Agincourt

this was particularly excellent historical novel. it had the usual page turning action. it had an illumination of the importance of the longbow in the history of the era covered and a colorful etching of the life and folk of that historical time. bravo!

I've been a reader of Cornwell for some time and, like his more famous Richard Sharpe novels, again Cornwell delivers a wonderfully written work of historical fiction. It's a page-turner and a fun read.

I have read the Archer series and thought they were very good and that was the reason I bought this book. Agincourt did not draw me in as the Archer did. It reads as if it was written for a younger audience.

Well told story of the battle of Agincourt. If you have ever read Shakespeare's Henry V, you will enjoy this novel. Or if you like Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth you will also likely enjoy this great book.

If you want to know every moment of the battle for France this is the perfect book. The storyline seemed to be just enough to make it worth reading to the end but I found that painful. It would be five stars to the right person but I gave it two because it was so repetitive.

Agincourt is a good historical novel in the best of Cornwell's "Richard Sharpe" traditions

It informs you of what's happening, and if one peruses it, it gives the reader a sense of BEING there.

One can learn much about archery and weaponry of the 15th century in this novel, but perhaps the chief learning will be the many and varied ways that persons could be killed in that long-ago time. Half of the book is given over to battle blood, torture, and horrors of mayhem, all of which I imagine happened in reality. However, whether you want to read of such things, resting on a very romantic plot of tough archer weds former forced nun, is up to you. It is a quick read, as most of Cornwell's work tends to be, but I found it eminently and just as quickly a forgettable one.

After reading three Cornwell novels I'm pretty much done. The research and plot is great but the characters and milieu is the same: stock tough guy and deep scorn for religion. Having been a soldier I know that tough guys are very round characters and some of them are actually tougher and noble because they believe in God. If you're into atheistic or agnostic historical adventures read this, but I couldn't get through this one.

Agincourt is better than most of Bernard Cornwell's historical fiction that I have previously read. The historical characters ring true and the account of the battle has to rate as accurate a description as if CNN had been there to cover it. The only reason I did not give it 5 stars is its obsession with scenes of rape, some fictional and some historical. These scenes did nothing to advance the plot.

It started out with a very brutal episode and from that it seemed the story would go on in the same viene. i knew it would be back in the ancient times but didn't realise it would be that far back in history. As I recall it was in the 1500's - very basic and brutal. I couldn't see where there would be a good story line.

Outstanding read in the same vein as the Grail series. It follows an archer through the trials and tribulations leading up to and culminating in the Battle of Agincourt. The original Band of Brothers in all their gore and glory. Highly recommended.

Excellent book. Received in 2 days in perfect condition. I would recomend this book for any British History buff.

Purcchasing from the store.com is a real pleasure!

T/Sgt. Lon Mcdougle
USAF Retired

The history behind given during the time was accuracy but the story itself so so boring. Battle, battle and more battle. You care nothing for the any of the characters from the king to the lowest servant. Not worth the read

And if you took a poleaxe to it, it would surely gush blood. When will I learn to read the bad reviews to find out just how lousy a book is before purchasing? Of course I notice that most of the reviewers are men, and I'm sure I have different tastes that most male readers. I can handle some violence, but this was like reading the same gory battle scene over and over and over! I nearly wore out my kindle skipping page after redundant page. What a waste of time and money!

Don't waste your time or money. Absolutely horrible book. The author has no idea what 14th century England was really like. A lot of the vocabulary used was not used back then. But he is one of those authors that pumps out books every year. He doesn't care about the quality. It's all about a quick buck for him

So... I had high hopes for this one. I think I also hold Cornwell to a higher standard than most authors. So even though I'm only giving it three stars, this is probably a better account of a historical English battle in the Hundred Years War than most you will find. I just can't give it the same number of stars as my least favorite book in The Saxon Stories (if there even is such a thing).

For starters, our hero Nicholas Hook is kind of a bland guy (but one that actually lived! Which is pretty cool) with one exception, he hears the voices of saints. Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian to be exact. This felt a little off to me, but the connection is made clear in the end and it was a deviation from Cornwell's norm. It was an interesting plot device and he pulled it off without making Hook seem utterly crazy.

I did appreciate Melisande, who is a nun Hook saves from being raped at the sack of Soissons. Generally speaking, there aren't a lot of strong female characters to be found in Cornwell's writing but Melisande was a good of example of one he's written well. She was feminine while still being strong and brave. SirJohn Cornweaille was also a fantastic character and endlessly entertaining (though he talks about cabbage-farting French a lot).

The battles are all told very well and are exciting. The history in this book is about as accurate as I suspect it probably could have been (only one archer in this book was truly invented). Apparently all the others were names taken from the archives about Azincourt, and it is that level of detail that I have come to love most about Cornwell's work.

I guess what wasn't working for me is that this book is fairly long (between 400-500 pages) and there weren't many sub-plots happening. The Archer's Tale which is the first in his Holy Grail trilogy is a retelling of the Battle of Crecy (whose lopsided numbers in favor of the French were even more impressive) but it was also about Thomas finding his faith and making good on his promises to his father and God. (Unrelated sidenote- I loved the nod that was given to The Archer's Tale! Did anyone else catch it?)

This book is mostly about Nicholas Hook fighting in at Azincourt and finding redemption. There just wasn't enough else happening to support the 450 page book length. All in all a solid read if a little slow at times. I would recommend this to people interested in the Hundred Years War, Azincourt, and Cornwell fans.

This is currently (Nov 29) available from the store.uk under the title "Azincourt", which is the French spelling of the town where the battle took place. It seems that this has confused quite a few of the Brit readers, and the US title will be "Agincourt". The flavor is similar to the Grail Quest series, but set in 1413-1415 rather than the 14th century, and the hero is Nick Hook rather than Thomas of Hookton: both are skilled archers, both have noble fathers but are not part of the nobility (in Hook's case the parentage is strongly suggested). The strengths of Cornwell's works are the battle scenes, and here you get the sieges of Harfleur and Soissons and of course Agincourt.

You get a good feel for the time and place--London and France--and the mercenary troops that Hook joins. There's a lot of attention to the armor of the period--almost too much attention. There are descriptions that have the donning of armor piece by piece which has the feel of Cornwell showing off his research rather than adding to the story--since it isn't Hook who is wearing the armor. Hook is an exceptionally skilled longbowman, which enables him to rise in the ranks and do more protagonizing, so to speak. We don't get too many novels about the ordinary grunts--those who might be good at their profession, but not great.

Cornwell is a very prolific writer. This is good in ways, but the danger is that sometimes in such cases novels are not always as original and creative as they could be. So in Azincourt we have a love interest, and we have some evil villains. Hook's main enemy is a lunatic priest of noble lineage, a bible-misquoting rapist. For me, this reminded me of Sgt Hakeswill of the Sharpe series who kept reappearing in the novels until, mercifully, Cornwell has him die: Hakeswill quickly began to get very tiresome indeed. If you think about the Sharpe series, what you remember best are the battles, the events and locales: the evil villians--especially Hakeswill--are easily forgotten. That might suggest that in a good historical novel with lots of battles, such as the Sharpe series or Azincourt, you don't need an evil villain in the story to make it interesting. You need to avoid becoming formulaic. Cornwell does not, thank goodness, churn out a new novel every month like some romance writers who epitomize formulaic writing. I didn't see any suggestion that the adventures of Nick Hook will be continued, although if it does continue, and Hook is part of a mercenary troop then Cornwell might be able to take us into less familiar territory--what was going on post-Agincourt? So you get here a mixture of some new characters plus some of Cornwell's previous formulas, and on balance, the novel is one of his best works.

And the French still don't get it. That is one theme of this masterfully told and meticulously researched historical novel of the blood and guts endemic to medieval warfare. Briefly, Henry V of England invades France with bubbling overconfidence to claim what he believes to be his rightful kingdom. Along the way in must first deal with the pesky French and debilitating disease. Since this is a novel, the main character has to be, and is, a heroic, strong, resourceful, handsome, and deadly accurate archer. Fortunately for King Henry and his vastly outnumbered army, the archer and friends are deployed brilliantly at the Agincourt battle field, and the woeful French, through lack of leadership and outmoded tactics, are roundly defeated to the delight of a multitude of subsequent military historians. It's almost irrelevant that his victory was pyrrhic at best.

Bernard Cornwell is a master story teller, to which anyone who has read any of his dozens of other books can attest. Our archetypical archer's story is woven seamlessly into the overall historical narrative, thereby enlivening what would potentially be a mind-numbing straight accounting. Cromwell's depth of research is apparent. Weapons and weapon deployment, battle tactics, armor, banners, clothing and other atmospheric details are described in exacting detail. Very few authors can manage large scope battle scenes with such apparent ease, especially when a good portion of the book consists of scenes of incredible savagery and brutality. If anything, the amount of such descriptive material overwhelms, but it also sears in your consciousness the intensity of period tactics, which inevitably degrade to hand- to- hand, eye gouging fighting (after the archers have done their business of course).

Agincourt is recommended for Cromwell fans as another example of his storytelling skills and for those interested in learning more about this pivotal battle.

Recently, my dad asked if the first Bernard Cornwell novel he lent me in high school (Sharpe’s Eagle) set me on the path to majoring in history. It probably did.

Cornwell is a master of historical fiction. Specifically, he’s a master of historical military fiction. His Richard Sharpe series follows a British solider through the Napoleonic Wars. I remember being totally enthralled by those books, to the point that I packed six of them to take on a week-long vacation, and read all six with time to spare. After I finished Sharpe’s Devil, the last in the series, I went to the library and borrowed a biography of Thomas Cochrane, a Royal Navy captain who figured prominently in the conclusion. That was the first non-fiction book I read for fun.

So I’m probably not in a position to review any of Cornwell’s other books objectively. But here goes.

Agincourt is Cornwell’s retelling of Britain’s most famous victory during the Hundred Years’ War. The battle saw the army of Henry V overcome a numerically superior French force (which may have been several times as large) on a muddy field in 1415, largely due to the prowess of Henry’s longbowmen.
Nick Hook, the novel’s protagonist, is one of those bowmen. He’s not all that likeable at the story’s outset in 1414, when he’s just a forester trying to kill a man in the name of a generations-old family feud. But after failing to save a girl from rape, Hook becomes increasingly pious. And during the French sack of Soissons, he survives by following the directions of what he believes to be the voices of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, the city’s patron saints. Eventually, Hook’s new self-belief—and skill with a bow—earn him a place in Henry’s army.

For all his growth, though, Hook doesn’t measure up to Richard Sharpe (who’s basically James Bond with a musket—less dynamic than Hook, but more fun to read). Agincourt’s battles are the equal of anything in the Sharpe series, however, and Cornwell weaves in frank appraisals of late-medieval Christianity and the general brutality of the age. Overall, the book struck me as something of a guilty pleasure; I imagine Cornwell’s audience is largely male. But you could do far worse if you want to learn how to write a stirring fight scene.

I have always wanted to read a novel by Bernard Cornwell and finally picked the novel, Agincourt. This is the first of many Bernard Cornwell novels that I plan to read. His writing style, colorful characters, eye for detail, eye for battle details, and engaging dialogue pulls the reader into a vivid retelling of the famous Battle of Agincourt in France. The author tells the tale of Nicholas Hook, an archer in King Henry V's army and the vision of Henry V. Hook's tale is one of a common man who is enscripted into military service in spite of a questionable background and many personal demons. Through the ensuing battles (Soissons and Harfleur)that led to the famous battle near Agincourt and the famous battle, Hook matures and faces his personal challenges. The author gives us a vivid recount of Henry V's claims on the French crown and the need to assert his kingship. The two tales of these two men, one common and the other a noble adds the fiber and flesh to a historical event. I enjoyed the two sides of the kind of men who fought under the English flag. The reader also gets an insight into the braggart French nobility who assumed victory. This is more than a battle tale although the author's description of battle is the best I have ever read in 40 years of reading historical novels. Other characters like the English priest, Fr. Christopher, the Perrill brother, Sir Martin, Sir Lanferelle, Melisande, the Scarlet brothers, William of Dale and Sir John Cornewaille come alive through the talent of Mr. Cornwell. Some were taken from history while others were flashed out secondary participants in the drama. Overall, this was an enjoyable journey through the events around the famous October battle of 1415. I fully recommend this historical novel by a master storyteller and student of human history and behavior. Bravo!

Note: I wrote the following on my blog to coincide with yesterday's anniversary of the actual battle.

Happy Saint Crispin's Day!

Normally, today was honored by the early Christian Church for the martyrdom of two brothers. However, a battle was fought 600 years ago this very day that's continues to capture the imagination of wargamers and military historians ever since--Agincourt.
To commemorate this occasion, I read Bernard Cornwell's stand-alone historical novel about the battle.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. The author's prose blends historical detail into a narrative that doesn't bore the reader with a "data dump." Cornwell excels at describing the course of a battle from the viewpoint of the troops doing the actual fighting.
In this story, the protagonist Thomas Hook follows in the wake of other Cornwell-conceived anti-heroes (Sharpe, Derfel, Thomas of Hookton and Uthred). They're all low-born, but natural warriors, who have to combat not only their external enemies, but the ones within their own ranks as well. Usually this takes the form of a rival, often paired-up with a certifiably insane priest. Of course, the Cornwellian bad-boy can't confront his lethal frenemies openly, lest he be condemned as a criminal.
But just because a story is formulaic, doesn't mean it's bad. In writing, as in science, formulas are used because they work--if followed correctly.
And Bernard Cornwell is a master formula mixer--even if his spin on Agincourt didn't include the coolest battle speech ever (I'm referring to Shakespeare's "Henry V").

Bernard Cornwell provides exceptional insights into the detail of life, surrounding the historical framework he uses to flow the narrative. I learn a great deal of history and the people, known and unknown.

I enjoy his stories because they are well told and supported by a depth of research and recognized sources. He doesn't sugarcoat the delivery - he describes in detail the fighting and dying on a medieval battlefield. He is very adept at providing important insights; for instance, I had never studied/read about Agincourt. My view was a hazy, uninformed general view that it was a well planned battle & the English were foredained to win: Mr Cornwell makes clear how close to disaster it really was.

Bernard Cornwell has written a fast-paced and historically sound novel about the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, although he has chosen to use the French "Azincourt" for his title rather than the Englsh "Agincourt". Because 2015 happens to be the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, it is likely to attract a great deal of attention to the famous battle for that reason, and we can reasonably expect some publishers to promote highly saleable distortions of what really happened at Agincourt.

I first became acquainted with Bernard Cornwell through his fine Napoleonic War novels centered on the colourful military career of English rifleman Richard Sharpe who fights in Wellington's armies, initially in India, and then through Portugal, Spain, and France to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. I found Cornwell's grasp of military history and weaponry to be quite extraordinary, his characters very engaging, and his recreation of military action to be absolutely riveting.

In "Azincourt", Bernard Cornwell follows a similar approach to the Sharpe novels by choosing a lowly English archer Nicholas Hook as his main character. Hook's deadly skill with the longbow does not protect him from the cavalier treatment and insults of upper class officers in the English army. Despite Hook's lack of social graces, Cornwell follows a settled pattern in his books by providing him with a beautiful woman as his companion throughout the Agincourt campaign. This lovely lady, whose name is Melisande, had been an unwilling novice nun in the Burgundian-occupied city of Soissons in northern France. Hook, in company with other English archer mercenaries, had been employed by the Burgundians to guard Soissons against the French king's forces. When the city is treacherously surrendered to the besieging French by senior English mercenary officer Sir Roger Pallaire shortly before the Agincourt campaign, all of the archers except Hook surrender. Hook is separated from the captured English archers, and consequently, survives the infamous massacre of these archers by the French. The brutal massacre of the English archers is an historical fact, and it is covered in exceptionally grisly detail by Cornwell. During the sacking of Soissons by the French, Hook rescues Melisande from rape by the same English officer who treacherously surrendered the city to the French for reward. Hook and Melisande escape to Calais, and travel from Calais to England where Hook finds employment as an archer with the army of King Henry V who is preparing to invade France in pursuance of his claim to the throne of France.

Bernard Cornwell's "Azincourt" novel is one of four in his treatment of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Although termed the Hundred Years War, hostilities between the British and French actually lasted for 116 years. Cornwell's other archer novels include the famous battles at Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). Cornwell's coverage of the Agincourt campaign and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 is quite remarkable for its accurate historical detail, his knowledge of medieval weaponry, and fast-moving action. The reader is placed squarely in the thick of the action at both Harfleur and Agincourt. Readers of the Sharpe novels will find that one major difference in "Azincourt", and its three companion medieval novels, is the use by Cornwell in the archer novels of much coarser language and very graphic descriptions of the terrible wounds inflicted by medieval weapons on the human body. These factors suggest to me that this book may not be suitable reading for children under the age of fifteen.

Bernard Cornwell wrote "Azincourt" in 2008, and published it in the context of newly risen controversy over the numbers on each side at Agincourt which has been recognised for six centuries as one of Britain's greatest military victories against extraordinary odds. That controversy was sparked in 2005 by academic medieval historian Professor Anne Curry of Southampton University. I feel that it is appropriate for me to say something about that controversy and the apparent attitude to the controversy taken by Cornwell in "Azincourt". Cornwell rejects Professor Curry's revisionist postmodern-style attempt to diminish one of Britain's "Grand Narratives". I believe that Bernard Cornwell's approach to the numbers involved at Agincourt/Azincourt is correct, and I will explain why I support his approach and reject that of Professor Curry as being deeply flawed.

In her revisionist "Agincourt: A new history", published in 2005, Professor Curry claimed to have exposed the famous victory of a heavily outnumbered, starving, and disease-ridden English army over a massive French army at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 as a centuries-old "myth". When launching her book, Professor Curry claimed that her researching of English and French archival records of hired mercenaries, including men-at-arms and archers, suggested to her that the English were outnumbered by a factor of only four to three rather than by at least four to one, and possibly six to one, as previously claimed by intelligent eyewitnesses to the battle and accepted by generations of military historians since 1415. There are serious problems attending Professor Curry's attempt to diminish the heroic quality of the Battle of Agincourt by reliance primarily on surviving archival evidence. First, she has to reject the evidence of intelligent eyewitnesses to the battle in both the French and English armies. This is an absurd approach that immediately destroys the validity of her argument. Secondly, her reliance on archival records ignores the fact that many French archival records from the time of Agincourt were destroyed in the French Revolution. On the other hand, a vast quantity of English records that are relevant to Agincourt still exist in British archives. Those British records show that the attendance of most of King Henry V's army in France, including the presence of England's nobility, was bought by the king. Even royal dukes signed contracts of employment (indentures) for the Agincourt campaign. Finally, with regard to French archival records, Professor Curry appears to have failed to appreciate, or perhaps wished to ignore, the historical fact that the massive French army at Agincourt was largely composed of the great nobles of France, their vassal lords, and their knights, squires, and retinues of men-at-arms. These were feudal levies of the French king. They were not mercenaries whose presence at Agincourt could be proved by documentary evidence. It is highly unlikely that these massive feudal levies would have been recorded in the surviving French archival records of hired mercenaries used by Professor Curry to create her very questionable revisionist history of Agincourt. Professor Curry produced no convincing historical evidence to support her Agincourt theory, but if she was seeking controversy, and the probability of increased book sales, she appears to have achieved her purpose.

It appeared to me that Professor Curry was another armchair academic who purported to write about military history but lacked any realistic appreciation of the dynamics of a battlefield, medieval or otherwise. I view Professor Curry as falling into this category because she fails to appreciate that the Battle of Agincourt could not have been fought, as it was observed by intelligent eyewitnesses, with her fanciful ratio of nine thousand English fighting men pitted against a French army of only twelve thousand fighting men, i.e. a ratio of 3 to 4. When measured against the topography at Agincourt, the prevailing conditions, the battle practices of English and French armies at that stage of the Hundred Years War, and the course of the Agincourt battle, Professor Curry's figures are quite simply absurd. Professor Curry is a highly qualified academic Medieval historian, but that does not necessarily mean that she is qualified to write sound military history.

The distinguished medieval historian Dr Juliet Barker published her own history of the Agincourt campaign "Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle" in 2005, and Dr Barker put her finger squarely on the deadly flaw in Professor Curry's argument for near equality of English and French numbers at Agincourt when she said of Professor Curry's suggested close ratio of English to French: "And if the differential really was as low as three to four then this makes a nonsense of the course of the battle as described by eyewitnesses and contemporaries". See "Acknowledgments" at page 366.

