It may be damning with faint praise, but I expected Desmond Seward’s The Hundred Years War to be worse. Don’t misunderstand me, I didn’t think it would be terrible, but it was first published in 1978 which is a long time ago given how much has been written on the Hundred Years War since. On the whole I weas pleasantly surprised by my experience with Seward’s history. I probably still wouldn’t recommend it to most people, it has some glaring problems mostly derived from its age, but on the whole, it was a lot better than I expected!
The Hundred Years War is a classic narrative history of Anglo-French conflict from 1337 to 1453. It is clearly an antecedent to more recent books like Jonathan Sumption’s Trial by Battle as well as its sequels and Juliet Barker’s Conquest. I am a little surprised to say that I think I prefer Seward’s history to both of those books. While the latter examples include more up to date research and a finer grain of detail, Seward does in about 270 pages what Sumption does in 1800 (and counting). Seward also has none of Barker’s stark English nationalism. In fact, Seward’s account is impressively even handed for the most part. He is critical of Henry V, happy to highlight his flaws along with his triumphs, and praises Charles V’s competence (a rarity in English language popular histories). He is arguably a bit harsh on Joan of Arc and Charles VII but in the case of the former he seems to be pushing back against a prevailing view that Joan was indispensable to French victory and in the latter while harsh, it largely mirrors the portrayal in Shakespeare that has long been the popular image of the French king.
Seward’s writing is very readable and engaging, I breezed through the book and didn’t feel like I was bogged down in unnecessary detail or bizarre asides. He even spends a reasonable amount of time on the fall of Normandy and Gascony in the 1450s, a novelty in books like this. I can see how Seward’s history would have been a big deal upon release and why it has remained popular over the decades since.
That having been said, it is definitely showing its age. In areas of military history Seward is far out of step with modern historiography. At Agincourt he gives the French as having 40,000+ soldiers to approximately 8,000 English. Anne Curry’s research has made a very strong case for the position that the English were only slightly outnumbered, and even proponents of a larger French army wouldn’t consider figures as large as those Seward quotes. Seward includes pretty much no references, either, so unless he mentions a source in the text it is largely impossible to determine what he is using as a basis for figures like this. Agincourt is probably the most egregious example, but throughout the book it is easy to see how it is rooted in a much older military historiography. That is not Seward’s fault, he worked with what he had at the time of writing, but it is reason to be wary of reading his book uncritically in 2022. I am also made a little wary by the fact that if I can see glaring errors in my specialty there is a likelihood that other errors exist that didn’t jump out at me because I am not as familiar with the historiography. While I didn’t notice anything as problematic as his accounts of Crécy and Agincourt (the account of Poitiers was less troubling), especially in comparison to more recent histories I have read, I am still not an expert in all things Hundred Years War and could have missed other flaws.
For this reason, I wouldn’t recommend you seek out a copy of Seward to read. If you desperately have to have a narrative history of the Hundred Years War and no alternative to narrative will do then Seward is still a reasonably good option. However, I would strongly recommend reading something like David Green’s The Hundred Years War: A People’s History – it will give you plenty of narrative in addition to a lot more contextual information on the period and is based in much more recent historiography. However, if what is on your shelf or in your local library is Seward, you could do worse than reading him as an introduction to the topic.