Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King
by Michael Livingston
Osprey Publishing 2023

Michael Livingston, who's currently Secretary-General of the United States Commission for Military History and who's the author of a lively book the Battle of Crécy, has credentials that almost immediately set up a weird dissonance-field with virtually every tone in his new book, Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King.

He's writing about the famous Hundred Years' War battle of 1415, when the outnumbered English led King Henry V defeated the massed forces of the French in an underdog surprise later immortalized by Shakespeare. Hundreds of books have been written about the Battle of Agincourt, and millions of people have thrilled when Shakespeare's Henry gives his rousing speech about we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, so it's predictable and only slightly disappointing that Livingston kicks off his book by quoting the whole thing. But then he follows the quote with: “It's a damn good speech … but it's not at all true.”

The heart immediately sinks. So despite his credentials, Livingston is going to turn in a Bloke's History of Agincourt? Not one single person who can read English needs to be told that Shakespeare is good, and not one single person who'd be likely to pick up a new history of Agincourt needs to be told that Shakespeare isn't historically accurate. The cautious reader begins to expect exclamations like “You'll never believe the effin' truth about Agincourt!” – a familiar kind of exclamation that would simultaneously insult both all serious military historians and the intelligence of every reader, some of whom might remember a similarly tub-thumping tone in the Crécy book.

Livingston seems to cement this attitude early on by invoking the late well-known military historian John Keegan, who's quoted relating the typical story of the English archers routing the heavily-mounted French. Livingston uses Keegan as a signpost for all the other purveyors of that typical story:

This is 'the narrative of Agincourt handed down to us,' as Keegan says. It is, in his estimation, 'a good one; it would in any case be profitless to look for better.' I've got dozens of histories of the battle on my shelves. Allowing for little tweaks, this same story is in pretty much all of them. It's pervasive. It's exactly what I was taught. It's the Vulgata.

Adding: “And it's wrong.”

But the merits of Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King force themselves to the forefront despite all this drinks-for-everybody, just as they did in the Crécy book (we abashedly remember). Livingston knows the subject down to the last bit of armor-jointing, and he patiently lays out all the details we can know from all the various sources. He walks the battlefield with care, and always with the aim of, as he puts it, 'stress-testing' all the evidence against their inevitable physical reality. He employs (in fact, proudly brandishes) a deep skepticism when engaging with even the most trivial item in the Vulgata, and despite any worries about author condescension, this fairly quickly becomes gripping reading.

Will the book entirely change the way Agincourt-familiar readers think of the battle? It's unlikely. Ultimately, Livingston tends to make readers doubt the punctilious numerical accuracy of the sources rather than the general shape of events they've conveyed to centuries of historians. But this kind of stress-testing, when a very knowledgeable expert sets out to attack the Vulgata of any subject, almost always makes for entertaining reading. And Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King will make readers wonder how such experts know what they know about one of the most famous battles in Western history.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.