Jonathan Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years War is nothing short of epic. This volume is 600 pages long and only covers the first ten years of the war, ending with the Siege of Calais in 1347. For the rest of the war, you’ll need to read the next four volumes, all equally massive, the final of which is still not finished. Research projects of this scale are exceedingly rare these days, and that makes this a particularly interesting and important book, but there are also reasons people rarely tackle projects this large. It’s hard to know where to begin when tackling something as enormous in both scope and impact as Sumption’s series and there’s a lot to talk about with this book, both its context and its contents, so let’s jump into it!
At the very start of Trial by Battle Sumption makes a passing remark that narrative history has somewhat fallen out of style and notes that his book is a bit of an outlier. Comments like these from historians tend to get my hackles up a bit, because they are often written by hacks who object to the fact that history is now telling more diverse and complex stories than just the lives of kings and their amazing accomplishments (or dramatic failures). They also usually ignore that narrative history is alive and well, it is just rarer in academic contexts. Now, Sumption isn’t a hack – although he has not exactly covered himself in glory with his comments on Covid responses – but I do think his lament is interesting, in part because his own work kind of answers why these histories have disappeared. He's not wrong, you don’t see narrative history on the scale and with the detail Sumption provides as much as you would have in, say, the mid-19th century. There are several reasons for this. Trial by Battle was published in 1990, the final volume of Sumption’s history is still not out over 30 years later. Most people don’t have time to devote themselves to a single research project for over three decades. More than that, while Sumption’s books are no doubt among the best-selling histories of the Hundred Years War I’d be highly surprised if he makes enough from book sales to support a family. Many of the classic multi-volume epic narrative histories of yore were by people who did not need their writing to pay dividends. Edward Gibbon’s famous (or infamous depending on your discipline) Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a six-volume history of Rome from 98 AD – 1590 AD published in the late 18th century, is the archetype for this kind of project. Gibbon was no wealthy lord, but he was a member of an elite political class that gave him significant advantages and time to write – he wasn’t exactly trying to fit writing time in between his work in the fields, he was a Member of Parliament. These massive narrative projects by and large tend to be the product of an elite class (Sumption sat on the UK’s supreme court and now has the title Lord Sumption) and so it doesn’t particularly surprise me that they aren’t very common. History, and academia generally, still has an elitist problem, but it is much more diverse than it was even a century ago, and with that comes changes in the types of stories that are told and how they are told. In that regard, Sumption’s series is something of a relic.
But how is the book itself? I found Trial by Battle to be deeply impressive, kind of frustrating, and a little boring. Let’s start with the good. When I said that this book only covers the war up until 1347, I was being a little misleading – Sumption’s history actually starts in 1328 with the death of Charles IV, King of France. Charles died without a male heir, and it is this fact that would eventually cause the core dispute of the Hundred Years War. Philip VI of France was Charles’ cousin while Edward III of England was the son of Charles’ younger sister. Most histories of the Hundred Years War will explain this, but Sumption goes even deeper, devoting nearly half the book to events pre-1337. He sets the context for why the English and French kings were so often in conflict, including a very close study of the political situation in Aquitaine and its role in kickstarting hostilities between Edward and Philip. The depth of background here is stunning and very important if you want to fully understand the Hundred Years War. I really like when books do this. While I’m quite familiar with the origins of the Hundred Years War, many readers won’t be and providing this context is crucial to helping people understand what is to follow. It reminded me of Peter Wilson’s history of the Thirty Years War, which devotes over a hundred pages to explaining the context of that war before the conflict even starts. It’s great, I love when big histories do this.
