of about 16 ranks each, and were positioned a bowshot length from each other. [27], During the siege, the French had raised an army which assembled around Rouen. Common estimates place the English army at about 6,000, while the French army probably consisted of 20,000 to 30,000 men. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. On 25 October 1415, an army of English raiders under Henry V faced the French outside an obscure village on the road to Calais. The two armies spent the night of 24 October on open ground. Very quickly after the battle, the fragile truce between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions broke down. (Even if archers whose middle fingers had been amputated could no longer effectively use their bows, they were still capable of wielding mallets, battleaxes, swords, lances, daggers, maces, and other weapons, as archers typically did when the opponents closed ranks with them and the fighting became hand-to-hand.). The f-word itself is Germanic with early-medieval roots; the earliest attested use in English in an unambiguous sexual context is in a document from 1310. Osprey Publishing. It took place on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day) near Azincourt, in northern France. In 1999, Snopesdebunked more of the historical aspects of the claim, as well as thecomponent explaininghow the phrase pluck yew graduallychanged form to begin with an f( here ). Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. What does DO NOT HUMP mean on the side of railroad cars? [60][61], Accounts of the battle describe the French engaging the English men-at-arms before being rushed from the sides by the longbowmen as the mle developed. Last, but certainly not least, wouldn't these insolent archers have been bragging about plucking a bow's string, and not the wood of the bow itself? Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. David Mikkelson Published Sep 29, 1999. [125] Shakespeare illustrates these tensions by depicting Henry's decision to kill some of the French prisoners, whilst attempting to justify it and distance himself from the event. [23] The army of about 12,000 men and up to 20,000 horses besieged the port of Harfleur. This would prevent maneuvers that might overwhelm the English ranks. The recently ploughed land hemmed in by dense woodland favoured the English, both because of its narrowness, and because of the thick mud through which the French knights had to walk. A complete coat of plate was considered such good protection that shields were generally not used,[75] although the Burgundian contemporary sources distinguish between Frenchmen who used shields and those who did not, and Rogers has suggested that the front elements of the French force used axes and shields. Since then there had been tension between the nobility and the royal house, widespread lawlessness throughout the kingdom, and several attempts on Henry Vs life. But lets not quibble. It established the legitimacy of the Lancastrian monarchy and the future campaigns of Henry to pursue his "rights and privileges" in France. England had been fraught with political discord since Henry IV of the house of Lancaster (father of Henry V) had usurped the throne from Richard II in 1399. The insulting gesture of extending one's middle finger (referred to as digitus impudicus in Latin) originated long before the Battle of Agincourt. . [110][111][112] Ian Mortimer endorsed Curry's methodology, though applied it more liberally, noting how she "minimises French numbers (by limiting her figures to those in the basic army and a few specific additional companies) and maximises English numbers (by assuming the numbers sent home from Harfleur were no greater than sick lists)", and concluded that "the most extreme imbalance which is credible" is 15,000 French against 8,0009,000 English. [124], The most famous cultural depiction of the battle today is in Act IV of William Shakespeare's Henry V, written in 1599. Many folkloric or etymological myths have sprung up about its origin, especially the widely quoted one about the interplay between the French and English soldiery at the battle of Agincourt 1415, where the French threatened to amputate the middle fingers of the English archers to prevent them from drawing their bows, which of course is absolute Henry managed to subjugate Normandy in 1419, a victory that was followed by the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which betrothed Henry to King Charles VIs daughter Catherine and named him heir to the French crown. Apparently Henry believed his fleeing army would perform better on the defensive, but had to halt the retreat and somehow engage the French [92], The French had suffered a catastrophic defeat. As the mle developed, the French second line also joined the attack, but they too were swallowed up, with the narrow terrain meaning the extra numbers could not be used effectively. Juliet Barker quotes a contemporary account by a monk from St. Denis who reports how the wounded and panicking horses galloped through the advancing infantry, scattering them and trampling them down in their headlong flight from the battlefield. [74], The plate armour of the French men-at-arms allowed them to close the 1,000 yards or so to the English lines while being under what the French monk of Saint Denis described as "a terrifying hail of arrow shot". The 'middle finger salute' is derived from the defiant gestures of English archers whose fingers had been severed