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Adam Chapman debates the evidence for a Welsh presence among Henry V's highly-successful force of archers at Agincourt in 1415.
Michael Drayton, in his poem of 1627, The Bataille of Agincourt, described the Welsh presence in Henry V's army: 'who no lesse honour ow'd To their own king, nor yet less valiant were, In one strong re'ment [regiment] had themselves bestowed'.1 Drayton was not privy to the surviving administrative sources for the 1415 campaign. His 'record' of the Welsh in Henry V's army in 1415 was part of a county-by-county praise of the shires of England and Wales. In fact, it was the archery talents of the men from Lancashire not of those from Wales which Drayton celebrated: 'not as the least I weene, Through three crownes, three Arrows smear'd with blood'.
Drayton was writing anachronistically. No fifteenth-century chronicle or sixteenth-century history which includes a narrative of Agincourt mentions Welsh archers at the battle at all. Yet in the popular imagination, Agincourt has been co-opted as a great patriotic achievement, the victory of Welshmen, in knitted Monmouth caps, over the French army. For much of the six centuries between 1415 and the present, however, Agincourt is actually the silent battle in Welsh culture. Among the large extant corpus of Welsh language poetry dating from the fifteenth century - the work of around a hundred poets and several thousand poems praising the Welsh gentry - there is not one mention of the battle of Agincourt. References to English wars in France are common, however, and these poems regularly reinforce the expectation that a gentleman should be proficient in arms and participate in war.
Henry V and Wales
The principal reason for this lack of mention of Agincourt was probably the failure of the decade-long national rebellion, led by the Welsh esquire, a descendant of Welsh princes and the self-proclaimed prince of Wales, Owain Glyndwr. At the height of Owain's rebellion, all Wales was involved. Owain even enjoyed the support of the king of France and English rebels against Henry IV and his son, Henry 'of Monmouth' Prince of Wales.2 The rebellion began on 16 September 1400 - indeed Glyndwr seems to have chosen Prince Henry's birthday to proclaim himself prince - and gradually petered out...