Henry V ✦ Trusted Source

By nightfall, the English had lost perhaps 400 men. The French lost over 6,000, including three dukes and countless nobles. Agincourt became the defining victory of the Hundred Years’ War. After Agincourt, Henry did not rest. Between 1417 and 1419, he methodically conquered Normandy—town by town, castle by castle. He learned to conduct siege warfare as deftly as he fought open battles. Rouen fell after a brutal six-month siege, where Henry famously refused to let the starving French citizens leave the city, forcing them to eat horses, dogs, and eventually grass before surrender.

What followed was not a battle but a slaughter. Arrows flew at a rate of ten per second, turning the French cavalry into pincushions. Knights in full plate armor drowned in the mud, suffocated under the weight of fallen comrades, or were dispatched by English archers wielding lead mallets. Henry, fighting in the thick of the melee, took a blow to the helmet that nearly felled him—but he stood his ground. Henry V

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother." By nightfall, the English had lost perhaps 400 men

On the morning of October 25, 1415, St. Crispin’s Day, Henry faced a French army that outnumbered his own by at least three to one (some chroniclers say six to one). The French knights, heavy with armor and arrogance, bogged down in a freshly plowed field turned to a quagmire by recent rains. Henry deployed his secret weapon: 5,000 English longbowmen. After Agincourt, Henry did not rest

He was intercepted near the village of Azincourt.

By 1420, the French were broken. The Treaty of Troyes was one of the most astonishing documents in medieval history: Henry V was named heir to the French throne, disinheriting the Dauphin (the French prince). He married Catherine of Valois, the French king’s daughter. For a brief, brilliant moment, it seemed that England and France would be united under one crown. But history is cruel to conquerors. Henry V never sat on the throne of France. While campaigning against holdouts loyal to the Dauphin, he fell ill—likely with dysentery—at the siege of Meaux. He died on August 31, 1422, at the age of just 35.