The Hundred Years War - Desmond Seward

One could spend many hours searching for a work of study on any period of history to equal Desmond Seward's summation in 265 pages of the Hundred Years War. For those who, like me, struggle to gain any lasting knowledge from some of the world's most boring treatises on a subject that should have more fire and inspiration than any other (namely, history written by dull historians), this coverage of an endlessly confusing era of important English and French drama flows more smoothly than any novel and wastes not a single word.

For the first time in my life I feel as if I have a grasp of the time period, the events, and the genealogy that surrounds this often spoken of but rarely understood series of conflicts. From Edward IIIs strong, if unjust, action at the start in 1337 to Henry VIs weak finish in 1453 we have a well-researched, unclogged perspective on the politics of the war, the effects on all classes during both the troubled peacetime and years of conflict, as well as religious or otherwise objection or promotion of the stunning atrocities committed by both peoples on each other, or themselves.

What I'm trying to say is that having read this book I feel that I understand what happened and why it happened, to the extent of our knowledge based on the sources that have survived. Seward writes with talent and clarity, and has such a grasp of things himself that, like a well-written novel, we know he's not giving us everything he knows—just everything that we need to know. He's the sort of historian who seems very trustworthy; like any history it should be taken with the grain of salt that comes by reading other sources, especially those primary to the case. Some things seem a little too simple in his retelling of it, and that may be because our expectations surpass the situation's reality, or that it has been simplified more than is healthy.

I am not yet a historian, and certainly not one with a knowledge of the War like Seward; I could not attempt to pass judgement for or against it in any informed way. But I do know that there is much to be gained from this book and that it takes little effort to pick it up; the only difficulty is putting it down before it's finished.

I wish my report could be less glowing; after all, it's the negative things we say that set us out as truly critical thinkers, as the great brains of the age we inhabit...but having wracked my brain all I can say is that I wish it were longer, and I wish he wrote books on every subject. If I sound at all like a giggling teenage fangirl, there may be some simplistic truth to the thought. I don't really mind, to be honest.