The 100 Years War

[ShadesWolf]

Most of you that know me will know that I am very interested in the history of the 100 Years War.

Does anybody know of any forums that are dedicated to this subject ?

[Knight_Yellow]

No but i was wondering if anybody watched the "dark secrets of agincourt" eppisode on Channel 5 last night.


turns out the reasons the french lost was down to the weather and ransom.

the team dug down to the periods soil and tested it to see what the conditions where like during the battle.
the strange thing about the french soil was that instead of water running through, it was absorbed so when several men trampled it, it quikly became very muddy.

apparently for the french foot knights everytime they took a step it would be like having 16 bags of sugar on each leg.

where ass the leather and cloth shoes of the english let them move mutch more easily only 2-3 bags.

the english had set up in a bottle neck and a "crowd controll" expert simulated what the crush would have been like. things turned especialy chaotic when the computer was told to factor in obstacles and the dead boddies of the french.


and they also discovered that the french knights where after ransom. each top ranking guy on each side would carry a shield and would be recognisable to the enemy, so the french knights that eventualy got to the english lines were busy going after valuable men and did not attack the english archers since they were considered "lower" forms of men.

when the english archers armed with hammers and daggers charged the french knights it caused a panic and the french were too heavily armoured coupled with the mud to form any sort of line and where cut down where they stood.


after the battle several hundred french noble men had been captured and henry ordered them to be executed...

several of henry's nobles pleaded for the french to live not for moral reasons but for the ransom they would recieve when they returned to england.

in the end the "lower men" (longbow men) were ordered to kill the prissoners and they where eager to do so as they wanted revenge for the french cutting off captured archers fingers.

henry gave the order as he was not sure he had won the day and couldnt resist the numerous french prisoners rioting and attacking their captors who were by no means ready for another fight.


who would have fought channel 5 would be useful http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[CBR]

Ah sounds pretty much like what some of us already knew http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

Dont think I have encountered a 100 Years War only forum.

CBR

[Mount Suribachi]

I watched the program and was somewhat disapointed. They constantly jumped to conclusions based upon little (or no) evidence, much of which was debatable. I work in a pharmaceutical lab and if I drew concrete conclusions from such scant evidence I'd be sacked and the company would be hauled before a court of law by the regulatory authorities They bill the program as being revisionist cos they think it will draw more viewers, so then they have to go out of their way to draw "controversial" conclusions. I found the whole thing unscientific and too willing to base a theory (and state it as fact) on a tiny bit of research.

[The Blind King of Bohemia]

This might not be helpful for you Shadeswolf but if you want good reading on the 100 years war get Trial by Battle and Trial by Fire by Jonathan Sumption. They are wicked.

[khurjan]

every military historian knew that mud was a factor, but also the ill discipline of french nobles, failure to setup flanking units and rash use of crossbowmen, taking prisoner for ransom was a common practise of nobility at that time they would take nobles for ransom and slaughter commoners....the main asset of a armoured knight or calvary than was their devastating charge...which if they lose momentum they lost one of their the major asset. Also the english army raised was in a indentured form that means that the troops were raised by nobles but were contracted by king to keep these troops on long standing basis for crown aka genesis of professional royal english army...these guys were professional soldiers compared to french fuedal hosts and levies.

i got tons of stuff on these battles from 100 yrs

[frogbeastegg]

I saw that program too, I'm agreeing with Mount Suribachi in that it was disappointing. I shall put it through 'Frogbeasteggs Patented TV History Reviewing Program TM' (Be nice Froggy, don't rant Must resist sarcastic urges)

1)Why oh why do they insist on having grainy, washed out footage as reconstructions? If you are going to do that then you should do it properly without all these stupid effects. All the blurriness etc does is make it hard to tell what is happening and make the viewer feel motion sick. Used properly these reconstructions can show a lot about period clothing etc, but over 95% of the ones I've seen throw this chance away.

2)Weee We've discovered that they had steel No one knew that before Of course the fact that there are umpteen pieces of steel armour dating from this period in museums and collection worldwide has never dawned on anyone. All historians failed to notice that the steel armour was made from steel Thank you Channel 5.

3) Tied in to point 2 is the ever so handy assumption 'Wow Steel armour Cool, it's only been around for three years before the battle and would have cost a fortune. Therefore everybody in the French army had it' Yes steel armour existed, but not everyone would have owned it. Many knights would still have been wearing older armour, leaving them more vulnerable. This rubbishes their assumption that the knights were all totally invulnerable to arrows (this one will appear quite a lot, sorry).

4)'Lets test the effectiveness of steel armour Vs arrows by getting a very thick piece and hitting it with an arrow head.' OK, this one is less of a rant but did anyone else thing that the piece of metal they used was a bit too thick? I'm not arguing that arrows would have gone through the armour, only that they made their test flawed which devalues it.

5)'To get the speed that an arrow would have travelled lets ask an old guy to draw a bow that is probably weaker than the ones really used, thereby making the arrow slower and devaluing our whole experiment' The man who demonstrated the bow did not look like he was using one with a pull of over 100LBs. In fact they never said what the draw weight was. This is highly relevant as the weight= the power= the arrows speed= arrows effectiveness. There is barely anyone alive today who could draw a proper English longbow, we just aren't strong enough. Again the spoiled their own experiment and invalidated the results.

