Story · for reading together
St Crispin's Day and Henry V at Agincourt
It was a wet, muddy October morning in a place called Agincourt, in France. King Henry V had a small English army. They were cold, they were hungry, they had walked a very long way. In front of them was a French army four times bigger.
But the English had LONGBOWS — tall bows of yew wood, taller than a man, that could shoot an arrow farther than anyone thought possible. The French had heavy armour and horses. They charged. The mud sucked at their boots. The arrows fell like rain.
The English won. Two hundred years later, a playwright called William Shakespeare gave Henry a speech to say the morning of the battle. Nobody knows what Henry really said. Everyone remembers what Shakespeare said he said.