battle of agincourt middle finger battle of agincourt middle finger

A widely shared image on social media purportedly explains the historic origins of the middle finger, considered an offensive gesture in Western culture. [46] Many lords and gentlemen demanded and got places in the front lines, where they would have a higher chance to acquire glory and valuable ransoms; this resulted in the bulk of the men-at-arms being massed in the front lines and the other troops, for which there was no remaining space, to be placed behind. Although it could be intended as humorous, the image on social media is historically inaccurate. [107], Most primary sources which describe the battle have English outnumbered by several times. Fighting ignorance since 1973. Supposedly, both originated at the 1415 Battle of Agincourt, . [36] Henry, worried about the enemy launching surprise raids, and wanting his troops to remain focused, ordered all his men to spend the night before the battle in silence, on pain of having an ear cut off. The number is supported by many other contemporary accounts. [73] The mounted charge and subsequent retreat churned up the already muddy terrain between the French and the English. It forms the backdrop to events in William Shakespeare's play Henry V, written in 1599. One of the most renowned. The pl sound, the story goes, gradually changed into an f, giving the gesture its present meaning. It continued as a series of battles, sieges, and disputes throughout the 14th century, with both the French and the English variously taking advantage. [105] Other benefits to the English were longer term. The English account in the Gesta Henrici says: "For when some of them, killed when battle was first joined, fall at the front, so great was the undisciplined violence and pressure of the mass of men behind them that the living fell on top of the dead, and others falling on top of the living were killed as well."[62]. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore [soldiers would] be incapable of fighting in the future. Most importantly, the battle was a significant military blow to France and paved the way for further English conquests and successes. Poitiers 1356: The capture of a king (Vol. By 1415, negotiations had ground to a halt, with the English claiming that the French had mocked their claims and ridiculed Henry himself. It seems it was purely a decision of Henry, since the English knights found it contrary to chivalry, and contrary to their interests, to kill valuable hostages for whom it was commonplace to ask ransom. The image makes the further claim that the English soldiers chanted pluck yew, ostensibly in reference to the drawing of the longbow. It. [43], The French were organized into two main groups (or battles), a vanguard up front and a main battle behind, both composed principally of men-at-arms fighting on foot and flanked by more of the same in each wing. This famous weapon was made of the native English yew tree, and so the act of drawing the longbow was known as "plucking yew". Didn't it originate at Agincourt? First of all, the word pluck begins with the blend pl, which would logically become fl if the voiceless bilabial plosive p has actually transformed into the labiodentalfricative f, which is by no means certain. In 1999, Snopesdebunked more of the historical aspects of the claim, as well as thecomponent explaininghow the phrase pluck yew graduallychanged form to begin with an f( here ). Early in the morning on October 25 (the feast day of St. Crispin), 1415, Henry positioned his army for battle on a recently plowed field bounded by woods. The Battle of Agincourt originated in 1328. This battle concluded with King Harold of England dying at the hands of the Norman King William, which marked the beginning of a new era in England. The Battle of Agincourt took place during the the Hundred Years' War, a conflict which, despite its name, was neither one single war nor did it last one hundred years. [21] On 19 April 1415, Henry again asked the Great Council to sanction war with France, and this time they agreed. Some historians trace its origins to ancient Rome. Inthe book,Corbeillpoints to Priapus, a minor deityhedatesto 400 BC, whichlater alsoappears in Rome as the guardian of gardens,according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Greece and Rome( here ). The two armies spent the night of 24 October on open ground. The recently ploughed land hemmed in by dense woodland favoured the English, both because of its narrowness, and because of the thick mud through which the French knights had to walk. The longbow. (Indeed, Henry V was heavily criticized for supposedly having ordered the execution of French prisoners at Agincourt. [128] The original play does not, however, feature any scenes of the actual battle itself, leading critic Rose Zimbardo to characterise it as "full of warfare, yet empty of conflict. This material may not be reproduced without permission. Your membership is the foundation of our sustainability