Falkirk 1298 and Agincourt 1415: medieval battles and their leaders

Two Battles, One Argument

Falkirk (1298) and Agincourt (1415) sit at either end of the medieval period and tell the same story from two angles. At Falkirk an English king crushed a Scottish foot army by combining knights and archers. At Agincourt an English king defeated a French knightly army by relying on archers and dismounted men-at-arms. Together they show why the longbow archer became the deciding figure on the medieval battlefield, and why combined arms was already a real idea long before the modern era.

Falkirk, 22 July 1298 — The First Time the Longbow Decided a Battle

William Wallace had won at Stirling Bridge a year earlier by trapping an English army on a narrow crossing. Now Edward I was determined to fight on his own terms. He brought a large army northwards: heavy cavalry, men-at-arms, and crucially around two thousand Welsh and English longbowmen.

Wallace formed his foot soldiers into four schiltrons — tightly packed circles of pikemen presenting outward-pointing 12-foot spears. Cavalry could not ride into them. Edward’s knights charged anyway and were repulsed. Then Edward did something new: he pulled the cavalry back and ordered his longbowmen forward. The arrows tore the schiltrons apart from a safe distance. Once the rings broke, the cavalry rode through the gaps and the Scottish foot army was massacred. Wallace escaped, but his military reputation was destroyed.

Falkirk mattered because of field of fire. The schiltron was effective only as long as the enemy stayed in front of pikepoints. As soon as ranged weapons could safely shoot from outside spear-reach, the formation became a death trap. Edward I had stumbled onto a basic principle of all later medieval warfare: combined arms beats any single troop type.

Agincourt, 25 October 1415 — The Lesson Repeated

A century later Henry V faced the same problem in reverse. He had landed in Normandy with around 12,000 men but his army was reduced by dysentery and the long march; by the time he reached Agincourt in Picardy he had perhaps 6,000 fighting men. Most of them were longbowmen. The French had assembled a far larger army — estimates range from 12,000 to 25,000 — including thousands of mounted knights eager to wipe out the English invader.

Henry chose his ground carefully. He fought in a narrow funnel of recently ploughed field between two woods, soaked by autumn rain. The French could not deploy their numbers; mud trapped horses and armoured men. The English longbowmen drove sharpened wooden stakes into the ground in front of their positions. The dismounted English men-at-arms stood between the archers as a steady, slow-moving line.

When the French knights charged, the longbowmen released arrows in massed flights. Horses fell in the mud. Knights pressed forward on foot through ploughed earth in 60 lb of plate armour. The first French line crashed into the English line exhausted. Behind them, more French knights kept arriving and trampling the wounded. By the end of the day the French had lost thousands of nobles; English casualties were a few hundred. The longbow had again decided a battle — but only because Henry had picked the field, the timing and the formation.

Logistics, Command and Morale

Both battles also turned on logistics. Edward I had marched a large, well-fed army into Scotland on prepared roads with supply trains. Wallace, by contrast, had been shadowing the English to deny them food, and his men were tiring. Henry V’s army had eaten badly for weeks and many were sick — but the French were also disorganised, with no overall commander, multiple grand lords competing for the right to fight in the front rank.

Command and morale sealed both outcomes. Wallace’s army began Falkirk demoralised after a year of evading battle, while Edward I had personally led his men since dawn. Henry V was famous for walking among his archers the night before Agincourt; Shakespeare invented many of the details, but the underlying point — that an English king physically present with his men was a force-multiplier — is real. The French at Agincourt had no such single voice: orders were ignored, ranks were jumbled and the rear pushed the front into the mud.