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.
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’.
This story is from the August 23, 2017 edition of Country Life UK.
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This story is from the August 23, 2017 edition of Country Life UK.
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