#'LOL HE SO FAT HE DROWNED IN THE MUD!!' or it's like 'i'm about to correct this misinformation in a way that implies being fat would be bad

[une-sanz-pluis]

The manner of the duke [of York]’s death is not recorded by contemporaries, but it is suggestive that there was a remarkably high casualty rate among his own retinue. (The legend that he was fat, and was therefore trampled underfoot and suffocated, is a late Tudor invention, though it is still repeated unquestioningly by modern historians.) The duke had originally indented to serve with 100 men-at-arms and 300 archers, though he ended up taking 340 archers (and had to mortgage his estates to pay their wages before he sailed from Southampton). By 6 October, when the exchequer records for the second financial quarter began, two days before the departure from Harfleur, his numbers had been reduced to eighty men-at-arms and 296 archers (four of the latter had been struck off because they could not fire the required minimum ten aimed arrows per minute). During the march he lost three more men-at-arms and three more archers, so his entire company at the battle consisted of 370 men. The records of those who reshipped home from Calais reveal that only 283 of them survived the battle: eighty-six of his esquires and archers—almost a quarter of those present—died at Agincourt with him.

Juliet Barker, Agincourt: The King, The Campaign, The Battle (Abacus 2015)