Agincourt’s First World War Legacy
On the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, Britain found itself in need of a national myth to bolster enlistment and morale. The victory of 1415 was soon put to service by the army of 1915.
How was the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt celebrated? An inspection of the British Newspaper Archive for October 1915 provides several answers, but first we should look back to August 1914 and the opening of the Great War, when a short story by Arthur Machen entitled The Bowmen was published in the Evening News. Ostensibly, it was about the Battle of Mons, when 80,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) encountered approximately 300,000 Germans around 70 miles from the village of Azincourt in Picardy. The story was that the British were assisted by a ghostly line of figures that appeared on the horizon. These were the bowmen of Agincourt, arriving to help their beleaguered descendants, and they duly proceeded to shoot the Germans down in droves. Machen's story was pure fiction, but many readers took it for reportage and, as it was told and retold, it became the foundation for the legend of the Angels of Mons.
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