battle of agincourt middle finger

[b] The unexpected English victory against the numerically superior French army boosted English morale and prestige, crippled France, and started a new period of English dominance in the war that would last for 14 years until France defeated England in the Siege of Orlans in 1429. Mortimer also considers that the Gesta vastly inflates the English casualties 5,000 at Harfleur, and that "despite the trials of the march, Henry had lost very few men to illness or death; and we have independent testimony that no more than 160 had been captured on the way". [45] A second, smaller mounted force was to attack the rear of the English army, along with its baggage and servants. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore be incapable of fighting in the future. [51] Albret, Boucicaut and almost all the leading noblemen were assigned stations in the vanguard. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore be incapable of fighting in the future. The metallography and relative effectiveness of arrowheads and armor during the Middle Ages. In the other reference Martial writes that a certain party points a finger, an indecent one, at some other people. The French nobility, weakened by the defeat and divided among themselves, were unable to meet new attacks with effective resistance. [53] A further 600 dismounted men-at-arms stood in each wing, with the left under the Count of Vendme and the right under the Count of Richemont. It seems to me that the single upturned middle finger clearly represents an erect penis and is the gestural equivalent of saying f*ck you! As such, it is probably ancient Wikipedia certainly thinks so, although apparently it became popular in the United States in the late nineteenth century under the influence of Italian immigration, replacing other rude gestures like thumbing the nose or the fig sign. The struggle began in 1337 when King Edward III of England claimed the title King of France over Philip VI and invaded Flanders. Some notable examples are listed below. The pl sound, the story goes, gradually changed into an f, giving the gesture its present meaning. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured soldiers. Osprey Publishing. Without a river obstacle to defend, the French were hesitant to force a battle. The image makes the further claim that the English soldiers chanted pluck yew, ostensibly in reference to the drawing of the longbow. This was an innovative technique that the English had not used in the Battles of Crcy and Poitiers. 138). Theodore Beck also suggests that among Henry's army was "the king's physician and a little band of surgeons". Battles were observed and chronicled by heralds who were present at the scene and recorded what they saw, judged who won, and fixed names for the battles. While the precise number of casualties is unknown, it is estimated that English losses amounted to about 400 and French losses to about 6,000, many of whom were noblemen. He considered a knight in the best-quality steel armour invulnerable to an arrow on the breastplate or top of the helmet, but vulnerable to shots hitting the limbs, particularly at close range. Very quickly after the battle, the fragile truce between the Armagnac and Burgundian factions broke down. The two armies spent the night of 24 October on open ground. [94][10][11] The list of casualties, one historian has noted, "read like a roll call of the military and political leaders of the past generation". Humble English archers defeated the armoured elite of French chivalry, enshrining both the longbow and the battle in English national legend. He told his men that he would rather die in the coming battle than be captured and ransomed. Moreover, with this outcome Henry V strengthened his position in his own kingdom; it legitimized his claim to the crown, which had been under threat after his accession. The Face of Battle. Shakespeare's version of the battle of Agincourt has been turned into several minor and two major films. French knights, charging uphill, were unseated from their horses, either because their mounts were injured on the stakes or because they dismounted to uproot the obstacles, and were overpowered. It forms the backdrop to events in William Shakespeare's play Henry V, written in 1599. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ISBN 0-19-282916-5 (p. 454). The French, who were overwhelmingly favored to win the battle, Continue Reading 41 2 7 Alexander L Materials characterization, 29(2), 111117. The play focuses on the pressures of kingship, the tensions between how a king should appear chivalric, honest, and just and how a king must sometimes act Machiavellian and ruthless. Axtell, Roger E. Gestures: The Dos and Taboos of Body Language Around the World.New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1991 ISBN 0-471-53672-5 (pp. [62] Le Fvre and Wavrin similarly say that it was signs of the French rearguard regrouping and "marching forward in battle order" which made the English think they were still in danger. Africa: Funny but Fanciful - Little Evidence for Origin of the F Word A BBCNews Magazinereportsimilarlytracesthe gesture back toAncient Greek philosophers ( here ). In pursuit of his claim to the French throne, Henry V invaded Normandy with an army of 11,000 men in August 1415. The Most Famous, Bloodiest Medieval Battle - AGINCOURT - Full - YouTube 1995 - 2023 by Snopes Media Group Inc. King Henry V of England led his troops into battle and participated in hand-to-hand fighting. French chroniclers agree that when the mounted charge did come, it did not contain as many men as it should have; Gilles le Bouvier states that some had wandered off to warm themselves and others were walking or feeding their horses. Despite the numerical disadvantage, the battle ended in an overwhelming victory for the English. [107], Most primary sources which describe