and resilience. I suppose that the two-fingered salute could still come from medieval archery, even if it didnt come specifically from the Battle of Agincourt, although the example that Wikipedia links to (the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter) is ambiguous. Thinking it was an attack from the rear, Henry had the French nobles he was holding prisoner killed. The English army, led by King Henry V, famously achieved victory in spite of the numerical superiority of its opponent. [90] In his study of the battle John Keegan argued that the main aim was not to actually kill the French knights but rather to terrorise them into submission and quell any possibility they might resume the fight, which would probably have caused the uncommitted French reserve forces to join the fray, as well. As John Keegan wrote in his history of warfare: "To meet a similarly equipped opponent was the occasion for which the armoured soldier trained perhaps every day of his life from the onset of manhood. The Battle of Agincourt (720p) Watch on . The approximate location of the battle has never been disputed, and the site remains relatively unaltered after 600 years. 78-116). During this battle, the medieval archers started ahead of the army and commenced the action. Probably each man-at-arms would be accompanied by a gros valet (or varlet), an armed servant, adding up to another 10,000 potential fighting men,[7] though some historians omit them from the number of combatants. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French,anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. The two candidates with the strongest claims were Edward III of England, who was the son of Charles's sister, and Philip, Charles's paternal . The next line of French knights that poured in found themselves so tightly packed (the field narrowed at the English end) that they were unable to use their weapons effectively, and the tide of the battle began to turn toward the English. And for a variety of reasons, it made no military sense whatsoever for the French to capture English archers, then mutilate them by cutting off their fingers. Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com. [27], During the siege, the French had raised an army which assembled around Rouen. .). [110][111][112] Ian Mortimer endorsed Curry's methodology, though applied it more liberally, noting how she "minimises French numbers (by limiting her figures to those in the basic army and a few specific additional companies) and maximises English numbers (by assuming the numbers sent home from Harfleur were no greater than sick lists)", and concluded that "the most extreme imbalance which is credible" is 15,000 French against 8,0009,000 English. Medieval warriors didn't take prisoners because by doing so they were observing a moral code that dictated opponents who had laid down their arms and ceased fighting must be treated humanely, but because they knew high-ranking captives were valuable property that could be ransomed for money. Moreover, if archers could be ransomed, then cutting off their middle fingers would be a senseless move. The idea being that you need two fingers to draw a bow, which makes more sense, and thus links up a national custom with a triumphant moment in national history! In March 2010, a mock trial of Henry V for the crimes associated with the slaughter of the prisoners was held in Washington, D.C., drawing from both the historical record and Shakespeare's play. (There is an Indo-European connection between the p-sound and f-sound see the distinction between the Latin pater and the Germanic Vater/father but that split occurred a long time ago.) [26] He also intended the manoeuvre as a deliberate provocation to battle aimed at the dauphin, who had failed to respond to Henry's personal challenge to combat at Harfleur. Some notable examples are listed below. [135] The battle also forms a central component of the 2019 Netflix film The King. Agincourt. After several decades of relative peace, the English had resumed the war in 1415 amid the failure of negotiations with the French. He told his men that he would rather die in the coming battle than be captured and ransomed. I admit that I bring this story up when I talk about the Hundred Years War only to debunk it. The Roman gesturemadeby extending the third finger from a closed fist, thus made the same threat, by forming a similarly phallic shape. ", "Miracle in the Mud: The Hundred Years' War's Battle of Agincourt", The Agincourt Battlefield Archaeology Project, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Battle_of_Agincourt&oldid=1137126379, 6,000 killed (most of whom were of the French nobility), Hansen, Mogens Herman (Copenhagen Polis Centre), This page was last edited on 2 February 2023, at 23:13. It sounds rather fishy to me. With Toby Merrell, Ian Brooker, Philip Rosch, Brian Blessed. . In the other reference Martial writes that a certain party points a finger, an indecent one, at some other