Opinion At the core of the British psyche

The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out,Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight,said Anne Curry,a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study. Those cold figures threaten an image of the battle that even professional researchers and academics have been reluctant to challenge in the face of Shakespearean verse and centuries of English pride,Ms Curry said. “It’s just a myth,but it’s a myth that’s part of the British psyche,” Ms Curry said.

The work is the most striking of the revisionist accounts to emerge from a new science of military history. The new accounts tend to be not only more quantitative but also more attuned to political,cultural and technological factors,and focus more on the experience of the common soldier than on grand strategies and heroic deeds.

The most influential example is the Counterinsurgency Field Manual adopted in 2006 by the United States Army and Marines and smack in the middle of the debate over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. Gen. David H. Petraeus,who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of the United States Central Command,drew on dozens of academic historians and other experts to create the manual. And he named Conrad Crane,director of the United States Army Military History Institute at the Army War College,as the lead writer. Drawing on dozens of historical conflicts,the manual’s prime conclusion is the assertion that insurgencies cannot be defeated without protecting and winning over the general population,regardless of how effective direct strikes on enemy fighters may be.

An extraordinary online database listing around a quarter-million names of men who served in the Hundred Years’ War,compiled by Ms Curry and her collaborators at the universities in Southampton and Reading,shows that whatever the numbers,Henry’s army really was a band of brothers: many of the soldiers were veterans who had served on multiple campaigns together. That trust must have come in handy after Henry,through a series of brilliant tactical moves,provoked the French cavalry — mounted men-at-arms — into charging the masses of longbowmen positioned on the English flanks in a relatively narrow field between two sets of woods that still exist not far from Mr. Renault’s farm in Maisoncelle. The series of events that followed as the French men-at-arms slogged through the muddy,tilled fields behind the cavalry were quick and murderous.

Volley after volley of English arrow fire maddened the horses,killed many of the riders and forced the advancing men-at-arms into a mass so dense that many of them could not even lift their arms. When the heavily armoured French men-at-arms fell wounded,many could not get up and simply drowned in the mud. And as order on the French lines broke down completely and panic set in,the much nimbler archers ran forward,killing thousands by stabbing them in the neck,eyes,armpits and groin through gaps in the armour,or simply ganged up and bludgeoned the Frenchmen to death. King Henry V had emerged victorious,and as some historians see it,the English crown then mounted a public relations effort to magnify the victory by exaggerating the disparity in numbers. Whatever the magnitude of the victory,it would not last. The French populace gradually soured on the English occupation as the fighting continued in the decades after Henry’s death in 1422,Mr. Schnerb said. Unwilling to blame a failed counter-insurgency strategy,Shakespeare pinned the loss on poor Henry VI: “Whose state so many had the managing,That they lost France and made his England bleed.”