Some of the mud that helped give England a victory still famous after 600 years, has been incorporated in a spectacular model depicting the Battle of Agincourt, centrepiece of an anniversary exhibition at the Tower of London.

Along with spectacular loans including treasures from French national collections such as the Louvre and Musée de l’Armée , curator Malcolm Mercer and his colleagues from the Royal Armouries brought back a plastic lunchbox filled with soil from the site.



“It has changed remarkably little,” Mercer said, “it was a ploughed field then and it is a ploughed field now.”

Shakespeare immortalised the 1415 victory in the “band of brothers” St Crispin’s Day speech, which he put into the mouth of Henry V. Whether or not the real Henry managed such oratory, the mud played a significant role in the battle. When Henry goaded the French (“I don’t want to sound jingoistic but he did play to their Gallic character,” said Mercer) to advance under an arrow cloud from the English archers, the wet mud churned up by the cavalry became a quagmire that the French, in heavy plate armour, sank into up to their knees.

The exhibition features signs in English and French. Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian

“The victory was not a pre-determined thing, but on the day Henry read the landscape and the enemy better,” Mercer said.



The real mud has been incorporated in the battlefield model, made by the Perry brothers in Nottingham, with thousands of men and horses, and miniature portraits of real historic figures including the dukes of York and Suffolk, whose bodies were dissected and boiled down so their bones could be shipped back to England.

There have been fierce arguments among historians about the relative size of the armies, and the casualties. Mercer does think the English army, which included many soldiers already weak and ill after the siege of Harfleur, was heavily outnumbered – though not 10 to one as some have suggested – but that, crucially, Henry’s far higher percentage of archers turned the battle.

Estimates of casualties also vary wildly, with contemporary or near contemporary chronicles on both sides putting the French dead at between 3,000 and 12,000. Mercer is sure English casualties were a fraction of the French, and that in the brutal aftermath of the battle, Henry had thousands of prisoners killed, when more French troops were still arriving and he feared the fighting might flare up again.



The exhibition opens with a portrait of Henry from the National Portrait Gallery, gaunt and grim faced. “I must say I don’t warm to him as a character,” Mercer said. However, by the standards of the day, the deaths were predictable, and his nobles were more likely to have objected to the loss of valuable ransoms than humanitarian outrage. “He was not a war criminal – but it was not an act of high chivalry either.”



Agincourt became an emblem of English valour and patriotism: the exhibition includes a medieval spur embedded in a tree root, said to be a souvenir of the battlefield – in fact a cunning 19th-century fake, revealed by the timber, as there was no spruce growing at 14th-century Agincourt. Projections show many actors who starred in the Shakespeare play beside a doublet worn by Richard Burton at Stratford on Avon in 1951.



The exhibition includes spectacular illuminated manuscripts from collections including the British Library and Lambeth Palace, a Shakespeare first folio from Cambridge university, and French loans including the mail shirt of Charles VI, who was not at the battle because he was mentally unfit, and the spectacular jewelled ring of John the Fearless, his regent, which has come from the Louvre. One of the most accurate images of a knight kitted out for the battle comes from an unlikely source, a sculpture of St George from St Albans cathedral, depicted head to toe in authentic contemporary armour.



All the labels are in both English and French, for the many French visitors expected.



Soldiers from both armies would have known the Tower of London – French prisoners from the battle were held there before being dispersed out to aristocratic households to be held until the ransom was paid. One scrap of paper from the National Archives shows what a profitable trade the aftermath of victory could be: for the 12 prisoners named held by Sir Henry Husee, he paid £133 4s 8d in commission to the Crown, expecting many times that in ransom.

• The Battle of Agincourt, Royal Armouries at the Tower of London, 23 October – 31 January, 2016

