Scott Alexander (author/host)

And every one of them was, in essence, a repeat of Cressy.

Footnote about Ajiburrota, this is an interesting one which I included chiefly because no American has ever heard of it.

The English and the French were allied with the main contenders, the Portuguese and Castilians, but in spite of this, it looks remarkably similar to any of the battles of the Hundred Years' War, complete with the Anglo-Portuguese alliance routing enemies that outnumbered them six to one using archers, defensive terrain, and their enemies' rashness.

Back to the text.

Minor variations occurred.

At Poitiers, the French attacked on foot.

At Verneuil, they detached troops to attack the English baggage train.

But these didn't help.

The French were saved from immediate disaster by three things.

The first was the Black Death, which killed a third of Europe.

This had effects wildly beyond the scope of our story, but also demolished the tax bases of every state in Europe.

This shrunk the size of the armies and thereby, as an incidental side effect, meant that all existing castles were heavily overbuilt.

since they were intended to defend against half again the force that they would actually be present, which slowed the pace of war tremendously.

The second was a strategy adopted by the French kings in which they did not fight the English.

They would just let the English field army march wherever it liked and loot and burn whatever it liked, and meanwhile their troops would be burning and pillaging everywhere the English held, and the English field army wasn't.

This was extremely unpopular among the people being pillaged, but the English did run out of money before the French ran out of castles, and that meant the French could go around taking English castles in France while the English army was in England.

And the third was that the English army depended on good leadership, and when Edward III died, the English wouldn't have it for another 40 years, until Henry V took the throne.

This two-generation time skip provided enough time for the population to partially replenish, and also for the French to completely forget Lesson 2, an era of memory which produced Agincourt.

Agincourt was the standard model of battle.

Henry V made it his course to busy the minds of his people with foreign quarrels, to misquote Shakespeare, landed an army in Normandy and went around taking and besieging towns.