Jonathan Sumption Meet the Author

mediaval historian and writer Jonathan Sumption.

Thundering history at its best, a narrative that becomes a rich

tapestry, telling the story of England and France at a time

when we were divided, wracked by violent

fortunes were intertwined through war and conquest.

Jonathan Sumption's fourth volume of his

history of the Hundred Years War, there is a last volume to come, has

the short and dazzling reign of Henry V at its heart, the warrior

king who died at 36 in 1422 when he was about to become King

This is history in the grand manner, painting a vivid picture of Royal

courts and battlefields, the struggles for the English throne and

France in the grip of political chaos.

Jonathan Sumption calls this volume Cursed Kings.

The Hundred Years War is a phrase that

trips off the tongue very easily but as a period, I suspect, it is

one that in many people's minds is extremely hazy until they perhaps

go to a Shakespeare Festival and see Henry IV parts I and II, Richard II

Henry V is the key figure in this volume and just reminds us

what the state of England was and the state of

England was a relatively small but highly organised country whose

wealth was much more at the disposal of the state and it's true in some

other European countries that it was a very centralised

country with a long tradition of powerful government.

This caused huge problems when the powerful

But it also meant that on occasions it could achieve

tremendous efforts in fighting wars with countries enormously more

powerful than itself, like France, which had three times the population

of England in the late Middle Ages and at least three times its wealth

but whom it nevertheless defeated on two brief

occasions before finally being defeated conclusively itself.

And Henry V, dead at 36, a young man about to

become King of France at

the time of his death, emerges from Europe as just as

extraordinary a figure as Shakespeare made him seem on

He really was somebody whose power to direct men was exceptional,

wasn't he? Yes.

Henry V had a tremendous force of personality.

He had an extraordinary strategic grasp

and he had the quality which is probably more important than any

He had the ability to seize his opportunities, to

understand what he needed to do and to exploit

He wore the wounds of battle, of course, on his face so people

When he fought the climactic battle, this part of

the conflict with France in 1415, how much luck was involved?

How easily could it have gone the other way?

Oh, it could very easily have gone the other way.

The French were enormously superior in numbers,

particularly in cavalry, and they lost the battle at least

They chose a site which was a disastrous place in

which to fight it because it meant that the two armies were confined

within a relatively narrow corridor between two areas of dense woodland.

And the English archers had a field day.

The English archers were an arm of warfare which had no equivalent

in France and undoubtedly were one of the main factors behind the

English success in battles, not just in Agincourt but on many other

occasions during the Hundred Years War.

What do you think we learned from this?

What do we learn about the process that the two countries

At that time in history, how they were

Well, the main thing that we learn is the different

responses of these two countries to the experience of fighting

and this is very significant for their

The lesson that the French learned was that the

only way in which to defeat foreign invasion and maintain their

national independence was to have a very powerful

centralised monarchy and restrict its tax-raising

And in a sense, therefore, this is the period in which the

French state as it existed until the French Revolution was born.

Yes, and in important respects as it existed

after the French Revolution and still does today.

The English on the other hand found that in order to raise

money it was actually much more productive and much more suitable,

much better way of increasing the King's power to cooperate with

And the Hundred Years War, because it was a

period when the English kings were very much in need of money,

for the period in which parliament really began to acquire the power

which it was to have in very large measure

Which makes it sad, doesn't it, that certainly at school level the period

is, relatively speaking, ignored to such an extent?

I think it is sad because there is enormous value

in studying a single society and in this country it makes sense

for that society to be English or at least British society,

And you lose a whole dimension of historical understanding

if you only study it in little bits here and

little bits there and unfortunately the Middle Ages has lost out from

that but it was a period of striking personalities, extraordinarily

powerful national movements and a period of very exciting events

which we would do well to study if only

because of its inherent human interest.

There is a dazzling array of source material for this volume.

You began the project, your history of the Hundred Years War,

You must have spent months in French archives

I assume you've done most of it yourself.

I don't have any research assistants.

I wrote the book for pleasure so it would be silly to

delegate the pleasure to someone else, not finding small nuggets

of information and documents have a curious way

of representing the past.

In the public record office there are handbooks which the

captain of Calais would have carried about with him on his nightly

There are documents in which the clerk says, "It is too

"perishing cold to go on with this writing.

They are trivial but they are wonderful, these crushed leaves

You are a justice of the Supreme Court but we're not

talking about that today, we're

And you were a lawyer, a distinguished lawyer about

Well, there is space in most people's life

It may be bell ringing, it may be morris dancing,

And when will we get the fifth and final volume?

Jonathan Sumption, thank you very much.

Good evening. Some very mixed weather over the next few days.

Tonight we will all get outbreaks of rain, turning heavier towards the

early hours of the morning with wetter conditions pushing into

Scotland and further