Agincourt and The Somme

Tour Introduction

To support Thematic studies focusing on Warfare and British Society, Anglia has created a range of tours exploring the relationship between war and society and the changing nature and experience of warfare itself.

Separated by five hundred years but just a few miles, the experiences of two British armies in the fields of northern France could not have been more different: from longbows to machine guns, heavy mounted cavalry to field artillery, at first sight there appears little similarity between these conflicts. Yet closer study reveals a shared experience between the fighting man of 1415 and 1916 – both were frightened, beleaguered and facing overwhelming odds.

This two-day tour explores how Henry V’s army utilised longbows and ground suited to defence to such great effect, challenging the accepted doctrines of warfare and making the ‘chivalrous’ mounted knight almost obsolete at a stroke, before moving on to Picardy to examine how trenches, barbed wire, artillery and machine guns combined to create a situation where the ‘poor bloody infantry’ found their task almost impossible to achieve. The experience of the ordinary fighting man will be brought alive by this tour.