Azincourt (published in the US as Agincourt) was published by HarperCollins in 2008. Nick Hook is a young English archer — an outlaw fleeing a murder charge — who joins Henry V’s army for the invasion of France in 1415. The novel follows Hook from the brutal siege of Harfleur (where dysentery kills more English soldiers than the French do) through the long march across northern France (starving, sick, and pursued by a vastly superior French army) to the field of Agincourt, where fewer than 6,000 English soldiers defeated an army three or four times their size.
Cornwell’s Agincourt is not Shakespeare’s Agincourt. There is no St. Crispin’s Day speech, no “band of brothers” rhetoric. What there is instead is mud — bottomless, sucking mud that trapped the heavily armored French knights and made them helpless before the English longbowmen. Cornwell describes the English longbow with the same technical precision he brings to all his military hardware: the draw weight (150 pounds or more), the rate of fire (ten to twelve arrows per minute from a skilled archer), and the devastating effect of a bodkin-pointed arrow on plate armor at close range.
The battle itself occupies roughly the final third of the novel, and it is among Cornwell’s most sustained and harrowing combat sequences: the French advance into a funnel of arrow fire, the melee when the survivors reach the English line, and the controversial killing of the French prisoners (which Henry ordered when he feared a counterattack) are rendered with an immediacy that makes the reader understand both the terror and the exhilaration of medieval combat.
Collecting Azincourt
First edition (HarperCollins, London, 2008): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$25