On St. Crispin's Day, roughly 6,000 English soldiers, exhausted and dysentery-ridden after a long march, faced a French army several times their size. Longbowmen loosed thousands of arrows into the packed, armored French vanguard, which bogged down in mud and collapsed under its own weight. French losses, including much of the nobility, dwarfed English casualties, and the victory became legend, immortalized centuries later in Shakespeare's Henry V.
The French had every advantage on paper: fresh troops, heavy cavalry, and overwhelming numbers against an English army that had been marching for two weeks, was riddled with dysentery, and was cut off from resupply. Henry V chose a narrow field flanked by woods near the village of Agincourt, forcing the French to attack on a front too tight for their numbers to matter.
English and Welsh longbowmen, protected by sharpened stakes driven into the ground, poured arrows into the advancing French men-at-arms. The heavy rain-soaked mud, churned further by thousands of armored feet, turned the battlefield into a trap; French soldiers sank to their knees and were crushed by the press of their own ranks. English casualties may have numbered only a few hundred against thousands of French dead, including three dukes and nearly ninety great lords.
Henry ordered the killing of many French prisoners when he feared a rear attack, a decision that troubled chroniclers even at the time. The battle's disproportionate outcome fed a myth of English martial superiority that outlived the medieval world, cemented forever by Shakespeare's 'we few, we happy few, we band of brothers' speech.