Talk:Battle of Agincourt

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1000 yards?

Latest comment: 9 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion

At some point the assertion seems to have been added to the article that the French were 1000 yards away from the English: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Battle_of_Agincourt&diff=prev&oldid=832221295 This may have been a good faith edit but I'm struggling to understand it. Henry ordered his army to advance to within extreme longbow shot range, which is generally given as about 300 yards. I've checked and Mortimer (p.420) says of the night before the battle: "The two camps were no more than 1,200 yards apart; one source says their front lines were as close as 250 paces." He then suggests that the English would have had to move forward "seven or eight hundred yards" (p.436), which is consistent with the lines starting 1,000 yards apart, but being more like 300 yards apart when the longbowmen started shooting. The point of that particular paragraph in the Wikipedia article is how far the French had to advance under longbow fire; they certainly didn't have to advance 1,000 yards under longbow fire. I will therefore revert it to 300 yards unless anyone has any major objections. Merlinme (talk) 23:09, 3 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

There seems some confusion between the distance apart of the two armies at the beginning of the battle and how far the French may have had to go while being shot at. The original version, with 300 yds, (roughly) fits the latter, the 1,000 yds even more approximately fits the former (various estimates are in the sources). Given the confusion of starting points, how far the English moved, what the actual range at which the English would have started sustained shooting (which is when the attached source quote is referring to), the whole sentence could do with reconsideration. Certainly, in its current form it is misleading. Monstrelet (talk) 12:38, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

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