[medved]

As I've read it, the French at Agincourt basically charged into a funnel-shaped field and the English just sat there and shot them as they reached the point at which they all got stuck in the funnel; probably several thousand of them would have died even if no English had been there and they'd only been required to plant their lances in straw targets.

[general_re]

Sort of. Charles of France wasn't there, so on the morning of October 25'th, the French had spent several hours arguing amongst themselves about who exactly was in charge of them - they heavily outnumbered the English, and expected to win easily, so everyone wanted to claim the glory of victory. This was, BTW, after sitting in their saddles all night long and arguing about the same thing, because nobody wanted to dismount and get their precious armor muddy.

Now, by about 10:00 or so, Henry got rather tired of waiting for the French to figure out what they were going to do, so he had his archers move up on the field, so as to be closer to the French. There, they set up their stakes that they used to defend themselves against cavalry charges, and loosed a few flights of arrows at the French. At that point, the French broke out in a completely disorganized charge towards the English, across this sea of mud, and straight into the stakes that the English archers had set up.

IMO, the role of the longbow is somewhat overblown, particularly by English historians. It will penetrate armor nicely, but it has to be done at fairly close range to do so. The real culprit at Agincourt was the French arrogance and disorganization. But, what goes around comes around - a generation later, the French would have much more success against the English...