A British Archer, 1415
'Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did this day…' Shakespeare, Henry V.
A medieval muster roll, 1435. NAM 2002-07-164-1
In the Middle Ages, individual heroism was celebrated in fiction with characters still popular today, from King Arthur and his Knights to Robin Hood and his Merry Men. But medieval accounts of real battles are patchy and unreliable, and the bravery of ordinary soldiers is rarely recorded.
We know the names of the archers who fought at Agincourt because muster rolls survive. Contemporary accounts confirm that the archers fought with courage; though exhausted from marching and racked with disease, they darkened the skies with their arrows; then they took on the flower of French chivalry hand-to-hand. Admittedly the French knights were bogged down in the mud, but they were still armed to the teeth and mounted on horses trained for war. No doubt many archers acted with extraordinary heroism. But when they did, history did not record the individual moment.