the battle have English outnumbered by several times. Last, but certainly not least, wouldn't these insolent archers have been bragging about plucking a bow's string, and not the wood of the bow itself? The key word for describing the battle of Agincourt is mud . This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Since pluck yew is rather difficult to say, like pheasant mother plucker, which is who you had to go to for the feathers used on the arrows for the longbow, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodental fricative f, and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger salute are mistakenly thought to have something to do with an intimate encounter. The Battle of Agincourt forms a key part of Shakespeare's Henry V. Photo by Nick Ansell / POOL / AFP) Myth: During the Hundred Years War, the French cut off the first and second fingers of any. A Short History of "Flipping the Bird" - OddFeed 10+ True Battle Agincourt Facts That Will Make You Look Stupid It took place on 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day) near Azincourt, in northern France. [citation needed]. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Updates? [60][61], Accounts of the battle describe the French engaging the English men-at-arms before being rushed from the sides by the longbowmen as the mle developed. According to most chroniclers, Henry's fear was that the prisoners (who, in an unusual turn of events, actually outnumbered their captors) would realise their advantage in numbers, rearm themselves with the weapons strewn about the field and overwhelm the exhausted English forces. What does DO NOT HUMP mean on the side of railroad cars? The English had very little food, had marched 260 miles (420km) in two and a half weeks, were suffering from sickness such as dysentery, and were greatly outnumbered by well-equipped French men-at-arms. The Battle of Agincourt Sumption, thus, concludes that the French had 14,000 men, basing himself on the monk of St. Denis;[119] Mortimer gives 14 or 15 thousand fighting men. Saint Crispin's Day - Wikipedia Agincourt, Henry V's famous victory over the French on 25 October 1415, is a fascinating battle not just because of what happened but also because of how its myth has developed ever since. A labiodental fricative was no less "difficult" for Middle English speakers to pronounce than the aspirated bilabial stop/voiceless lateral combination of 'pl' that the fricative supposedly changed into, nor are there any other examples of such a pronunciation shift occurring in English. The English eyewitness account comes from the anonymous author of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, believed to have been written by a chaplain in the King's household who would have been in the baggage train at the battle. Keegan also speculated that due to the relatively low number of archers actually involved in killing the French knights (roughly 200 by his estimate), together with the refusal of the English knights to assist in a duty they saw as distastefully unchivalrous, and combined with the sheer difficulty of killing such a large number of prisoners in such a short space of time, the actual number of French prisoners put to death may not have been substantial before the French reserves fled the field and Henry rescinded the order. News of the contrivance circulated within Europe and was described in a book of tactics written in 1411 by. [citation needed], In any event, Henry ordered the slaughter of what were perhaps several thousand French prisoners, sparing only the highest ranked (presumably those most likely to fetch a large ransom under the chivalric system of warfare). So they were already overcome with fatigue even before they advanced against the enemy". In Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome, Anthony Corbeill, Professor of Classics at the University of Kansas wrote: The most familiar example of the coexistence of a human and transhuman elementis the extended middle finger. 78-116). Agincourt. The Battle of Agincourt originated in 1328. The field that the French had to cross to meet their enemy was muddy after a week of rain and slowed their progress, during which time they endured casualties from English arrows. [114][115] Curry and Mortimer questioned the reliability of the Gesta, as there have been doubts as to how much it was written as propaganda for Henry V. Both note that the Gesta vastly overestimates the number of French in the battle; its proportions of English archers to men-at-arms at the battle are also different from those of the English army before the siege of Harfleur. On February 1, 1328, King Charles IV of France died without an heir. Many people who have seen the film question whether giving the finger was done around the time of the Titanic disaster, or was it a more recent gesture invented by some defiant seventh-grader. Opie, Iona and Moira Tatem. With 4,800 men-at-arms in the vanguard, 3,000 in the main battle, and 1,200 in the infantry wings. October 25, 1415. [89] A slaughter of the French prisoners ensued. A truce had been formally declared in 1396 that was meant to last 28 years, sealed by the marriage of the French king Charles VIs daughter to King Richard II of England. Battle of Agincourt, (October 25, 1415), decisive battle in the Hundred Years War (13371453) that resulted in the victory of the English over the French. Barker states that some knights, encumbered by their armour, actually drowned in their helmets.