On about this date 600 years ago news of the great victory at Azincourt (that’s the French spelling) arrived in Bristol.

The battle had been fought on 25th October 1415, on the pretence that the French weren’t English enough – although King Henry V (part 1) wasn’t either (part 2 was a bit more). Despite being Welsh he favoured archery over rugby and as a result his people were experts with the war bow (calling it a longbow is like calling a party a disco).

This was bad news for the French but good news for Shakespeare because without archers Henry V part 2 would have been quite a short play.

From the bowmens’ perspective it was a mixed blessing – pulling a bow is even harder than scrummaging against New Zealand and the hours of forced practicing distorted upper bodies so that bone mass and muscles grew differently from everyone else’s (so that bit was just like rugby then).

It also meant that to become an archer you needed to start young and that you needed at least 10 years of practice before you became proficient.

Meanwhile the French team just weren’t willing to put the hours in at the gym- preferring a long lunch and a little snooze in the afternoon. Just like today they tried to poach our best players in return for the promise of a baguette and some decent cheese. But the threat of not being allowed back to Blighty to play in the pub finals was enough to keep the best men on home soil. That and the fact not many of them could speak French.

To appreciate the significance of archery you need to think of the social structure of Britain in the 1400’s. Basically you had two types of people: on the one hand the lords, knights and noblemen – they had chain mail, armour, horses and nice little crests with Latin motos. Then there were the peasants: stunted, flea ridden, infectious and illiterate. A medieval peasant would have looked like a throwback to Neanderthal man: except that his diet wasn’t so good and he moaned a lot more about not having enough hair to keep him warm. But stick a Lord on a white charger, plume of feathers in his helmet, opulent velvet under his armour, great standard in front, lance by his side, glittering jewelled sword in his hand and you can imagine the deference of the peasant; the touching of the forelock and the unquestioned acceptance of this rigid social order where the life of a command man ranked somewhere between that of a turnip and a bad cold. The archers weren’t actually peasants, they were more your lower middle class, but the point still applies.

Until the Middle Ages a peasant’s armoury wouldn’t have extended much beyond a conker on piece of string and a lump of mud, but stick a war bow in his iron grip, train him for ten years and at anything up to half a mile the poor knight wouldn’t stand a chance.

For the first time in history it didn’t matter where you went to school. It would have been like Jeremy Corbin winning an election against Boris Johnson. It just wasn’t going to happen.

The wonderful thing about Agincourt (the English spelling won) was that the effete French ruling class were brought up short by the English working man. It was as if the British had been knocked into shape at a Warren Gatland training camp whilst the French had trained for the battle at the perfume counter in Harvey Nichols: think Samson Lee in one to one combat with Russell Brand: and then imagine Samson Lee with a machine gun.