Ignoring the informed estimates of eyewitnesses in both armies, including the recorded account of one intelligent Burgundian man-at-arms in the French army, Jehan Waurin, Professor Curry has grossly underestimated the numbers in each of the massive French divisions or "battles", namely, the vanguard, the main body, and the rearguard. She appears to have totally forgotten or chosen to ignore several thousand French archers relegated to the rear of the French army through the arrogant foolishness of the French nobility. She appears to have totally forgotten or chosen to ignore the heavily armoured French cavalry positioned on both wings of the French divisions (or "battles") whose purpose was to attack and crush the English archers at the outset of the battle. The heavily armoured French cavalry numbered at least 1,400, but an appalling failure of leadership of the French army caused the cavalry charges from both wings to be made by only about one-third of that number. The rest of the cavalry had wandered away from the battlefield during the lengthy period of inactivity in the morning. The pitifully reduced French cavalry charges failed because of failure to keep all the cavalry in the line of battle, the surprise advance of the English army to within long bowshot of the French, the storm of English (and Welsh) arrows that broke over the greatly diminished French cavalry, and deep sucking mud on the rain drenched battlefield.

Fortunately, highly respected medieval historian and author Dr Juliet Barker proved by publishing her "Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle" that she has a far better appreciation of the dynamics of a medieval battlefield than Professor Curry. To demonstrate that Dr Barker has a sound appreciation of the Battle of Agincourt in her book, and that Bernard Cornwell has wisely followed her approach in his novel "Azincourt", it is necessary for me to mention some of the historical details.

King Henry V invaded France with just over 12,000 fighting men. Henry's first target was the massively fortified town of Harfleur at the mouth of the Seine. The gallant French defence of the town prolonged the siege and allowed an epidemic of dysentery to ravage the English army. After the surrender of Harfleur, with his army reduced to about half its original number mainly through disease and battle injuries, Henry V abandoned his original plan to march on Paris. He could have safely withdrawn his army to England from the harbour of captured Harfleur but pride, and the political imperative to show more than the capture of Harfleur for the massive financial outlay on his campaign in France, impelled Henry to march his heavily depleted army from Harfleur to the English-held port of Calais on the English Channel. This march would normally be completed in 6-7 days and involve crossing a ford near the mouth of the Somme River. Henry's purpose in marching his army across French Normandy to Calais was to provoke the French to battle on their own soil. He had to leave a substantial English garrison to defend captured Harfleur. He buried some two thousand soldiers at Harfleur who had died from battle injuries or dysentery, and sent at least two thousand wounded and/or sick soldiers back to England. On his long march to Calais, Henry had only about 900 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers. The French rose to the challenge. They blocked the ford across the Somme and stripped the country between Harfleur and Calais of any food to feed Henry's army. After a lengthy diversion eastwards along the Somme, Henry finally found an unguarded ford and crossed the river. His small army had no food and was starving as it set off on a journey of several days to Calais. The French finally brought Henry V to bay at Agincourt (Azincourt) where they blocked the path of Henry's army to safety and food at Calais. The desperate English were starving, exhausted, and many were ravaged by dysentery.

There were intelligent eyewitness chroniclers in both the English and French armies at Agincourt, and I suggest that the most reliable assessment of French numbers on the actual battlefield probably comes from the noble Burgundian man-at-arms Jehan Waurin who history records not only as a soldier in the French army but also as Lord of le Forestier, politician, chronicler, and bibliophile. I believe that Jehan Waurin's credibility as an accurate chronicler of the Battle of Agincourt is enhanced by the fact that he actually lists the number of men assigned to each division or "battle" of the French army and the two cavalry formations on the wings. For example, he lists 8,000 men-at-arms, 4,000 archers, and 1,500 crossbowmen in the vanguard; a similar number in the main body, and two heavily armoured cavalry wings numbering in total 1,400. So including supporting cavalry, we have 28,400 French fighting men in the vanguard and main divisions or "battles" without including the mounted rearguard. Without including the numbers for the French rearguard, Jehan Waurin has driven a "coach-and-four" through Professor Curry's fanciful underestimate of French numbers. On the basis of his listing of numbers in the French divisions or "battles", Dr Barker describes Jehan Waurin's claim that the French outnumbered the English by six to one as "most likely" (at page 264).

The English and French armies formed up early on the morning of 25 October 2014 with the French army blocking the road to Calais. The two armies were separated by some 1,000 yards (914 metres) of rain-drenched ploughed farmland. Confident of their overwhelming strength in numbers, and knowing that the English were exhausted and starving, the French were content to wait for the English to either attack or attempt to flee. Henry V knew that his small army was starving and that flight was not an option. As the hours passed on the morning of 25 October with no movement from the massive French army, Henry decided to advance the English line of battle to within long bowshot of the French army, and hoped to provoke the French with arrows fired into their army. An extraordinary aspect of the Battle of Agincourt, and clear evidence of the failure of leadership in the French army, was the failure of the French to attack while the English army was moving forward and at its most vulnerable when the archers were busy hammering their defensive stakes into the ground with their backs to the French. Even on the night before the battle, the great nobles of France were squabbling over who would lead the vanguard of the French attack. The experienced French military commanders, Constable d'Albret and Marshal Boucicaut, were only nominal commanders. Had either been in full command, it appears unlikely that the French would have idly watched the English advance to long bowshot. The tactic succeeded when the English archers began firing into the French army. The provocation stung the French to action. A ragged and wholly uncoordinated French attack developed.

At the point where the English finally established their forward line of battle, the forest narrowed on either side to leave open wet ploughed ground measuring only some 900-1,000 yards (823-914 metres). This figure is put forward by the distinguished British military historian Sir John Keegan in the Agincourt section of "The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme". Sir John Keegan appears to adopt Jehan Waurin's figures of 8,000 men-at-arms in both the French vanguard and main body (ibid.). Keegan writes that these numbers in each French division would produce a dense body of men-at-arms with serried ranks "some eight deep" at the point of tactical contact of the two armies (ibid.). The narrowing of the point of tactical contact of the two armies favoured the English who now faced much less risk of being flanked by French cavalry intent on attacking and crushing the English archers who were mostly positioned on the wings of the English army. The English tactic would also seriously hamper the French vanguard and main body - producing a funnel effect that compressed even more tightly the already dense French lines of battle as each division struggled in heavy plate armour through deep sucking mud to reach the English line, and leaving the French men-at-arms greatly hampered in the use of their weapons when they finally reached the English line. The primary focus of the French vanguard and main body attacks was the 900 English men-at-arms in the centre of the English army. The great lords of France were not interested in demeaning themselves by attacking lowly archers, and many in the French divisions were interested in the ransoms to be paid by captured English lords and knights. This focus on the comparatively small number of English men-at-arms in the centre of the English line of battle and the deadly fire of the English archers on the flanks of the French divisions served to compress even more tightly the French divisions at the point of tactical contact with the English line, and made it very difficult for the French at the front line to use their weapons effectively, and consequently, they were slaughtered as rank after French rank was pushed forward by the compressed mass behind it. As each of the forward French ranks fell, their bodies created a rising barrier that had to be surmounted by those in the ranks behind them. Compounding the very serious problem of compression of the French divisions was the exhaustion of the French men-at-arms when they finally reached the English line of battle. The earlier failed French cavalry charges had churned up the wet mud of the battlefield and the cavalry horses that fled from the English arrows disrupted the line of advance of the French vanguard. The armoured French men-at-arms approached the English line very slowly, dragging each armoured foot out of the deep sucking mud before they could move on. Many exhausted Frenchmen died from being trampled underfoot in the crush.

The French could not have had only one rank or even three ranks in the lines of battle of the vanguard and main body as the mass of men-at-arms on foot approached the English battle line. Such thin French lines of battle, as apparently envisaged by Professor Curry when she plucked her figure of twelve thousand for the French army out of the air, would have been heavily depleted by the English arrow storm and would have lacked the mass and momentum necessary to break through the English line of battle. Unlike Professor Curry, the Marshal of France Jean Boucicaut had the military experience to appreciate that a dense massing of French men-at-arms was necessary to survive in sufficient numbers to break through the deadly English arrow storm and attack the English men-at-arms positioned between the archers. Marshal Boucicaut's plan for the Battle of Agincourt had envisaged ranks eight deep in each French division but he was not the appointed leader of the French army at Agincourt. There was no appointed leader of the French army at Agincourt. Boucicaut could only offer advice to the French royal dukes. As a result, all attacks on the English line of battle were spontaneous, uncoordinated, and disastrous.

Why were the French defeated at Agincourt when they heavily outnumbered a much smaller English army that was starving and ravaged by disease? One answer is that the English were well led, highly motivated, highly disciplined, and equipped with the deadliest weapon on the battlefield - the longbow. As to the French army, the answer is that it totally lacked discipline, leadership, and coordination of its attacks.

Although lacking a PhD in history, I graduated in politics, history and law from the University of Queensland, and served for seven years as an army officer. My formal history studies included the military campaigns of Julius Caesar (and translating from Latin his "Commentarii de Bello Gallico"), the Napoleonic Wars, and Japanese history to 1945. The One Hundred Years War has been one of my passions for twenty years. I admire greatly Dr Barker's scholarship, and despite my own modest qualifications as a military historian, I regard her as a medieval historian who understands the realities of a medieval battlefield. If those who read Bernard Cornwell's "Azincourt" want to learn more about this famous battle, I urge them to read Dr Juliet Barker's "Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle". It is very readable and much better researched than the treatment of Agincourt by Professor Curry. In my opinion, Dr Barker's "Agincourt" is the definitive account of the Agincourt campaign at this time. It is very helpful to follow Bernard Cornwell's accounts of the siege of Harfleur and the Battle of Agincourt with maps. I also recommend the excellent short and focussed history of the Agincourt campaign written by respected military historian Dr Matthew Bennett who has been a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst since 1984. Dr Bennett is an acknowledged expert on medieval warfare. His Osprey title "Agincourt 1415: Triumph against the odds" (Campaign) is available from the store at a very modest price and it contains magnificent illustrations and very helpful maps covering the siege and capture of Harfleur, the trek by Henry V with his greatly diminished army from Harfleur to Agincourt, and the battlefield at Agincourt. I also recommend the excellent DVD docudrama "Agincourt 1415: Triumph of the Longbow" (also available from the store).

Book: Overall, I think this was excellent book. I enjoyed the literary method of showing the battle from proposed viewpoint of fictional and some historical characters. The tale does bogged down in tempo but that is the nature of war; 30 days of boredom followed by 30 minutes of sheer terror. In particular, I enjoyed the discussion of bows, tunnels (military mining), weapons, and the actual feel of the fighting from the archer, mounted knights, and men-of-arms. It helps you understand the fighting if you can visualize or look at the image of 13th century European knight. At times, it is gruesome in the description of the killing and raping in some of the sections, and the misery of being the field cold, hungry, sick, tire, and with the feeling of doom. The book takes you through all those actions and their related feelings.

Reader / Production: As it seems with most audiobooks, the readers and production are excellent. This reader makes you forget that is an older man reading even for young female and male characters. The production place introduction and ending music to signal the end of the disc. They could announce the beginning, end, and the disc number however. I enjoyed the writer's notes at the end to explain his assumptions on the event, the research he made, his references, his caveats about not being a scholar, and his literary methods.

Agincourt
I have read a lot of Bernard Cornwell’s work, including most of the terrific ‘Sharpe’ novels about the Napoleonic Wars. “Agincourt” has more excitement, better characterization and in general is Cornwell at the very top of his form.
A young fellow runs into problems at home and finds refuge by enrolling as a professional archer in a company on the way to fight in France in the later years of the 100 years war. Nick Hook matures quickly as he is enfolded in the horrors of war. Eventually, he finds himself engaged in the historic battle of Agincourt.
If anyone has captured the flow, the tactics and the horror of face to face, man to man, boot to head brutality of battle in the high Middle Ages better than Cornwell, I have yet to read it.
No novel can work well without a character that we like and can root for. Cornwell creates for our enjoyment the young archer, Nick Hook. We hope for his survival and agonize over his troubles throughout the long story. “Agincourt” is worth the time for fans of dramatic, history based fiction.

Agincourt is a stunning ride through the battle best known from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Through the eyes of archer Nicholas Hook, I was entrapped at the siege of Harfleur; I marched relentlessly, cold and hungry, across France as I was chased doggedly by the French army; I shot arrows skillfully at a legion said to be almost five times larger than mine. I experienced the worst in men and trembled as hard decisions were made about my future without my consent. After turning the last page, I was exhausted yet exhilarated, much as Hook and his lord felt after their unlikely triumph.

As the book opens, Hook is outlawed from England after striking a priest; he heads to France to try out his archery skills and ends up a fugitive in the attack on Soissons. From there, he returns to England, where Henry V assigns him to Sir John Cornewaille’s men. Under Sir John’s instruction, Hook accompanies Henry’s army back into France with the plan to use Henry’s birthright to seize the throne. Trapped at Agincourt, the vastly outnumbered English must employ their archers to lead to an improbable victory. Threaded neatly throughout is Hook’s ability to “hear” the voice of St. Crispinian in his head; Hook comes to rely on his patron to guide him in his uncertainty.

Agincourt is filled with blood, gore, and treachery, and Cornwell gives a human face to the suffering through Hook’s travails as well as those of his army. The characters are vivid, and the gusto of Sir John is particularly rousing. Cornwell has a gift for bringing the past to life, and this is without a doubt his finest work to date. I emerged broken, beaten, restored, and victorious as I closed the final page, and that is a testament to Cornwell’s skill.

Thank you to the Historical Novel Society for providing a copy of this novel for review.

I have read The Grail Quest series, The first two books of the Starbucks Chronicles, The Winter King, Stonehenge, Gallows Thief and the Saxon series. Bernard Cornwell is master of historical fiction and provides a crackling good read, as well as being a must for enthusiasts of military history and war gamers.
Cornwell tells the story of an archer in the English army, Nicholas Hook, from a common background, having fled England as an outlaw, and haunted by his failing of having rescued a Lollard girl. Sarah, who is burned to death during Henry V's mass burning of the Lollard religious dissidents.

Cornwell recounts the sieges of Harfleur and Soissons, where Nick rescues a beautiful young nun from being raped and murdered. The horror of the mass murder at Soissons of both English archers and the murder French civilians, is graphically recounted her by an author who knows how to bring the re-inaction historical atrocities to vivid life. His enmity with the evil sir Martin and the Perrill brothers, his love of the beautiful Melisande, the camaraderie with fellow archers and a kindly monk, Father Christopher are all well illustrated as are lots of action and suspense. A nuanced portrayal of Henry V and above all Nick's communication with Saint Crispinian and Saint Crispin ,w ho speak to him and guide him are central features of a crackling good read, and well studied historical recreation of the invasion of France by Henry and its finale in the Battle of Agincourt where 9 000 English archers and soldiers beat a 30 000 strong French army. Cornwell is certainly a master of historical fiction.

Bernard Cornwell has written a fast-paced and historically sound novel about the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, although he has chosen to use the French "Azincourt" for his title rather than the Englsh "Agincourt". Because 2015 happens to be the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, it is likely to attract a great deal of attention to the famous battle for that reason, and we can reasonably expect some publishers to promote highly saleable distortions of what really happened at Agincourt.

I first became acquainted with Bernard Cornwell through his fine Napoleonic War novels centered on the colourful military career of English rifleman Richard Sharpe who fights in Wellington's armies, initially in India, and then through Portugal, Spain, and France to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. I found Cornwell's grasp of military history and weaponry to be quite extraordinary, his characters very engaging, and his recreation of military action to be absolutely riveting.

In "Azincourt", Bernard Cornwell follows a similar approach to the Sharpe novels by choosing a lowly English archer Nicholas Hook as his main character. Hook's deadly skill with the longbow does not protect him from the cavalier treatment and insults of upper class officers in the English army. Despite Hook's lack of social graces, Cornwell follows a settled pattern in his books by providing him with a beautiful woman as his companion throughout the Agincourt campaign. This lovely lady, whose name is Melisande, had been an unwilling novice nun in the Burgundian-occupied city of Soissons in northern France. Hook, in company with other English archer mercenaries, had been employed by the Burgundians to guard Soissons against the French king's forces. When the city is treacherously surrendered to the besieging French by senior English mercenary officer Sir Roger Pallaire shortly before the Agincourt campaign, all of the archers except Hook surrender. Hook is separated from the captured English archers, and consequently, survives the infamous massacre of these archers by the French. The brutal massacre of the English archers is an historical fact, and it is covered in exceptionally grisly detail by Cornwell. During the sacking of Soissons by the French, Hook rescues Melisande from rape by the same English officer who treacherously surrendered the city to the French for reward. Hook and Melisande escape to Calais, and travel from Calais to England where Hook finds employment as an archer with the army of King Henry V who is preparing to invade France in pursuance of his claim to the throne of France.

Bernard Cornwell's "Azincourt" novel is one of four in his treatment of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Although termed the Hundred Years War, hostilities between the British and French actually lasted for 116 years. Cornwell's other archer novels include the famous battles at Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356). Cornwell's coverage of the Agincourt campaign and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 is quite remarkable for its accurate historical detail, his knowledge of medieval weaponry, and fast-moving action. The reader is placed squarely in the thick of the action at both Harfleur and Agincourt. Readers of the Sharpe novels will find that one major difference in "Azincourt", and its three companion medieval novels, is the use by Cornwell in the archer novels of much coarser language and very graphic descriptions of the terrible wounds inflicted by medieval weapons on the human body. These factors suggest to me that this book may not be suitable reading for children under the age of fifteen.

Bernard Cornwell wrote "Azincourt" in 2008, and published it in the context of newly risen controversy over the numbers on each side at Agincourt which has been recognised for six centuries as one of Britain's greatest military victories against extraordinary odds. That controversy was sparked in 2005 by academic medieval historian Professor Anne Curry of Southampton University. I feel that it is appropriate for me to say something about that controversy and the apparent attitude to the controversy taken by Cornwell in "Azincourt". Cornwell rejects Professor Curry's revisionist postmodern-style attempt to diminish one of Britain's "Grand Narratives". I believe that Bernard Cornwell's approach to the numbers involved at Agincourt/Azincourt is correct, and I will explain why I support his approach and reject that of Professor Curry as being deeply flawed.

In her revisionist "Agincourt: A new history", published in 2005, Professor Curry claimed to have exposed the famous victory of a heavily outnumbered, starving, and disease-ridden English army over a massive French army at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 as a centuries-old "myth". When launching her book, Professor Curry claimed that her researching of English and French archival records of hired mercenaries, including men-at-arms and archers, suggested to her that the English were outnumbered by a factor of only four to three rather than by at least four to one, and possibly six to one, as previously claimed by intelligent eyewitnesses to the battle and accepted by generations of military historians since 1415. There are serious problems attending Professor Curry's attempt to diminish the heroic quality of the Battle of Agincourt by reliance primarily on surviving archival evidence. First, she has to reject the evidence of intelligent eyewitnesses to the battle in both the French and English armies. This is an absurd approach that immediately destroys the validity of her argument. Secondly, her reliance on archival records ignores the fact that many French archival records from the time of Agincourt were destroyed in the French Revolution. On the other hand, a vast quantity of English records that are relevant to Agincourt still exist in British archives. Those British records show that the attendance of most of King Henry V's army in France, including the presence of England's nobility, was bought by the king. Even royal dukes signed contracts of employment (indentures) for the Agincourt campaign. Finally, with regard to French archival records, Professor Curry appears to have failed to appreciate, or perhaps wished to ignore, the historical fact that the massive French army at Agincourt was largely composed of the great nobles of France, their vassal lords, and their knights, squires, and retinues of men-at-arms. These were feudal levies of the French king. They were not mercenaries whose presence at Agincourt could be proved by documentary evidence. It is highly unlikely that these massive feudal levies would have been recorded in the surviving French archival records of hired mercenaries used by Professor Curry to create her very questionable revisionist history of Agincourt. Professor Curry produced no convincing historical evidence to support her Agincourt theory, but if she was seeking controversy, and the probability of increased book sales, she appears to have achieved her purpose.

