AGINCOURT: REVISITED
The significance of a battle can be judged upon two criteria: first, its internal strategy and tactics, and the brilliance – or stupidity – of its commanders; and, second, how its outcome affected the war of which it was a part and, going forward, the course of history. As great battles recede into the past, the academic historian – whose function it is to analyse their significance – like everyone else, becomes more and more desensitised to the human suffering of the individual participants, and the terrible consequences for societies.
If, in retrospect, we can divorce the great battles of the past from emotion, we should be able to arrive at more reliable conclusions about their historical importance.
If I asked you to name some important battles from Britain’s past, your list might include the Battle of Britain, Waterloo, Stalingrad, Balaclava and the Charge of the Light Brigade, Midway, the Somme and, almost inevitably, Agincourt. The fact that this last battle took place four centuries before any of the others on that list speaks volumes for its prestige in the catalogue of slaughters.
Most of those battles have been amply commemorated, glorified or otherwise modified or popularised using the medium of literature or film. In fact, such conflicts were to Edward Creasy’s (1851).