by the French at the Battle of Agincourt. News of the contrivance circulated within Europe and was described in a book of tactics written in 1411 by. because when a spectator started to hiss, he called the attention of the whole audience to him with an obscene movement of his middle finger. Morris also claims that the mad emperor Caligula, as an insult, would extend his middle finger for supplicants to kiss. This claim is false. You would think that anything English predating 1607, such as the language, Protestantism, or the Common Law, would have been a part of Americas patrimony. Thepostalleges that the Frenchhad planned to cut offthe middle fingers ofall captured English soldiers,to inhibit them fromdrawingtheir longbowsin futurebattles. The king received an axe blow to the head, which knocked off a piece of the crown that formed part of his helmet. I admit that I bring this story up when I talk about the Hundred Years War only to debunk it. [135] The battle also forms a central component of the 2019 Netflix film The King. The number is supported by many other contemporary accounts. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore be incapable of fighting in the future. [76] Modern historians are divided on how effective the longbows would have been against plate armour of the time. Updates? In March 2010, a mock trial of Henry V for the crimes associated with the slaughter of the prisoners was held in Washington, D.C., drawing from both the historical record and Shakespeare's play. When the first French line reached the English front, the cavalry were unable to overwhelm the archers, who had driven sharpened stakes into the ground at an angle before themselves. Although the French initially pushed the English back, they became so closely packed that they were described as having trouble using their weapons properly. [38], The French army had 10,000 men-at arms[39][40][41] plus some 4,0005,000 miscellaneous footmen (gens de trait) including archers, crossbowmen[42] (arbaltriers) and shield-bearers (pavisiers), totaling 14,00015,000 men. It forms the backdrop to events in William Shakespeare's play Henry V, written in 1599. Take on the burden and expense of caring for them? The basic premise that the origins of the one-finger gesture and its association with the profane word "fuck" were an outgrowth of the 1415 battle between French and English forces at Agincourt is simple enough to debunk. ", "Miracle in the Mud: The Hundred Years' War's Battle of Agincourt", The Agincourt Battlefield Archaeology Project, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Battle_of_Agincourt&oldid=1137126379, 6,000 killed (most of whom were of the French nobility), Hansen, Mogens Herman (Copenhagen Polis Centre), This page was last edited on 2 February 2023, at 23:13. Its origins can be traced back to 1066 . Legend says that the British archers were so formidable that the ones captured by the French had their index and middle fingers cut off so that they . Eventually the archers abandoned their longbows and began fighting hand-to-hand with swords and axes alongside the men-at-arms. The trial ranged widely over whether there was just cause for war and not simply the prisoner issue. "Guardian newspaper:French correction: Henry V's Agincourt fleet was half as big, historian claims, 28 July 2015", "Living Dictionary of the French Language", "Limitations imposed by wearing armour on Medieval soldiers' locomotor performance", "High Court Rules for French at Agincourt", "High Court Justices, Legal Luminaries Debate Shakespeare's 'Henry V', "The Development of Battle Tactics in the Hundred Years War", "Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt", The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, "Henry V's Greatest Victory is Besieged by Academia", The Little Grey Horse Henry V's Speech at Agincourt and the Battle Exhortation in Ancient Historiography, "The Battle of Agincourt: An Alternative location? Participating as judges were Justices Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Keegan, John. In the song Hotel California, what does colitas mean? [39] Curry, Rogers[118] and Mortimer[42] all agree the French had 4 to 5 thousand missile troops. According to most chroniclers, Henry's fear was that the prisoners (who, in an unusual turn of events, actually outnumbered their captors) would realise their advantage in numbers, rearm themselves with the weapons strewn about the field and overwhelm the exhausted English forces. Early in the morning on October 25 (the feast day of St. Crispin), 1415, Henry positioned his army for battle on a recently plowed field bounded by woods. 78-116). They had been weakened by the siege at Harfleur and had marched over 200 miles (more than 320 km), and many among them were suffering from dysentery. The longbow. This famous weapon was made of the . It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows that the symbolic gesture is known as "giving the bird". [19], Henry V invaded France following the failure of negotiations with the French. Wikipedia. Archers were not the "similarly equipped" opponents that armored soldiers triumphed in defeating -- if the two clashed in combat, the armored soldier would either kill an archer outright or leave him to bleed to death rather than go to the wasteful effort of taking him prisoner. October 25, 1415. (Indeed, Henry V was heavily criticized for supposedly having ordered the execution of French prisoners at Agincourt. