It was at a distance at first, but towards the end of the battle the longbowmen gradually advanced into point-blank range and then, as they ran out of arrows, switched to whatever melee weapons they had to mob the incapacitated French men-at-arms and knights.

Though it's certainly true that the historical English longbowman wasn't the usual 'peasant' stereotype, given that they were generally landowners (rather than tenant farmers) and were actually legally required to take a certain amount of regular practice weekly with the bow.

https://www.forbes.com/2010/06/16/legal-humor-archery-opinio... says that the English were required to practice the longbow starting before the 13th Century. In 1541 every man 60 and under was to have a longbow and practice it. Many games were then banned for possibly distracting men from archery.

Interestingly there's no information on where the bows were to come from but it sounds like the typical longbowman would have the income to buy it himself.

> English longbowman wasn't the usual 'peasant' stereotype, given that they were generally landowners

Can you elaborate. I thought serfdom was still around in 1415 in England.

Serfdom was on its last legs in England by this stage. I believe there were plenty of landowners who practiced the longbow but a majority would have been yeomen who were tenants of big solid farms, not themselves landowners. England was almost the first place to get rid of serfdom and a peasantry both, though the Netherlands may have it beat. Remember we’re on the verge of the Reformation. These are quite urbanized bourgeois societies by the 1400s.

"If you want to train a longbowman, start with his grandfather." Being a longbowman took extensive training and practice.

As far as I am aware, most longbowmen at the time were yeomen, a sort of middle class between the landed gentry and the serf class, where they owned their land and thus had the free time and energy to practice and hunt with a longbow.

The Battle of the Golden Spurs would be a better example, with several French nobles (such as the Marshal of France and the Constable of France!) ultimately losing their lives to pikemen. All the more surprising because this was pretty much the first battle in Medieval history where the side with the most knights lost (quite badly).

Admittedly, the Flemish side wasn't exactly peasantry but largely townspeople in guilds, although in terms of the classic three-tier model (nobility, clergy, peasantry), they would have fallen into the last class.

But it matters---the same point could be made about the Battle of Poitiers, in which the fancy French noble knights were crushed, mostly by longbowmen. It's silly to ask the question of whether peasants could kill knights without considering the actual ways peasants killed knights...

> longbowmen shooting from a distance and protected by both terrain and a line of sharpened stakes

Ugh, camping snipers.

Your comment regarding the archers reminded me of "The Grail Quest" book series by Bernard Cornwell

Bernard Cornwell wrote a fictionalised account of the battle of Agincourt (the book is called Azincourt). It's very good if you enjoy Cornwell.