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

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Unfortunately, one receives little sense of this from Sumption's work, in which the motives and manipulations of other polities in the period are only mentioned insofar as they directly touch upon the unfolding stories of the French and English kings. Sumption’s erudition and grasp of the literature is formidable: the entry in the bibliography for one leading scholar, Anne Curry, runs over three pages, the most recent from 2020. It tells the story of the collapse of the English dream of conquest from the opening years of the reign of Henry VI, when the battles of Cravant and Verneuil consolidated their control of most of northern France, until the loss of all their continental dominions except Calais thirty years later.

Essentially, as long as France was united, it was a richer and stronger country and as long as the fRench king did not give up the fight, England could ultimately not win, not with smaller resources in terms of manpower and wealth. Throughout the book Sumption ensures that the weight of detail – often concerning intricate politics and diplomacy – is leavened by startling anecdotes and revelations that keep the narrative lively and which remind us of the sheer strangeness and horrific brutality of the Middle Ages. So, too, with the unfolding of the war in the Low Countries, or the manipulations of the international banking systems that were required for the execution of conflict on such a scale and length--and which had their own motivations and circumstances.Those who are familiar with the previous volumes in this series will know what to expect from this one, which deals with the final stages of the war. Perhaps because royal successions are not always straightforward, and possession becomes nine ninths of the law.

On 17 January 2021, Sumption appeared on The Big Questions to discuss the question of whether the lockdown was "punishing too many for the greater good", and said (with reference to the medical concept of quality-adjusted life years) that "I don't accept that all lives are of equal value.Her chief achievement was of boosting morale; her legend was built on her successful prophecy that the Dauphin would be crowned King of France at Reims.

On 13 December 2019, Sumption was appointed as a Non-Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal in Hong Kong by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam. It gets so little attention, one must assume, because it has been traditionally ignored by historians of the period.

It brought to an end four centuries of the English dynasty's presence in France, separating two countries whose fates had once been closely intertwined. Volume IV (covering the years from 1399 to 1422) appeared in 2015, the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. House of Lords Judgments – Three Rivers District Council and Others (Original Appellants and Cross-Respondents) v. He has criticised the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which interprets and adjudicates on the European Convention on Human Rights. Sangatte, once an English fort covering Calais, which in turn shielded Kent, was until recently a staging post for migrants making the illegal crossing to England.

When hundreds of Flemings were butchered during an English sortie from Calais, the rest took to their heels. I make no claim of familiarity with the first four Hundred Years War volumes, for me it is how wars end that is more interesting, rather than how they start. Yet it is nevertheless true that the Hundred Years War metastasized to stretch across the entire theater of Europe in direct and measurable ways. Likewise, the fascinating French invasion of England in 1405, which was executed in conjunction with Glyndwr's rebellion and actually reached as far as Hereford, merits a mere three pages of cursory discussion despite the great many questions it presents regarding Wales as a front in the Hundred Years War. There is a great service in this, and a great necessity in the stabilization of ground that it provides for the next generations of scholars to build against and upon.From his narrative, it becomes clear that there were three main reasons for the decline of English power in France. This may play well to an Anglo-centric view of history, but it seems somewhat at odds with the broader political truth of the times. The security of the south coast of England depended on control of the ports on the other side of the Channel, in Flanders and Normandy. With Triumph and Illusion Jonathan Sumption has, after more than three decades’ toil and 4,000 pages, brought his epic five-volume history of the Hundred Years War to its conclusion. There were also valid dynastic reasons to defend hereditary territories in Normandy and in the south-western province of Gascony.