Welrain said:I watched a program a little while ago about Agincourt and how it wasnt the longbowmen that won the day, rather that the incompetence of the French Knights who lost it. They got themselves in a muddle and bogged down and a huge number were captured. They were then slaughtered.
While Im not fond of the current rewriting of history thats going on, this program was quite interesting.
I watched it too - it had good points but their weapons test on the longbow was a travesty. I don't know what the pull weight was on the longbow, but I do recall them saying that the plate it failed to penetrate was 2mm thick - something over _twice_ the historical thickness of plate armour in that period. I've seen enough demos where bodkin arrows fired at close range easily penetrated plate armour (front, back & the mannequin in-between) to be highly sceptical of their claim that the longbow was as ineffective as they claimed. OTOH their demonstration of how the wet Agincourt clay could effectively hold fallen plate-armoured knights immobile seemed credible, and helped explain the origin of the "a fallen knight is as helpless as a turtle on his back" myth.