[64]. Your opponent is not going to pay you (or pay you much) for the return of mutilated soldiers, so now what do you do with them? [23] The army of about 12,000 men and up to 20,000 horses besieged the port of Harfleur. Modern test and contemporary accounts conclude that arrows could not penetrate the better quality steel armour, which became available to knights and men-at-arms of fairly modest means by the middle of the 14th century, but could penetrate the poorer quality wrought iron armour. Do you return these prisoners to your opponents in exchange for nothing, thereby providing them with trained soldiers who can fight against you another day? This is the answer submitted by a listener: Dear Click and Clack, Thank you for the Agincourt 'Puzzler', which clears up some profound questions of etymology, folklore and emotional symbolism. Battle of Agincourt - HISTORY [135] The battle also forms a central component of the 2019 Netflix film The King. [130][131] Partially as a result, the battle was used as a metaphor at the beginning of the First World War, when the British Expeditionary Force's attempts to stop the German advances were widely likened to it.[132]. The f-word itself is Germanic with early-medieval roots; the earliest attested use in English in an unambiguous sexual context is in a document from 1310. French history myths: The 'two fingers' insult comes from the Battle of If the one-fingered salute comes from Agincourt, as the graphic suggests, then at what point did it get transformed into two fingers in England? [7] Barker, who believes the English were outnumbered by at least four to one,[120] says that the armed servants formed the rearguard in the battle. After several decades of relative peace, the English had resumed the war in 1415 amid the failure of negotiations with the French. The one-finger salute, or at any rate sexual gestures involving the middle finger, are thousands of years old. Agincourt and the Middle Finger | First Floor Tarpley Jones, P. N. (1992). They had been weakened by the siege at Harfleur and had marched over 200 miles (more than 320 km), and many among them were suffering from dysentery. Longbowmen and "The Finger" - (on 'TheBeckoning') The Burgundian sources have him concluding the speech by telling his men that the French had boasted that they would cut off two fingers from the right hand of every archer, so that he could never draw a longbow again. [123] Other ballads followed, including "King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France", raising the popular prominence of particular events mentioned only in passing by the original chroniclers, such as the gift of tennis balls before the campaign. Upon hearing that his youngest brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester had been wounded in the groin, Henry took his household guard and stood over his brother, in the front rank of the fighting, until Humphrey could be dragged to safety. PDF THE ENGLISH VS FRENCH - Carolina Traditional Archers It supposedly describes the origin of the middle-finger hand gesture and, by implication, the insult "fuck you". These numbers are based on the Gesta Henrici Quinti and the chronicle of Jean Le Fvre, the only two eyewitness accounts on the English camp. This famous weapon was made of the . Shakespeare's portrayal of the casualty loss is ahistorical in that the French are stated to have lost 10,000 and the English 'less than' thirty men, prompting Henry's remark, "O God, thy arm was here". Probably each man-at-arms would be accompanied by a gros valet (or varlet), an armed servant, adding up to another 10,000 potential fighting men,[7] though some historians omit them from the number of combatants. [85], The French men-at-arms were taken prisoner or killed in the thousands. But frankly, I suspect that the French would have done a lot worse to any captured English archers than chopping off their fingers. The Hundred Years' War. [23] Thomas Morstede, Henry V's royal surgeon,[24] had previously been contracted by the king to supply a team of surgeons and makers of surgical instruments to take part in the Agincourt campaign. The English men-at-arms in plate and mail were placed shoulder to shoulder four deep. It was a disastrous attempt. The third line of the French army, recoiling at the pile of corpses before them and unable to make an effective charge, was then massacred swiftly. The Battle of Agincourt took place during the the Hundred Years' War, a conflict which, despite its name, was neither one single war nor did it last one hundred years. . Rather than retire directly to England for the winter, with his costly expedition resulting in the capture of only one town, Henry decided to march most of his army (roughly 9,000) through Normandy to the port of Calais, the English stronghold in northern France, to demonstrate by his presence in the territory at the head of an army that his right to rule in the duchy was more than a mere abstract legal and historical claim. In another of his books Morris describes a variety of sexual insults involving the middle finger, such as the middle-finger down prod, the middle-finger erect, etc., all of which are different from the classic middle-finger jerk. It goes on to state thatafter an unexpected victory, the English soldiersmocked thedefeatedFrenchtroopsbywavingtheir middle fingers( here ). Upon his death, a French assembly formed to appoint a male successor. This famous weapon was made of the native English yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as "plucking the yew." The main part of the speech begins "This day is called the feast of . The English army, led by King Henry V, famously achieved victory in spite of the numerical superiority of its opponent. There is a modern museum in Agincourt village dedicated to the battle. The fighting lasted about three hours, but eventually the leaders of the second line were killed or captured, as those of the first line had been. Another verse begins: You love to be sodomized, Papylus . The brunt of the battle had fallen on the Armagnacs and it was they who suffered the majority of senior casualties and carried the blame for the defeat. The French, who were overwhelmingly favored to win the battle, threatened to cut a certain body part off of all captured English soldiers so that they could never fight again. The situation in England, coupled with the fact that France was weakened by its own political crisisthe insanity of Charles VI had resulted in a fight for power among the nobilitymade it an ideal moment for Henry to press his claims. 