The Battle of Agincourt has inspired books and studies and aficionados, but it was not decisive in the sense of Crécy, which, by leading to the capture of Calais, transformed Edward III’s semi-serious adventure into a hundred years’ war, nor in the sense of Poitiers, which determined the loss of confidence in the noble as knight. Agincourt merely confirmed both these results, especially the second, for not even Nicopolis was so painful a demonstration that valor in combat is not the equivalent of competence in war. The battle was lost by the incompetence of French chivalry, and won more by the
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