“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” These nine words from Shakespeare’s Henry V are among the best known in the great playwright’s canon. Yet they are also seriously misleading. For, as King Henry V prepared to do battle with his French foes at Agincourt 600 years ago, he did so not with a hopelessly outnumbered force – as Shakespeare’s description of the battle would have us believe – but with an army of around 8,500 men.
That army had numbered close to 12,000 when Henry led it across the Channel in mid-August, making it the largest sent to France since Edward III’s invasion 70 years earlier. The English king was hellbent on conquering Normandy – and he was not about to fail through a lack of numbers.

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But despite the size of his army – and the subsequent acclaim for his victory at Agincourt as a high-water mark in medieval English history – Henry’s campaign in Normandy started badly. After more than a month, his army had seized just one target – the port of Harfleur on the Channel coast – and at a terrible cost. As the author of the contemporary chronicle Gesta Henrici Quinti observed: “Dysentery carried off more of our men than the sword, and had so direly afflicted and disabled many of the rest that they could not journey on with him further.”

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