About where Azincourt is not ...

Anyway, it is a clay ridge, which narrows from the initial French postion towards the English one. It had been raining heavily. The French formations all wanted to be in the front, and so took up the whole of their end of the ridge. As it began to narrow, they started pushing inwards to avoid falling off the ridge. No room, and people started falling over (try marching through wet clay even in Wellington Boots, let alone armour). The people behind kept pushing on and falling over the people in front of them.

We've seen these crowd disasters more recently at football matches (and without wet clay to make things more difficult). Perhaps it should be called "the Crowd Disaster of Agincourt" rather than "the Battle of". Certainly the chaplain of Henry V couldn't work out why the English had won.

A pity that Henry V had most of the prisoners massacred (when he saw another group of French arrive, and thought that the prisoners might break out). Otherwise England would have got even more money in ransoms, and no doubt the French would have appreciated the lives of their aristocrats, for a couple of centuries anyway.

Mark