It appeared to me that Professor Curry was another armchair academic who purported to write about military history but lacked any realistic appreciation of the dynamics of a battlefield, medieval or otherwise. I view Professor Curry as falling into this category because she fails to appreciate that the Battle of Agincourt could not have been fought, as it was observed by intelligent eyewitnesses, with her fanciful ratio of nine thousand English fighting men pitted against a French army of only twelve thousand fighting men, i.e. a ratio of 3 to 4. When measured against the topography at Agincourt, the prevailing conditions, the battle practices of English and French armies at that stage of the Hundred Years War, and the course of the Agincourt battle, Professor Curry's figures are quite simply absurd. Professor Curry is a highly qualified academic Medieval historian, but that does not necessarily mean that she is qualified to write sound military history.

The distinguished medieval historian Dr Juliet Barker published her own history of the Agincourt campaign "Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle" in 2005, and Dr Barker put her finger squarely on the deadly flaw in Professor Curry's argument for near equality of English and French numbers at Agincourt when she said of Professor Curry's suggested close ratio of English to French: "And if the differential really was as low as three to four then this makes a nonsense of the course of the battle as described by eyewitnesses and contemporaries". See "Acknowledgments" at page 366.

Ignoring the informed estimates of eyewitnesses in both armies, including the recorded account of one intelligent Burgundian man-at-arms in the French army, Jehan Waurin, Professor Curry has grossly underestimated the numbers in each of the massive French divisions or "battles", namely, the vanguard, the main body, and the rearguard. She appears to have totally forgotten or chosen to ignore several thousand French archers relegated to the rear of the French army through the arrogant foolishness of the French nobility. She appears to have totally forgotten or chosen to ignore the heavily armoured French cavalry positioned on both wings of the French divisions (or "battles") whose purpose was to attack and crush the English archers at the outset of the battle. The heavily armoured French cavalry numbered at least 1,400, but an appalling failure of leadership of the French army caused the cavalry charges from both wings to be made by only about one-third of that number. The rest of the cavalry had wandered away from the battlefield during the lengthy period of inactivity in the morning. The pitifully reduced French cavalry charges failed because of failure to keep all the cavalry in the line of battle, the surprise advance of the English army to within long bowshot of the French, the storm of English (and Welsh) arrows that broke over the greatly diminished French cavalry, and deep sucking mud on the rain drenched battlefield.

Fortunately, highly respected medieval historian and author Dr Juliet Barker proved by publishing her "Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle" that she has a far better appreciation of the dynamics of a medieval battlefield than Professor Curry. To demonstrate that Dr Barker has a sound appreciation of the Battle of Agincourt in her book, and that Bernard Cornwell has wisely followed her approach in his novel "Azincourt", it is necessary for me to mention some of the historical details.

King Henry V invaded France with just over 12,000 fighting men. Henry's first target was the massively fortified town of Harfleur at the mouth of the Seine. The gallant French defence of the town prolonged the siege and allowed an epidemic of dysentery to ravage the English army. After the surrender of Harfleur, with his army reduced to about half its original number mainly through disease and battle injuries, Henry V abandoned his original plan to march on Paris. He could have safely withdrawn his army to England from the harbour of captured Harfleur but pride, and the political imperative to show more than the capture of Harfleur for the massive financial outlay on his campaign in France, impelled Henry to march his heavily depleted army from Harfleur to the English-held port of Calais on the English Channel. This march would normally be completed in 6-7 days and involve crossing a ford near the mouth of the Somme River. Henry's purpose in marching his army across French Normandy to Calais was to provoke the French to battle on their own soil. He had to leave a substantial English garrison to defend captured Harfleur. He buried some two thousand soldiers at Harfleur who had died from battle injuries or dysentery, and sent at least two thousand wounded and/or sick soldiers back to England. On his long march to Calais, Henry had only about 900 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers. The French rose to the challenge. They blocked the ford across the Somme and stripped the country between Harfleur and Calais of any food to feed Henry's army. After a lengthy diversion eastwards along the Somme, Henry finally found an unguarded ford and crossed the river. His small army had no food and was starving as it set off on a journey of several days to Calais. The French finally brought Henry V to bay at Agincourt (Azincourt) where they blocked the path of Henry's army to safety and food at Calais. The desperate English were starving, exhausted, and many were ravaged by dysentery.

There were intelligent eyewitness chroniclers in both the English and French armies at Agincourt, and I suggest that the most reliable assessment of French numbers on the actual battlefield probably comes from the noble Burgundian man-at-arms Jehan Waurin who history records not only as a soldier in the French army but also as Lord of le Forestier, politician, chronicler, and bibliophile. I believe that Jehan Waurin's credibility as an accurate chronicler of the Battle of Agincourt is enhanced by the fact that he actually lists the number of men assigned to each division or "battle" of the French army and the two cavalry formations on the wings. For example, he lists 8,000 men-at-arms, 4,000 archers, and 1,500 crossbowmen in the vanguard; a similar number in the main body, and two heavily armoured cavalry wings numbering in total 1,400. So including supporting cavalry, we have 28,400 French fighting men in the vanguard and main divisions or "battles" without including the mounted rearguard. Without including the numbers for the French rearguard, Jehan Waurin has driven a "coach-and-four" through Professor Curry's fanciful underestimate of French numbers. On the basis of his listing of numbers in the French divisions or "battles", Dr Barker describes Jehan Waurin's claim that the French outnumbered the English by six to one as "most likely" (at page 264).

The English and French armies formed up early on the morning of 25 October 2014 with the French army blocking the road to Calais. The two armies were separated by some 1,000 yards (914 metres) of rain-drenched ploughed farmland. Confident of their overwhelming strength in numbers, and knowing that the English were exhausted and starving, the French were content to wait for the English to either attack or attempt to flee. Henry V knew that his small army was starving and that flight was not an option. As the hours passed on the morning of 25 October with no movement from the massive French army, Henry decided to advance the English line of battle to within long bowshot of the French army, and hoped to provoke the French with arrows fired into their army. An extraordinary aspect of the Battle of Agincourt, and clear evidence of the failure of leadership in the French army, was the failure of the French to attack while the English army was moving forward and at its most vulnerable when the archers were busy hammering their defensive stakes into the ground with their backs to the French. Even on the night before the battle, the great nobles of France were squabbling over who would lead the vanguard of the French attack. The experienced French military commanders, Constable d'Albret and Marshal Boucicaut, were only nominal commanders. Had either been in full command, it appears unlikely that the French would have idly watched the English advance to long bowshot. The tactic succeeded when the English archers began firing into the French army. The provocation stung the French to action. A ragged and wholly uncoordinated French attack developed.

At the point where the English finally established their forward line of battle, the forest narrowed on either side to leave open wet ploughed ground measuring only some 900-1,000 yards (823-914 metres). This figure is put forward by the distinguished British military historian Sir John Keegan in the Agincourt section of "The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme". Sir John Keegan appears to adopt Jehan Waurin's figures of 8,000 men-at-arms in both the French vanguard and main body (ibid.). Keegan writes that these numbers in each French division would produce a dense body of men-at-arms with serried ranks "some eight deep" at the point of tactical contact of the two armies (ibid.). The narrowing of the point of tactical contact of the two armies favoured the English who now faced much less risk of being flanked by French cavalry intent on attacking and crushing the English archers who were mostly positioned on the wings of the English army. The English tactic would also seriously hamper the French vanguard and main body - producing a funnel effect that compressed even more tightly the already dense French lines of battle as each division struggled in heavy plate armour through deep sucking mud to reach the English line, and leaving the French men-at-arms greatly hampered in the use of their weapons when they finally reached the English line. The primary focus of the French vanguard and main body attacks was the 900 English men-at-arms in the centre of the English army. The great lords of France were not interested in demeaning themselves by attacking lowly archers, and many in the French divisions were interested in the ransoms to be paid by captured English lords and knights. This focus on the comparatively small number of English men-at-arms in the centre of the English line of battle and the deadly fire of the English archers on the flanks of the French divisions served to compress even more tightly the French divisions at the point of tactical contact with the English line, and made it very difficult for the French at the front line to use their weapons effectively, and consequently, they were slaughtered as rank after French rank was pushed forward by the compressed mass behind it. As each of the forward French ranks fell, their bodies created a rising barrier that had to be surmounted by those in the ranks behind them. Compounding the very serious problem of compression of the French divisions was the exhaustion of the French men-at-arms when they finally reached the English line of battle. The earlier failed French cavalry charges had churned up the wet mud of the battlefield and the cavalry horses that fled from the English arrows disrupted the line of advance of the French vanguard. The armoured French men-at-arms approached the English line very slowly, dragging each armoured foot out of the deep sucking mud before they could move on. Many exhausted Frenchmen died from being trampled underfoot in the crush.

The French could not have had only one rank or even three ranks in the lines of battle of the vanguard and main body as the mass of men-at-arms on foot approached the English battle line. Such thin French lines of battle, as apparently envisaged by Professor Curry when she plucked her figure of twelve thousand for the French army out of the air, would have been heavily depleted by the English arrow storm and would have lacked the mass and momentum necessary to break through the English line of battle. Unlike Professor Curry, the Marshal of France Jean Boucicaut had the military experience to appreciate that a dense massing of French men-at-arms was necessary to survive in sufficient numbers to break through the deadly English arrow storm and attack the English men-at-arms positioned between the archers. Marshal Boucicaut's plan for the Battle of Agincourt had envisaged ranks eight deep in each French division but he was not the appointed leader of the French army at Agincourt. There was no appointed leader of the French army at Agincourt. Boucicaut could only offer advice to the French royal dukes. As a result, all attacks on the English line of battle were spontaneous, uncoordinated, and disastrous.

Why were the French defeated at Agincourt when they heavily outnumbered a much smaller English army that was starving and ravaged by disease? One answer is that the English were well led, highly motivated, highly disciplined, and equipped with the deadliest weapon on the battlefield - the longbow. As to the French army, the answer is that it totally lacked discipline, leadership, and coordination of its attacks.

Although lacking a PhD in history, I graduated in politics, history and law from the University of Queensland, and served for seven years as an army officer. My formal history studies included the military campaigns of Julius Caesar (and translating from Latin his "Commentarii de Bello Gallico"), the Napoleonic Wars, and Japanese history to 1945. The One Hundred Years War has been one of my passions for twenty years. I admire greatly Dr Barker's scholarship, and despite my own modest qualifications as a military historian, I regard her as a medieval historian who understands the realities of a medieval battlefield. If those who read Bernard Cornwell's "Azincourt" want to learn more about this famous battle, I urge them to read Dr Juliet Barker's "Agincourt: The King, the Campaign, the Battle". It is very readable and much better researched than the treatment of Agincourt by Professor Curry. In my opinion, Dr Barker's "Agincourt" is the definitive account of the Agincourt campaign at this time. It is very helpful to follow Bernard Cornwell's accounts of the siege of Harfleur and the Battle of Agincourt with maps. I also recommend the excellent short and focussed history of the Agincourt campaign written by respected military historian Dr Matthew Bennett who has been a senior lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst since 1984. Dr Bennett is an acknowledged expert on medieval warfare. His Osprey title "Agincourt 1415: Triumph against the odds" (Campaign) is available from the store at a very modest price and it contains magnificent illustrations and very helpful maps covering the siege and capture of Harfleur, the trek by Henry V with his greatly diminished army from Harfleur to Agincourt, and the battlefield at Agincourt. I also recommend the excellent DVD docudrama "Agincourt 1415: Triumph of the Longbow" (also available from the store).

Book: Overall, I think this was excellent book. I enjoyed the literary method of showing the battle from proposed viewpoint of fictional and some historical characters. The tale does bogged down in tempo but that is the nature of war; 30 days of boredom followed by 30 minutes of sheer terror. In particular, I enjoyed the discussion of bows, tunnels (military mining), weapons, and the actual feel of the fighting from the archer, mounted knights, and men-of-arms. It helps you understand the fighting if you can visualize or look at the image of 13th century European knight. At times, it is gruesome in the description of the killing and raping in some of the sections, and the misery of being the field cold, hungry, sick, tire, and with the feeling of doom. The book takes you through all those actions and their related feelings.

Reader / Production: As it seems with most audiobooks, the readers and production are excellent. This reader makes you forget that is an older man reading even for young female and male characters. The production place introduction and ending music to signal the end of the disc. They could announce the beginning, end, and the disc number however. I enjoyed the writer's notes at the end to explain his assumptions on the event, the research he made, his references, his caveats about not being a scholar, and his literary methods.

Agincourt
I have read a lot of Bernard Cornwell’s work, including most of the terrific ‘Sharpe’ novels about the Napoleonic Wars. “Agincourt” has more excitement, better characterization and in general is Cornwell at the very top of his form.
A young fellow runs into problems at home and finds refuge by enrolling as a professional archer in a company on the way to fight in France in the later years of the 100 years war. Nick Hook matures quickly as he is enfolded in the horrors of war. Eventually, he finds himself engaged in the historic battle of Agincourt.
If anyone has captured the flow, the tactics and the horror of face to face, man to man, boot to head brutality of battle in the high Middle Ages better than Cornwell, I have yet to read it.
No novel can work well without a character that we like and can root for. Cornwell creates for our enjoyment the young archer, Nick Hook. We hope for his survival and agonize over his troubles throughout the long story. “Agincourt” is worth the time for fans of dramatic, history based fiction.

Agincourt is a stunning ride through the battle best known from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Through the eyes of archer Nicholas Hook, I was entrapped at the siege of Harfleur; I marched relentlessly, cold and hungry, across France as I was chased doggedly by the French army; I shot arrows skillfully at a legion said to be almost five times larger than mine. I experienced the worst in men and trembled as hard decisions were made about my future without my consent. After turning the last page, I was exhausted yet exhilarated, much as Hook and his lord felt after their unlikely triumph.

As the book opens, Hook is outlawed from England after striking a priest; he heads to France to try out his archery skills and ends up a fugitive in the attack on Soissons. From there, he returns to England, where Henry V assigns him to Sir John Cornewaille’s men. Under Sir John’s instruction, Hook accompanies Henry’s army back into France with the plan to use Henry’s birthright to seize the throne. Trapped at Agincourt, the vastly outnumbered English must employ their archers to lead to an improbable victory. Threaded neatly throughout is Hook’s ability to “hear” the voice of St. Crispinian in his head; Hook comes to rely on his patron to guide him in his uncertainty.

Agincourt is filled with blood, gore, and treachery, and Cornwell gives a human face to the suffering through Hook’s travails as well as those of his army. The characters are vivid, and the gusto of Sir John is particularly rousing. Cornwell has a gift for bringing the past to life, and this is without a doubt his finest work to date. I emerged broken, beaten, restored, and victorious as I closed the final page, and that is a testament to Cornwell’s skill.

Thank you to the Historical Novel Society for providing a copy of this novel for review.

I have read The Grail Quest series, The first two books of the Starbucks Chronicles, The Winter King, Stonehenge, Gallows Thief and the Saxon series. Bernard Cornwell is master of historical fiction and provides a crackling good read, as well as being a must for enthusiasts of military history and war gamers.
Cornwell tells the story of an archer in the English army, Nicholas Hook, from a common background, having fled England as an outlaw, and haunted by his failing of having rescued a Lollard girl. Sarah, who is burned to death during Henry V's mass burning of the Lollard religious dissidents.

Cornwell recounts the sieges of Harfleur and Soissons, where Nick rescues a beautiful young nun from being raped and murdered. The horror of the mass murder at Soissons of both English archers and the murder French civilians, is graphically recounted her by an author who knows how to bring the re-inaction historical atrocities to vivid life. His enmity with the evil sir Martin and the Perrill brothers, his love of the beautiful Melisande, the camaraderie with fellow archers and a kindly monk, Father Christopher are all well illustrated as are lots of action and suspense. A nuanced portrayal of Henry V and above all Nick's communication with Saint Crispinian and Saint Crispin ,w ho speak to him and guide him are central features of a crackling good read, and well studied historical recreation of the invasion of France by Henry and its finale in the Battle of Agincourt where 9 000 English archers and soldiers beat a 30 000 strong French army. Cornwell is certainly a master of historical fiction.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book from the very first chapter to the last. Bernard Cornwell brought his characters to life using vivid descriptions and placing them in real-life historical situations. His use of true historical data along with the fictional story of what could so easily have been the true story of a young man's life in the early 1400's helped to bring his story to life.. The young man in his story was an actual individual listed on the historical rolls as having fought at Harfleuer and at Agincourt in the army led by Henry V of England and other principalities. This, too, helped to auth this compelling story. All in all, I gave this exceptIonal book a rating of 5/5 as I cannot even imagine any way it could have been made better. Congratulations Mr. Cromwell, you have a winner.
If you are a fan of reading Historical Fiction I recommend that you read this book. If you are a fan of Historical Romaance you may or may not enjoy this book as it does have the element of romance but that is not the book's primary focus. The focus of this book is primarily the history and the story of a young man's life as it might have been during this period in history. The romantic part of his life is well done without being over-done.

Again, this is an exceptional book and I'm very happy that I found it.

Cornwell produced a good, solid story about a fictional character who ended up participating in a well known historical battle.
The characters themselves were OK if not overly deep. I did feel that the introduction of the voices of saints in the mind of the main character added an unnecessary bit of fantasy to an otherwise solid historical fiction.
The tales of the invasion of France by the English was well handled and realistic. The war was not glamorized yet it was not unnecessarily grizzly (except for the attack at Soissons). Even at the most graphic, it was all backed by well researched occurrences of the time.
If you enjoy historical war fiction, you will enjoy this book.

In Bernard Cornwell's vision of 15th-century warfare, almost everyone in it is a nasty, brutish and violent bastard. And they're also short. Nicholas Hook, the hero of "Agincourt," is a different kind of man - oh he can be nasty and brutish as they can all right, but he's also -- tall and with a touch of honor to him. Cornwell is quite matter-of-fact about violence and murder as everyone else in his story seems to be, and this is definitely a book for those who like nonstop action; preferably drenched in blood, mud and bad language.

As the title suggests, "Agincourt" takes an in-depth look at one of the best-documented and -- thanks to Shakespeare -- most famous battles in early English history. Like all good historical fiction, though, the political background and historical incidents in the novel play out through the perspective of the main character -- in this case, the fictional Nick Hook, archer extraordinaire and unlikely confidant of saints.

The action starts with the first line: "On a winter's day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder." From there, Cornwell riffs through a fast first chapter that sets up an ongoing conflict with a wicked priest and his two illegitimate sons. Nick gets sent to London as an archer, where he's obliged to help hang heretics, and ends up in France, to help King Henry V pursue his claim to the French throne.

It's a long and bloody way to Agincourt, beginning with the fall of Soissons, whose aftermath is one of the nastiest -- because true -- tales of betrayal and cruelty in the annals of military warfare. Nick escapes the fate of his fellow archers and in the process saves a French novice from rape. He also escapes the town, with the intercession of two saints, Crispin and Crispinian, the patrons of Soissons, whose voices pop into his head at opportune moments throughout the book. Whether the saints approve of Nick's rescue of the girl or have taken offense at the slaughter of their town's residents, no one knows -- certainly not Nick, though he's humbly grateful for the help.

The personal aspects of Nick's story are executed in Cornwell's hallmark style: logical, well-constructed, deftly paced and brief, so that we can get back to the hacking, eyeball-gouging and blood-squirting without too much delay. All the characters are drawn with quick, vivid strokes, but largely in two dimensions. The real star of the show is the final battle, which is carried out in such painstaking detail that you can feel the liquid -- you should hope it's only sweat -- trickling down the inside of your armor.

One of Cornwell's many authentic touches is that none of the soldiers knows or cares why he's in France. They've been sent to kill Frenchmen. This is their job; plunder and ransom are what's on everyone's mind, with rape a close third. (Aside from Nick's grandmother, there's only one female character in the book who doesn't either suffer rape or narrowly escape it.) If the king says God has given him the French throne, that's good enough for these soldiers.

Cornwell's use of Saint Crispin and his brother is a clever touch, tying the fall of Soissons into a progression of military action that takes us through the siege of Harfleur and on to the final unlikely battle on Saint Crispin's Day. The tiny English force overcomes a French army four times larger -- in the process echoing Shakespeare's famous speech from "Henry V," though such stirring words are never spoken on Cornwell's bloody ground.

"God's blood, William, but this is joy!" is probably the most eloquent speech given during this version of the battle. It's spoken by Sir John Cornewaille, an actual participant in the battle, but no relation to the novel's author, though Cornwell obviously has great affection for him; Cornewaille is monomaniacal but has more true life to him than most of the other characters.