When Sumption ventures beyond the Hundred Years War his commentary gets a bit…messier. He will at times seemingly ignore evidence that doesn’t fit the exact point he wants to make. As an example, at one point he criticises King Philip IV of France for ceasing trade relations with Flanders between 1302 and 1305, neglecting to mention that Flanders was in open rebellion after their victory at Courtrai in 1302 and would only return to the French fold after Philip led a successful invasion in 1305. There’s no reason why Philip would have been maintaining trade with a region he was at war with. This isn’t essential knowledge, and once the book passes 1337 these issues largely disappear, but when it happened it always felt a little sloppy and rubbed me the wrong way. I think because the rest of the book achieves such depth, the fact that on the peripheries I could see the shallowness bothered me.
The thing that makes Sumption’s book so impressive, and the reason I probably wouldn’t recommend it to people, is the level of detail he captures – particularly after the outbreak of the war in 1337. Sumption has spent a very long time studying this war and he lays out exactly what is happening at each stage of the conflict in plain and easy to read language without losing any detail or complexity. It’s impressive how simple and readable, excusing the occasional needlessly obscure word, this book is. That is an achievement. If what you want is for a very detailed and very thorough blow by blow account of the Hundred Years War than Sumption delivers that better than anyone else. However, my question would be: do you really want that?
Don’t get me wrong, for scholars and dedicated amateurs of the Hundred Years War the work Sumption has done is very useful. Having an easy and reliable reference for the order these many complicated events happened in, especially given the war’s many diverse theatres, is super useful. For a general reader, though, it’s all a bit much. You don’t really need this level of detail and while Sumption’s writing is clear I wouldn’t call it particularly engaging. I’m really into this stuff and I still found it kind of boring in places and wanted him to skip to the good stuff. For this reason, I think I might prefer this volume as a reference work, something to dip into when I have a question to answer, rather than as a cover to cover read. The one problem I have here is that Sumption’s referencing is a bit sparse. I fully believe he did his research so I’m not worried about the veracity of his statements, but there are more than a few interesting anecdotes that I would love to follow up on but he offers little in the way of a guide as to where I could find it among the sea of fourteenth century sources.
I think there is a general perception that epic histories like this are the final word on their subject. People still read Gibbon despite him being hopelessly outdated historiographically because it’s long and famous and so it must be good. Trial By Battle is a great narrative of the Hundred Years War, but it’s also thirty years old. It doesn’t have the benefit of thirty years’ worth of research. This is particularly apparent in its discussion of the Battle of Crécy, an area where our understanding has expanded enormously in the past two decades. This is a huge challenge for a project like this – when the final volume comes out, I have no doubt it will be one of if not the best account of the end of the Hundred Years War, but the series beginning will be largely out of date by then. Reading Sumption’s histories will fill you with lots of information about the Hundred Years War, but it still won’t tell you anything, which gets to another issue I have.
Trial by Battle suffers because of what it is: pure narrative history. Sumption isn’t nearly as good at explaining the more complex questions around the why’s of the war as he is at explaining the how and when of its main events. This is very political history. While he dabbles in other areas, particularly economic, legal, and diplomatic history, there is so much of the Hundred Years War missing from its pages. You will learn very little about the culture of the fourteenth century. The roles of women and peasants, unless they are directly engaged in fighting, are largely left to the side which is disappointing. The church also largely exists within the political sphere in this history, the role of spirituality is not something Sumption is particularly interested in including. Now, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that Sumption can’t include all of this. Trial by Battle is a massive book, there isn’t much room for more, but at the same time I prefer something like David Green’s The Hundred Years War: A People’s History which while it doesn’t go into nearly the depth of Sumption does a much better job at providing a holistic view of the Hundred Years War.
That all having been said, most of my criticisms are more a critique of the kind of book I think Sumption should have written and are unfair in that they don’t consider the work on its own terms. By that measure, Trial by Battle is a success – it’s a readable and very thorough narrative history of the opening act of the Hundred Years War. I wouldn’t recommend it to any but the most diehard of Hundred Years War enthusiasts, many of whom have probably already bought and read it anyway, but it is an impressive scholarly achievement of that there is no doubt. I’m glad I read it even if I’m not particularly looking forward to reading the rest of the series.