We (unhappy) band of brothers

It’s taken them 593 years, but the French have finally devised an excuse for losing the battle of Agincourt: the rosbifs cheated. French academics gathered at the battle site yesterday on St Crispin’s Day, the anniversary of the battle, and held English manhood cheap, as Henry V might have put it. They accused his troops of acting dishonourably, even committing what we would now understand as war crimes, burning soldiers and hacking bits off French noblemen.

We have only one thing to say; once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. If the French wish to apply contemporary standards to the great battles of history, so be it. Let them explain how blind King John of Bohemia’s death at Crécy was not history’s most outrageous breach of health and safety legislation. Let them explain how shooting Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar, a man with one arm and one eye, advanced the employment rights of the disabled.

Or perhaps it’s just better to dismiss yesterday’s gathering as an entirely appropriate tribute to St Crispin – the patron saint of cobblers.