The Hundred Years War, Vol IV: Cursed Kings by Jonathan Sumption review – a formidable history

The hundred years war, fought by England and France from the mid‑14th to mid-15th centuries, is remembered this side of the water for famous English victories such as Crécy and Agincourt, the latter battle being the prize exhibit of this fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption’s majestic multi-tomed history. The French tend to remember the fact that, unlike us, they won, which will be painfully apparent in Sumption’s next book. Here, he covers the years 1399-1422, the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V of England, and in France, most of the reign of Charles VI.

In 1422, Charles made himself useful for once by dying, thus providing Sumption with neatly matching terminal dates for the two sides of his narrative: the French king outlived Henry V by less than a few months. Charles had been on the throne more than 40 years, for most of which he had been pathetically and embarrassingly mad, with just enough intervals of lucidity to make a nuisance of himself. His long-suffering subjects referred euphemistically to his usual state of incapability as his “absences”, and his wretched reign illustrates the fact that history, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Ambitious relatives in the Valois family jostled to rule on Charles’s behalf, and so in the end did Henry V, with miserable results for both kingdoms. Not content that his father had usurped the English throne, Henry’s distinctive brand of self-righteousness impelled him to try an even greater usurpation and create a dual monarchy spanning the Channel. When he died he seemed to have triumphed in this unlikely ambition, but it took the next quarter century for reality to seep into English consciousness, with a little help from Joan of Arc and her supernatural visions (which do not appear in this volume).

Sumption is free from partisan nationalism in telling his story, and that is just as well, because the hundred years war should not be viewed through the increasingly nationalist viewpoints of the 16th to 19th centuries. A much more intricate tussle of identities is apparent, in which those at the top of society thought more in terms of dynasty than of nation. After all, that was the whole point of the war: the Plantagenets were trying to enlarge on their ancient French Angevin inheritance and their tattered remaining territories in the extreme south-west and north-east of France. Their royal heraldry, adopted in the mid-14th century, was the reverse of nationalist, combining the golden lions of England and the golden lilies of France (which actually stood in pride of place on the shield). It was only by dynastic arguments that Henry V could justify his chutzpah in seeking to be heir to the French throne (apart from dealing out that perennial medieval joker in the pack, the will of God).

Matters were different for the humbler subjects of these dynasts, who had other priorities than their masters’ glory, and here something more like modern nationalism might have come into play. The stretch of water between England and France formed one of the most decisive linguistic frontiers in Europe, and language was a potent source of identity. The English nobility and gentry, heirs to William of Normandy’s conquest of England, had once spoken French, but that had changed. One of the interesting threads in Sumption’s account of the endless (and normally fruitless) diplomatic negotiations between the two monarchies is that the English often tried to insist on using the international language of Latin, on the grounds that they didn’t understand French. That was a much less plausible argument than the undoubted fact that hardly anyone in France bothered to learn English, yet English French, or rather Norman French, was becoming obsolete. Jubilant Londoners welcomed Henry V’s victories with banners bearing triumphant slogans in English.

Thus French as a living language in England was in steep decline in the period covered by this volume. Geoffrey Chaucer gently satirised his Prioress in the Canterbury Tales for speaking French “after the school of Stratford atte Bowe”: what he meant was that she had learned archaic Norman-French to understand her nunnery’s Rule of Life, which convents such as St Leonard’s Stratford-at-Bow treasured from their foundations two centuries or so before.

Touchingly, conscientious nuns were still doing this when Henry VIII dissolved their convents generations later. The nuns’ pious custom was a testimony to a lost world of Norman elite civility uniting western Europe, which might have been restored again had Henry V lived longer. On the other hand, it might not. Plantagenet England was a second-rate power beside Valois France in terms of population and financial clout, and only the self-lacerating antics of the Valois dynasty really gave Henries IV and V any chance of French conquests. Most of the time, the two kingdoms’ mutual warfare was as ludicrous and ineffective as a couple of elderly drunks fighting in a pub car park. English armies had one real advantage in their deployment of longbowmen, so effectively demonstrated at Agincourt. It may be symptomatic of the general idiocy of the commanders on the other side that they did not make much serious effort to remedy this imbalance, but maybe they were wise simply to wait for the limits of English resources to kick in.

This is a formidable text of nearly 800 pages, plus endnotes. It could have been written any time in the last hundred years, conceding little to the topics that generally fill lecture timetables in university history departments today. In another sense, however, it is bang up to date: this is Game of Thrones history, with plenty of crazed kings, martial heroes, dastardly betrayals, silky clerical types and prisoners rotting in foul dungeons. A certain sort of teenage boy will devour it obsessively. It is difficult to see that anyone could do this type of history better than Sumption. He has an enviable command of original sources, and an excellent sense of place, very necessary when his geographical canvas extends from Perth to the Pyrenees. He has tramped the squares, back lanes and battlements of France, and he tells you what you might see now when you get off the coach. While the book does not have a single illustration, it offers a generous helping of clear maps and plans by which to follow monarchs brooding on lost provinces, bannered hosts marching o’er hill and dale, and burly archers loosing their deadly showers on the enemy. And we should be grateful to Sumption for sparing us much Tudor spin-doctoring from Shakespeare – no “God for Harry” or similar familiar noises adorn his text. The teenage reader should enjoy the possibly authentic alternative shout from Henry V at Agincourt recorded by one contemporary chronicler: “Fellas, let’s go.” I can see that catching on in the sixth form.