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

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Approachable, impressively organized, erudite, and engagingly well-written, Cursed Kings is a fantastic one-stop compendium of received history across the period--but it is rarely more.

In earlier volumes he chronicled the savage chevauchées, extended raids that wrecked large swathes of France.

He is the author of Pilgrimage and The Albigensian Crusade, as well as five volumes in his celebrated history of the Hundred Years War. Exceptionally, he was appointed to the Supreme Court directly from the practising bar, without having been a full-time judge. New York Review of Books (on THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR, Vol II) This is one of the great historical works of our time. Accepting it for what it is--an Anglo-centric examination of the Anglo-centric view that the Hundred Years War was an Anglo-centric conflict, it is, in all truth, a work of staggering importance.

I make no claim of familiarity with the first four Hundred Years War volumes, for me it is how wars end that is more interesting, rather than how they start. During the last ten years or so of the war, the English were worn down, first gradually, then suddenly. He died, Sumption reports, “a childless, embittered and tight-fisted old man”, his fortune by no wish of his own going to found Magdalen College, Oxford. Many Frenchmen, weary of the civil war between “Burgundians” and “Armagnacs”, welcomed the prospect of peace and stability under the Anglo-French Union of Crowns. On 13 December 2019, Sumption was appointed as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam.This may play well to an Anglo-centric view of history, but it seems somewhat at odds with the broader political truth of the times. It tells the story of the collapse of the English dream of conquest from the opening years of the reign of Henry VI, when the battles of Cravant and Verneuil consolidated their control of most of northern France, until the loss of all their continental dominions except Calais thirty years later.

and interprets it with imaginative and intelligent sympathy" and is "elegantly written" ( Rosamond McKitterick, Evening Standard); for Allan Massie it is "An enterprise on a truly Victorian scale . This is relentless, narrative-driven history, written with clarity, passion and, above all, self-confidence.When hundreds of Flemings were butchered during an English sortie from Calais, the rest took to their heels.