England this week is to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, one of its greatest-ever battlefield victories, when king Henry V’s longbow archers routed the French nobility.
The battle on Oct. 25, 1415, saw a heavily outnumbered English army inflict a catastrophic defeat on the enemy that altered the course of the Hundred Years’ War.
Anniversary dinners, commemorative services, Shakespeare performances, exhibitions, conferences and archery tournaments are marking the anniversary.
“By defeating the French, Henry V united the English. He was the last great warrior king of the Middle Ages,” said Andrew Gimson, author of Grimson’s Kings and Queens: Brief Lives of the Forty Monarchs since 1066.
Henry was 28 at the time of the battle, two years into his nine-year reign.
He is buried in London at Westminster Abbey, which is to hold a service marking the anniversary on Thursday, six centuries from the day when news of the victory reached the city.
The abbey holds his “funerary achievements” — the personal items carried at Henry’s funeral, namely his sword, shield, saddle and helmet.
Henry’s sword is to be paraded through the abbey once again on Thursday and placed on the altar.
Agincourt was immortalized in William Shakespeare’s 1599 play Henry V, whose stirring battle speeches still resound and feature in popular lexicon, including: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends”; “we happy few, we band of brothers”; and “Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George.’”
The Royal Shakespeare Company is staging the play at its base in the bard’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, with Alex Hassell in the title role.
The City of London, the British capital’s financial hub, is keen to recall its part in bankrolling the expedition.
It is putting on show the rarely-seen Crystal Sceptre, the 43cm-long mace given to the city by Henry to mark his gratitude.
It is only removed from the Guildhall vaults for coronations and the ceremonial swearing-in of City of London mayors, who silently place their hands on it.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema