Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
The Hundred Years War was a vicious, costly, and, most dramatically,
drawn out struggle that laid the framework for the national identities
of both England and France into the modern era. The first twenty years
of the war were positive for the English, by any account. They already
held the South of France, through Eleanor of Aquitaine's dowry, and were
allied with the Flemish in the north. After the brilliant naval battle
of Sluys, the English had control of both the English Channel and the
North Sea. The battles of Crécy and Poitiers gave the English a powerful
toehold on the continent; they even captured the French king, Philip,
occasioning a peace treaty in 1360.
This long-awaited third volume of Jonathan Sumption's monumental history
of the war narrates the period from 1369 to 1393, a span marked by the
slow decline of English fortunes and the subsequent rise of the French.
The English were condemned to see the conquests of the previous thirty
years overrun by the armies of the king of France in less than ten.
Edward III was succeeded by a vulnerable child, destined to grow into a
neurotic and unstable adult presiding over a divided nation. England's
citizenry was being asked to pay for a long and expensive war, soldiers
were becoming disenchanted, and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 evidenced
the social unrest in the land. However, France too paid a heavy price
for her success. Beneath the surface splendor the French government sat
poised at the edge of bankruptcy and the population subsisted in fear
and insecurity. The inexperience of Charles VI and his gradual relapse
into insanity divided the French political world, as the king's
relatives competed for the plunder of the state, sowing the seeds of
disintegration and civil war in the following century.
Marshaling a wide range of contemporary sources, both printed and
manuscript, French and English, Sumption recounts the events of this
critical period of the Hundred Years War in unprecedented detail.
