Sumption, who has commented extensively on recent events such as Covid restrictions and Brexit, wisely does not draw any parallels with the present here. Thus the great English victory at the Battle of Agincourt receives much detailed and breathless (though hardly revelatory) attention in the book, while the great Franco-Scottish victory at the Battle of Baugé is something to be dealt with in far more summary terms. It is now 33 years, and more than 3,000 pages since Jonathan Sumption’s first readers followed Charles IV on his last journey, as his funeral procession wound its slow way from Notre-Dame across the Grand Pont and out through the streets of Paris into the open countryside to the north of Europe’s most populous and richest city. Volume II, Trial by Fire (680 pages) and Volume IV (909 pages) are first printings with full number lines.

The Guardian once described him as being a member of the "million-a-year club", the elite group of barristers earning over a million pounds a year. The more land France reconquered, the greater its tax base; painfully, the opposite was true for the English. This is not to deny the fact that the Hundred Years War was nominally about the bloodshed between France and England. And it is generational, too, in that it could be said to codify the standard interpretation of the Hundred Years War of the preceding generation of scholarship.

Its an amazing achievement for a person not a professional historian who has risen so highly in another.

This situation, coupled with the never-ending tensions between England and France (the former still holding Gascony, the latter probing into this territory under its aggressive new monarch, Philip) created an opportunistic moment for Edward III of England to claim the French throne through his mother, Isabella of France.

Sumption's decision to tell the tale as it has been traditionally told, therefore, is far from unexpected.