Books: A Great and Glorious Adventure: A History of the Hundred Years War and the Birth of Renaissance England By Gordon Corrigan

The Done Thing

By Robert Minto

Although the Hundred Years’ War was fought to unite the English and French crowns, Gordon Corrigan notes in his new history that it “might more accurately be described as the series of events which transformed the English from being Anglo-French into pure Anglo.” The war consisted of numerous English chevauchées, Viking-style raiding expeditions through the countryside of France, punctuated by massacres of French chivalry on the fields of Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. This one-sided conflict continued for so long because the French couldn’t cope with the English super-weapon – the longbow – and the English couldn’t hold the extensive lands they conquered with their small armies. The war forged an enduring enmity, but also the identities of each nation. On one hand, the war enabled the English to perfect their professional military, gave them a strong sense of national pride, and distracted them from an otherwise rampant tendency to civil war. On the other hand, the conflict slowly strained out the seditious aristocracy that divided the French monarchy, and ultimately gave the nation a unifying hero-martyr in Joan of Arc.

Corrigan sets out to tell this story in an accessible narrative. This simple goal may surprise those who first acquaint themselves with the description on the back cover of his book. There, we are told that Corrigan will give the events and personalities of the war “the full attention and reassessment they deserve.” A total of exactly 46 endnotes and the lack of a full bibliography quickly deflate this expectation. But authors should not be blamed for what their publishers get up to on back covers. Corrigan’s style and verve immediately reveal his true intentions.

As an accessible narrative, A Great and Glorious Adventure succeeds very well – perhaps too well. The story is memorably told, but some of the devices, unnecessarily deployed to render an already gripping tale more gripping still, range from the tedious to the disturbing.


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