All this makes up one of Shakspere’s most moving scenes. The action and the result of this battle are as inexplicable as those of Cressy and Poictiers. We know that now, as then, the sturdy English archers did their fearful execution on the massed French. France had learned nothing in seventy years of defeats and adversity; she had no infantry, entrusted no peasantry with arms: still depended on gentlemen alone to defend France—and again the gentlemen failed her. Sixty thousand were packed in a narrow passage between two dense forests. On this mass the bowmen fired their shafts until these were exhausted. Then throwing away their bows, swinging their axes and long knives, and planting firmly in the earth in front of them their steel-pointed pikes, they waited the charge of the French chivalry. The mud was girth-deep. The horses stumbled under their heavily-armored riders. Such as reached the English line struck the horrid pikes and were hewn down by the stalwart axmen. They break and retreat, carrying dismay and confusion to the main body. The pikes are pulled up, and the line advanced. A charge of English knights is hurled upon the broken mass of French, and their return is covered by the axmen, who advance and form another line of pikes to meet the countercharge of French. So it goes on, until the French host is a mob, and the English are everywhere among them, hewing, stabbing, and thrusting. “So great grew the mass of the slain,” said an eye-witness, “and of those who were overthrown among them, that our people ascended the very heaps, which had increased higher than a man, and butchered their adversaries below with swords and other weapons.” It all lasted three hours before the French could be called defeated, for they were so numerous and were packed so closely that even retreat was long impossible. Before the battle had been decided, every Englishman had four or five prisoners on his hands, whom he was holding for ransoms. This was the grand chance to recoup all their losses and sufferings and grievous denial of plunder. This was a predicament for a victorious army, and if a small force of the French had made a rally they might then have reversed their defeat on the scattered English. Henry tried to avert such a catastrophe by sounding the order for every man to put all his prisoners to death: but cupidity saved many, nevertheless. The flower of the chivalry of France perished on this field, greatly to the relief and benefit of France. Seven of the princes of the blood royal, the heads of one hundred and twenty of the noble families of France, and eight thousand gentlemen were counted among the 30,000 slain. The feudal nobility never recovered from the blow,—but France did, all the sooner for lack of them.