Quick Review

Agincourt by Christopher Hibbert

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Not my sort of history, generally speaking.  Not much for warrior kings, chivalry, and the movement of troops.  Maybe in a Scott novel, but even then.  But, this was less than 150 pages without the back-matter, perhaps the most famous battle in the history of the English speaking world, and Christopher Hibbert, one of the most reliably informative and entertaining popular historians of the last Century.  Why ever not then?

One evening's read.  Some pretty exciting stuff; what with the odds against the English, the technological innovation of the long-bow, lovely patches of Shakespeare and the rest.  Hibbert is specially good at negotiating efficiently from point to point, up to, across and away from the fight, without making even this brief book a traditional military history of ranked tin soldiers, chess metaphors and competing blocks of shaded grey, wheeling on a white field.  Hibbert writes a narrative history; personalities, politics and the implications for competing dynasties rather than states, are the stuff of his story.

And just as well, for me at least, as Henry V, if not the hero of Shakespeare or the genocidal conqueror of the French chroniclers, was clearly -- even at this short length -- roughly as interesting as a character as he was a nice fellow, which is not much at all.  I can't remember the last time a central historical figure felt quite so remote from anything for which I might feel the slightest sympathy or admiration.  A man of his time then, and a bloody awful time it was, too.

Still, the significance of the battle, the story and the stakes are made clear enough, and the battle itself was remarkable enough, so I can hardly regret the hour or two it took to read this.

Christopher Hibbert was a master of his craft, in long or short form.



View all my reviews