Beyond the saints' unlikely intercessions in Nick's private life, Cornwell handles religion reasonably well. Too many historical novels are written from a modern secular-humanist viewpoint, which assumes that religion is and always has been a scam and that its practitioners must be either cynical or naive, the clergy either exploiters or feckless fools. Cornwell does have an insane rapist priest, but he carefully includes a decent one as well, and on the whole, manages to show a time in which religion and its references were part of the fabric of life for the common man.

In fact, Cornwell's historical accuracy is excellent throughout, and he gracefully acknowledges his sources in an interesting "Historical Note" at the end. Agincourt isn't a glorious battle; you see every mud-clogged, blood-soaked inch of the field and smell the sweat and excrement of the archers, knights and foot soldiers who fought for those hard-won inches. But when the fighting's over, you're left with a sense of awe at what was done there, and admiration for the men who did it.

I just love good historical fiction! It brings history to life for me in a way that those boring history lessons at school never did. My favourite writers in this genre are Conn Iggulden and Bernard Cornwell, although there are many others who light up all of my lights.

There are many books about the Battle of Agincourt, but this has to rate as one of the best. That is unless you want the non-fiction, factual version of events. But who is to say what is factual? There is even much disagreement amongst the scholars of the period.

The story, as told by Cornwell, follows the life of an archer, Nick Hook. He is outlawed early in the narration for hitting a priest. The priest deserved much more than a punch in the stomach for what he did, but Hook would've been caught and hung had he meted out the correct justice.

Nick is a brilliant archer, and soon finds himself in France, in Soissons, where he witnesses some horrendous betrayal and violence, but those events lead to one positive outcome: he meets the lady who is eventually to become his wife.

I can't say much more without giving away the whole story, and I don't want to spoil it for you.

There is a lot of graphic violence in this book, but it is, I believe, the reality of that age.

The narrative was generally fast flowing, but there were occasions when there was just too much detail, and that slowed the whole story down and irritated me somewhat.

I also felt that the book could really have benefited from the inclusion of a glossary of definitions of armoury, clothing, weaponry and other terms of the age. I don't wish to interrupt my enjoyment of the story by breaking off to consult my dictionary or encyclopaedia.

This small criticism aside, this is a really great read, and I would recommend it to all fans of historical fiction and Bernard Cornwell.

Note: You may well ask, "Why the title Azincourt (in UK) rather that Agincourt?" The answer is that this is, and was, the correct spelling of the name of the nearby village which gave its name to the famous battle.

This is one of my favorite novels by Bernard Cornwell. The hero of Agincourt is Nicholas Hook, a nineteen-year-old forester who escapes punishment for trying to murder one of his family rivals by serving as an archer in the English army occupying the French city of Soissons. Due to the treachery of an English knight, Nick gets caught up in the French massacre of Soissons, where he saves a nun named Melisande from being raped and starts hearing the voices of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian, the town's patron saints.

After the two saints help Nick and Melisande escape, Nick learns that Melisande is the daughter of a powerful French knight nicknamed the Lord of Hell, who is not too happy she's taken up with Nick. Soon, Nick and Melisande end up in the army of Henry V at the siege of Harfleur in Normandy, but amid Henry's forces, Nick encounters his old family rivals, who may be even more of a threat than the French. The novel culminates at Agincourt, where Nick must face all of his enemies, including the Lord of Hell and a French army larger and more powerful than Nick ever could have imagined.

The novel is classic Cornwell, filled with memorable characters, lots of tension, and thrilling scenes that lead up to the centerpiece battle at Agincourt. Conwell's gift is making the reader feel like they've lived through this famous battle. But he does so much more. He makes the reader genuinely concerned for his heroes as he places them in one dangerous situation after another, all at the mercy of a host of villains that will leave you longing for the moment they meet their bitter end. The voices of Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian add a hint of a fantasy to what is otherwise pure historical fiction, but I think the novel is better for it. If you like medieval historical fiction, odds are you'll love Agincourt.

Agincourt is another action-packed novel from Bernard Cornwell. It is about Nicholas Hook, an English archer who joins Henry V's war against the French, culminating in the legendary battle in 1415. On one hand, I enjoyed the novel as a rousing adventure, while on the other hand I feel slightly conned because it is so similar to The Archer's Tale. Normally, I do not mind that Cornwell's heroes are virtually identical: Sharpe, Derfel, Thomas of Hookton, Uhtred, and now Nicholas Hook are all natural warriors who eventually lead men into battle despite their low birth. Usually, the historical details are enough to distinguish the novels. The time period in Agincourt, however, is a lot like the time period in The Archer's Tale--the difference is less than 100 years. Both Thomas and Nicholas are archers, have murdered relatives, rescue young women from rape who turn out to be the daughters of enemies, and have religious quests. Even their names are alike. While I am glad that Cornwell decided to write about one of history's famous battles, he could have tried a different tact. His main character could have been a lord, woman, man-of-arms, squire, or camp follower. Anything but a lowborn warrior who excels because he is good at killing. At this point, I think that Cornwell needs to try something new.

Nicholas Hook is an English archer. He is a very good archer. In the 15th century, the English longbow was the leading edge military technology. Previously, knights in armor were the greatest form of military might. However, it was extremely expensive to outfit and train a knight. So only a few wealthy warriors became knights. In contrast, it was much less expensive to train archers.

Due to a family feud, Nick is declared outlaw. He joins a mercenary archer troop and goes to war in France. There he survives the massacre of the English by the French at the battle of Soissons.

When he returns to England he joins Sir John Cornewaille's company. Sir John gives Nicholas a more complete warrior's training. Sir John's company then joins King Henry V to invade France. There they lay siege to the castle at Harfleur. King Henry believes that he is the rightful king of France. He wants to have a great battle with the French so that he can take possession of the the French throne. After the fall of Harfleur, Henry marches through France toward Calais. The two armies meet at Agincourt.

The battle of Agincourt is considered one of the pivotal battles between England and France. The English army of about 6,000 challenged a French army of about 30,000. The French army consisted of mostly knights and men-at-arms, while the English had more than 4,000 archers. The English army defeats the French.

Cornwall's novel follows Nicholas Hood's adventures as an archer in the 15th century. Cornwell realistically describes the horrors and depredations of life in a medieval military campaign. He describes the violence of the battles, and filth of life in those old days.

I liked this book. Cornwall stays close to the actual historic events of those times. The plot lines of Nicholas's family feud, and his relationship with Melisande are believable. Sometimes, novels based on historical events can be dry. In my opinion, authors can try to impress the reader with the depth of their research. Cornwell avoids this and has created an enjoyable historical novel.

A nice touch was the nod to Shakespeare that Cornwell includes in this novel. He has King Henry visit the archer's camp in disguise to discuss the imminent battle. This scene also is in Shakespeare's play "Henry V".

This is a fine book. My impression is that Cornwell decided to revisit the medieval archer theme he'd first used in his Thomas of Hookton series. Here, he's got a buildup to a more historic battle, no hokey Grail theme to embroider, and a better hero in Nicholas Hook. I'm not bashing Thomas, but he never grabbed me the way Hook does - the way Sharpe or Uhtred did.

Cornwell writes his heroes one of two ways. They may be up from the gutter (Sharpe, the best of them), men who succeed against all odds and who remain true to their own code, with a certain underlying goodness but a willingness to stick it in and twist it. Or they may be men who come from a certain (often shaky) position who have fallen on hard times (Uhtred or Nathaniel Starbuck.) Hookton was more the latter, but Hook is the former. Orphaned by a longstanding feud, he grows up a lean and tough forester. When he's outlawed, his skill with a bow helps him survive.

Cornwell doesn't have a whole series in which to give Hook a more gradual rise, so it's a bit fast - one moment he's a fugitive, the next he's his unit's sole survivor of a horrible defeat and massacre at Soissons, the next he's the new fair-haired boy of King Henry V's favorite warrior. Sir John Cornewaille is one of Cornwell's quintessential characters, profane, tough-talking, entertaining, an invincible tournament champion, only slightly mad for war, loyal to his men and someone those like Hook would follow into the gates of hell.

The English, engaged in perennial warfare in the north of France, invade once more as Henry asserts his right to the French throne. Their initial sally against the port of Harfleur becomes a debilitating siege where the English die from disease and can't finish its stubborn French defenders. They ought to retreat to England, but Henry can't admit his expensive expedition has been a failure, and so decides to march across France to Calais. Lurking not far away is an enormous and growing French force that can't wait to expel the hated invaders while seizing its king and highest nobles for ransom. When they finally meet at Agincourt, the French outnumber the English by at least five to one, with hordes of Europe's finest and best armed knights among them. The English have a single wild card: their longbowmen, unique to England and thousands strong.

Here's yet one more historic battle you can learn about through a Cornwell novel. What better way is there to learn about Waterloo, Trafalgar, Antietam, Bull Run or Crecy? As always, his period military detail is superb. No one does it better than he. He finds enough new archery detail to keep himself and us gentle readers engrossed even if we'd read the earlier series. I learned all about the bodkin, the heavy armor-smashing arrowhead that fits Nick Hook like a .44 Magnum fits Dirty Harry. The Harfleur siege has a realistic feel. Unreliable early artillery blows up. Cannons make only a few shots a day between reloads. They damage city walls so slowly defenders can often make repairs overnight. Diseased animal corpses are hurled out of the city, spreading stink and disease among the attackers.

Cornwell also gets the balance just right between these wars' brutality and the medieval chivalry around the margins. Hook's nemesis (he has several) includes a fearsome but elegant French lord, whose illegitimate but (of course) beautiful daughter Hook rescues at Soissons and then (of course) takes up with. You're never sure if he's going to wave a handkerchief at someone or cut his head off. He's savage on the battlefield and religious off it. He's sired many bastards but seems solicitous of their well-being, and all these contradictions make for a great characterization.

Cornwell naturally can't resist going after the clergy. In the Hookton series, the religious angle was the Grail. Here, it's the certitude of both sides that God is on their side.

Here the main foil is the hideous Sir Martin, a priest and murdering rapist. Other priests are portrayed in passing as cowards, torturers, greedy careerists, toadies to the rich, and so on. There's the obligatory jolly friar, Father Christopher, cheerily cynical, a lover of feasting and girls. Cornwell isn't all negative; Henry is merciful to the vanquished in part from his religion. Some minor characters are allowed sincerity of prayer. Hook has his brushes with the divine, hearing saints' voices during moments of trial. His inner musings are less tedious than were Thomas's; as the plot doesn't center on religion, Cornwell can relegate it to a secondary role, and doesn't have to stretch it out for three books. I think it works better this way.

This is one of Bernard Cornwell's best offerings. I will concede that I don't read his Sharpe series nor his Starbuck series (I just don't care for those periods of history), but I enjoy all his other works & this is among his best. Here is the tale of Azincourt (the word may have been anglicized to Agincourt, but the place is Azincourt), the story that Shakespeare popularized in Henry V. Cornwell sticks almost entirely to historical fact in this tale, with a few concessions made in the historical note. But this tale is a strong historical telling through the eyes of fictional characters. The maps included in this are much better than in some of Cornwell's previous offerings.

Cornwell tells the tale of Nick Hook, a man with personal demons & enemies that are always near. Hook, due to a failed attempt at murder, is exiled & an archer in the English army. He uses the skill that he honed his entire life to use the English longbow with deadly accuracy. On his first journey to France, he saves a beautiful young woman during the vicious attack on Soissons & the two travel back to England. Defying punishment for returning, Nick is placed under a great Lord of England & meets the King.

Traveling to France with Henry to claim what Henry believes is his rightful crown, Nick watches the historical battles & sieges that have now become legend. With the assistance of 2 saints who speak to Nick, he becomes a leader of archers & is on the front lines of the battle at Azincourt, one of the greatest military accomplishments in history. Cornwell's ability to develop characters through whom we see the story unfold is at its best here. Nick is a real person, a man with fears & hopes. His struggle amongst the muck and mire of the battlefield in Azincourt is told with overwhelming grit & gore; Cornwell pulls no punches in telling of the horrors of battle in the middle ages.

For fans of Cornwell, homage is paid to archer Thomas of Hookton from Cornwell's Grail Quest Trilogy (The Archer's Tale,Vagabond &Heretic). I highly recommend that Trilogy, from the same period of time as this work, for those that enjoy this. I would also, in the spirit of this work, highly recommend Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles (The Last Kingdom,The Pale Horseman,Lords of the North &Sword Song, a series not yet complete & I eagerly await Vol. 5) & his Arthur Series.

I suggest a quick read of the historical note at the end of the book BEFORE you read this as it will provide setting & circumstances which led to the battles. Cornwell notes 3 historical works about Azincourt & I plan to read each; they are 'Agincourt: A New History' by Anne Curry, 'The Face of Battle' by John Keegan & the work that Cornwell lauds, Agincourt by Juliet Barker.

Enjoy!

What made the experience of listening to Agincourt the most enjoyable?

The vivid narration and descriptions by the author and Charles Keating the narrator. This story really came to life as an actual piece of history. My first thought on hearing this was

What other book might you compare Agincourt to and why?

I have never read a book this graphic before, so can't compare it with a book. It's very similar to the movies like 300 or Troy, and the tv show Spartacus.

What about Charles Keating’s performance did you like?

His characterizations of Sir Martin, (weasly villain) and Sir John Cornwell, (brave hero).

If you could rename Agincourt, what would you call it?

Battle Ready!

Any additional comments?

This is a well rounded story, a love story with Nick and Melisande, a soldier's story of ancient archers and a history of Henry V's greatest battle.

England, 1414. Nicholas Hook is a forester and archer involved in a bitter feud with a rival family, the Perrils. The feud eventually sees Hook declared an outlaw, and he flees to France to fight as a mercenary. He is at Soissons when the French retake the city from the Burgundians and brutally sack it in such a violent manner that all of Europe is shocked. Back in England, King Henry V means to pursue his claim to the French throne. Using Soissons as a demonstration of French brutality to inflame his troops (now including Hook), he embarks on the siege of Harfleur. But the French refuse to give battle, forcing Henry to march up the coast...and a confrontation with the vastly larger French army at wooded vale called Azincourt.

Azincourt (Agincourt is the English rendition of the name) is a historical novel depicting the epic Battle of Agincourt, regarded as an important turning point in the Hundred Years' War and the development of medieval warfare, with the supremacy of the English longbow confirmed (though, arguably, battles such as Crecy established this many years earlier). Surprisingly, it's the first English-language depiction of the battle in a novel in a century.

Bernard Cornwell is the go-to guy if you want rousing and entertaining military history. His works stretch from the fun Sharpe series to the far darker, deeper and more compelling Warlord Chronicles trilogy (his excellent take on the Arthurian legend). Azincourt, a stand-alone, falls somewhere between the two extremes.

The book is well-researched, and in an afterword Cornwell acknowledges some problems with clashing historical accounts of the battle, including recent suggestions that the numbers of British and French troops at the battle were much closer to parity than previously thought. In the end, Cornwell has elected to use the 'classic' figures of 9,000 British (mostly archers) versus 30,000 French to give the battle the lopsided feel that so inspired Shakespeare. The battle itself takes up the last quarter of the novel, with Cornwell also paying a lot of attention to the preceding campaign (the frustrating siege of Harfleur is described in some detail, as well as Henry's raising of the army and the battle between Burgundy and France the preceding year over Soissons). From a military perspective, the action is compelling and described vividly. Cornwell also sprinkles in some nice period detail, such as the fact that the Welshmen in the army constantly grumbled about being called 'English', as they had been fighting the English only a few years earlier.

Characterisation is reasonable, with Nicholas Hook being an interesting protagonist, and somewhat shadier than a lot of Cornwell's heroic protagonists. Where the book stumbles a bit is that Nicholas starts experiencing religious visions a short way into the book and becomes convinced that God is talking to him through visions of Saint Crispin and Crispinian. Whilst there are hints that this might be just Hook using these visions as a psychological took to galvanize him into action, generally the visions are accepted at face value (even by other characters that Hook confides in) and are used to get Hook out of some scrapes and dangerous situations. They verge on deus ex machina territory and reduce the tension of some parts of the novel, which is a shame.

Other characters, such as the flamboyant and indefatigable Sir John Cornewaille and the French lord Lanferelle, are also excellently characterised. The sole female character of note, Melisande, is a bit more cliched though. Henry V himself also shows up several times and Cornwell depicts him as a religious man who holds that God has a plan for him he must follow whilst remaining morally superior to his enemies (in particular, Henry hangs anyone suspected of raping a nun or looting churches). This does make the infamous incident during the battle when Henry orders the prisoners executed somewhat puzzling, but then historians themselves have argued over that decision for six centuries.

Overall, Azincourt (****) is an enjoyable and solid historical adventure, its fidelity to the historical record somewhat dented by the bringing in of religious visions as an artificial plot device to drive the story forward at key moments when perhaps it wasn't necessary. But for readable, page-turning historical adventure, Cornwell delivers the goods once again. The book is out now in the UK and USA.

Aside from the lead-up (the first quarter or so of the book) this whole book is the story of the seminal battle of Agincourt. Having read a lot of political and military historical fiction, I'd have to say this book differs a bit from the norm. The defining characteristic of Agincourt vis-a-vis other medieval battle-specific books is that he takes, for lack of a better phrase, a "blue collar" approach to the narrative. That is, there are very few knights, kings, courtly manners, fancy uniforms, and all the other stuff that typically goes into a book of the period. The main character in Agincourt is from the bottom of the barrel - a forester who gets declared an outlaw, and takes military service to get out of a hanging. Most of his close colleagues throughout the book are similarly those without power, money, land, prospects, or much hope for the future. This provides an interesting perspective, since the grunts see a different war than do nobles. To the grunts, it's all about violence, mud, blood, gore, diseases, plundering, the occasional rape, doing what you're ordered, and trying to survive. It is fascinating to get a look from ground-level into one of the seminal battles of western history. Of course, with Agincourt, the really fascinating question is how did an English army outnumbered at least 5 to 1 manage to win the battle of Agincourt? This book explains it in great detail. Worthwhile reading.

Was there a bit more detail than required? An extra 50 or 75 pages on battle dress and weapons types the omission of which wouldn't greatly have impacted the story but made it a breezier read? Yes. A few sections were slow. But on the whole, it was a well-crafted book that takes you right onto the field, in all its violent, pre-modern splendor.

Recommended reading, and I am now on to a bunch more of the author's works.

Having never read a book by Bernard Cornwell before, I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up Agincourt. Suffice it to say that I was blown away. Agincourt is a powerful historical novel with a moving plot, fascinating lead characters, and a thrilling final battle scene that is among the best war fiction I've read.

Agincourt is history from the bottom up, focusing on a young archer named Nicholas Hook. When Hook attempts to murder a man with whom his family has had generations of blood-feud, he finds himself exiled from England, serving in the defense of Soissons in the Hundred Years' War. After Soissons falls, Hook rescues a young nun from rape and witnesses the torture and butchery of his fellow archers at the hands of the French. With the nun, Melisande, in tow, he escapes to Calais and returns to England. In England, Hook is employed by Sir John Cornewaille, a nobleman, tournament champion, and close associate of King Henry V. Still on the run from his enemies, Hook finds himself in Henry's invasion army, laying siege to the Norman city of Harfleur, and, finally, among the archers at the Battle of Agincourt.

Cornwell writes with vigor and the battle scenes--Soisson, Harfleur, Agincourt, and many skirmishes and tussles in between--are thrilling and horrifying in equal measure. He's really done his homework and it shows in his detailed descriptions of medieval battlefield brutality. Cornwell's characters are also vivid. Sir John Cornewaille in particular is well-drawn and entertaining. And Hook's story, his romance with Melisande, and his feud with the Perrill brothers and their insidious priest father, is tense and its resolution suspenseful.

I had a few problems with the book. Cornwall isn't the best writer--he falls back on cliche and clumsy dialogue tags entirely too often--and the chief villain, the rapacious, hypocritical priest Sir Martin, is the most tired medieval cliche available. In fact, it is clear all the way through that Cornwell doesn't like Christians at all--he even puts modern pantheistic ideas into the mouth of the one normal priest character. But Cornwell's story and the action are so strong that they easily outweighed my misgivings about his style. I don't know if his other books are better-written, but after reading Agincourt I'll find out. Agincourt was thrilling--some of the best historical fiction I've ever read.