people. Updates? See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays. [51] Albret, Boucicaut and almost all the leading noblemen were assigned stations in the vanguard. . [70]), The tightness of the terrain also seems to have restricted the planned deployment of the French forces. [47] Although it had been planned for the archers and crossbowmen to be placed with the infantry wings, they were now regarded as unnecessary and placed behind them instead. News of the contrivance circulated within Europe and was described in a book of tactics written in 1411 by. Contemporary accounts describe the triumphal pageantry with which the king was received in London on November 23, with elaborate displays and choirs attending his passage to St. Pauls Cathedral. In Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution, Desmond Morris and colleagues note that the digitus infamis or digitus impudicus (infamous or indecent finger) is mentioned several times in the literature of ancient Rome. [citation needed], Immediately after the battle, Henry summoned the heralds of the two armies who had watched the battle together with principal French herald Montjoie, and they settled on the name of the battle as Azincourt, after the nearest fortified place. The Hundred Years War was a discontinuous conflict between England and France that spanned two centuries. By most contemporary accounts, the French army was also significantly larger than the English, though the exact degree of their numerical superiority is disputed. A Dictionary of Superstitions. However, a need to reassert his authority at home (as well as his own ambition and a sense of justice) led Henry V to renew English claims in France. The image makes the claim that the gesture derives from English soldiers at the Battle of Agincourt, France in 1415. There is a modern museum in Agincourt village dedicated to the battle. The Battle of Agincourt (October 25, 1415) was a pivotal battle in the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), resulting in an English victory over the French. If the two-fingered salute comes from Agincourt, then at what point was it reduced to one finger in North America? The English Gesta Henrici described three great heaps of the slain around the three main English standards. While numerous English sources give the English casualties in double figures,[8] record evidence identifies at least 112 Englishmen killed in the fighting,[103] while Monstrelet reported 600 English dead. He contrasts the modern, English king and his army with the medieval, chivalric, older model of the French. Barker states that some knights, encumbered by their armour, actually drowned in their helmets.[64]. [89] A slaughter of the French prisoners ensued. The body part which the French proposed to cut off of the English after defeating them was, of course, the middle finger, without which it is impossible to draw the renowned English longbow. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. The third line of the French army, recoiling at the pile of corpses before them and unable to make an effective charge, was then massacred swiftly. Bowman were not valuable prisoners, though: they stood outside the chivalric system and were considered the social inferiors of men-at-arms. And where does the distinction between one and two fingers come from? After a difficult siege, the English forces found themselves assaulted by a massive French force. Wikipedia. [104] Henry returned a conquering hero, seen as blessed by God in the eyes of his subjects and European powers outside France. [91] Such an event would have posed a risk to the still-outnumbered English and could have easily turned a stunning victory into a mutually destructive defeat, as the English forces were now largely intermingled with the French and would have suffered grievously from the arrows of their own longbowmen had they needed to resume shooting. Some historians trace its origins to ancient Rome. The key word for describing the battle of Agincourt is mud . A list of English archers killed at Agincourt, as recorded in the village's museum, The story of the battle has been retold many times in English, from the 15th-century, Dates in the fifteenth century are difficult to reconcile with modern calendars: see, The first known use of angled stakes to thwart a mounted charge was at the Battle of Nicopolis, an engagement between European states and Turkish forces in 1396, twenty years before Agincourt. [116] Rogers, on the other hand, finds the number 5,000 plausible, giving several analogous historical events to support his case,[112] and Barker considers that the fragmentary pay records which Curry relies on actually support the lower estimates. [82], The surviving French men-at-arms reached the front of the English line and pushed it back, with the longbowmen on the flanks continuing to shoot at point-blank range. People who killed their social betters from a distance werent very well liked, and would likely have paid with their lives as did all the French