When King Henry reached Agincourt, he found the French army drawn up across his path, and was forced to halt. The Constable, like King John at Poictiers, was confident that he had the English in a trap, for they had exhausted all their provisions, and had the flooded Somme in their rear. Henry, however, was determined to fight, and put his hope in the bad management which always characterized the disorderly armies of feudal France. He was not disappointed: the Constable dismounted all his knights and bade them fight on foot, for fear of the effect of the archery on their horses. Only a few hundred mounted men formed a forlorn hope in front. He arranged his army in three heavy columns, one behind another, and formed the front entirely of mailed men-at-arms; the cross-bowmen and light troops were placed in the rear, where they could be of no possible use. The week had been rainy, and the space in front of the French was a newly ploughed field sodden with water, and hemmed in with woods and villages on either hand. At its further end the English were waiting. Henry had drawn them up in a single four-deep line, in order to make a front equal to that of the enemy. So arranged they just filled the space between the woods. The archers were on the wings, protected by _chevaux-de-frise_ of pointed stakes which they had planted in front. The king with his men-at-arms formed the centre; a small flanking force of archers had also been sent into the woods on the right. The Constable led his men straight on the English front, but they had a mile to go across the greasy mud of the fields. To men arrayed in the full knightly panoply, which had vastly increased in weight since the days of Edward III., the ploughland was almost impassable. After a space they began to sink as far as their ankles, and presently as far as their knees, in the mud. The mounted men struggled on, and gradually drew near the English, but they were shot down one after another as they slowly forced themselves up to the stakes of the archery. The main body of the first column never won its way so far; it literally stuck fast in the tenacious clay and stood a few score yards from the English line, as a target into which the archers emptied whole sheaves of arrows. The crowded mass was soon full of dead and dying, for at such short range armour could not protect its wearers. The whole column reeled and wavered. Then King Henry, seeing the moment was come, bade his whole line charge. The lightly equipped archers could cross with ease the ploughland where the men-at-arms had found themselves unable to move. They flung themselves upon the French knights, and by the force and fury of their assault completely rolled them over. Though unprotected by mail, they obtained a complete ascendency over the enemy, dashing them down with their axes and maces till they lay in heaps two or three deep. Henry and the band of men-at-arms around him