England, France and Aquitaine: From Victory to Defeat in the Hundred Years War by Richard Ballard

I have lamented before about how there aren’t enough histories of the end of the Hundred Years War (in English anyway). That was why I was particularly excited to discover Richard Ballard’s history focusing on just Aquitaine over the Hundred Years War. Aquitaine was one of the main theatres of the Hundred Years War and most relevant was the location of its dramatic conclusion in 1453. This is not the first book to cover this subject but Malcolm Vale’s classic English Gascony, 1399-1453: A Study of War, Government and Politics During the Later Stages of the Hundred Years' War is both 50 years old and decidedly out of print so I was hoping for a newer volume covering similar ground. I have to confess, though, that I had an altogether uneven experience with Ballard’s book. It covers an interesting period and is well researched, but I would have reservations in recommending it to anyone but the most diehard of Hundred Years War enthusiasts.

Overall, the book comes across as reasonably well researched. Ballard reads both French and English and shows an impressive familiarity with the key archives relevant to a study of this subject. He has also clearly read the historiography deeply. He refers to older works quite often which can sometimes be a worrying flag, but with a subject as sparsely treaded as the end of the Hundred Years War it’s not uncommon to have older historiography still be relevant. While I would quibble with interpretations in some places, on the whole information contained within the book is good. It is mostly a narrative history, which is fine but doesn’t make me particularly excited, but there are moments where Ballard ventures into more thematic history and these parts are among the book’s best in my opinion.

Ballard chooses a somewhat unusual framing for the book which works for and against it. From the title one would expect it to chart Aquitaine from the at least the 1340s, with particular emphasis on the Poitiers campaign, through to Battle of Castillon and fall of Bordeaux in 1453. While Ballard does cover the early history of English Aquitaine including the first half of the Hundred Years War, much of the focus is on the campaigns in the 15th century. In fact, the narrative continues well beyond 1453 and includes the start of the Wars of the Roses and the campaigns of Edward IV up until the Treaty of Picquigny in 1475.

On the one hand this framing is a really interesting choice. While traditionally 1453 has been treated as the de facto end of the Hundred Years War, hostilities between the English and French continued for centuries. The outbreak of the Wars of the Roses was caused by the events of the Hundred Years War, and it is impossible to avoid the fact that Edward IV’s resumption of hostilities with the French is inextricably tied to the politics of the early 1400s. The boundaries of the Hundred Years War are the creation of historians, and it is interesting to see someone explore an alternative framing. That said, it is something of a double-edged sword in this particular work. The Yorkist campaigns were confined entirely to Normandy and the area around Calais – they have very little to do with Aquitaine. This makes for a rather strange inclusion in a history of Aquitaine. It’s not that they had no impact on politics in the southwest or that nobody thought about trying to launch another invasion through Bordeaux, but it’s far from the centre of the narrative. This happens in a few places throughout the book where the narrative ventures far from Aquitaine which somewhat undercuts the framing of the rest of the work and makes for a confusing and meandering read.

That brings me to my final, and most significant, problem with this book: Ballard’s writing can be a real chore. Individual sentences are fine but there is no clear thread that links them together into a coherent whole. The narrative frequently swings wildly between disparate topics and geography, and it just does not make for a very pleasant reading experience. This made me kind of dread picking the book up each day and it took me much longer to finish it than its thin size would suggest. I’m also not sure how someone who is not already familiar with the events of the Hundred Years War would fair. I was able to navigate the sudden leaps in discussion because I knew the big picture already, but if you were trying to learn it from this book, I think you would probably struggle.

While the content of the book was interesting and covered a much-neglected topic, the quality of the writing and the book’s habit of meandering into topics beyond Aquitaine means that I cannot recommend it to anyone but Hundred Years War completionists.