The Hundred Years War Vol 5: Triumph and Illusion (Hundred Years War, 5)

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Jonathan Sumption is a former History Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. The eagerly anticipated final volume in Jonathan Sumption's prize-winning history of the Hundred Years War, 'one of the great historical undertakings of our age' (Dan Jones, Sunday Times ). He has criticised the "living instrument" doctrine, particularly regarding Article 8 of the convention, which he describes as, "the most striking example of this kind of mission creep.

Many of the characters are unforgettable: Joan of Arc, of course, but also John the Fearless, the father of the reigning Duke of Burgundy, who was murdered towards the end of the previous volume, but whose ghost still stalks the first half of this one.So although the French had not been able to counter that development directly, it was not so clearly to the English advantage as it had been in the earlier decades of the war, particularly at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt.

In due course, England would unite with two other old enemies, Scotland and Ireland, but this time it was not to be. In earlier volumes he chronicled the savage chevauchées, extended raids that wrecked large swathes of France. Four years later, he began work on a history of the conflict that helped shape modern France, the Hundred Years War.Joan saw to it that Charles was crowned Charles VII of France at Reims that year; Bedford exacted his revenge in 1431 with the show trial and execution of Joan. Yet it is nevertheless true that the Hundred Years War metastasized to stretch across the entire theater of Europe in direct and measurable ways. With the final word remaining with one of Burgundian heralds during the (failed) peace talks of the Congress of Arras “We must be fools to risk our lives and souls at the whim of lords and princes, they make peace when it pleases them and leave us with the poverty and destruction. The Hundred Years War is at its core the conflict between these two kingdoms, and it is certainly a kind of historical commonplace to view a monarchical realm as an extension of its crown. Though with questionable legitimacy until he was able to be crowned at the traditional site of Rheims.

He believes that history should not be apologised for once perpetrators of injustices are no longer alive, describing apologies for events such as the Irish Famine and the Armenian genocide as "morally worthless", although saying that, "we have a duty to understand why things happened as they did" and there are "lessons to be learned". Sumption and Joseph co-wrote a 1979 book, Equality, seeking to show that "no convincing arguments for an equal society have ever been advanced" and that "no such society has ever been successfully created".

Sumption speaks French and Italian fluently, and reads Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan and Latin. There were many English settlers, principally in Normandy, but also in Gascony, Maine and other parts of France. Volume I (covering the years from the funeral of Charles IV of France in 1329 to the Surrender of Calais in 1347) was first published in 1990. It is now 33 years, and more than 3,000 pages since Jonathan Sumption’s first readers followed Charles IV on his last journey, as his funeral procession wound its slow way from Notre-Dame across the Grand Pont and out through the streets of Paris into the open countryside to the north of Europe’s most populous and richest city.

He does not overburden the reader with his own conclusions, but offers them when he has a deep insight to share. He has served as a Deputy High Court Judge in the Chancery Division, and a Judge of the Court of Appeal of Jersey [18] and the Guernsey Court of Appeal.The denouement of the war is more interesting than its messy origins, when the death of Charles IV of France in 1328 marked the end of the Capetian dynasty and its replacement with the Valois one. From then on, there was little the English could do to counter the weight of factors against them, especially after Charles effectively initiated war taxation and a standing army on a scale that left England’s inadequate fiscal efforts far behind. He retired from the Supreme Court on 9 December 2018 upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70. One is reminded of this exchange reading Jonathan Sumption’s utterly engrossing Triumph and Illusion, which deals with the final 30 years or so of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) between England and France.