Saturday 24 October 2015

Agincourt - missing the point

I think I've just found the saddest ever attempt to hop on to the Agincourt bandwagon:
Business people from Welwyn Hatfield commemorated the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt yesterday in an event with a military theme.
King Henry V’s medieval victory over the French was celebrated by the borough’s chamber of commerce with a lunch at Moor Park Golf Club near Rickmansworth.

The event included a talk by business guru Nick Skelton, who recounted the 1415 campaign, and argued that business people could learn from the innovative use of the longbow by the English army.

He told his audience: “Henry V didn’t fight harder or smarter, He fought in a different way.
“Your business needs its own longbow - a point of differentiation.”
Welwyn Hatfield Times

Business people - and the rest of England - could learn even more by just googling the outcome of the Hundred Years' War. For those who missed the final result, the English lost, a fact that seems to get lost in all the jingoistic self-congratulation over one battle. In terms of romanticising an irrelevant lost cause, this puts English nationalists up there with those obsessive Scottish nationalists who never got over 1745 and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

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