Highly recommended.

Agincourt is a historical fiction novel from Bernard Cornwell. This is my first from Bernard and won't be my last. The story centers on a fictional archer from King Henry the Fifth's armies during the Hundred Years war. The archer, Nicholas Hook joins the King's armies under Sir John Corneweille after escaping the noose because of killing a member of the Perrill family, who has been the leading cause of death of the Hook family for a long time. We follow Nicholas from the massacre at Soissons, to the siege of Harfleur to the final battle at Agincourt. Along the way we learn the finer points of archery, discover that Sir John Corneweille is an honorable, whirling machine of death, Hook saves a nun who becomes his wife, a psycho priest is dealt with and Hook speaks to saints Crispin and Crispinian. I loved this book, it is very well written and the characters very detestable or very likeable. I wanted to pull the priest sir Martin out of the book and tear his soul out and pull out John Corneweille out to elect him president of the universe. The descriptions of battle were very vivid, painting them with both horror and glory. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who enjoys history or historical fiction.

The legions of Bernard Cornwell's fans know the score when they crack one of his new novels. The hero, whether he live during the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, or the Middle Ages, will be a mighty warrior from a common background. He will encounter hypocritical, treacherous figures of both secular and religious authority. He will earn the love of a beautiful woman . . . or several. And he will fight in gruesome battles.

Cornwell has used this basic outline to write some of the most entertaining historical fiction ever penned. Thanks to his wit and his eye for detail when writing a battle scene, the outline never gets old.

"Agincourt," Cornwell's latest novel, has a melancholy, bitter current running throughout its pages. While the Richard Sharpe series used humor and swashbuckling romance to lighten its occasionally gruesome pages, "Agincourt" hearkens back to Cornwell's "Stonehenge" as a fairly dark work. The reader will be hard-pressed to crack many smiles over the course of this novel.

Our hero, Nicolas Hook, is an English archer forced by fate to march with King Henry V's "army" across France. Hook earns this fate after surviving the massacre at Soissons, one of the most dastardly events of a dastardly era. The novel tracks the misery endured by Henry and his army through the waterlogged, desperate march across France to Agincourt, where Henry and his archers won eternal renown.

Kudos to Cornwell for providing us with an entertaining yet reasonably-factual treatment of this legendary battle. Shakespeare did it better, but he was not interested in historical accuracy. Agincourt deserves to be understood as a historical event, not just as the inspiration for some of the greatest lines ever penned for drama. In this effort, Cornwell succeeds magnificently.

And yet "Agincourt" is so rooted in the Cornwell trademark style and structure that it is hard to give it more than four stars. Fans of Cornwell will recognize the formula instantly.

The recent James Bond film, "Casino Royale," was hailed as a triumph because it breathed fresh life into the Bond franchise, which had fallen into a catastrophic rut. Cornwell's "rut," if he has one, is not as pronounced as the Bond films' slavish devotion to its past, but it must be said that Cornwell has adhered to his past practices with this new novel. The result is an exciting and bloody, yet familiar, novel.

The inexhaustible Bernard Cornwell, who made his fictional bones with Wellington's Army, has - in my opinion - risen to even greater heights in his novels about war and kingship in the Middle Ages. This has run the gamut from the low Middle Ages (the King Arthur trilogy and the four-part King Alfred series) to the high (the Archer trilogy) and into the fifteenth century with his latest, about the epic battle of Agincourt. This is another top-drawer outing for Cornwell - a well-researched historical novel with a compelling story line, an abundance of blood and gore, and a happy ending: who could ask for more? Along the way the reader learns as much as anyone could wish to know about the legendary English longbow archers, practitioners of a demanding battlefield skill that would be exceptionally difficult to resurrect today. You will also learn about the rampant venality and corruption in the medieval clergy (a recurring theme with Cornwell), details of siege warfare in the high Middle Ages (it was a bit more complicated than "once more into the breach, dear friends!"), and exit with a gripping account of the famous battle of Agincourt that represents a synthesis of accepted history. Cornwell treats us to an accurate portrait of King Henry V, a complex man whose religious fanaticism (not out of place in that era) plunged his nation back into a war that had been lost decades before. His march to Agincourt was ill-advised in purely military terms if unavoidable politically, and on St. Crispin's Day the French army - vastly superior in numbers - had a dozen ways to gain a victory and end the Hundred Years War once and for all. But the French had no leadership to speak of and they faced a well-drilled army under one of the foremost military commanders in Europe. We all know the story, and it suffers not a whit in Bernard Cornwell's retelling.

Cornwell's a successful author of historical novels who excels at making books in a series. But this book is a standalone without sequels. Over his whole body of works, I usually find his series more satisfying because there is more depth possible for character and plot. This book, as some reviewers noted, bears some resemblance to his Grail quest series. However, I found this book more satisfying on its own than any part of or the sum of the Grail quest series. There was an economy in this book lacking in the Grail series that seemed to wander overmuch. I'd have to say its a far more interesting book than another one of his standalones, entitled Redcoat. Perhaps it's just me but I think the hero of this book shoots out a real presence from the page to a greater degree than many others whom Cornwell has concocted.

This is a tight book about the Hundred Years war. Anybody interested in warfare or history of that time should enjoy this fiction, which is saturated with tangible facts. The attention and description of detail is what makes Cornwell stand apart. He's a hardworking writer who packs in the information densely where others would have stopped long before. Cornwell writes well and readers will not notice his style only be drawn into a story made visible by the hard and effective descriptive work of the narrative.

A a fan of Cornwell's Grail trilogy I just had to give Azincourt a chance and i'm so glad that I did. This is an amazing piece of Historical Fiction and I think the reason I like Cornwell's work so much is that instead of novels written about what Kings or generals did during a time like this he paints a vivid picture of what life would have been like for the ordinary person. This book is written so well that you could actually close your eyes and just think of yourself being there, whether in the line of archers who shoot arrow after arrow into the oncoming French soldiers or riding into the battle on a war mount weighed down with armour. Personally for me this is how you can tell a great piece of fiction from just a good piece of fiction and as usual Cornwell pulls it off brilliantly.

This novel is about the life and times of one Nick Hook who is a thief, liar and murderer and finally an outlaw, we follow his life from his humble beginnings as a forester for his local lord to his exile and his joining to a band of archers heading for battle in France. As one of England's feared archers he is hated and reviled by the French people, it is here the Nick learns what it takes to be an archer, what it is like to kill man after man with the bow. Also he will learn about the dark side of war as the town he defends is destroyed by the enemy he witnesses the people slaughtered and raped, only through the intervention of Saint Crispin does Nick fins a way to escape, but all is not over, he still has battles to fight to win and to survive.

If you're a fan of Historical fiction that is action pacted then this novel just may be for you, give it go, it's well worth it.

Mr Cornwell is an author I have come to know and greatly appreciate in recent years. Many members of the public will be familiar with the excellent "Sharpe" series of books-cum-TV series with Sean Bean, but Mr Cornwell is a prolific historical writer whose quick, snappy prose and non stop action ensure a rollicking good read in all his novels to date, "Azincourt" not being the least of these. If any historical errors occur in Mr Cornwell's period research, the average reader can easily overlook discrepancies as the novel engrosses one's interest from page to page.

Nick Hook, the hero of the piece, is a young English bowman of exceptional skill but whose rebellious nature and tendency for trouble sees him having to flee England and join Henry V's invasion army of France. A formula not unlike Mr Cornwell's previous novels runs throughout the story; the down and out hero of modest origin whose hard life experiences somehow do not destroy a strong inner core of decency, the beautiful yet feisty heroine and a maniacal villain who stalks the hero and his girl throughout the pages like the Black Plague. Although this formula is repetitious, it ensures a flowing storyline and reader interest. I for one can appreciate the no-nonsense, down to earth approach Mr Cornwell takes with his characters, and he has the rare ability to paint colourful, full bodied individuals without a surfeit of words. In "Azincourt" I particularly like the larger than life depiction of Nick Hook's commander in the field, Sir John Cornewaille, a hard bitten, fire eating old warrior who thinks nothing of slaughtering his fellow man, but who honours women, values his own men as equals and champs at the bit if anyone perceives he is, after all, a rather decent man at heart under the hard crust. As with many of Mr Cornwell's previous works, the corruption,ignorance and warped practices of much of the medieval clergy pervades throughout. From the grim execution of the Lollard heretics at the start of the novel, we are introduced to Nick's nemesis, Sir Martin. This well born priest portrays a saintly outer shell to the world, but in reality it conceals a sadistic serial rapist and maniacal killer - in this, he is reminiscent of Richard Sharpe's earlier nemesis, Sergeant Hakeswill. We are also treated to an excellent depiction of,literally, "the father in law from hell" - Nick chances to save the fair Melisande at the well depicted sack of Soissons and marries her, only to find out she is the favourite bastard daughter of the deadly Sire de Lanferelle - "The Lord of Hell" - who is none too pleased at having an English archer as a son in law and thinks nothing of hacking off English archers' fingers.

There are excellent descriptions of the appalling conditions of the day, namely the siege of Harfleur and the battle of Azincourt itself. Any glamourous ideals the reader may have of the chivalry of medieval battle vanish immediately as Mr Cornwell paints a realistic vista of mud, blood, and all out butchery on a grand scale that is all too vivid in the reader's mind. One can almost feel the crunching of bone and ripping of flesh and sinew with each swing of the poleaxe - a favourite weopon of archers of the period. The carnage of the muddy furrows of Azincourt field is therefore brought brilliantly to life in the novel's climactic scenes.

Lusty, full bodied and setting a cracking pace, this novel spins a rollicking good historical yarn. This is not for the politically correct or the faint hearted, as Mr Cornwell is a most graphic writer with a fine understanding of the true nature of war and men at war. For the average reader, forget searching for the finer points of historical accuracy, settle back and just enjoy.

I had previously read Cornwell's first three Saxon Series books and I really enjoyed those which take place a couple hundred years earlier. He gives you a great feel and sense of the historical time he is writing about and I find him to be one of the very best at writing historical novels. While not as grand in scope and lenght as Follett's two works, since Cornwell tells a shorter story, there is quite a bit of depth to his story. In Agincourt he does no less with the years 1414 and 1415 and Henry V's foray into France to claim the crown. Cornwell uses Nick Hook to move us through the story and the times and he develops his many characters very well. Nick has made a few mistakes and could soon to be hung as an outlaw for punching a vile priest. But rather than facing the gallows Nick is saved, since good archers are needed and war is looming and Nick Hook is a very good archer with the long bow.

Life in 1414 was cruel and unfair and brutal and Cornwell lets you know it. Nothing too pretty about living back then unless maybe you were a Duke or Lord. Cornwell brings this all to you in a hundred different ways as the story propels itself to Agincourt. I found Agincourt to be a great read for a historical novel and it moves very quickly and never bogs down and get boring. There was no real surprise ending since I had studied Agincourt and other battles of the era, but Cornwell makes it a great story and adds characters to it.

Cornwell's strength is his description of warfare, and in this novel of one of the most famous battles in English history, he brilliantly captures the feel and the detail of the archers and men at arms at Agincourt.

Agincourt is a famous English victory against the French, where an exhausted English army, desperate to reach the port of Calais to return to England, fights and defeats a much larger French force. The English archers are the key to the victory, and in this book, Cornwell tells the story of Nick Hook, one such archer.

Hook is an expert archer who has been outlawed for hitting a priest,the result of a feud between his family and another local family. He joins a troop of soldiers, learns how to fight hand to hand, and is a part of the invasion of France by the troops of Henry V. The story is told from the perspective of the archers and foot soldiers, not the kings and nobles.

The book is most eloquent and alive in the scenes describing battles, and military technology. It's easy to visualize the details of battle from Cornwall's prose, from how to create an arrow to how to mine under the battlements of a besieged city.

If you are a fan of Cornwell, this is one of his best in a long time. The plot is relatively straightforward, and since we know that the English win Agincourt, there is no surprise here. The joy is in watching the details unfold. I found the accounts of the battles mesmerizing.

I have never read a book by Cornewll and picked up the book at Costco because it was next to James Patterson and looked interesting.

Let me start out with the the writing style. I felt it was graphic and as I turned the pages, I really started to see the scenes and could picture the battlefield. I usually read 75 pages a day but Agincourt was so good and easy to read that I was doing about 200 pages a day and staying up much longer than I wanted.

I recently read Robin Cookes series about the templar knights and my chief complaint was that the book seemed to have a female perpective and the characters and battles were soft. Not so in Arigcourt this was the opposite. I am sure that Cornwell is a gruff beer drinking woman chasing kind of guy. When he writes about battle he talks about tearing guts out and leaving them on hangind on the poleax. He is brutal and descriptive which was appreciated.

The plot was also complelling with several sub plots that were tangled into the main plot. Once again well done and enough detail to the sub plots to make those stories interesting.

I really liked the book and I am going to invest in other books written by Agincourt. I would recommend this book to everyone as there is some history, romance, personal triump, blood and guts that no matter what you are into you will enjoy.

A fine story of the battle of Agincourt (1415) from the perspective of English archer Nick Hook.
Hungry army living off acorn stew before the battle worried me. I would have thought no hare,bird or river fish would have been safe.
Historical Note section at rear of book "..its fame persists almost seven hundred years later."
I make that six hundred years.
I'm pleased Mr Cornwell has stuck with the traditional troop numbers involved and not succumbed to the revisionists who would diminish the scale of the English victory.
Doubtless we shall soon be informed that King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans actually outnumbered Xerxes and his forces.
If only such people would confine themselves to computing the number of Angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

I bought this book because I'm a huge fan of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Chronicles. I was not disappointed. Very exciting book about the Battle of Agincourt. Certainly gives a different perspective from Shakespeare. The protagonist, Nicholas Hook, couldn't be more different from Uhtred in his Saxon series. I like how the author used Soissons to set the stage for the English Invasion and ultimately the battle at the end of the book. The best part is instead of pretending Charles the Fifth was some kind of military genius, he shows how a series of his blunders ended up placing the whole army in danger, with only their skill at archery and unwillingness to die saving them in the end.

Agincourt, St Crispin's Day 1415. This is one of those epic battles in history where myth and reality have combined in a way that makes it difficult to see where fact ends and fiction begins.

Nicholas Hook is an English archer and he is the main character with whom we travel in the events before and during the battle. History is always written by the victorious but Mr Cornwell's novel takes us behind some of the myth and onto the muddy field itself. The life of Nicholas Hook provides a good vehicle for the telling of this story and it enables us to obtain a different perspective of events than we would have if Mr Cornwell had chosen one of the nobility (eg Sir John Cornewaille) or King Henry V himself to tell the story.

King Henry appears at a number of key stages in the novel:

`I am your king but this day I am your brother, and I swear on my immortal soul that I will not forsake my brothers.'

This is a novel set within a period of history. I recommend reading Juliet Barker's `Agincourt' (published in 2005) as a good non-fiction source for those more interested in discovering more historical detail.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

I thoroughly enjoyed Agincourt. Cornwell's writing is wonderful, nearly poetic at times, but never gets in the way of the quick-moving story. His development of the physical surroundings is amazing: I often felt like I was seeing the action on a big screen, and imagining the physical surroundings was effortless. Character development is in some cases phenomenal...Sir John, especially, is a wonderfully colorful character who caused me to laugh out loud several times, as did Father Christopher. Lanferelle and Sir Martin are among the better bad guys in literature. And the voices of St. Crispin and St. Crispinian are delightful as good cop/bad cop.

The only reason I withhold a star is that the central character, Nicholas Hook, seemed to me to develop quite slowly over the course of the book. For example, I didn't imagine him as a very large man until well after the story was in full swing, and learning this (and other descriptive details as they emerged) required several mid-course corrections in my imagining of him. It is certainly possible that I overlooked some aspects of his development, or that the author achieved a desired effect by doing this. In any case, it is a minor complaint.

Agincourt is marvellous! Very highly recommended!

The ending pages of this novel, the battle of Agincourt, itself, makes this novel worth reading. It is a graphic retelling of the famous, lopsided battle. There is the pagentry of knights 'in shining armor' totally fouled and then defeated in the mud they were foolish enough to fight in.

The outnumbered English, fighting defensively and relying heavily on rapidly firing longbows, force the French chivalry into the tightening squeeze of a limited front. Horses go down, struck by arrows, and the chivalry of continental Europe goes down with them, like nine pins. There is brutality that amounts to murder. Wounded knights, mired in the mud, are slain with thin blades thrust through their visors.

At the same time, perhaps the fiery executions of heretics is overly emphasized. Also, the 'hero', Nicholas Hook, never quite caught my interest. Perhaps this is because, despite his size and strength, he is depicted as a monodimensional peasant. Certainly these were the longbowmen who made history but I think that Cornwell could have been created him as a more interesting character.

Ron Braithwaite author of novels--'Skull Rack' and 'Hummingbird God'--on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico

Cornwell's Agincourt is a one-off novel (not part of series) taking place during Henry V's chevauchee through France in 1415. It follows the fortunes of an archer named Nick Hook, who is plagued by enemies of his family and narrowly escaped a French atrocity at Soissons. Returning to England, he is enlisted in Henry's campaign, which began with the long siege and capture of Harfleur, and then a long trek through northern France as the army made its way toward Calais to evacuate back to England. Henry believed he was on a mission from god, however, and was making a statement claiming he was the rightful heir to the French crown.

The French and Burgundians, meanwhile, put together a massive army, intent on crushing the upstart English king once and for all. By most accounts, the army opposing Henry was three to four times the size of sick, depleted English force. The armies met near the town of Agincourt, on a muddy field saturated by rain the night before. The mud bogged down French men-at-arms and cavalry in heavy armor, while the English longbowmen wreaked havoc upon the initial waves. As the body count mounted, the French struggled to get past the wall of corpses, and were defeated in detail. The result was one of those most one-sided and unlikely victories in the history of warfare.

The battle took place on the feast day for the saints Crispian and Crispianan, coincidentally the patron saints of Soissons whose aforementioned destruction at the hands of French and English turncoats instigated the campaign. This leads to the only thing I really didn't like about the book -- those two saints would actually "speak" to Hook, saving his life on multiple occasions. I'm not really a fan of incorporating supernatural nonsense into historical novels, so this is a pet peeve more than anything else. Cornwell used a variety of resources for his historical background material, the most important was the book Agincourt by Juliet Barker, a book I read a few years ago and highly recommend.

...that I have ever read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it!

What I liked:
-Grit: medieval Europe was an incredibly violent period of time, and this book captures the brutal damage inflicted on various body parts by the various weapons of the day (poleaxe, sword, axe, arrow, etc.) incredibly well. Plus, the incredible acts of savagery inflicted on defeated enemies - the rape and humiliation of the women, the torture and execution of captured soldiers, and the complete disregard for human life in general - are captured quite accurately. The entire Battle of Agincourt section is worth the read for anyone that wants to learn how to write battle scenes on a large scale.

-Sir John and Sir Martin: arguably the best characters in the book, IMO. I must admit that I listened to the audio version of this book, and the reader did an incredibly entertaining reading of both of these characters. Sir John maniacal rants about what he would do to the French made me LOL and Sir Martin's made up Bible quotes to justify rape were funny as well ("There's truth in nakedness" is a quote I plan on using in real life...:) ).

-Author's historical notes: being a history buff myself, I found the section where he goes through the real history of the battle to be enlightening. He even points out some areas of his book where he took some liberties for the sake of plot.

What I disliked:
-Characters: this is why I only gave the book 4 stars. Except for the two mentioned above, I found the other characters to be fairly drab and uninteresting, including the protagonist, who came off as a cross between Forest Gump and Joan of Arc. The author tried to give him some internal conflict, namely the feud with the Peril brothers, but this conflict is not thoroughly developed so we are left with the typical cliched revenge storyline. The love interest, Milicent, was also boring and one-dimensional, but I must admit that the sub-plot involving her father was pretty good.

Or Agincourt as it was when I was at school!
The Battle of Agincourt was a King Henry V led English victory against a larger French army during the Hundred Years' War (1415). In addition to a great deal of luck (ground conditions, poor French tactics) this was a battle where the power of the English archer (okay, a few Welsh as well) reigned supreme.
In typical Cornwall style he gives us a character (Nicholas Hook an English archer) against which to tell the tale and politics of the events leading up to, and the battle itself.
Cornwall's skill is in the blend of character, action and history. The Sharpe novels are obviously the perfect mix, and perhaps the blend was wrong with the Starbuck novels set in the US Civil War. In this novel it `almost' works but not quite. Hook is a talented fighter who hears voices (a Saint giving him advice) but his character felt lacking. On the march to Azincourt he suffers a personal tragedy, yet seems over it by morning!
The historical elements are, as always, excellent but the rest of this novel lacks that perfect blend that we have come to expect.

