Agincourt

Stephen Cooper's "Agincourt: Myth and Reality, 1415-2015" arrives at a fitting moment, published to coincide with the six-hundredth anniversary of the battle that has become one of the most enduring episodes in English military history. Rather than offering a straightforward narrative account of the fighting on Saint Crispin's Day, Cooper sets himself a more ambitious task: to examine how the battle has been remembered, reshaped, and mythologised across six centuries, and to separate that accumulated legend from the historical record as best it can be established.

The book opens with a concise but clear account of the campaign itself, tracing Henry V's invasion of France, the siege of Harfleur, and the circumstances that led to the confrontation near the village of Agincourt on 25 October 1415. Cooper does not linger excessively on tactical minutiae, but he provides enough detail about the longbow, the terrain, the weather, and the disposition of forces to give readers unfamiliar with medieval warfare a solid grounding. This groundwork is essential, because the heart of the book lies not in the battle itself but in what came after: the long process by which a bloody and, by most contemporary accounts, brutal encounter was transformed into a symbol of national identity and martial glory.

Cooper is particularly effective when tracing the battle's afterlife in literature and popular culture. He examines how chroniclers in the decades and centuries following the battle shaped its memory, and how Shakespeare's "Henry V", written nearly two hundred years later, cemented certain images and phrases in the English imagination that persist to this day. The famous Crispin's Day speech, with its rhetoric of a "band of brothers", receives careful attention, as Cooper considers how much of this owes to historical fact versus dramatic invention. He is careful not to dismiss Shakespeare's contribution but instead to contextualise it, showing how the play both reflected and reinforced ideas about English exceptionalism that were already circulating.

The book's scope extends well beyond the Tudor period. Cooper follows the Agincourt legend through subsequent centuries, showing how it was invoked during periods of national crisis, including the two World Wars of the twentieth century. The 1944 film adaptation of "Henry V", starring Laurence Olivier and produced during the Second World War, receives particular attention as an example of how the battle's memory was consciously mobilised for wartime morale. Cooper's discussion here is measured and well-supported, avoiding the temptation to overstate the connections while still making clear how malleable historical memory can be when pressed into service for contemporary purposes.

One of the strengths of Cooper's approach is his willingness to interrogate long-held assumptions about the battle, including questions about the size of the opposing armies and the extent of the English victory's decisiveness. He engages with the work of other historians who have revised earlier estimates of troop numbers, presenting these debates in an accessible way without descending into overly technical argument. This even-handedness extends to his treatment of the battle's controversial aspects, including the killing of French prisoners, which he addresses without sensationalism but without shying away from its uncomfortable implications for the traditional heroic narrative.

Cooper writes in a style that is accessible without being simplistic, and his background as a solicitor with a longstanding interest in medieval history is evident in the careful, evidence-based approach he brings to contested questions. The book is well organised, moving chronologically through the various phases of the Agincourt legend's development, from medieval chronicle to Shakespearean drama to modern commemoration.

For readers interested in medieval history, this book offers a useful account of the campaign and battle. For those more broadly interested in how nations construct and sustain historical myths, it offers a case study of considerable value. Cooper does not attempt to demolish the Agincourt legend entirely, recognising that myths often contain genuine truths alongside embellishment, but he succeeds in giving readers the tools to distinguish between the two. The result is a thoughtful, well-researched contribution to the historiography of one of England's most celebrated battles.