Battle of Agincourt

+15 votes
458 views

On St Crispin's Day, 25th October 1415 the English (with a contingent of Welsh bowmen) were lined up against a much larger French force near Agincourt (now Azincourt) in Northern France.  In just over a weeks time it will be the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt which was an overwhelming victory for the English (mainly through the efforts of those Welsh bowmen).

The battle has been immortalised by Shakespeare in his play Henry V, which contains lines often used today such as "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" and "Once more unto the breach , dear friends, once more".  And for those republicans of all persuasions there is always "I think the king is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me"

Wikitree has it's own version of immortalising the participants in the Battle of Agincourt, by having a category for this battle http://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Battle_of_Agincourt but it's only been applied to 8 profiles.  The challenge leading up to this 600 year anniversary is to see how many other profiles we can find who are already on Wikitree and should have this category attached to their biography.

There is a list here of some of the participants, both those who fell in the Battle and those who survived.  There have also been some discussions on the medieval genealogy group  

The other option to see if an ancestor was serving in the military in England around this time (not necessarily at Agincourt) is to check a great new database The Soldier in later Medieval England

And if you want to know more about the Battle of Agincourt, there is always Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Agincourt

in The Tree House by John Atkinson G2G6 Pilot (625k points)
edited by John Atkinson
Great idea John, thank you!
This is really cool! While my GEDCOM hasn't been approved yet, I'm almost certain that I can link directly back to Dafydd Gam via my father's parents, so this is of particular interest to me.

(Yes, I did mean both his parents. I just this afternoon discovered a duplicate great-grandparent and realized that Dad's parents were half-siblings, born in the same year to the same mother by different fathers.)

I just this afternoon discovered a duplicate great-grandparent and realized that Dad's parents were half-siblings, born in the same year to the same mother by different fathers

Sorry, not buying a word of that.

Well, it turns out I was wrong (though it wouldn't be the least bit out of character for my family). So points to you!
Happy St Crispin's Day.

 

But I am sure there are more Wikitree profiles that could be added to the category.
Afraid the gentlemen of England conformed to precedent by staying a-bed and missing the anniversary.  But I've now added the category tag to all the English side on the Genealogics list, except 3 - Radcliffe, Sampson, Clifton
Thanks RJ, I've added a couple of the French but there are probably some more hiding on Wikitree somewhere.
Crosse-124 fits the category
I try to remember adding the French ones to the category when I find them - they're sort of easy to spot: they all died on the same day !

2 Answers

+3 votes
Thanks

The link to  "The Soldier in later Medieval England" [ http://www.medievalsoldier.org/search.ph ] gives me a 404 but this one seems to work [ http://www.medievalsoldier.org/search_musterdb.php ].

(I have one of the 8 already in the category, though colateral to my line)
by Janet Gunn G2G6 Pilot (160k points)
Thanks Janet, I've changed the link in my original question to the one you have provided (teach me to check links)
And here is another source that lists participants in Agincourt
http://www.scortonarrow.com/features/agincourt.htm
That's a great source, Janet.  I wonder what it is copied from?  

If it's all from the same medieval document, then it's a wonderful example of the problems with medieval spelling; I think I counted at least 4 different ways of spelling retinue!!!
It appears to come from
"History of the Battle of Agincourt"
 By Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas
https://books.google.com/books?id=kbgaAAAAYAAJ&pg=PP17&lpg=PP17&dq=%22History+of+the+Battle+of+Agincourt%22+Nicholas+Harris+Nicolas&source=bl&ots=lQE5sEP5Jp&sig=8Y9ILR8u70jxOb47a1Ko70PHcgY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDgQ6AEwBWoVChMI15Hq7bLIyAIVBXk-Ch0rHgbn#v=onepage&q=%22


The preface refers to "A research among the MSS in the British Museum accidentally discovered a list of the peers, knights, and men-at-arms who were at Agincourt.", and then refers to a number of different manuscripts, but I can not tell which one is the actual list.

Apparently after the battle Sir Robert Babthorpe complied a complete list of every man present.  If that included the infantry, it must have been a very long and pointless list, but maybe the infantry didn't count as men but were considered a lower form of life.

The list is mostly lost, though Joseph Hunter is said to have found some fragments in the 1850s.

But Ralph Brooke had access to the list in 1604 and made an extract, which survives in 3 copies - Bodleian, College of Arms, and Harleian (British Museum).

The Nicholas Harris Nicholas book is based on the Ralph Brooke extract.

The list in the book was republished in the Family Chronicle magazine in 1997, and online by Kenneth Fitton to the soc.gen.medieval newsgroup in 1998.  Other sites have taken it from the book or the newsgroup.  I don't know if Fitton got it from the magazine or direct from the book.  You can recognize this version by the unlikely "Conrad Aske", 8th from the top, where the book has the original "Conand Aske".

Brooke didn't copy the complete list of names.  The infantry are ignored completely, but it's hard to know what else got lost or corrupted.  Apparently one would normally expect heavy cavalry, who were all knights and squires in full armour, and light cavalry, so it's not clear who is included under Lancers.  Monsr indicates a knight, but the puzzle is to know whether all the other names can be taken as squires.

Even if they can, the names are hard to identify positively, because anybody of any prominence is likely to have had some obscure namesake lording it over some one-horse manor somewhere.

The much shorter list on Genealogics presumably sticks to people who are positively identified, mostly knights.

Another question is whether Brooke kept the spellings as he found them or modernised them to those of his own day.  Actually it's not entirely clear that the original was in English.

Thanks for the history of the documentation.

In my case, John Rous of Baynton  [Rous-56] was an arminger rather than a knight, and Baynton could be called a "one horse manor" (John was the younger son, and only got a small part of the entire estate).  But there is a fair amount of contemoprary documentation connecting John Rous (and his brother William) to Walter Hungerford (under whom John is listed in the list), so I am quite confident it is the same John Rous.
Nice to see a list of ordinary combatants. There's a John Aston on there. Aston is my maiden name. Doesn't mean I'm related though, but you never know. I'm stuck in the late 17th century, on my Aston line. There are way too many of them, to know who is who.
+3 votes
https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/agincourt

Hi John I took the course on line some time ago and they provided info  to the course about who was at the Battle.

Thank you

Jenny
by Living Snyder G2G6 Mach 2 (25.1k points)

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