Cornwell's Agincourt is the story of King Henry V's campaign against France as seen through the eyes common man and archer Nick Hook. We start with Nick being concripted and end at the famou battle where it was archers, not armor or mounted knights who won the day for England. Nick proves a flawed but sympathetic hero who fights not just out fo loyalty but for the love of a frenchwoman, Melisande. Along the way we are treated to narrow escapes, dastardly villains in the form of treacherous Englishman and a rapist priest and graphic descriptions of 15th century warfare.

The novel functions on two levels. First its a historical, taking great pains the accurately describe how warfare was conducted at the time. If you ever wanted to know how why and when longbows, crossbows, canons, maces, and poleaxes were used, this is the book for you. the descriptions are skillfully woven into the narrative however, which tis the second level. Agincourt is a first rate thriller with loads of well-developed characters and a shifting point of view. Fans of Follet's Pillars of the earth will enjoy it. All the characters, especially the irrepresible mercenary leader Sir John Cornwaile are expertly realized and you'll find yourself turning the pages quickly to find what fate will befall them. Although we know how the battle will ultimately turn out, Cornwell creates suspense by crafting interetsing characters whom we care about.

Add a star if you're familiar with Shakespeare's Henry V, as the book has a lot of scenes which parallel the classic play.

A ripping yarn and terrific historical fiction. The closest you'll ever come to being there.

Although familiar as most people are, with the conclusion of the battle at Agincourt I enjoyed reading a fictional tale which presented the political and historical facts surrounding the battle in October 1415. Nick Hook is rough-around-the-edges, but honest and likeable, but then most heroes are. In amongst the obvious plot of war, there is family feuding, heresy, love, honour and sickness. It's gory, but then war is...and I found the techniques of battle fascinating. Whilst I have to admit that maybe some females might not be initially attracted to the genre...I found it both historically interesting and entertaining and I think female readers who are interested in historical fact OR fiction would find it a really worthwhile read.
It really brought home to me how dire the circumstances were for the armies and how terrifying it must have been for the men who had no choice but to march on for King and country. That said and although the horrors of war aren't shied away from, there is a strong presence of camaraderie and honour.

I love learning something new about medieval lore, and the wielding of the long bow as detailed in Cornwell's Agincourt was fascinating. Starting with the difficulty in developing the sheer muscle strength to draw the bow, which required all bowmen to begin training at the age of six, to how it changed the face of 13th century battle - on a war history scale, this was a treat. Nicholas Hook's travels and troubles provide a good opportunity for the author to bring up interesting facts of british law, medieval life and this particular era in the seemingly endless wars between England and France of the middle ages. If you don't know how the english army enjoyed a near miraculous victory at Agincourt, this battle will put you on the end of your seat. For those well versed in this chapter of history, Cornwell, as always, delivers an entertaining piece of fiction with characters you cannot fail to root for!

Long ago I started reading Mr. Cornwell's Sharpes series; I've been curious about his other works but until a few weeks ago I hadn't gone down that path because there are so many different things out there. While was at the bookstore the other day I saw Agincourt and decided that it was time to try reading something other than his Sharpe's Rifles series. I figured this was a good solution since I'd wanted to read something else by Mr. Cornwell and didn't want to start a series and I've had a passing interest in the 100 Years War. As a quick descriptor, Agincourt is Mr. Cornwell's look at the battle of Agincourt from a personal perspective ala Sharpe's Rifles. Focus revolves around Nicholas Hook (known to his friends as Nick) who starts out as a game warden but has some minor problem, like a priest and his illegitimate sons who don't like him (there's something of a feud between the Hook's and the Perrill's). Anyway, young Nick is forced to leave his lords service (after being accused by the priest) and heads to France to serve with the English forces there.

Agincourt is a nice historical fiction account of Henry V's campaign in France. While Agincourt is the focus of the book, Mr. Cornwell puts young Hook in three battles that are told only as Mr. Cornwell can (nice viewpoints of the battle from his characters perspective, historically accurate with a nicely modified adaptation to history for his characters). While this makes for a nice transition for those of us who're Sharpe's Rifles fans, there's a problem with Mr. Cornwell's book in that it almost came across as a formula. There were too many similarities between Hook and Sharpe. Both men are rather large, both have had problems with their legal systems, both men were stronger than normal man, and both get the pretty girl and win battles. While this is fine and nice, I wanted something a little different than Mr. Sharpe in the 100 Years War; as a matter of fact at times I was looking for Patrick Harper to appear beside Hook to help him (sorry, got to read it to see if Patrick is there;). Writing style is very Bernard Cornwell for those familiar with his style (for those not familiar, Mr. Cornwell does an excellent job of describing things from his main character's perspective and seeing history unfold as they might have; dialog is nice and fresh, not to much or to little). The violence is very acceptable, especially for the topic being written about (btw, Mr. Cornwell does capture the period very nicely) with sex being implied rather than heavily described. With all of this in mind I'm rating this one for my person piece as 3.5 stars. Since the rating systems won't let me rate half stars I'm rounding down because of the reasons cited above and the fact that this one isn't as good as many in Mr. Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles (yes, I might be being a little hard but if Hook hadn't been a 100 Years clone of Sharpe I'd have rounded up to 4). Btw, for those interested Mr. Cornwell has an excellent chapter at the end of the book describing the actual history and his studies into it). I'll close by saying that if Mr. Cornwell does expand Mr. Hook's `history' a little I'll probably be getting a copy of it though.

Or Agincourt as it was when I was at school!
The Battle of Agincourt was a King Henry V led English victory against a larger French army during the Hundred Years' War (1415). In addition to a great deal of luck (ground conditions, poor French tactics) this was a battle where the power of the English archer (okay, a few Welsh as well) reigned supreme.
In typical Cornwall style he gives us a character (Nicholas Hook an English archer) against which to tell the tale and politics of the events leading up to, and the battle itself.
Cornwall's skill is in the blend of character, action and history. The Sharpe novels are obviously the perfect mix, and perhaps the blend was wrong with the Starbuck novels set in the US Civil War. In this novel it `almost' works but not quite. Hook is a talented fighter who hears voices (a Saint giving him advice) but his character felt lacking. On the march to Azincourt he suffers a personal tragedy, yet seems over it by morning!
The historical elements are, as always, excellent but the rest of this novel lacks that perfect blend that we have come to expect.

Cornwell's Agincourt is the story of King Henry V's campaign against France as seen through the eyes common man and archer Nick Hook. We start with Nick being concripted and end at the famou battle where it was archers, not armor or mounted knights who won the day for England. Nick proves a flawed but sympathetic hero who fights not just out fo loyalty but for the love of a frenchwoman, Melisande. Along the way we are treated to narrow escapes, dastardly villains in the form of treacherous Englishman and a rapist priest and graphic descriptions of 15th century warfare.

The novel functions on two levels. First its a historical, taking great pains the accurately describe how warfare was conducted at the time. If you ever wanted to know how why and when longbows, crossbows, canons, maces, and poleaxes were used, this is the book for you. the descriptions are skillfully woven into the narrative however, which tis the second level. Agincourt is a first rate thriller with loads of well-developed characters and a shifting point of view. Fans of Follet's Pillars of the earth will enjoy it. All the characters, especially the irrepresible mercenary leader Sir John Cornwaile are expertly realized and you'll find yourself turning the pages quickly to find what fate will befall them. Although we know how the battle will ultimately turn out, Cornwell creates suspense by crafting interetsing characters whom we care about.

Add a star if you're familiar with Shakespeare's Henry V, as the book has a lot of scenes which parallel the classic play.

A ripping yarn and terrific historical fiction. The closest you'll ever come to being there.

Although familiar as most people are, with the conclusion of the battle at Agincourt I enjoyed reading a fictional tale which presented the political and historical facts surrounding the battle in October 1415. Nick Hook is rough-around-the-edges, but honest and likeable, but then most heroes are. In amongst the obvious plot of war, there is family feuding, heresy, love, honour and sickness. It's gory, but then war is...and I found the techniques of battle fascinating. Whilst I have to admit that maybe some females might not be initially attracted to the genre...I found it both historically interesting and entertaining and I think female readers who are interested in historical fact OR fiction would find it a really worthwhile read.
It really brought home to me how dire the circumstances were for the armies and how terrifying it must have been for the men who had no choice but to march on for King and country. That said and although the horrors of war aren't shied away from, there is a strong presence of camaraderie and honour.

I love learning something new about medieval lore, and the wielding of the long bow as detailed in Cornwell's Agincourt was fascinating. Starting with the difficulty in developing the sheer muscle strength to draw the bow, which required all bowmen to begin training at the age of six, to how it changed the face of 13th century battle - on a war history scale, this was a treat. Nicholas Hook's travels and troubles provide a good opportunity for the author to bring up interesting facts of british law, medieval life and this particular era in the seemingly endless wars between England and France of the middle ages. If you don't know how the english army enjoyed a near miraculous victory at Agincourt, this battle will put you on the end of your seat. For those well versed in this chapter of history, Cornwell, as always, delivers an entertaining piece of fiction with characters you cannot fail to root for!

Long ago I started reading Mr. Cornwell's Sharpes series; I've been curious about his other works but until a few weeks ago I hadn't gone down that path because there are so many different things out there. While was at the bookstore the other day I saw Agincourt and decided that it was time to try reading something other than his Sharpe's Rifles series. I figured this was a good solution since I'd wanted to read something else by Mr. Cornwell and didn't want to start a series and I've had a passing interest in the 100 Years War. As a quick descriptor, Agincourt is Mr. Cornwell's look at the battle of Agincourt from a personal perspective ala Sharpe's Rifles. Focus revolves around Nicholas Hook (known to his friends as Nick) who starts out as a game warden but has some minor problem, like a priest and his illegitimate sons who don't like him (there's something of a feud between the Hook's and the Perrill's). Anyway, young Nick is forced to leave his lords service (after being accused by the priest) and heads to France to serve with the English forces there.

Agincourt is a nice historical fiction account of Henry V's campaign in France. While Agincourt is the focus of the book, Mr. Cornwell puts young Hook in three battles that are told only as Mr. Cornwell can (nice viewpoints of the battle from his characters perspective, historically accurate with a nicely modified adaptation to history for his characters). While this makes for a nice transition for those of us who're Sharpe's Rifles fans, there's a problem with Mr. Cornwell's book in that it almost came across as a formula. There were too many similarities between Hook and Sharpe. Both men are rather large, both have had problems with their legal systems, both men were stronger than normal man, and both get the pretty girl and win battles. While this is fine and nice, I wanted something a little different than Mr. Sharpe in the 100 Years War; as a matter of fact at times I was looking for Patrick Harper to appear beside Hook to help him (sorry, got to read it to see if Patrick is there;). Writing style is very Bernard Cornwell for those familiar with his style (for those not familiar, Mr. Cornwell does an excellent job of describing things from his main character's perspective and seeing history unfold as they might have; dialog is nice and fresh, not to much or to little). The violence is very acceptable, especially for the topic being written about (btw, Mr. Cornwell does capture the period very nicely) with sex being implied rather than heavily described. With all of this in mind I'm rating this one for my person piece as 3.5 stars. Since the rating systems won't let me rate half stars I'm rounding down because of the reasons cited above and the fact that this one isn't as good as many in Mr. Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles (yes, I might be being a little hard but if Hook hadn't been a 100 Years clone of Sharpe I'd have rounded up to 4). Btw, for those interested Mr. Cornwell has an excellent chapter at the end of the book describing the actual history and his studies into it). I'll close by saying that if Mr. Cornwell does expand Mr. Hook's `history' a little I'll probably be getting a copy of it though.

I think I enjoyed Agincourt as much as any of the Sharpe series and equally as much as the Grail series. That being said, my personal favorite still is his US Civil War series. In Agincourt, I found myself somewhat bogged down with all of the repetition in the battle scenes although my knowledge of that action says Cornwell was true to history. The one disappointment in the book came in the Historical Notes where he fell into the intellectual arguments between modern-day historians.

Reading between the lines, it appears this will be the only Nicolas Hook book. According to Cornwell's website, he had a helluva time writing this book and it took him more than twice the time it usually takes to spin the tale.

My reaction to the book might be colored by listening to the audio version. The presenter is superb with every word clear, properly enunciated and with spot-on inflection. The scenes were alive in my mind's eye and perhaps compensated for what some others have thought trite and wordy.

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother" Henry V

What would you do if you heard voices in your head telling you what to do, would you follow them?

Nick Hook does and they lead him on a journey across England and France. He tries to make up for past mistakes, to make ammends and earn redemption in order to deserve a chance at life and at love. His bravery and strength make him the perfect archer in King Henry V's army and lands him at one of the most famous battles of all time- Agincourt!

Great read for guys or girls, especially for history buffs and fans of Shakespeare's Henry V like myself. A thrilling read that kept me turning the pages. My only compaint is that I wanted it to go on...

Peering from his hiding place in a corpse-strewn alley of 15th century Soissons, young Nicholas Hook watched in horror as his fellow English archers, surrendered by a treacherous nobleman for a pouch of coins then disarmed, are set upon by their French captors. First, their bow fingers are sliced off, something Hook had heard stories about in the short time he had spent with his company. But then they were grabbed by the hair, their heads wrenched back, and their eyes gouged from their sockets. Still the Frenchmen's bloodlust was not sated. Drawing their daggers, the French men-at-arms castrated the screaming, blinded men and left them to bleed to death, writhing on the cobblestones of the square in front of the little church where they had sought refuge.

This scene (I have condensed it) reflects the sheer brutality of warfare during the Hundred Years War. I have read many books in which conquering armies sack cities but I have never experienced the savagery as explicitly as I did reading Cornwell's description of the fall of Soissons in 1415.

There, men not only hacked each other to pieces with poleax, mace, and sword, but the victors used their own bodies to violate and rend dazed women and hollow-eyed children. Even priests and nuns were raped or disemboweled. The shockwaves of this massacre of mostly French citizens by French soldiers rocked all of Christendom. In fact, this transgression was pointed to as the reason the French were so resoundingly defeated at Agincourt a year later, October 25, 1415, on the feast day of St. Crispin and St. Crispian, the patron saints of the town of Soissons.

Nicholas Hook escapes the carnage, along with a young novice, Melisande, the bastard daughter of a wealthy French nobleman. The couple flee to Calais where Nicholas relates all he has seen to the English commander there. As one of the few survivors of the butchery at Soissons, Nicholas is then summoned to London to repeat his story to King Henry V. Afterwards, the king assigns him to the company of Sir John Cornewaille (sometimes spelled Cornwall).

Sir John Cornewaille was born in 1364 to a noble family. His father, also Sir John Cornewaille, had been in service to the Duke of Brittany. His mother was, purportedly, the niece of the Duke. Sir John (the younger) served Richard II in Scotland. Then, he fought for the Duke of Lancaster in Brittany and, later, King Henry IV. Sir John was made a Knight of The Garter in 1410 for his numerous acts of courage on the battlefield. King Henry IV even gave him Elizabeth Plantagenet, the Duchess of Exeter, daughter of the third surviving son of King Edward III , in marriage.

But, although he was a celebrated tournament champion as well as decorated soldier, Sir John was not the romanticized warrior that people often think of when the subject of knights and chivalry arise. His training speech, as related by Cornwell, would make a U.S. Marine drill sergeant proud:

" ...you rip their bellies open, shove blades in their eyes, slice their throats, cut off their bollocks, drive swords up their arses, tear out their gullets, gouge their livers, skewer their kidneys, I don't care how you do it, so long as you kill them!"

Now English archers were lethal and Nicholas Hook was an exceptional archer. Hook could punch a fletched shaft through the throat of a crossbowman at a distance considered out-of-range by the average archer. But Sir John taught him to kill with poleax and dagger as well. As it turned out he would need all of these skills to survive the killing fields of Agincourt.

But first, Hook had to endure the withering siege of Harfleur, a small port on the coast of Normandy. There, Henry V's army not only faced a defiant French garrison supported by determined townsfolk, but, as the siege dragged on and on, devastating disease and dysentery.

Again Cornwell's gritty narrative engulfs you in the grinding deprivations of the victims of the besieged town as well as the squalid existence of the archers and men-at-arms clamoring outside the crumbling walls.

Cornwell also introduces us to a quintessential villain, not a menacing Frenchman, but a stringy-haired English priest who uses his office to force himself on women and now casts a lecherous eye on Melisande. Each time this priest appeared, I would picture the balding priest with bulging, lascivious eyes who is groping a cackling, bulbous-breasted prostitute in the History Channel series, "The History of Sex". This character was so well drawn, like all of Cornwell's characters, that he actually made my skin crawl.

Of course the climax of the novel is the battle of Agincourt. The battle itself lasted for about three hours and Cornwell's account of the slaughter that occurred in those three hours left me as emotionally drained as those unarmored archers who, after exhausting their supply of bodkins, struggled in the knee deep mud of that sodden wheat field to fight off French knights wielding shortened lances and spiked maces.

I had always heard that the English won the battle of Agincourt because of their archers with their famous long bows. But, actually, the archers depleted their arrow supply on the first French battle charge. The second wave was repulsed in hand to hand fighting along the entire English line, with archers discarding their bows and resorting to secondary weapons like poleaxes and mallets.

I must confess, now, although I have seen probably all of the Sharpe's Rifles television series and have over a dozen of Bernard Cornwell's books in my "to be read" stack, Agincourt: A Novel
is the first book by Cornwell that I have actually read. I have read hundreds of other novels featuring accounts of many of the ancient world's most famous battles - some, like Cannae, with much higher death tolls than Agincourt. But I have never read a fictionalized account of battle more immersive than the struggle described by Cornwell in this novel.

The Battle of Agincourt, on St. Crispins's Day, October, 1415, is almost legendary among military encounters -- especially those that took place in the long, long struggle between England and France. A force of maybe 6,000 Englishmen (the majority of them archers), led by the energetic Henry V, met and heavily defeated an army of some 30,000 French knights and men-at-arms. The French aristocracy was practically destroyed while the English suffered no more than a few hundred casualties. Cornwell's prose can get a little purple around the edges at times, but there's no better author working today when it comes to describing land battles, making them come alive, and explaining the tactics and strategy without ever quite appearing to do so. The focus of the story is Nick Hook, a forester for the lord of a small village who is also one of the most talented bowmen in England. To escape a feud, as well as the punishment for striking a priest, he takes work as a mercenary in Soissons the year before and barely escapes when that city is sacked by the French themselves. He gets recruited for the king's expedition back across the Channel -- Henry has a claim on the French throne and he means to pursue it -- and finds himself in the van from the landing near Harfleur to the final act in the plowed fields near the minor castle of Agincourt. He's not really as fully developed a character as he might have been, but the two main "characters" in the story are actually the English and French armies. The English had archers, the product of decades of dedicated training in villages and towns throughout the island, who could get off twelve to fifteen arrows a minute. Multiplied by five thousand archers, that's six thousand arrows in sixty seconds. They also had the highly charismatic King Henry, while the French were sorely lacking in the leadership department. Finally, there was the weather. A downpour across the newly-plowed fields the night before meant the heavily-armored French had to struggle through calf-deep mud to reach the enemy. The result was something you would think the French would have learned to avoid after Crecy and Poitiers, but no. This book doesn't have the swashbuckling and angst fans of the "Sharpe" series might expect, but it's good read.

I've read 5 of Cornwell's novels, including this one, and he never fails to draw me into the story. This book is imbued with a gritty realism, which fans of his work will be satisfied with. Readers looking for knights in shining armor spouting poetic verse best look elsewhere. This is a story of medieval warfare and there is nothing flowery about it. At points the sheer cruelty was downright disturbing, as I imagine it was for those who lived it.

His style suits the subject matter perfectly and his research is extensive, as always. I've never read another author who recreates historical conflict with such honesty and conviction. I really felt connected to the daily struggles of an orphaned archer in 15th century Europe.

