The Hundred Years War Vol 5: Triumph and Illusion (Hundred Years War, 5)

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England’s lands in France, and the declaration by English kings that they were kings of France too, necessitated the military campaigns that ran through almost two-thirds of the 14th and over half of the 15th centuries. In Sumption’s telling, Bedford is a rare protagonist commended for his positive qualities: ‘a capable administrator and an astute politician with an incisive mind’, the ‘beak-nosed’ Bedford ‘managed to combine an affable manner with an imposing presence and a habit of authority’. My children's and my grandchildren's life is worth much more than mine because they've got a lot more of it ahead". As another example, the Welsh revolt of Owain Glyndwr--to whom Sumption refers, inaccurate to both history and linguistics but in accord with a mistaken English tradition, as Owen Glendower--is mentioned only as a side note to the history of the period, despite the fact that recent studies have shown that it had a far greater impact and represented a far greater existential threat to England than traditional English histories have understood. After one town fell, an enemy soldier appeared above its gate with the severed head of one of the defenders and impaled it on a spike; the victim’s mother was waiting ‘in the crowd below with a bag full of money’ for the ransom.

There are suggestions of religious and popular movements acting through a focus on Joan, though understandably documentary evidence of this is unlikely to enable this to be addressed as a factor in conventional history such as this. The controversy that constitutes the spine of the work, is that the carefully negotiated agreement for Henry V to succeed Charles VI of France, finally realising the claim of Edward III through his mother, that the English king should also be king of France, Henry V also being married to the daughter of a French king, and having proved his prowess through Agincourt and subsequent diplomacy, was completely blown away when he died unexpectedly young. The more land France reconquered, the greater its tax base; painfully, the opposite was true for the English. The security of the south coast of England depended on control of the ports on the other side of the Channel, in Flanders and Normandy.The powerful noble Jacqueline of Bavaria made a dramatic escape from her prison cell dressed as a man. Jonathan Sumption's magisterial history of the Hundred Years War concludes with the detailed, judicious and far-sighted Volume Five . Five volumes with unfortunately bad bindings (no gathers, no sewing, just paperback glue binding) are a sad, sad way to bind The history of one of the major dysfunctional events of the High Middle Ages. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

One is reminded of this exchange reading Jonathan Sumption’s utterly engrossing Triumph and Illusion, which deals with the final 30 years or so of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) between England and France. Though with questionable legitimacy until he was able to be crowned at the traditional site of Rheims. And it is generational, too, in that it could be said to codify the standard interpretation of the Hundred Years War of the preceding generation of scholarship. Pub Date: 2022-12-01 Pages: 912 Language: Chinese Publisher: Social Science Literature Press The English tried to dismember the European continent. Even in the 1420s, when the English military campaign was going successfully (exemplified by the rout at Verneuil of the forces of the Dauphin, and those of Scotland and Milan, in 1424), a shortage of funds put in jeopardy the ability to pay existing soldiers and recruit new ones.Visit our privacy Policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. Sumption paints her without sentimentality as a religious maniac with no grasp of the realities of conducting warfare; but he also describes superbly the tenor of medieval French society, with its deep religiosity, that not only won her a popular following but enabled her to talk the Dauphin’s commander round to her ideas of how to proceed against the English. In this volume Sumption elaborates another numbing list of burnings and “wastings”, which by the end had turned whole territories, as one observer put it, into a “sea of brambles”.