8 - A Battle is Its Ground: Conflict Analysis and a Case Study of Agincourt, 1415

Summary

Building from the baseline proposition that terrain plays a central role in conflict, the author presents a potential methodology for the location and reconstruction of ancient and medieval battles using the widest possible accumulation of data and technologies. Though touching on the battles of Thermopylae in 480 BC and Crécy in 1346, the primary case study used for the methodology is Agincourt in 1415, with the result being a tentative suggestion that the traditional site of the battle may be in error. This essay is a slightly expanded version of the paper given as De Re Militari's Journal of Medieval Military History Annual Lecture at the International Congress on Medieval Studies on 9 May 2022.

A battle is its ground.

Armchair experts can forget the central role of terrain in a battle, but the truth known by anyone who has experienced or closely analyzed combat is that the ground, perhaps more than any other single factor, shapes the conflict that takes place upon its surface. It is nearly impossible to understand how a fight unfolded unless we have stood where it took place and reckoned lines-of-sight, ease-of-maneuver, and everything else that is fundamentally built upon the topography. This holds for most conflicts today – at the time of this writing we are seeing it in real time in Ukraine – but it is an absolutely essential truth for pre-modern battles, in which the combatants had no recourse to aerial reconnaissance or detailed mapping information. What the fighters could see is more or less what they knew, so for us to comprehend their actions in the fight, we must try to see what they saw.

In many cases, unfortunately, we cannot be sure where battles took place, meaning we do not always have a ground to examine. The further back in time we go the more likely this is to be a problem. For many ancient battles, our sources do not give us enough information to figure out precisely where fighting took place beyond the roughest triangulations. In some cases, we know little more than the region in which a battle took place, which is not terribly helpful at all.