AGINCOURT
. The greatest English victory of the Hundred Years’ War came when France was divided
by the Armagnac-Burgundian feud. Henry V seized this opportunity to invade France and
forcibly reassert a dubious claim to the French throne. Henry captured Harfleur and then
marched north toward Calais. On October 25, 1415, a hostile force cut off his route. An
exhausted English force of 1,000 men at arms and 6,000 archers confronted perhaps
25,000 French. Henry shrewdly profited from the restricted, muddy terrain and so
deployed his troops to defeat an adversary ill served by a divided command. English
archers provoked the overconfident French into an assault that squandered their
numerical advantage, allowing the outnumbered but disciplined English to encircle and
destroy the uncoordinated French mass. At least 5,000 French died and many French
peers were captured, while English casualties were trivial. The dramatic victory proved
crucial to Henry’s ambitions. With Armagnac forces devastated, he was emboldened to
undertake the occupation of Normandy and to conclude an alliance with Burgundy. The
resulting Treaty of Troyes gave him widespread recognition as the legitimate heir to the
throne of France.
Paul D.Solon
[See also: ARMAGNACS; BOUCICAUT; CHARLES VI; HENRY V; HUNDRED
YEARS’ WAR]
Burne, Alfred Higgins. The Agincourt War. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956.
Hibbert, Christopher. Agincourt. Philadelphia: Dufour, 1964.
Jacob, Ernest Fraser. Henry V and the Invasion of France. New York: Macmillan, 1950.
Jarman, Rosemary Hawley. Crispin’s Day: The Glory Of Agincourt. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
Keegan, John. The Face of Battle. New York: Viking, 1976.
AGRICULTURE
. Throughout the Middle Ages, a huge majority of France’s population was engaged in
agriculture; land with the laborers on it remained the primary source of wealth even after
towns, commerce, and industry revived later in the period. From late antiquity to the 9th
century, although there were some independent peasant holdings, agriculture was
generally practiced on great estates or villas that were the successors of Roman villas.
These estates, organized and worked under a system called manorialism, tended to be
self-sufficient, having little recourse to trade and producing for all their own needs. A
small surplus went to support the warrior or clerical owner, but few of the villas were
large enough to have supported a great man and his retinue through a twelve-month
period; to live off their estates, early-medieval lords had to move from one to the next
during the year.
Ownership of such estates and rights to the tenancies within them became more
fragmented as the centuries passed; by the 12th century, inefficiencies of scale and the
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