prisoners, archers or otherwise, whom Henry V had executed at Agincourt, in what some historians consider a war crime. PLUCK YEW!". The king received an axe blow to the head, which knocked off a piece of the crown that formed part of his helmet. The fighting lasted about three hours, but eventually the leaders of the second line were killed or captured, as those of the first line had been. Its not known whether one displayed the digitus infamis in the same manner that we (well, you) flip the bird today. The English eyewitness account comes from the anonymous author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, believed to have been written by a chaplain in the King's household who would have been in the baggage train at the battle. It lasted longer than Henry had anticipated, and his numbers were significantly diminished as a result of casualties, desertions, and disease. (Even if archers whose middle fingers had been amputated could no longer effectively use their bows, they were still capable of wielding mallets, battleaxes, swords, lances, daggers, maces, and other weapons, as archers typically did when the opponents closed ranks with them and the fighting became hand-to-hand.). One final observation: any time some appeal begins with heres something that intelligent people will find edifying you should be suspicious. The main part of the speech begins "This day is called the feast of . [101] The bailiffs of nine major northern towns were killed, often along with their sons, relatives and supporters. Jean de Wavrin, a knight on the French side wrote that English fatalities were 1,600 men of all ranks. A Dictionary of Superstitions.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ISBN 0-19-282916-5 (p. 454). 33-35). During World War II the symbol was adopted as a V for victory. [citation needed]. The fact that Winston Churchill sometimes made his V-for-victory gesture rudely suggests that it is of much more recent vintage. The terrain favoured Henrys army and disadvantaged its opponent, as it reduced the numerical advantage of the French army by narrowing the front. Thus, when the victorious English waved their middle fingers at the defeated French, they said, "See, we can still pluck yew! [62] Le Fvre and Wavrin similarly say that it was signs of the French rearguard regrouping and "marching forward in battle order" which made the English think they were still in danger. Battle of Agincourt. This use of stakes could have been inspired by the Battle of Nicopolis of 1396, where forces of the Ottoman Empire used the tactic against French cavalry. [54] To disperse the enemy archers, a cavalry force of 8001,200 picked men-at-arms,[55] led by Clignet de Brban and Louis de Bosredon, was distributed evenly between both flanks of the vanguard (standing slightly forward, like horns). Agincourt 1415: The Triumph of the Longbow: Directed by Graham Holloway. Details the English victory over the French at the Battle of Agincourt. Update [June 20, 2022]: Updated SEO/social. When the archers ran out of arrows, they dropped their bows and, using hatchets, swords, and the mallets they had used to drive their stakes in, attacked the now disordered, fatigued and wounded French men-at-arms massed in front of them. The brunt of the battle had fallen on the Armagnacs and it was they who suffered the majority of senior casualties and carried the blame for the defeat. [50] Both lines were arrayed in tight, dense formations of about 16 ranks each, and were positioned a bowshot length from each other. [22], Henry's army landed in northern France on 13 August 1415, carried by a vast fleet. [31], The precise location of the battle is not known. [84] The exhausted French men-at-arms were unable to get up after being knocked to the ground by the English. The field that the French had to cross to meet their enemy was muddy after a week of rain and slowed their progress, during which time they endured casualties from English arrows. 1.3M views 4 months ago Medieval Battles - In chronological order The year 1415 was the first occasion since 1359 that an English king had invaded France in person. Bloomsbury Publishing. After the battle, the English taunted the survivors by showing off what wasn't cut off. [69] (The use of stakes was an innovation for the English: during the Battle of Crcy, for example, the archers had been instead protected by pits and other obstacles. Subject: Truth About the Finger In the film Titanic the character Rose is shown giving the finger to Jack, another character. To meet and beat him was a triumph, the highest form which self-expression could take in the medieval nobleman's way of life." The middle finger gesture does not derive from the mutilation of English archers at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. [109] Juliet Barker, Jonathan Sumption and Clifford J. Rogers criticized Curry's reliance on administrative records, arguing that they are incomplete and that several of the available primary sources already offer a credible