6)'Because our (rather dubious) arrow can't go through a piece of steel the Knights were totally invulnerable to arrows'. They forgot about all the joints and weak spots in the armour. All you have to do is look at some of the surviving suit to see that there were points an arrow could go through. This doesn't destroy their argument that the longbows were less effective, it supports it by showing that the knights were mostly invulnerable and that they would only receive minor wounds.

7)'Because the knight is invulnerable to arrows so is the horse (until half way through, when we will give poor Dobbin a mention)' The real power of the longbows against a charging knight was their ability to drop the horse, destroying the cohesion of the charge and upsetting the other horses. This program seemed to think that it doesn't matter about the horse as long as the man doesn't get hit by an arrow it won't matter. Then half way through they say that a horse getting hit by an arrow would destroy the charge, and that horses were vulnerable. Let me condense what they said: Archers are useless against charging knights, they barely did any damage and they didn't stop the charge. However they absolutely destroyed the horses thereby damaging the knights and stopping the charge. Make up your minds

8)'Arrows are only ever used once, you don't get them back.' What about all the accounts of arrows being collected during lulls in the battle and reused? What about all the times the arrowheads were collected after the battle for reuse on another shaft, or for melting down for reuse? If they weren't reused Europe would be drowning in arrowheads, instead they are reasonably rare finds.

9) 'Choosing a good position on a battlefield is not skill, it's luck'. I think we can all analyse that one for ourselves. Yes the English didn't exactly choose where to fight, but they did choose where to stand and it was a good position.

10) Don't even get me started on the way that female expert handled ancient, one of a kind, irreplaceable documents You are supposed to wear white gloves so the acids on your hands don't damage the document. You are not supposed to turn the pages violently or bang away at the extremely fragile seal on the documents She could have just pointed at it, I was waiting for the seal to fall to pieces.

11) What exactly was the whole point of the 'The king was a war criminal, then again he wasn't, oh yes he was' thing at the end? They gave an important and sensitive subject less than two minutes It would have been better if they hadn't bothered, since they couldn't explore an interesting issue properly. They forget several key things:
A) The ransom money was needed. They said themselves that the King had porned the crown jewels, don't they think a fat pile of ransom money would have relieved the crowns debt? If the king could have kept the POWs he would have done so.
B) How exactly was the king supposed to take all these prisoners back to England with him? Or for that matter how was he supposed to guard them and feed them after the battle was over? That's assuming he could have survived and won with a mass of POWs to guard at his back.
C) They conveniently avoided the whole 'should we judge the past by our own standards?' argument. It is highly relevant in this case.

12) Why do they think that the information on the battlefield being muddy is new? There are contemporary accounts of the battle that describe the mud. They also describe the French knights slipping over and being unable to get back up due to suction. The same applies to the crowding on the battlefield.

13) The whole attempt to turn an English victory into a stupid mistake is wrong on so many levels, no one ever claimed that the French couldn't have won. No one ever claimed that the English victory wasn't partly due to luck. But to claim that the only reason we won is because the French were stupid is disgraceful, both to the English and the French. Tactics, skill and bravery were just as important in this battle as in any other. The English would probably have lost if the ground was dry and they hadn't got such a good position but the thing is they chose to fight with those conditions to help them. Suggesting that the French were stupid isn't much better; with better organisation and better conditions their advance would have been deadly. The men at the back would have been very brave to keep going, they would have seen that something dreadful was happening at the front and they would have been stepping over the bodies of their comrades but they kept going. And yet they are given no credit for this bravery. Disgraceful.

I shall stop there before this becomes a two-page rant I won't even go into how their 'revolutionary' battle plan sounded exactly the same as every other one written in the last 10 years. I won't ask if they had all the appropriate licenses to dig and survey the battlefield. I won't ask why they were playing with cards. I won't ask where they got the idea that longbowmen were all-powerful deadly machine gunners that killed everything they shot at. I just wasted nearly an hour critiquing this program

Thankfully this one was not quite as bad as the whole 'Ivar the Boneless' debactacle on Channel 4 some time ago. That was a prime example of ignoring evidence and historical credibility to chase one person’s viewpoint. 'Ivar' was just plain embarrassing.

If you want to see good history TV you need look no further than Channel 4's Castle series. Unfortunately its finished, but it was an example of how this kind of thing should be done. Here's hoping for a DVD release.

[Mount Suribachi]

Everything Froggy said and more besides. I just couldn't be bothered to type all that http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

[ShadesWolf]

I have both books and they are excellent, I hope we get a third but it prob wont come out until 2009 (if hes still alive by the.) http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/shock.gif

[Lord Of Storms]

I have a copy of a nice 100 yrs war campmap for MTW 1.1 with all the lukup maps and bifs needed for a campaign, that have been on my HD for quite some time. I just never had the time to do anything with it. One of my favorite periods. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

[ShadesWolf]

So when you going to release it then lord.

[PFJ_bejazuz]

'The White Company' by Conan Doyle is a rip snorting 100yrs war read that has saved my sanity on at least two all day airport waits for me.

ok, there are no coke head detectives in it but the application of a broad sword seems to resolve most issues that arise.

EDIT:
just done a quick search & found that its available as a free e-book download at:
http://www.abacci.com/msreader/ebook.aspx?bookID=423