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Government and Warfare

Essay and Seminar Questions

  • Is it accurate to describe medieval Europe as 'a society organised for war'?
  • Why were the English successful for so long in the Hundred Years War?
  • 'The chivalric code served as a veneer to disguise the brutality of medieval warfare'. Discuss.


Introductory Reading

Barber, The Two Cities. No readings.

Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 24-105

Waley and Denley, Later Medieval Europe, 3-28, 48-63, 132-149, 172-217, 314-317


Further Reading

Warfare and Chivalry

Barber, Richard, The Knight and Chivalry (2000)

Contamine, Philippe, War in the Middle Ages, trans. Michael Jones (Oxford, 1984)

Hale, J.R., War and Society in Renaissance Europe (Stroud, 1998)

Keen, Maurice, (ed.), Medieval Warfare: A History (Oxford, 1999)

Keen, Maurice, Chivalry (Yale, 1984)

Mallett, Michael, Mercenaries and their Masters (London, 1974)

Nicholson, Helen, Medieval Warfare: Theory and Practice of War in Europe, 300-1500 (Houndmills, 2004)

Taylor, Craig, Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France During the Hundred Years War (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

The Hundred Years' War

Anonymous, A Parisian Journal, 1405-1449, trans. Janet Shirley (Oxford, 1968)

Allmand, Christopher, The Hundred Years' War (Cambridge, 1988)

Allmand, Christopher, Society at War: The Experience of England and France During the Hundred Years War (Edinburgh, 1973)

Curry, Anne, The Hundred Years War (Basingstoke, 2003) [also online]

Curry, Anne and Michael Hughes (eds), Arms, Armies, and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War (Boydell, 1994)

Dodd, Gwylim, 'Agincourt: Henry's Hollow Victory', History Today, 65:10 (2015)

Froissart, Jean, Chronicles, ed. and trans. John Jolliffe (Harmondsworth, 1978) [The most important contemporary history of the Hundred Years' War] [also online]

Ormrod, W.M., The Reign of Edward III (New Haven, 1990)

Saul, Nigel (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval England (Oxford, 1997)