Rémy Ambühl and Andy King (eds.)
Documenting Warfare: Records of the Hundred Years War, Edited and Translated in Honour of Anne Curry
(The Boydell Press, 2024), 428 pp. $160.00
Festschriften can be tricky beasts. To receive one is a great honour, no doubt, but compiling and then later reading one can be a strange process. In many ways the challenges facing a festschrift are the same for most edited volumes. Establishing a theme, in this case the life’s work of a respected academic, is one thing but ensuring that every article contained in the text aligns with that theme can be challenging. This is particularly fraught when the individual in question had a wide-ranging career covering many different topics, which most historians warranting a festschrift have. Should the volume focus on one element of their scholarship or should it range across the full breadth and risk feeling disjointed as a result?
Documenting Warfare, a festschrift in honour of the always excellent Anne Curry, takes a path I have never seen before. Yes, it focuses on the Hundred Years War, a subject that Anne Curry has spent most of her career on, but rather than offering essays on topics that Curry wrote on it instead chooses to replicate her process. Each author has selected a primary source document that has not been published, or at least not widely, before. This document is transcribed and translated at the end of the chapter while the chapters provide context and commentary on the author’s selected document. This is the greatest homage to Curry’s career that there could be – it embraces her methodology and shows her influence by continuing to pursue history in a method she would approve of. It’s a small thing, but the choice to include both the transcribed original text and the translation is very welcome and ensures that this volume will prove an invaluable record of these sources and not simply a commentary upon them.
The choice to focus on sources that have largely been absent (I won’t quite say neglected) from wider discussions of the Hundred Years War is also welcome and has several interesting knock-on effects on the volume’s contents. Since famous documents have been avoided it is also the case that many of the war’s most famous events are also largely absent. Seven of the book’s eighteen chapters are concerned with the period from 1361 to 1385 – a period that many general histories of the war rarely cover in detail. The documents even journey beyond England and France, to include discussions of Ireland, Scotland, and Castile. It would be a stretch to call the final collection a representative sample, but I would suggest they are something better – they fill in gaps often neglected in wider histories and by doing so show the complexities of medieval society at war.
Documenting Warfare is too long for me to feasibly break down every chapter, but a sampling of some of the best can give an indication of the quality of the whole.
Chloë R. McKenzie’s article on Princess Isabella and the Great Wardrobe Livery Roll provides fascinating insight into courtly life at the end of the reign of Edward III. Royal daughters are often neglected in general histories despite playing essential roles in medieval political life and this chapter offers an antidote to that neglect by showing how Isabella fulfilled the role vacated by her late mother and unable to be filled by the king’s unpopular mistress. It also digs deeper into the complexities of marriages between the English royal family and senior French nobles when the war was going badly for England, and the role of women in the Order of the Garter. Finally, it is an excellent argument for how something as seemingly simple as the purchase and gifting of cloth can tell historians about so much more than just cloth prices.
Michael Jones’ article on Jean de Blaisy’s efforts to arrange, on King Charles’ behalf, a fleet in Brittany to invade England is one of several chapters concerned with naval affairs and the ever-present challenge of transporting armies across the channel. It stands out as the only one concerning a French attempt to invade England and in how it must incorporate the legacy of the Breton War of Succession and Brittany’s tenuous diplomatic position between England and France. Perhaps because its allegiance was so fluid Bretons seem to have played a disproportionate role in the Hundred Years War and this is an excellent addition to discussions of their exploits, even if this invasion never materialised. It is also one of several chapters that emphasises the gritty detail of medieval logistics and how individual soldiers, long a focus of Curry’s work, interacted with the wider war.
Valérie Toureille’s chapter on rape and Welsh mercenaries was a revelation in part because I had never realised there were so many Welsh mercenaries fighting for France against England. That is something of a footnote to the chapter’s wider examination of how communities might take justice into their own hands against the rampaging violence of soldiers without a purpose during lulls in the war, and the judicial processes in place for dealing with the initial violence and those who would punish the mercenaries for it. While most histories will spend some time discussing the violence on civilians inflicted by medieval armies, it is still always interesting and useful to read an account that digs into the detail of what this looked like and the many complexities that could spiral out of an individual case. It makes the victims more relatable, and thus the violence more horrifying.
Perhaps my favourite single chapter is Bertrand Schnerb’s on a horse auction held in Aire in 1416. This is technically the book’s chapter on Agincourt, but instead of having anything to say about the battle itself it considers its aftermath. In particular, a horse auction of animals captured in Aire that likely had fled the battle. None of these horses were particularly valuable, they were clearly pack animals not warhorses, but the mundanity of it provides fascinating insight into the often-unconsidered aftermath of a major battle and the details of seignorial rights exercised by lords at this time – in this case the local lord’s right to unclaimed property in his demesne. It also shows that even though one of the Middle Ages’ most famous battles may have been fought nearby, life continued to go on and business had to be done.
If I am to offer a minor critique it is that some chapters engage with their documents better than others. While providing essential context is an invaluable asset of these chapters – for example Dan Spencer’s discussion of Fireworks Books in his analysis of a document describing a display of gunpowder technology by German artificers for Henry VI is necessary if readers are to understand the document’s significance – a minority of chapters seem to be more of a wider article with a document tacked on at the end.
As someone who has just completed a book on Castillon, I was very interested in Craig Lambert’s article on the seizure of ships for Earl Rivers aborted mission to Gascony in 1450-1, and certainly the wider analysis fit within the scope of representing the kind of work Anne Curry did, but the single indenture copied at the end did little to capture the scope of his chapter. The research on display is impressive and it clearly drew on many sources, but it does not fully fit the notion of also being a valuable resource by providing copies of relevant primary sources, as the one included indenture won’t get a student or researcher very far. This is almost certainly the result of limitations on what can feasibly be included, though, as the substance of the chapter does not leave room for multiple indentures at the end. The chapter itself is excellent, my only complaint is that it would possibly fit better in a different volume.
On the whole, Documenting Warfare is an excellent book, both as a testament to the influence of Anne Curry and in its own right as a volume on the Hundred Years War. These chapters and sources will provide a valuable resource for years to come and hopefully they may even spark further research questions as they frequently cover less explored aspects of the war. A tremendous book that the editors and contributors, as well as Curry herself, should be very proud of.
Stuart Ellis-Gorman
Independent Scholar
[email protected]