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore [soldiers would] be incapable of fighting in the future. If the one-fingered salute comes from Agincourt, as the graphic suggests, then at what point did it get transformed into two fingers in England? [84] The exhausted French men-at-arms were unable to get up after being knocked to the ground by the English. The French monk of St. Denis says: "Their vanguard, composed of about 5,000 men, found itself at first so tightly packed that those who were in the third rank could scarcely use their swords,"[63] and the Burgundian sources have a similar passage. [114][115] Curry and Mortimer questioned the reliability of the Gesta, as there have been doubts as to how much it was written as propaganda for Henry V. Both note that the Gesta vastly overestimates the number of French in the battle; its proportions of English archers to men-at-arms at the battle are also different from those of the English army before the siege of Harfleur. In the words of Juliet Barker, the battle "cut a great swath through the natural leaders of French society in Artois, Ponthieu, Normandy, Picardy. Clip from the 1944 movie "Henry V" (137 min). The pl sound, the story goes, gradually changed into an f, giving the gesture its present meaning. A Dictionary of Superstitions.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ISBN 0-19-282916-5 (p. 454). See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays. The middle finger gesture does not derive from the mutilation of English archers at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. It continued as a series of battles, sieges, and disputes throughout the 14th century, with both the French and the English variously taking advantage. Singer Robbie Williams insults the viewer. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. [127], Shakespeare's play presented Henry as leading a truly English force into battle, playing on the importance of the link between the monarch and the common soldiers in the fight. According to contemporary English accounts, Henry fought hand to hand. The Battle of Agincourt (720p) Watch on Julia Martinez was an Editorial Intern at Encyclopaedia Britannica. [116] One particular cause of confusion may have been the number of servants on both sides, or whether they should at all be counted as combatants. By most contemporary accounts, the French army was also significantly larger than the English, though the exact degree of their numerical superiority is disputed. Since 'pluck yew' is rather difficult to say (like "pleasant mother pheasant plucker", which is who you had to go to for the feathers used on the arrows), the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodental fricative 'f', and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute are mistakenly thought to have something to do with an intimate encounter. It did not lead to further English conquests immediately as Henry's priority was to return to England, which he did on 16 November, to be received in triumph in London on the 23rd. [23] Thomas Morstede, Henry V's royal surgeon,[24] had previously been contracted by the king to supply a team of surgeons and makers of surgical instruments to take part in the Agincourt campaign. Im even more suspicious of the alleged transformation of p to f. He considered a knight in the best-quality steel armour invulnerable to an arrow on the breastplate or top of the helmet, but vulnerable to shots hitting the limbs, particularly at close range. The English numbered roughly 5,000 knights, men-at-arms, and archers. Poitiers 1356: The capture of a king (Vol. Rather than retire directly to England for the winter, with his costly expedition resulting in the capture of only one town, Henry decided to march most of his army (roughly 9,000) through Normandy to the port of Calais, the English stronghold in northern France, to demonstrate by his presence in the territory at the head of an army that his right to rule in the duchy was more than a mere abstract legal and historical claim. "[102], Estimates of the number of prisoners vary between 700 and 2,200, amongst them the dukes of Orlans and Bourbon, the counts of Eu, Vendme, Richemont (brother of the Duke of Brittany and stepbrother of Henry V) and Harcourt, and marshal Jean Le Maingre.[12]. They were successful for a time, forcing Henry to move south, away from Calais, to find a ford. [51] Albret, Boucicaut and almost all the leading noblemen were assigned stations in the vanguard. The Battle of Agincourt is one of England's most celebrated victories and was one of the most important English triumphs in the Hundred Years' War, along with the Battle of Crcy (1346) and Battle of Poitiers (1356). Kill them outright and violate the medieval moral code of civilized warfare? [c], The English made their confessions before the battle, as was customary. 33-35). I suppose that the two-fingered salute could still come from medieval archery, even if it didnt come specifically from the Battle of Agincourt, although the example that Wikipedia links to (the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter) is ambiguous. John Keegan argues that the longbows' main influence on the battle at this point was injuries to horses: armoured only on the head, many horses would have become dangerously out of control when struck in the back or flank from the high-elevation, long-range shots used as the charge started.
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