BLOODY CROWNS

A well-trodden subject in expert hands.

Military historian Livingston, author of Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England, writes that the Hundred Years War traditionally is understood to begin in 1337, when Philippe VI of France declared that he ruled English-held lands in France, and end in 1453 with the French capture of Bordeaux, the last extensive English holding. It’s an England-centered view featuring three of its great victories (Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt) and a great defeat, Joan of Arc’s 1429 relief of Orléans. Livingston emphasizes that this was less an episode in the interminable wars between the two nations than “France’s struggle to define itself: its borders, its powers, its place in the world.” England played the major role, but it was often joined by Burgundy, Brittany, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, and other statelets. There was no shortage of sovereigns arguing that they had a better claim to the French throne than England’s king or even France's. Making his case, the author moves the war’s beginning back to 1292, when bloody battles broke out between English, Norman, and Gascon trading ships off the French coast, and the English king (technically a mere duke in his French possessions and owing fealty to the French king) refused to take responsibility. Livingston pushes its conclusion out to 1492, when, in the Treaty of Étaples, England acknowledged France’s familiar borders. Doing the math, he promotes it to a 200-year war. Livingston easily keeps track of royal dynasties teeming with innumerable Philips, Edwards, and Charleses. With few and mostly unreliable eyewitnesses, the iconic battles pass quickly; not so his skillful accounts of tortuous dynastic and diplomatic maneuvers, as well as the campaigns that occasionally featured battlefield fireworks but more often fizzled when money ran out or disease killed too many participants.

Solid traditional history on a multigenerational conflict.