On the downside, the cast of characters is also familiar to me. Young, flawed, reluctant hero. Grizzled, veteran warlord. Defiant female. Conflicted King. Unreasonably crazy clergyman. (Seriously...there's been a vindictive, hypocritical, "Bad Priest" in every novel so far. I'm sure they weren't ALL that nuts.)

Also, if the use of God's name as a curse offends you, you may take issue here. There is one phrase used so many times, I think you'd significantly shorten the length of this book by removing it. Realistic? Maybe. Necessary to the integrity of the dialogue? Maybe not.

In all though, this was a rousing, adventurous read. Cornwell has done it again. If you are not familiar with details surrounding the English victory over the French at Agincourt, you will want to be after reading this book. You may even be inspired to pick up a longbow and take a shot it yourself.

This is an action packed story with a twist of Lollard martyrs, mysterious and fortune-telling saints (St Crispin and St Crispian), and destiny. Being a Napoleonic War history buff, I have always found Cornwell's Sharpe novels to be historically accurate and technically well-researched. This is equally true for Agincourt.
The focus though is not so much on the battle of Agincourt but on the campaign and the siege of Harfleur, which fills most of the book as it did the campaign. The description of the siege is accurate, exhausting and gruesome. One thing is clear: these were pretty brutal times and if you were just an ordinary guy they were pretty much unbearable - unless of course you could draw a long bow.
Cornwell's take on the battle - the mud and the congested field - suggests that the English archer's were a necessary but not sufficient explanation for the astounding victory. He makes a strong argument that Henry's choice of position, tactics and the rain sodden field all contributed significantly - especially if it is true that the archers largely ran out of arrows after the first wave of French men-at-arms.
As for the novel itself - the hero, Hook, ironically is a Sharpe-like character, which is comforting but a bit tedious. Father Christopher, a warlike, worldly, philosphic and wise priest, is by far the most interesting character.
It is not a great novel, but it is a page turner and it will prompt many to read more about Agincourt and Henry V.

There were times during my reading of Bernard Cornwell's Agincourt that I had to put the book down, close my eyes and try to remove the images of violence and bloodshed from my mind. Cornwell does what good writers of historical fiction attempt: transport readers into the time and place while maintain much historical accuracy, and add fictional characters and dialogue that brings history to life in the form of the impact of major events on ordinary lives. In this case, most readers already know from Shakespeare or elsewhere what happened in this battle in France in October 1415. Cornwell leads readers into the battle with a few hundred pages of buildup that sets a context and presents characters that make the novel a story of people as much as the event itself. Agincourt's protagonist is Nick Hook, a perfect English name (one can almost hear Rowan Atkinson pronouncing it with heavy emphasis on that "k" consonant). Nick is a talented archer at a time when England's archers delivered mass destruction to the enemies of King Henry V. Nick becomes an outlaw after a long family feud leads to trouble at home. He runs away and is taken under the wing of a warrior-lord who prizes Nick's skills. Nick's exploits include his rescue of the bastard daughter of a French lord from being raped in the convent where she is a novice nun. The battle scenes are bloody, the violence almost constant, and the pace of the story brisk. The 460 pages turned rapidly, interrupted only when I needed to cleanse by brain from all the violence.

Rating: Three-star (Recommended)

If you're into historical fiction, particularly historical military fiction, Cornwell is about as good as it gets. This book is excellent. It's not my favorite book of Cornwell's, but that doesn't mean much. The sense of impending warfare and chaos that Cornwell conveys preceding the start of each battle is spine tingling. Even the best story falls flat on its face if the storyteller is poor. Not a problem here.

Another good book from Bernard Cornwell. I feel like I know what to expect with him. A good read, a few twists that you can pretty much pretty, a well done battle or two, a bad guy rapist character, the underdog hero etc.

It's not Lord of the Rings or anything but it is an entertaining read.

I've never read anything from Bernard Cornwell before, and picked this up without knowing much about him. I am SO GLAD I found this author, and can't wait to read more. It's an awesome novel dealing with one of the pivotal battles of the Middle Ages. I'd heard about Agincourt from studying Renaissance history, but this novel brings it to life so clearly. It was like I was right there with the archers. I also really cared about the characters, so the story was really fascinating, in addition to being a really interesting perspective of middle-ages battles. I really learned a lot from this book, and highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in this time period, in warfare of the middle ages, and in a really good story!

Here's the situation. You're a peasant, and as we used to say back home, you're so broke you can't pay attention. You're in the middle of a medieval battlefield, filled with rough characters and sharp weapons, with nothing to cover your own precious hide but the clothes on your back. You have one superb weapon --- the English longbow --- but not much in the way of arrows. You also have a long, sharp stick, assuming you haven't burned it for firewood already. On the other side of the line of battle, there is a nobleman, a feudal lord who owns, more or less, the labor of hundreds of people just like you. He's on a horse, wearing a suit of armor that incorporates all of the best technology of the day and worth more than your entire village can produce in 10 years. You've shot your last arrow, and the guy with the armor is coming to crush your skull. A plan would seem to be in order.

This is what you do, if you're lucky enough and strong enough to pull it off. You plant yourself right in front of the galloping, charging horse (nobody said this was going to be easy), stab it with your sharpened stick, and hope that the animal is hurt enough and scared enough to knock its rider clean off. While the knight is still on his back, trapped under the weight of his armor, you find the one weak spot in the armor --- his visor. And then you draw your long hunting knife and stab the no-good wretch right in the eye. Score one for the home team.

That's the reality of medieval warfare. It's savage, messy, and a million miles away from something as comparatively cold and dispassionate as pushing the button that unleashes hundreds of pounds of high explosives from a Predator drone over a terrorist camp. And if you want to bring back that world in fiction, it's not enough to reproduce the strategies of battle and the blood and slaughter that follows in its wake. You have to know the ground --- the sticky French mud that bogged down a huge army, making it vulnerable to barefoot English archers. You have to know the technology --- how the English craftsmen took a piece of yew wood and shaped it into a weapon that changed history. You have to know the dynastic politics that animate the strategy, the engineering of the castles and the religious beliefs that led men into battle.

In other words, it's the kind of thing that Bernard Cornwell has been doing for years --- and nobody does it better.

If you're not familiar with Cornwell's work, you can start with his bestselling novels about the Viking era in England, which follow a ferocious war leader into the shield walls of Alfred the Great. Or you can check out the monumental Richard Sharpe series, which chronicles a Napoleonic War hero from the torture pits of an Indian warlord all the way to a personal confrontation with the Corsican corporal in exile on the lonely island of St. Helena. Both of these series (as well as other Cornwell novels set in the Civil War or the American Revolution) betray a comprehensive knowledge of their respective historical eras --- and, even more important, considerable skill in making the battlefields and characters come to full, comprehensible life.

Cornwell's books are populated with stout, resolute heroes, noble enemies and the treacherous plots of evil men. AGINCOURT is no exception; the differences are largely in the areas of weapons technology, strategy and the intricate details of late medieval life. Its principal hero, longbowman Nicholas Hook, differs from most Cornwell protagonists in his religious faith (notwithstanding that it's hard to be a good Christian when your job description involves stabbing people in the eye).

The story of the climactic battle of Agincourt has been told before, most notably by Shakespeare, who gives King Henry perhaps the most rousing speech in English literature. Cornwell incorporates that speech in his narrative, but it's more of a grace note than anything else. The real work is done in the trenches, by the men with the long bows and the empty stomachs. Cornwell tells their story, and nobody does it better.

--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds

I like Cornwell's work, and I would recommend this book if you like historical fiction. He does a good job in describing the battle, and it fits with what I know of the actual battle. My main complaint about this book, and every other one Cornwell writes, is that the Catholic priests are always ugly horrible people. I know it is politically popular to attack Christians. At first I assumed he was doing it because he wanted to be politically correct and accepted by the pseudo intellectual community, but after seeing this characterization over and over again, I think he has just gotten lazy in creating his characters.

I just finished "Angicourt," and I thoroughly enjoyed it. As he does with most of his books, Cornwell invents a story in the context of an actual historical event and lets it unfold. With respect to the story itself, there are very few twists and turns that will surprise the reader. Most of it is quite predictable, even somewhat formulaic. But where Cornwell really shines is in the environment he creates and his attention to historical detail. You get a genuine feel for life in the Middle Ages, the sheer cruelty and barbarity of hand-to-hand combat, the logistics of raising, feeding and transporting an army, and the intricacies of making and mastering the long bow. Mr. Cornwell has done his homework and its shows.

Filling the large shoes of Patrick O'Brian, Bernard Cornwell carries on the mantle of historical fiction par excellence. Historically accurate, vividly descriptive with strong characterizations, this book was a joy to read. This book is not for those who faint at the sight of blood; it is gory, the literary equivalent of "The 300" or the video game "Grand Theft Auto." Cornwell nevertheless tempers the gore of the battle with a wonderful mix of the love story of Hook, the archer, and his French girl friend, Melisande, the beauty of the French countryside, details on assaulting the ramparts of a medieval city, Harfleur - tres important these days - and the specifics of the English archers victory at Agincourt.

I headed into Bernard Cornwell's most recent battlefield narrative expecting some graphic depictions of medieval warfare. I hoped to find an interesting, character-driven story as well. And while I found the first in great abundance, the latter was dissappointingly scarce.

The character development in Agincourt is limited at best. There are a few interesting sketches of historical figures from the time--particularly Sir John Cornewaille, a highly skilled and delightfully vulgar-mouthed leader in Henry V's army, and King Henry himself, a young monarch trying to prove to himself and the world that he is God's man for the job. But only the main character, Nicholas Hook, and his love interest, the French novice Melisande, are given any background story, and even that is undetailed.

Hook alone shows development and change over the course of the novel, from an uncertain young man into a confident, battle-hardened leader. Hook is an archer who finds himself an outlaw mercenary in search of redemption. Near the beginning of the novel, he witnesses a girl being raped by a priest. He hears the audible voice of God telling him to prevent the crime, but unsure of himself and of the voice, Hook fails to act. Thereafter, he finds himself hearing the voices of saints, especially Saints Crispin and Crispinian, who advise him in battle and eventually assist him in redeeming himself from his failure to obey God's behest.

While Nicholas himself is of some interest, Cornwell's real story is that of the battles that led up to Henry V's miraculous victory at Agincourt. From the French massacre of their own people at Soissons to the siege of Harfleur to the battlefield at Agincourt itself, Cornwell clearly takes delight in exploring the details of medieval warfare, including the gruesome bloodshed and barbaric, carnal behavior of the soldiers involved. If there are a thousand ways to die on a battlefield, Cornwell has thought of them all--and described them in extensive detail throughout the 4oo pages of his novel. By the time you finally get to the battle at Agincourt, which is nearly 300 pages in, even the most horrific images fail to impress. At this point, I felt little interest about what happened to Hook or Melisande or the other characters--only a sense of exhaustion and a "Must this go on? Can't you all just wrap this up and go home?" While I see this excruciatingly drawn-out description as a definite weakness in Cornwell's writing, I do have to give him credit: I think I was feeling the same mental exhaustion and disbelief that the soldiers must have felt, knowing that they had yet more fighting in front of them. Perhaps this was all intentional on Cornwell's part?

Despite the shallow characters and exhausting detail, the novel has one major redeeming quality: I learned an incredible amount about medieval warfare in general and about the specific confrontations leading up to and including the famous battle at Agincourt. Henry V is among my favorites of Shakespeare's plays, and I was truly gratified to learn more about the history and the brutal reality of Agincourt and it's preceding battles. I always prefer to glean my history from historical fiction or first-hand accounts rather than from dried-up textbook descriptions. Cornwell does an admirable job portraying the realities of life as a medieval soldier, and I feel I have a much more precise (and de-romanticized) picture of knights and lords and daily life in those times than I did before pushing through this novel.

If you are squeamish about depictions of blood and violence, or if you simply don't want to spend a dozen hours immersing yourself in such images, then avoid this book. But if you are looking for a highly descriptive ground's-eye glimpse into medieval warfare, Cornwell will happily and skillfully assist. As for me, I think I'm ready for a story about kittens or something else equally benign.

For more Illumine book reviews, visit [...]

I enjoyed this book like the other Cornwell books I've read. Like any Cornwell novel, there is a war, a protagonist, a lady at the side of the protagonist, and eventual victory of some sort for the protagonist. There is nothing wrong with this story. Even though the book seemed to follow a 'Cornwellian formula', my mind quickly overlooked that suspicion once I started getting into the book. Cornwell has a gift when it comes to writing riveting historical fiction that keeps readers glued to every page and word that he writes. Like other Cornwell books, one could easily read this book in less than a week - it took me 5 and a half days.

As a matter of personal preference, though, I prefer the novels that made up the Saxon Series and The Grail Quest. It may perhaps be the formulaic to this book and the fact that it was written after the others. it could also be the fact that the conflict seemed to be complete all in one book where his other tales involved at least 2 or 3 books.

Still, I have no complaints. I picked up this book with a sense of expectation from having read many of Cornwell's books and was not disappointed.

This is the first novel I've read by Cornwell, and I enjoyed it. I was a bit shocked at the language at first, but I got past it all and actually found it amusing. The main characters are well developed and interesting, and Cornwell conveys the bravery of the English army as they faced the daunting French army and quite literally stared death in the face. The brutality of medieval warfare is made very real here; it's like actually being there on the battlefield, smelling every rank scent, feeling each horrendous, fatal blow. Definitely worth the read.

Never got around to reading any of the Sharpe novels, but wanted to. I'm looking forward to it more now.

This book is entertaining and the author does a great job of capturing the feel of a historical time and place. The plot is great, the writing good and the characters reasonably well fleshed out. The latter is probably his weakest element, but it doesn't distract from the story. Rather it reads like a modern thriller with heros and villains.

Now I just have to decide which of his series to move onto; Saxon Chronicles or Sharpe's Rifles.

I think I saw my first Sharpe movie back in the 90s on the History Channel. I started reading the series and found eventually myself thoroughly engrossed by, not only the action, but the history and characters of Mr. Cornwell's myriad novels. He has the ability to make history come alive. In my opinion, good historical novels would do so much more to interest students in history than the dry texts I had to read--and I majored in it!

Having read 80-85% of Cornwell's work, I expected a good, enjoyable retelling of a story well-known to medieval history students. What I didn't expect was finding an historical novel that sucked me in so thoroughly that I found myself picking it up in the morning even before the coffee was brewed and wishing it would not end. Yes, perhaps the hero is Hollywood-ready as "Publishers Weekly" said, and yes, maybe it's a bit formulaic as some other reviewers have said but---don't we want a hero who defies the odds, wins out over his enemies and gets the girl in the end? It's the basis of all our mythology from Homer to "Star Wars".

I've not liked all of Cornwell's novels. I tried "The Winter King" twice and just could not get into the style of it. But I love most of his others and this one ranks up there as one of his best, along with "The Gallows Thief". Like that one, I have found myself thinking about it days afterward. You know you have a good one when you don't want it to end. In this one he got character and story and history and pacing just right to make it an engrossing read. And while maybe some of his historical details may not be exactly right, he does thorough research and breathes life into the past. I think it is more important that an author transports me to another time, makes me care about his characters, and educates me in spite of myself, than if a helmet is called by a wrong name.

Pssst, don't tell anybody but I once wrote a paper on John of Gaunt using the novel "Katherine" by Anya Seton for my information. His official biography was 3 inches thick and I only used it to make up footnotes. I got a B. I've learned as much, if not more, about history from good novelists than I have from historians. If I was writing a paper on Agincourt today, I would use Cornwell. Kids, don't try this at home.

In what feels somewhat like a follow-up to the Grail Quest series Cornwell continues his obvious admiration for the English (yes, and some Welsh) longbowmen of the Middle Ages. This time, a recounting of the lead up and events of the Battle of Agincourt (or Azincourt in the French).
The story is a fast paced, light and engaging read but doesn't quite live up to some of his stronger efforts. That said, it is well worth a read and details a fascinating piece of history in a readily accessible way. Cornwell remains the King of historical fiction.

Anyone with half an interest in English history is probably familiar with the broad story of the English victory over a vastly more numerous French army at the Battle of Agincourt, but what Bernard Cornwall's latest novel offers is an up close and detailed version of events from the perspectives of those involved.

Shakespeare's well known play necessarily focuses on the English King Henry, but Cornwall's strength has lain for years in allowing a version of history from the multiple perspectives of the many people involved.
Here the primary point of view is that of an English archer, and how appropriate is that?

But Cornwall's strength has always been his ability to write of battles, of conflicts between men with real sense of the action, whether it's in the Sharpe novels or others. Here is no different. The violence of the times and the battle itself is presented to the reader in gut-wrenching detail. If this isn't what it was like, I'd be surprised.

But Cornwall's strength has also been in creating characters with motives and heart that draws the reader in. Nick Hook is a great character, a man driven by revenge and hate, but also possessed of warmth and love for those close to him. And he can shoot an arrow over 200 yards and still find his mark.

The arrogance of those with power, the fear of those without, all is captured in a truly great yarn.

Read this book.

A great historical novel. Interesting and very well written. It is very brutal in some parts of the book, but adds to what life must have been. This is a standalone book not part of a series. This was the first book I read of the author, but I have already started another.

As always, Corwell tells a good story and his integration of historical characters and recorded history is excellent here. The battle of Agincourt holds a mythic interest among history buffs because of the great disparity in the odds (5 to 1 for the French in most accounts) and the large number of French nobility done in by an exhausted band of archers and men-at-arms led by Henry V. Recent (last 20 years) motion pictures have helped enhance the Agincourt's prominence although, as Corwell points out in his Historical Notes, the battle itself had little lasting impact on English-French competition for Normandy and Burgundy.

While Corwell's history and technical detail are great (pull out your dictionary of medieval war devices), his characters are flat and very predictable. Like a television script everyone ends up where you know they are headed early on. The character plot seems to be a duplicate of The Archer's Tale series and the individual characters are very flat (handsome archer/beautiful daughter of aristocratic family, etc.). Don't read this novel expecting any memorable characters.

There is a lot of blood here. The battle descriptions (siege warcraft, Agincourt itself) seem true to history, but there are unending detailed descriptions of how men are killed on the battlefield. Very gory and a little tedious.

This was my first Kindle 2 read. A good book for getting used to reading on an electronic device, but I really missed the maps and graphics of the hardcover Corwell books I have read in the past. The maps reproduced very poorly on the Kindle and the zoom function did not really work.

This books is a good 3 day weekend (or summer vacation read) but is likely to appeal most to male history buffs that enjoy descriptions of physical conflict.

March 17, 2009

The main reason that I didn't give this read 5 stars was due to the use of blasphemous language. I know it was used then as now; however, the stream of vulgarities was unrelenting and made me most uneasy. As one who enjoys medieval history I found this fictionalized account of the Battle of Agincourt frightening, yet fascinating. The military strategy and weapontry are what make this period of history and particularly this confrontation so engaging. While not necessarily a tipping point in the history of Western Civilization, The Battle of Agincourt none-the-less continues to captivate the imagination of writers and readers alike. This battle proves, if nothing else, that numerical superiority does not always insure victory on the field of conflict.

A good exploration of what it might have been like to have been at Agincourt. The novel follows an English archer, Nicholas Hook, from the sack of Soissons to the siege of Harfleur and the climactic battle at Agincourt. Along the way, Hook falls in love and meets up with lords from both sides, including the King of England. The novel moves along briskly but makes time to really establish all the main actor's characters and motivations. The siege of Harfleur drags a bit, but otherwise the novel is excellent.

I found Agincourt a fairly enjoyable read. The novel's main protagonist is Nicholas Hook, an archer who is on King Henry V campaign through France that ended in the famous battle of Agincourt.

The writing is vivid, and the siege of Harfleur and the battle of Agincourt are described in great detail. The weaponery and armour of the day is well described also. However, I felt the character development was lacking, in comparison with other novels that I have read by this author.

For anyone with an affinity for this moment in history, this is a must read. It's not a history book, so don't get too carried away about fact checking. And it's not Shakespeare, so don't expect a character study of Henry. But if you are a fan of Henry V, or have had the pleasure reading Keegan's "The Face of Battle" for an introduction to this battle at Agincourt, you can't go wrong with Cornwell's story. What you should expect is a fast-moving story, set in a pivotal moment in history, with the usual simple yet heroic and likable Cornwellian characters.

The author has come a long way, and presents a more nuanced set of characters than in the past. In the series involving Alfred and the Grail Quest, the characters were interchangeable, albeit living in different centuries and having different names.

