It’s timely of Alex Clark to pre-empt any use of Shakespeare’s Henry V – you can see it coming – as evidence of how the selfhood of England and the English thrives on sticking it to the French (Shakespeare’s Henry V was more nuanced than we think, 2 September).
We won the Battle of Agincourt, so there you go, Macron. But we didn’t; our victory was at a place called Azincourt. The now revamped museum Clark rightly approves of for its Anglo-myth busting is the Centre Historique Medieval Azincourt. Not Agincourt – that was, presumably, a medieval trooper’s mishearing (“What’s this place then, eh?”) of Azincourt.
That we go on keeping up this mistake is no doubt a good sign of how we’ve always known better than our old frog-eating enemy.
Prof Valentine Cunningham
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
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