On 25 October 1415, the English army under King Henry V defeated a vastly larger French force at Agincourt in northern France, in one of the most celebrated military encounters of the Hundred Years' War. English longbowmen inflicted catastrophic casualties on the French nobility, and the victory secured Henry's position as a dominant European sovereign. The battle was immediately commemorated in English chronicles and verse, becoming a touchstone of English national identity and military mythology. Its cultural afterlife would prove as significant as its immediate strategic consequences.

The Battle of Agincourt entered the literary imagination almost immediately, appearing in contemporary chronicles and ballads that celebrated English martial prowess and Henry V's personal courage. Shakespeare's 'Henry V' (1599) transformed Agincourt into the defining expression of English nationhood — 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers' — ensuring the battle's permanent presence in the poetic canon. The event also spurred French elegiac writing lamenting aristocratic loss, demonstrating how a single military catastrophe could generate literary responses across opposing cultural traditions.