The first five parts of an all-new episode of Professor Darryl Dee’s Great Battles in History podcast has been released. In previous episodes, Professor Dee examined the Battle of Thermopylae and its legacy, followed by the bloody Battle of Cannae during the Second Punic War between Carthage and the Roman Republic, and, most recently, the Battle of Hattin during the period of the Crusades. Now, Dee takes his listeners to the Hundred Years’ War and the fields of Agincourt:
On October 25, 1415, the feast day of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, on a field near the village and castle of Agincourt, an English army under King Henry V defeated a much larger French host. Agincourt would be the last great English victory of the long series of conflicts that came to be called, collectively, the Hundred Years’ War. Five years after it, Henry V would claim the throne of France itself. Agincourt is also, thanks to William Shakespeare, the medieval battle with the greatest cultural legacy. Many who are otherwise unfamiliar with the Hundred Years’ War know of Harry the King and his band of brothers. Last and certainly not least, Agincourt is a touchstone of Englishness. It supposedly saw the plucky, tenacious ordinary Englishman, the yeoman, wield the trusty national weapon, the longbow, to humble the arrogant French chivalry.
Darryl Dee is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON. He is interested in 17th- and 18th-century French history, particularly the reign of Louis XIV, the famous Sun King. He is currently working on two research projects. The first examines the uses and abuses of money during the period 1680 to 1726. The second project is a multifaceted analysis of 1709, a year of military, political, economic and ecological crises in France. He also teaches the popular course Great Battles in History for the Department of History at Laurier, the subject of his podcast. He has appeared as a guest on the LCMSDS’s On War & Society podcast, where he discussed his research and the myth of decisive battles.