assessment of the numbers involved. When the first French line reached the English front, the cavalry were unable to overwhelm the archers, who had driven sharpened stakes into the ground at an angle before themselves. Henry threatened to hang whoever did not obey his orders. Henry managed to subjugate Normandy in 1419, a victory that was followed by the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which betrothed Henry to King Charles VIs daughter Catherine and named him heir to the French crown. Shakespeare's portrayal of the casualty loss is ahistorical in that the French are stated to have lost 10,000 and the English 'less than' thirty men, prompting Henry's remark, "O God, thy arm was here". And I aint kidding yew. If the one-fingered salute comes from Agincourt, as the graphic suggests, then at what point did it get transformed into two fingers in England? The Gesta Henrici places this after the English had overcome the onslaught of the French men-at-arms and the weary English troops were eyeing the French rearguard ("in incomparable number and still fresh"). It established the legitimacy of the Lancastrian monarchy and the future campaigns of Henry to pursue his "rights and privileges" in France. The Battle of Agincourt was another famous battle where longbowmen had a particularly important . It seems to me that the single upturned middle finger clearly represents an erect penis and is the gestural equivalent of saying f*ck you! As such, it is probably ancient Wikipedia certainly thinks so, although apparently it became popular in the United States in the late nineteenth century under the influence of Italian immigration, replacing other rude gestures like thumbing the nose or the fig sign. Corrections? The effect of the victory on national morale was powerful. Several heralds, both French and English, were present at the battle of Agincourt, and not one of them (or any later chroniclers of Agincourt) mentioned anything about the French having cut off the fingers of captured English bowman. Your opponent is not going to pay you (or pay you much) for the return of mutilated soldiers, so now what do you do with them? The next day the French initiated negotiations as a delaying tactic, but Henry ordered his army to advance and to start a battle that, given the state of his army, he would have preferred to avoid, or to fight defensively: that was how Crcy and the other famous longbow victories had been won. The Battle of Agincourt was dramatised by William Shakespeare in Henry V featuring the battle in which Henry inspired his much-outnumbered English forces to fight the French through a St Crispin's Day Speech, saying "the fewer men, the greater share of honour". In another of his books Morris describes a variety of sexual insults involving the middle finger, such as the middle-finger down prod, the middle-finger erect, etc., all of which are different from the classic middle-finger jerk. Contemporary accounts [ edit] [34] The rearguard, leaderless, would serve as a "dumping ground" for the surplus troops. (Its taking longer than we thought.) The Face of Battle.New York: Penguin Books, 1978 ISBN 0-140-04897-9 (pp. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Unable to cross the Somme River because of French defenses, he was forced to take a detour inland and cross farther upstream. Axtell, Roger E. Gestures: The Dos and Taboos of Body Language Around the World.New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1991 ISBN 0-471-53672-5 (pp. Image source Course Hero uses AI to attempt to automatically extract content from documents to surface to you and others so you can study better, e.g., in search results, to enrich docs, and more. [85], The French men-at-arms were taken prisoner or killed in the thousands. It is unclear whether the delay occurred because the French were hoping the English would launch a frontal assault (and were surprised when the English instead started shooting from their new defensive position), or whether the French mounted knights instead did not react quickly enough to the English advance. Since then there had been tension between the nobility and the royal house, widespread lawlessness throughout the kingdom, and several attempts on Henry Vs life. Recent heavy rain made the battle field very muddy, proving very tiring to walk through in full plate armour. Keegan, John. Keegan also speculated that due to the relatively low number of archers actually involved in killing the French knights (roughly 200 by his estimate), together with the refusal of the English knights to assist in a duty they saw as distastefully unchivalrous, and combined with the sheer difficulty of killing such a large number of prisoners in such a short space of time, the actual number of French prisoners put to death may not have been substantial before the French reserves fled the field and Henry rescinded the order. Henry would marry Catherine, Charles VI's young daughter, and receive a dowry of 2million crowns. The "middle finger" gesture