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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 1121471" data-attributes="member: 463">There was a (BBC?) TV show on Agincourt recently where among other things (eg analysing the French attack using software analysis designed for crowd disasters) they did scientific testing on the mud from the locality - indeed it is a heavy clay that absorbs and holds water like a sponge, becoming easily waterlogged and able to create the 'sucking' effect on rigid armour (or boots).  This wouldn't happen in loamy soil but it does perhaps provide one explanation for the myth.  The lightly armoured English archers had a big advantage in the muddy melee against the plate-armoured knights.  The show wasn't necessarily 100% accurate in all respects*, but I thought this seemed plausible.They claimed that the English archers' arrows could never have been able to penetrate the French plate armour, and demonstrated this with a test where an arrow was struck ineffectively against a sheet of plate - a 2mm thick sheet of plate, about _twice as thick_ as historical full plate of the era.  It also ignored the extreme draw weights of some longbows found on eg the Mary Rose, up to 140lbs or so, and the skeletal evidence of archers trained their whole lives to do one thing - punch a bodkin arrow through plate.  I found this a bit annoying - while it's perfectly true that _most_ longbow arrows fired would not penetrate a target's plate armour, I've seen other demonstrations of it being done easily enough, and there are plenty of contemporary pictures of punctured knights on medieval battlefields.  I think they were more concerned to emphasise the other factors that led to French defeat by downplaying the longbow's effectiveness.</blockquote>

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