First, a confession: I have not read volumes 2-4 of Jonathan Sumption’s staggering multi-volume history of the Hundred Years War. I read and reviewed volume one over a year ago but with the release of volume five last year I decided to skip straight to the end. Since I’m currently writing a book on the end of the Hundred Years War this was the volume most relevant to my current research and I wanted to get right to it. This is also the part of the war that has received the least coverage in English, so I was very excited when I heard it was finally coming out. Most English language histories of the Hundred Years War skip over the very end of the war with only the lightest of detail – everything that comes after Jeanne d’Arc is summarized in just a few pages. I was keen to read Sumption’s lengthier take on both la pucelle and what followed.
I have previously been on record as not being the biggest fan of Sumption’s work. I believe his commitment to providing a strict narrative of the history of the war puts his work in an awkward middle space. It is too long and dense to be desirable or suitable for most general readers, but it doesn’t really engage in historiographical analysis or other scholarship to really be an academic reference work. While I preferred Triumph and Illusion to Trial by Battle, I still think these critiques remain relevant. Triumph and Illusion is purely narrative history, and as narrative history it’s pretty good and certainly very detailed, but it doesn’t put forward much in the way of interesting theories or arguments, and it certainly isn’t a useful introduction to wider scholarship. Triumph and Illusion can also more easily stand out as an important work on the Hundred Years War because this is a part of the war that has been crying out for a more detailed study. Trial by Battle covered the start of the war, an area where there are many other histories that can compete with it in terms of quality. While I think in some ways this book is too narrow, I do have to credit Sumption with providing a relatively clean narrative of an extremely complex and chaotic period in Anglo-French history and as a guide purely to the chronology of this period it is excellent.
While on the whole I liked Triumph and Illusion and I found it to be quite informative, there were some parts of it that I was less than impressed with. Sumption’s depiction of Charles VII and Jeanne d’Arc particularly underwhelmed me. While Sumption manages to be mostly non-partisan in his writing, which is appreciated and not a universal trait of historians of the period, when writing about Jeanne d’Arc he clearly aligns himself with an older school of scholarship that is far more hostile to her and presents her as entirely a pawn of wider forces. This is where I think you can see how Sumption is writing primarily from his reading of the primary sources with less interest in the wider scholarship. Jeanne d’Arc is one of the most written about people of the Middle Ages and there are numerous ways to view her short life. However, Sumption doesn’t really present any of them to the reader. He provides a very narrow view of her that I found rather underwhelming, repeatedly emphasizing the moments when she was excluded from key decisions and reliably presenting very hostile views. He quotes hostile accounts of her, sometimes without mentioning who the author was or even providing a citation, which I found incredibly frustrating. He is of course allowed to provide his own interpretation of Jeanne but I don’t feel like he does due diligence in explaining his position - he is telling you his version without feeling an obligation to justify it.
King Charles VII is one of the most impenetrable French monarchs. He spent much of his time in isolation and did not leave a large body of evidence describing his opinions, plans, or even his general mannerisms. This has made understanding him and interpreting his tumultuous reign very difficult. Sumption chooses to take the line that Charles was a monarch largely moved about by forces beyond his control. This is hardly an indefensible position, but I don’t think Sumption does enough to really dig into who Charles VII was and to consider the various ways we can interpret his life. As with Jeanne d’Arc, there is no variety present, Sumption has his quite narrow take and does not do very much to justify it.
This one is really just a pet peeve of mine, but Sumption also makes some very strange choices when it comes to name spelling, often using the spellings one would expect from a book written nearly a century earlier. This gives his writing the feeling that it is much older than it is and reinforces the idea that he is trying to be to the Hundred Years War what Gibbon is to the fall of Rome. It made me feel like I should have blown a layer of dust off the book before I started reading it, even if in many ways the actual evidence within is quite modern. The style and attitude feel very old.
I would be more inclined to recommend Triumph and Illusion to people than I am Trial by Battle, but that is largely because there is so little else that competes with it in this space. If you want histories of the end of the Hundred Years War in English, you really are starved for choice. Juliet Barker’s Conquest covers this period, but only for Normandy. Malcolm Vale wrote on several related topics but usually only in specifics and most of his work is long out of print and very academic. I still find Sumption to be at times tedious and not as deep as I would like, but at least in this case he is probably the best available option for reading about what is a genuinely fascinating period in Anglo-French history.