Azincourt

Bernard Cornwell has been thinking about this subject for years. He has long wanted to write a book about a single battle, the events that led up to it, the actual days in the battle and the aftermath from multiple viewpoints.

Agincourt, fought on October 25, 1415 — St. Crispin's Day — is one of the best known battles, in part through the brilliant depiction of it in Shakespeare's Henry V, in part because it was a brilliant and unexpected English victory and in part because it was the first battle won by the use of the longbow. This weapon was developed in this form only by the English — parishes required boys as young as eight to train daily — and enabled them to dominate the European battlefields for the rest of the century.

Lively historical characters abound on all sides, but in Bernard Cornwell's hands the fictional characters — horsemen, archers, nobles, peasants — are authentic and vivid, and the hour-by-hour view of the battle is dramatic and gripping.