The main characters are well developed and believable. Their armies contain more archers than knights. The English accept the new reality of war grudgingly. The French hate all English archers and kill them brutally given the chance. Readers wanting to explore the background to the battle of Agincourt will find Juliet Barker’s website useful: .uk. Cornwell captures the uneasiness of that time well. The novel is the story of the archers who helped win a battle that has entered legend, but in truth is a tale, as Sir John Keegan says, ‘of slaughter-yard behaviour and outright atrocity’. What happened at Soissons shocked all Christendom, but in the following year, on the feast day of Crispin and Crispinian, Hook finds himself in that small army trapped at Azincourt. He believed he could evade that army, but the march, like the siege, went disastrously wrong and the English were trapped and so forced to fight against an enemy that outnumbered them six to one.Īzincourt is the tale of Nicholas Hook, an archer, who begins the novel by joining the garrison of Soissons, a city whose patron saints were Crispin and Crispinian. The stock book description follows: Agincourt is classic Cornwell. Azincourt, the novel coming soon, tells the story of that small army how it embarked from England confident of victory, but was beaten down and horribly weakened by the stubborn French defence of Harfleur.īy the end of that siege common-sense dictated that the army sail for home, but Henry V was stubbornly convinced that God was on his side and insisted on marching from Harfleur to Calais to prove that he could defy the great French army that was gathering to crush him. Unmarked hardcover in unclipped jacket now protected by archival jacket.

Agincourt (Azincourt in French) is one of the most famous battles ever fought the victory of a small, despised, sick and hungry army over an enemy that massively outnumbered it.

Agincourt book cornwell