does not derive from the mutilation of English archers at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. These heralds were not part of the participating armies, but were, as military expert John Keegan describes, members of an "international corporation of experts who regulated civilized warfare." Rogers, Mortimer[117] and Sumption[41] all give more or less 10,000 men-at-arms for the French, using as a source the herald of the Duke of Berry, an eyewitness. When that campaign took place, it was made easier by the damage done to the political and military structures of Normandy by the battle. Archers were not the "similarly equipped" opponents that armored soldiers triumphed in defeating -- if the two clashed in combat, the armored soldier would either kill an archer outright or leave him to bleed to death rather than go to the wasteful effort of taking him prisoner. The ransoming of prisoners was the only way for medieval soldiers to make a quick fortune, and so they seized every available opportunity to capture opponents who could be exchanged for handsome prices. Military textbooks of the time stated: "Everywhere and on all occasions that foot soldiers march against their enemy face to face, those who march lose and those who remain standing still and holding firm win. Upon hearing that his youngest brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester had been wounded in the groin, Henry took his household guard and stood over his brother, in the front rank of the fighting, until Humphrey could be dragged to safety. The Battle of Agincourt forms a key part of Shakespeare's Henry V. Photo by Nick Ansell / POOL / AFP) Myth: During the Hundred Years War, the French cut off the first and second fingers of any. Theodore Beck also suggests that among Henry's army was "the king's physician and a little band of surgeons". It forms the backdrop to events in William Shakespeare 's play Henry V, written in 1599. Legend says that the British archers were so formidable that the ones captured by the French had their index and middle fingers cut off so that they . [37], Henry made a speech emphasising the justness of his cause, and reminding his army of previous great defeats the kings of England had inflicted on the French. Many people who have seen the film question whether giving the finger was done around the time of the Titanic disaster, or was it a more recent gesture invented by some defiant seventh-grader. The Hundred Years' War. The Battle of Agincourt (/dnkr(t)/ AJ-in-kor(t);[a] French: Azincourt [azku]) was an English victory in the Hundred Years' War. [59], The field of battle was arguably the most significant factor in deciding the outcome. Barker, Sumption and Rogers all wrote that the English probably had 6,000 men, these being 5,000 archers and 9001,000 men-at-arms. King Charles VI of France did not command the French army as he suffered from psychotic illnesses and associated mental incapacity. Soon after the battle started, it had thousands of English and French soldiers and horses running through it. [48] On account of the lack of space, the French drew up a third battle, the rearguard, which was on horseback and mainly comprised the varlets mounted on the horses belonging to the men fighting on foot ahead. The Burgundians seized on the opportunity and within 10 days of the battle had mustered their armies and marched on Paris. This head-lowered position restricted their breathing and their vision. [93] Among them were 90120 great lords and bannerets killed, including[95] three dukes (Alenon, Bar and Brabant), nine counts (Blmont, Dreux, Fauquembergue, Grandpr, Marle, Nevers, Roucy, Vaucourt, Vaudmont) and one viscount (Puisaye), also an archbishop. Although an audience vote was "too close to call", Henry was unanimously found guilty by the court on the basis of "evolving standards of civil society".[136][137][138]. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore be incapable of fighting in the future. Osprey Publishing. It was a disastrous attempt. Despite the numerical disadvantage, the battle ended in an overwhelming victory for the English. "[102], Estimates of the number of prisoners vary between 700 and 2,200, amongst them the dukes of Orlans and Bourbon, the counts of Eu, Vendme, Richemont (brother of the Duke of Brittany and stepbrother of Henry V) and Harcourt, and marshal Jean Le Maingre.[12]. Thepostalleges that the Frenchhad planned to cut offthe middle fingers ofall captured English soldiers,to inhibit them fromdrawingtheir longbowsin futurebattles. The deep, soft mud particularly favoured the English force because, once knocked to the ground, the heavily armoured French knights had a hard time getting back up to fight in the mle. [93] In all, around 6,000 of their fighting men lay dead on the ground. On October 25, 1415, during the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) between England and France, Henry V (1386-1422), the young king of England, led his forces to victory at the Battle of .