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Agincourt has become one of a small number of iconic events in our collective memory. Anne Curry explores how succeeding generations have exploited its significance.
In his budget statement of 18 March 2015 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced £lm had been awarded to commemorate the 600lh anniversary of the battle of Agincourt. He used the opportunity to make a political jibe, claiming that the victory showed a strong leader defeating 'an ill-judged alliance between the champion of a united Europe and a renegade force of Scottish nationalists'. The Scots did indeed send troops to France on several occasions in the 1420s. Many Scots fell fighting for the French at the battle of Verneuil on 17 August 1424, a battle which has been termed 'a second Agincourt' because it was won, as Agincourt itself had been, thanks to the power of English longbows. But no Scots were at Agincourt. Nor did the French in 1415 symbolise a united Europe. Indeed, the battle was fought at a time of major divisions within French political society between the Burgundian and Armagnac factions. Such divisions played a role in undermining the French response to Henry V's invasion in 1415 and in contributing to the defeat.
The 600,h anniversary of Agincourt prompts us to reflect on how the battle has been remembered since. In the modern age we are accustomed to officially-orchestrated celebration of anniversaries. Commemoration of the victory at its first anniversary on 25 October 1416, however, seems to have been private to Henry's chapel. The Gesta Henrici Quinti, a text written by a priest who had been present on the campaign, tells us that ?there came round in due course the feast of St Crispin and Crispinian on which feast the year before God had shown his clemency to England in her resistance to the rebellious people of France at Agincourt. The king, not unmindful of God's goodness, renewed praises to Fiim in the hymn Te Deum laudamus, solemnly chanted in his chapel before Mass'.1
By the end of 1416, attention had been given to more public celebration. In December the archbishop of Canterbury ordered that commemorative collects in churches on 25 October should henceforth be shared between martyrs generally, Crispin and Crispinian, and...