There is more subtlety here, slightly less painfully constant railing against the church, and a rousing and fun story.

Haven't read the sea-going series, but Agincourt is easily his best effort in recent years.

A truly well-written historical page-turner of a novel! My only complaint is the Sarah thing, I'd forgotten all about her by the epilogue... and the ending was TOO abrupt, my gosh it just "boom" ended!Was over and done with. After such a page-turning pace, the book hit me in the face as it ended. Highly recommended though and one of the better books I've read thus far this year 2009.

The good: gives you a great poor-man's view of early 15th century war. Some great action. Conveys a mystique and subculture around archery I didn't realize (perhaps) existed.

The questionable: Characters are quite shallow. Details the most individual deaths of any book I've ever read (if it were a movie, would have the highest on-screen body count).

Agincourt reads somewhat like the movie Gladiator. It's brutal, bloody, and loaded to the gills with testosterone. There's enough historical context and battlefield tactics to hold an intellectual interest, as well.

If you have a queasy stomach, stay away. But if a visceral account of one of history's most remembered battles from the age of chivalry interests you, Agincourt is worth a read.

Henry IV for himself took the crown
Henry V took the French king down
...but came close to defeat, and by all odds should have died.
Told through the eyes of a humble archer who rose through service to a noble patron.

The author has come a long way, and presents a more nuanced set of characters than in the past. In the series involving Alfred and the Grail Quest, the characters were interchangeable, albeit living in different centuries and having different names.

There is more subtlety here, slightly less painfully constant railing against the church, and a rousing and fun story.

Haven't read the sea-going series, but Agincourt is easily his best effort in recent years.

Carnage, cruelty, and corruption play out on these pages as the army of Henry V trudges toward destiny. The descriptive passages put me right there with the mud and the blood. Even the romantic subplot is harrowing. The book isn't for the faint of heart, but for those who want a taste of what it might have been like.

A truly well-written historical page-turner of a novel! My only complaint is the Sarah thing, I'd forgotten all about her by the epilogue... and the ending was TOO abrupt, my gosh it just "boom" ended!Was over and done with. After such a page-turning pace, the book hit me in the face as it ended. Highly recommended though and one of the better books I've read thus far this year 2009.

The good: gives you a great poor-man's view of early 15th century war. Some great action. Conveys a mystique and subculture around archery I didn't realize (perhaps) existed.

The questionable: Characters are quite shallow. Details the most individual deaths of any book I've ever read (if it were a movie, would have the highest on-screen body count).

Agincourt reads somewhat like the movie Gladiator. It's brutal, bloody, and loaded to the gills with testosterone. There's enough historical context and battlefield tactics to hold an intellectual interest, as well.

If you have a queasy stomach, stay away. But if a visceral account of one of history's most remembered battles from the age of chivalry interests you, Agincourt is worth a read.

Henry IV for himself took the crown
Henry V took the French king down
...but came close to defeat, and by all odds should have died.
Told through the eyes of a humble archer who rose through service to a noble patron.

This is one author who's books I devour from cover to cover and enjoy every page. It could be the Napoleonic wars, or Medieval Times, or the Dark Ages, or even the US Civil War,every novel is packed with high adventure, evil doers and ladies waiting to be rescued. It's all fun and great escapism.
This is one of his thicker than normal books and a page turner. Get lost in the days of old when Knights were bold.

The book is fun to read but is a bit excessive in the actual description of the battle scenes. Of course, Cornwell writes excellently, but I found the page after page of actual hand-to-hand fighting a bit repetitive.

The book is interesting on many levels. The background of the characters is fine, as is the mystical bits with St. Crispin, but the real meat here is the well defined battle at Agincourt. My only background coming to the book was Shakespearen plays. Everything is laid out so crisp and clear...and horrifying. In my memory it’s almost as if I was there.

This is what historical fiction is about! I am using my dictionary as I read this because I wanted to know more about the kinds of horses used. That led to the whole Hundred Years War and the various tribes all fighting for money and power. I am loving the history and all the discrete pieces of information. Now I can go back to the Tower of London and be engaged. I want to see a longbow again.

I recently read this story and found I could not put it down once started. As a long time fan of Cornwell's writing I was not disappointed. Characters are well drawn and the action flows from the start. Great read and I recommend to all those who want to know more about this time period. You do feel like you are part of the action. I look forward to reading his next title.

I'll say this, first: If you are new to Bernard Cornwell's writing, then you could/should thoroughly enjoy this book if you enjoy this genre. It's a very entertaining story, chock full of history and mayhem.

However, I have read most of Mr. Cornwell's works and this book, while enjoyable, continues a disconcerting trend that I have noticed lately - deja vu. In this book we've got an eerily familiar (OK, more like a carbon copy) protagonist and love interest, the usual villainous rabble, yet another evil priest and many action sequences (complete with lots of the same old screaming) that are near seamlessly interchangeable with most every one of BC's latest books. Yeah, (some of) the details are different, but . . . .

I'm not saying the book wasn't a fun read, I'm just saying that I kept getting the feeling that I might have previously read it. And, in a sense, I think I had.

Maybe a break from the hacking and slashing and screaming is in order. How about another sailing thriller or two, instead!

Seldom does a book grab me enough that I will sit up into the night. This did.
Apart from some technical weaponry foepau, it was good. But... hey, it's a NOVEL!
Unfortunately Anzincourt history is still shrouded in mysticism... leaving the door open for creative license.
Pleasurable read!

In my opinion, Bernard Cornwell is the greatest living writer of historical fiction. His Warlord Chronicles (The Winter King, Enemy of God, Excalibur) is the most brilliantly written trilogy I've ever read. I am such a huge fan that I had my mother bring me the UK edition of this book so I could read it a few months before the US release date. My review is consequently colored by my very close familiarity with this author's earlier works.

Agincourt (Azincourt in the UK edition) is set during a pivotal phase of the Hundred Years' War: the reign of King Henry V. We follow the protagonist Nicholas Hook, an English archer obviously inspired in name and character by Thomas of Hookton of Cornwell's Grail Quest trilogy. Thomas gets a mention in this book as a legendary archer who managed to become wealthy, a nice shout-out that made me nostalgic for the far more interesting and well-developed earlier character. More on this point later. Nick gets entangled in the Siege of Soissons, the siege of Harfleur which makes up the middle of the book and the battle of Agincourt itself to close.

Part of what makes Cornwell's writing so good is his intense attention to detail, vividly painting the picture of a long-ago time and place in a compelling manner without feeling dry or academic. We certainly get a good sense of how warfare was conducted during the 15th century, and a little bit about how different life was for the nobility as opposed to everyone else. I admit to being so spoiled by the quality of Cornwell's writing that I've taken these things for granted. What I'm looking for are freshly imagined events and characters that deviate from his established formula.

By this I mean that most of the characters that Cornwell writes are offshoots of the fantastic individuals that populate the worlds of his best work. Nick Hook is, as I mentioned earlier, very similar to the grittier Thomas of Hookton from the Grail Quest novels. His woman Melisande is a French woman of noble blood, like Jeanette from the Grail Quest, who used to be a nun, like Hild from Cornwell's Saxon Stories. Lanferelle is a French nobleman with a grim reputation, like Guy Vexille from the Grail Quest. Sir Martin is an evil priest, a character who is present in almost every Cornwell novel, who quotes Scripture to his victims, like Obadiah Hakeswill from the Sharpe novels. I could keep on going for the other characters. Certain scenes seem to be recycled as well. To give one example, Nick and Melisande make a daring escape by pretending to be lepers, using their clappers and bells to drive off would-be captors. The very same ruse first made an appearance in one of the Grail Quest books, employed by Thomas and Jeanette.

In summary, if you have never read a Cornwell book then you will definitely enjoy reading this book. He makes the creation of an intriguing fictional storyline set in a highly accurate historical backdrop seem easy. If, like me, you have read nearly every single book produced by Mr. Cornwell, you will probably get the unfortunate feeling of having read this one before.

I have read the Saxon series and the Archer/Grail series by Cornwell and found Agincourt to be the best work that Cornwell has done of these. The mix of the fictional story of Hook with the historical perspective and detail was amazing. BC did his homework on this one too and it shows.

If you haven't read this yet, pick it up immediately. You will be drawn in quickly and will be unable to put it down.

I have no idea about the historical accuracy of time and place but can say that this is one hell of a story that kept me wanting more. I am fanatic of early American History and love fiction and non-fiction about the same and never had a desire to read about this time period, but this book has changed my way of thinking.

Hook was great!

A solid novel, you learn a lot, but it doesn't do as good a job at developing the insight into the human mind and how the emotions develop between two people, or in one person in a tragic event, or through trials and tribulations.

It definitely does a good job of describing the surroundings, the settings, the people, of giving you a feel for the externals of life during Henry V's reign.

Overall, a solid book, but if you're looking for more of the pathos side of a story such as this, look to the Afghan Campagin or The Iron Sword.

Cheers,
Jared

I couldn't put this one down! It's really detailed but isn't hard to read at all. Just a non-stop adventure from the first page where you meet a young archer named Nicholas Hook who is kind of a scrubby lad with a single talent: archery. He's not the smartest guy, not the most able, but he comes of age in this story after punching a priest who was about to rape a girl and becoming an outlaw who believes God may or may not be interested in his comings and goings. If you're expecting the Branagh HENRY V that isn't this. This Henry just might be crazy and believes he's doing God's work just as much as Hook. Couldn't put down. I practically fell asleep during KINGDOM OF HEAVEN staring Orlando Bloom but a movie of this would be the best thing ever.

Agincourt is Bernard Cornwell's newest historical fiction novel, set in the midst of the 100 Years War. The Battle of Agincourt has been glorified by Shakespeare's "Henry V" and is a subject of some dispute to historians, given the relative sizes and operations of both sides. Cornwell has tossed his proverbial hat into the proverbial ring and written an account of one Thomas Hook, an English archer who finds himself campaigning in France, first in the protracted Siege of Harfleur and the penultimate battle which the book takes its name from.

Agincourt is far from a bad novel but as an avid Cornwell fan, it came as quite a disappointment. Cornwell's protagonists are frequently rogues and Hook is no exception, but he's not terribly clever, brash, or charming like previous Cornwell characters (such as Sharpe, Derfel, Uhtred). As a result I didn't find myself laughing with him or pulling for him to come out victorious. WIth the exception of Father Christopher -- a vice-loving priest who supplies most of the jokes, especially about sex -- most of the characters in Agincourt followed very cookie-cutter roles, and others could have been used more. I certainly would have liked to see Henry play as much of a role as Arthur and Alfred did in their respective novels, and the nemesis Sire de Lanferelle, while quite nicely framed as the "Lord of Hell", had too little stage time to build up much animosity. I think the latter is especially a pity, because Lanferelle could have been a villain in the mold of Hakeswill; the enemy we love to hate.

Some small points irked me throughout, and perhaps I'm missing the forest for the trees but it seems like Cornwell's editor took a day off. Frequently the characters make a declarative statement framed as a question, and it comes across as if these grown men in plate armor speak with a dialect to match those of sorority girls. Much of the description of the final battle at Agincourt explains time and time again how muddy the field has become and how much blood the dead and dying men are shedding. I've no doubt the battle was both muddy and bloody but it quickly became tiresome.

The book ends quite suddenly, and leaves a few questions unanswered. Throughout the story Hook has auditory hallucinations of various saints and angels, who give him protection or guidance. Cornwell never gives a hint whether or not Hook has schizophrenia, delusions of grandeur, actual divine intervention on his side, or is just plain crazy, letting us interpret his conversations as we will. These religious interludes are literal deus ex machinas (I hate the term as much as anyone else, but there it is) and keep Hook from having to rely on his own skill or wit to survive, and are quite frustrating. Did Richard Sharpe ever need God on his side? Certainly not. Why does Hook not seek revenge on the Sire de Lanferelle, and how did Melisande survive the chaos of the final battle? No answer is given, we have to figure it out for ourselves.

The novel is not bad, however. Cornwell has a gift for battle scenes that no other author has figured out, and Agincourt is filled to the brim with medieval violence. There are many good one-line laughs that Cornwell fans expect, and many scenes made me cheat ahead to the next page to see how they would be resolved.

The story on the whole is not Cornwell's best, but fans will enjoy it and anyone with an interest in English or military history could do worse.

Bernard Cornwell has, as expected, produced another hellacious good read in Agincourt. Whether following Sharp on his travels or any of the multitude of other Cornwell protagonists, the military history fiction buff always gets his money's worth. Although there nearly always is what some readers may consider superfolous and un-necessarily gory details involving battle scenes, they are there for a purpose, I think. We readers of the genre need to know that war is not a game. Having seen the results of violent combat, I can assure you that nothing Cornwell describes is over-done.

Very interesting tale of battle and gore covering a very dangerous period. The battles are vividly described and I believed that this very well could have been what happened there. It shows that if you apply yourself, and come out ahead

Mr. Cornwell has another hit on his hands with this one. His blending of accurate history with a good story makes for an easy, exciting and fun read. His portrayl of the common yet uncommon soldier is fantasticly realistic and draws the reader into his world. A really good book!

Cornwell is the master of weaving great story lines, vivid characters and engrossing plots into accurate and well researched historical settings. After reading Agincourt, I really have a feel for what the English experienced--the privation, dysentary, hunger, desperation, inspiration and confidence in their longbows.

Perhaps my favorite Cornwell novel--and that's saying a lot!

If you're an historical fiction fan, you will not regret buying this book.

Enough people have written about the literary strengths and weaknesses of this book without me needing to add more. My 2-star rating describes my overall impression. But a specific beef is that Cornwell seems to have made some basic misunderstandings regarding the significant weaponry of the battle.

Firstly, arrows, whether shot from a mighty English bow or not, do not strike like hammer blows, throwing people backwards, punching them out of saddles etc. The whole point of an arrow is to deliver terrific force on a tiny point, thus penetrating. An arrow has neither the mass nor the surface area to shunt 150+ kg of man and armour as described at stages in the book. Collapsing from the wound, yes. But being thrown, no.

Secondly, crossbows do not recoil. They may look a bit like guns, but they have no backward thrust. The energy is imparted through the prior pulling back of the cord, not from a chemical reaction.

These are not insignificant errors in a book that is about a longbowman.

AGINCOURT is my third Bernard Cornwall novel to read. Two of his books on the American Revolution were my first, REDCOAT and THE FORT. Thus far it's a toss up between AGINCOURT and REDCOAT as to which is my favorite. AGINCOURT is a great read. It is not for the faint-hearted, there are several violent scenes that described in graphic detail. If you want an exciting book to read that is well-grounded in history then AGINCOURT is highly recommended.

This book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the Battle of Agincourt told in frank and honest language, and never flinching from the chaos and brutality of the times.

It gives a good accounting of the historic elements of the time while still developing characters that we can care about.

The book will grant a kernel of understanding of how it must have felt to be a commoner swept up, almost powerless, in the politics and intrigues of religion, politics, and kings.

This is my first experience with Bernard Cornwell and from all the raving reveiws I definately expected much more.
I also read the sample for 1356 and found that its just incredably too similar to this one.

Another thing that confused me was that some readers referred to this as AGINcourt. Why????? Its not just 1 or 2 people but a number of reviewers. Is it possible that this book was misprinted and some received it as Agincourt and others like me as Azincourt??
Well, I won`t be surprised. This author seems to have very little regard for the intelligence of his readers as he totally and arrogantly disregards it.
I read adventure, mystery, sci-fi and fantasy and what I always look for in a good book is the author`s ability to surprise.

Cornwell is boring and crude and offers absolutely nothing new.
This theme of wicked and crooked Churchmen and noble and good soldiers has been done to death for many many years already and to name but 2 famous stories, much better than this; Hunchback of Notre Dame(in 1831 already!!) and the Three Musketeers.
Cornwell is copying this exact theme, very badly, which even includes the corrupt and half crazed Churchman lusting after the beautiful young girl from the people he is prosecuting in the name of God.
So why would I buy a book where theres overly much bloodshed, cruelty and rape and no clever protagonist who will outwit
the villians???
No reason, which is why I will not recommend this at all.
Luckily, I spent no money on this as a friend downloaded it and read it from there. I did not finish it either, so my review might be incomplete, but I notice from other reviewers that I did not miss anything.
I will certainly not bother with any of his other works.

After reading the history of the battle and watching docos about the behind the scenes facts, Bernard Cornwall's version, Azincourt was a great read. It brought to life the history, without the danger, dysentery, or death. The way history should be told. Making it feel real, with the politics, the passing of time, the boredom, the blood and disease all depicted from a believable viewpoint.

Too many people blanche at the thought of reading history for fun. A good compromise is historical fiction, which blends fiction with actual events and/or people. Cornwell's Agincourt (Azincourt) is a well-crafted novel, and although it isn't always perfect in detail, gives a good overall view of warfare, and daily life, during the period. It's also fast-paced and entertaining. Not a comprehensive account of the battle, by any stretch, but then it wasn't meant to be.

The author is a good wordsmith, but lousy plot writer. The book takes the reader on a completely predictable journey that, at times, is simply banal. Battle scenes are filled with the arcane and detailed descriptions of various armor and weapons so the the reader knows that the author has done his homework, not to contribute significantly to the story line. Character development is minimal.

Another well-cvrafted and readable story from Cornwell, one of the most intelligent of English historical writers. The casual violence of the era is captured perfectly in this tale. The religious over- and undertones are a welcome offset to the political reasonings that are also put forth. The charatcters are well drawn, although somewat superficial by necessity. The action bursts forth and the events are well paced.

This book is fantastically written from both an historical and literary standpoint. Cornwell brings a famous piece of history to life through the eyes of a common soldier. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this time period and is tired of reading dry texts. This story remains very entertaining while remaining historically accurate.

Charles Keating is one of, if not the best of today's audio book readers. Listening to this book is like listening to Game of Thrones, only with real historical background. A great story, an incredible tale, and a masterful reading.

Bernard Cornwell is better than this.

The historical setting is contrived realism, even if descriptions of places and battles have some accuracy.

His characterizations are stilted. Where Donald E. Westlake could take unlikely characters and make them seem real, Cornwell takes potentially realistic characters and makes them seem unlikely. They march through the novel like robotic prototypes.

While his charges related to the failings of the Church again have some accuracy, his apparent relentless glee in documenting them deplete their intended force.

A first year graduate student in history, writing an end-of-term paper in a 500 level course, may have been able to write a better account.

I believe I have read every book Cornwell has written. This is the first one I couldn't finish. The problem isn't that I don't know what happened at Agincourt. I knew what happened at Crecy and Waterloo, and what happened to Alfred the Great, and still managed to get through those series. Maybe it is that Cornwell has become to historical fiction what Louis Lamour or Zane Grey were to westerns, or E.R. Burroughs was to science fiction. An author only cranks out books quickly if he follows a formula. I can predict what will happen in Corwell's books by now by simply reading the dust jacket.
The Uhtred books have been Cornwell's best recent offerings. The characters are somewhat more believable. The lead character is different for a change (not the low born noble, but the high born low life). Agincourt, however, was simply too much of a re-write of the Archer's Tale series. Furthermore, it's boring. I didn't care about the characters, none of whom were particularly likeable. When I don't care who lives or dies, or I know the only likeable characters will die horribly before the end of the book, I see no point in reading it.

I have been reading a lot of novels and history and found the book most interesting.

I cannot recommend this book nor will I read others by this author because of the Author cursing the Lord with all his characters. It seems ironic that there are many good thoughts and questions as to which sides of battle that the Lord is on and in the same breath the Author Curses the Lord.
Obvioulsy he lives and thinks like this also. Its time that he grows up makes Peace with God.
Maybe he is struggling and this is his way showing it.
I would recommend that the try to draw closer to the Light than to dwell in eternal darkness.

I have read nearly every book written by Cornwell. I keep the kindle nearby and read a few pages whenever I am waiting in court. Cornwell's style is intriguing, but not so dense that you can't walk away from the book and pick up right where you left off.

Carnage, cruelty, and corruption play out on these pages as the army of Henry V trudges toward destiny. The descriptive passages put me right there with the mud and the blood. Even the romantic subplot is harrowing. The book isn't for the faint of heart, but for those who want a taste of what it might have been like.

I broke the rule when i picked it out and judged it by the cover because it looked good.. and I'm so glad I did! It was an amazing read with lots of history. I have already loaned it to 3 people that loved it too.