After a hiatus where I went on holiday I'm back with another review. I spent my time tackling the first volume in Jonathan Sumption's massive history of the Hundred Years War, Trial by Battle. Full review below:

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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.

Last month, French historian Anthony Guyon published a book on the Senegalese tirailleurs from their creation in 1857 to this day. Previous studies often focused on a specific timeframe of the tirailleurs’ history, such as the World Wars. A complete and fresh study is thus very welcome. I’m not sure if there is any translation planned, so the book will probably remain only in French for a while.

The tirailleurs were sub-Saharan Africans recruited to serve the French military in expanding the colonies in Africa. Like with the Algerian tirailleurs who in fact were Arabs and Kabyles, the term Senegalese is misleading because these men were of different ethnicities and spoke different languages. At first, France considered using them as support troops and not a proper fighting unit. Guyon explores the thin line between slavery and the conscription of these men. One of the early rhetoric was “we freed you from slavery, so you owe us service”. But, also the relationship between colonial authorities and the local leadership or the stereotypes (such as that of the “strong, but simple-minded African man”).

The turning point for the tirailleurs was World War 1 and their use on the fronts of Metropolitan France. They made a name for themselves, including with the French soldiers, but their deployment in Europe provoked the ire of the Germans and the resentment of the British. The anger in pro-colonial circles, both in France and elsewhere, was that it was immoral and dangerous to have Black men kill White men. Not only that, but these tirailleurs would witness White men killing White men, and White men mentally breaking. This, they argued, would weaken the (supposed) status quo in Africa.

Alongside this general study, Guyon also focuses on several personalities who served in the tirailleurs, one of them being the resistant Addi Bâ.

I have yet to read the book, but I listened to a long podcast by Guyon. It’s fascinating. So, I’d highly recommend it to any French speaker (or at least reader) interested in African, colonial, or military history.

The reference is: Guyon, Anthony (2022), Histoire des tirailleurs sénégalais. De l’indigène au soldat de 1857 à nos jours, Perrin, 366 p.

I'm looking for a good introductory overview of the Middle Ages. Is Dan Jones' Powers and Thrones a good place to start? Or should I look at something more academic rather than a popular history?

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