42 Share 3.9K views 4 years ago There is an old story that allegedly gives the background of how we came to use the middle finger as an insult along with the alleged origin of the "F-word". [70]), The tightness of the terrain also seems to have restricted the planned deployment of the French forces. [20] He initially called a Great Council in the spring of 1414 to discuss going to war with France, but the lords insisted that he should negotiate further and moderate his claims. In the ensuing campaign, many soldiers died from disease, and the English numbers dwindled; they tried to withdraw to English-held Calais but found their path blocked by a considerably larger French army. All quotes delayed a minimum of 15 minutes. [22], Henry's army landed in northern France on 13 August 1415, carried by a vast fleet. Opie, Iona and Moira Tatem. Julia Martinez was an Editorial Intern at Encyclopaedia Britannica. During World War II the symbol was adopted as a V for victory. The legend that the "two-fingered salute" stems from the Battle of Agincourt is apocryphal Although scholars and historians continue to debate its origins, according to legend it was first. See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays. They shadowed Henry's army while calling a semonce des nobles,[30] calling on local nobles to join the army. Corrections? Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. [77][78][79][80] Rogers suggested that the longbow could penetrate a wrought iron breastplate at short range and penetrate the thinner armour on the limbs even at 220 yards (200m). The Battle of Agincourt was a major English victory in the Hundred Years' War.The battle took place on Friday, 25 October 1415 (Saint Crispin's Day) in the County of Saint-Pol, Artois, some. The version that I tell explains the specific British custom of elevating two fingers as a rude gesture. What it is supposed to represent I have no idea. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. The battle probably lasted no longer than three hours and was perhaps as short as half an hour, according to some estimates. When did the middle finger become offensive? - BBC News There is no evidence that, when captured in any scenario,archers had their finger cut off by the enemy( bit.ly/3dP2PhP ). The Battle of Agincourt - The European Middle Ages However, the lack of archaeological evidence at this traditional site has led to suggestions it was fought to the west of Azincourt. Increasingly, they had to walk around or over fallen comrades. Juliet Barker quotes a contemporary account by a monk from St. Denis who reports how the wounded and panicking horses galloped through the advancing infantry, scattering them and trampling them down in their headlong flight from the battlefield. According to research, heres the true story: Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. And although the precise etymology of the English word fuck is still a matter of debate, it is linguistically nonsensical to maintain that that word entered the language because the "difficult consonant cluster at the beginning" of the phase 'pluck yew' has "gradually changed to a labiodental fricative 'f.'" The Battle of Agincourt was dramatised by William Shakespeare in Henry V featuring the battle in which Henry inspired his much-outnumbered English forces to fight the French through a St Crispin's Day Speech, saying "the fewer men, the greater share of honour". An account purporting to offer the historical origins of the obscene middle-finger extended hand gesture (varously known as "flipping the bird," "flipping someone off," or the "one-finger salute") is silly, and so obviously a joke that shouldn't need any debunking. [72], The French cavalry, despite being disorganised and not at full numbers, charged towards the longbowmen. The French could not cope with the thousands of lightly armoured longbowmen assailants (who were much less hindered by the mud and weight of their armour) combined with the English men-at-arms. In Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution, Desmond Morris and colleagues note that the digitus infamis or digitus impudicus (infamous or indecent finger) is mentioned several times in the literature of ancient Rome. After Henry V marched to the north, the French moved to block them along the River Somme. Apparently Henry believed his fleeing army would perform better on the defensive, but had to halt the retreat and somehow engage the French (Even if archers whose middle fingers had been amputated could no longer effectively use their bows, they were still capable of wielding mallets, battleaxes, swords, lances, daggers, maces, and other weapons, as archers typically did when the opponents closed ranks with them and the fighting became hand-to-hand.). The 'middle finger salute' is derived from the defiant gestures of English archers whose fingers had been severed by the French at the Battle of Agincourt. [121] Mortimer notes the presence of noncombatant pages only, indicating that they would ride the spare horses during the battle and be mistakenly thought of as combatants by the English.[122]. Barker, following the Gesta Henrici, believed to have been written by an English chaplain who was actually in the baggage train, concluded that the attack happened at the start of the battle. Fighting commenced at 11:00 am, as the English brought their longbows within killing range and the first line of French knights advanced, led by cavalry. [49], The French vanguard and main battle numbered respectively 4,800 and 3,000 men-at-arms. Pluck yew - onlysky.media

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