Azincourt

Azincourt
Bernard Cornwell

A unique novel, looking at one the greatest battles, a battle that was a turning point in history, from many points of view, by a master storyteller.Bernard Cornwell has been thinking about this subject for years. He has long wanted to write a book about a single battle, the events that lead up to it, the actual days in the battle and the aftermath from multiple viewpoints.Agincourt, fought on October 25th 1415, on St Crispin's Day, is one of the best known battles, in part through the brilliant depiction of it in Shakespeare's Henry V, in part because it was a brilliant and unexpected English victory and in part because it was the first battle won by the use of the longbow. This was a weapon developed in this form only by the English - parishes were forced to train boys from as young as eight daily - and enabled them to dominate the European battlefields for the rest of the century.Lively historical characters abound on all sides but in Bernard Cornwell's hands the fictional characters, horsemen, archers, nobles, peasants are authentic and vivid, and the hour by hour view of the battle is dramatic and gripping.

AZINCOURT

BERNARD CORNWELL

Azincourt

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008 1

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2008

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

Internal Maps by John Gilkes

Copyright © John Gilkes 2008

Illustration of Archer by Andrew Ashton

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 2008

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

While some of the events and characters are based on historical events and figures, this novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007287918

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Version: 2017-05-05

Azincourt

is for my granddaughter,Esme Cornwell,with love.

Contents

Prologue (#udcd8bb1c-944e-5fa0-8931-0f140bbbafca)

Part One: Saint Crispin and Saint Crispinian (#u4b63e86e-246d-500b-91d8-2c1314136155)

Part Two: Normandy (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Three: To the River of Swords (#litres_trial_promo)

Part Four: Saint Crispin’s Day (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)

‘Agincourt is one of the most instantly and vividly visualized of all epic passages in English history … It is a victory of the weak over the strong, of the common soldier over the mounted knight, of resolution over bombast … It is also a story of slaughter-yard behaviour and of outright atrocity.’

Sir John Keegan, The Face of Battle

‘… there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of carcasses; and there is none end of their corpses: they stumble upon their corpses.’

Nahum 3.3

Prologue (#u2f14002f-e106-572e-aa7f-2d54eea9b193)

On a winter’s day in 1413, just before Christmas, Nicholas Hook decided to commit murder.

It was a cold day. There had been a hard frost overnight and the midday sun had failed to melt the white from the grass. There was no wind so the whole world was pale, frozen and still when Hook saw Tom Perrill in the sunken lane that led from the high woods to the mill pastures.

Nick Hook, nineteen years old, moved like a ghost. He was a forester and even on a day when the slightest footfall could sound like cracking ice he moved silently. Now he went upwind of the sunken lane where Perrill had one of Lord Slayton’s draught horses harnessed to the felled trunk of an elm. Perrill was dragging the tree to the mill so he could make new blades for the water wheel. He was alone and that was unusual because Tom Perrill rarely went far from home without his brother or some other companion, and Hook had never seen Tom Perrill this far from the village without his bow slung on his shoulder.

Nick Hook stopped at the edge of the trees in a place where holly bushes hid him. He was one hundred paces from Perrill, who was cursing because the ruts in the lane had frozen hard and the great elm trunk kept catching on the jagged track and the horse was baulking. Perrill had beaten the animal bloody, but the whipping had not helped and Perrill was just standing now, switch in hand, swearing at the unhappy beast.

Hook took an arrow from the bag hanging at his side and checked that it was the one he wanted. It was a broadhead, deep-tanged, with a blade designed to cut through a deer’s body, an arrow made to slash open arteries so that the animal would bleed to death if Hook missed the heart, though he rarely did miss. At eighteen years old he had won the three counties’ match, beating older archers famed across half England, and at one hundred paces he never missed.

He laid the arrow across the bowstave. He was watching Perrill because he did not need to look at the arrow or the bow. His left thumb trapped the arrow, and his right hand slightly stretched the cord so that it engaged in the small horn-reinforced nock at the arrow’s feathered end. He raised the stave, his eyes still on the miller’s eldest son.

He hauled back the cord with no apparent effort though most men who were not archers could not have pulled the bowstring halfway. He drew the cord all the way to his right ear.

Perrill had turned to stare across the mill pastures where the river was a winding streak of silver under the winter-bare willows. He was wearing boots, breeches, a jerkin and a deerskin coat and he had no idea that his death was a few heartbeats away.

Hook released. It was a smooth release, the hemp cord leaving his thumb and two fingers without so much as a tremor.

The arrow flew true. Hook tracked the grey feathers, watching as the steel-tipped tapered ash shaft sped towards Perrill’s heart. He had sharpened the wedge-shaped blade and knew it would slice through deerskin as if it were cobweb.

Nick Hook hated the Perrill family, just as the Perrills hated the Hooks. The feud went back two generations, to when Tom Perrill’s grandfather had killed Hook’s grandfather in the village tavern by stabbing him through the eye with a poker. The old Lord Slayton had declared it a fair fight and refused to punish the miller, and ever since the Hooks had tried to get revenge.