A Great and Glorious Adventure
A History of the Hundred Years War and the Birth of Renaissance England
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The glory and tragedy of the Hundred Years War is revealed in a new historical narrative, bringing Henry V, the Black Prince, and Joan of Arc to fresh and vivid life.
In this captivating new history of a conflict that raged for over a century, Gordon Corrigan reveals the horrors of battle and the machinations of power that have shaped a millennium of Anglo-French relations.
The Hundred Years War was fought between 1337 and 1453 over English claims to both the throne of France by right of inheritance and large parts of the country that had been at one time Norman or, later, English. The fighting ebbed and flowed, but despite their superior tactics and great victories at Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, the English could never hope to secure their claims in perpetuity: France was wealthier and far more populous, and while the English won the battles, they could not hope to hold forever the lands they conquered.
Military historian Gordon Corrigan's gripping narrative of these epochal events is combative and refreshingly alive, and the great battles and personalities of the period—Edward III, The Black Prince, Henry V, and Joan of Arc among them—receive the full attention and reassessment they deserve.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The politics of the Hundred Years War (1337 1453) form a backdrop for minute dissections of its major battles as British military historian Corrigan (The Second World War) addresses not only battle formations and weapons but also the logistics of feeding men, horses, and an array of other noncombatants. The number of fighting men, notoriously inflated by medieval chroniclers, is brought to logical proportions, and Corrigan even calculates the number of geese needed to provide fletches for the arrows. He writes with knowledge and humor, especially in his footnotes, as he analyzes the battles of Cr cy, Poitiers, and Agincourt while correcting myths often derived from Shakespeare. However, his bias shows in an archaic jingoism: England is superior in all ways; French royalty are mad or subject to "sloth and indifference" and "refuse to face facts and recognize that their way of waging war was obsolete"; and Joan of Arc, along with her victories, is dismissed in four pages. Corrigan blames the English loss on the death of Henry V, "the greatest Englishman that ever lived," and on the French learning how to fight like the English. The facts are solid, but Corrigan's point of view harks back to anachronistic dreams of empire.
