Most historians, including this reviewer, are wary of reading historical fiction. The danger is in overlap. Did one get one’s view of life in the Georgian navy from Admiralty records, or from the pages of Patrick O’Brien? Similarly has one’s opinion of Marshal Marmont been formed from Wellington’s Despatches and Foy’s La Vie Militaire or from Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe? Hollywood is the greater sinner, but too many historical novels play fast and loose with facts, interspersing dialogue and forms of address that are inappropriate for the period, ignoring chronology and inventing incidents that simply could not have happened. There are of course exceptions – one could pass a GCE O Level on the Second Afghan War by reading Flashman and nothing else, but these are few and far between. It was a great pleasure, therefore, to come across Crécy by Richard Foreman, himself a sound historian and also a novelist. Foreman takes the facts of the Hundred Years War and of King Edward III’s first major land campaign culminating in the 1346 battle, and weaves his story around it, without deviating from what actually happened. Within the campaign the author inserts three characters who did not exist but could well have: William Gower, a man-at-arms (infantryman in modern parlance), Owain of Swansea, an archer, and Sir Hugh Grey, an intelligence officer (effectively a spy although he might not have been so described then).Gower is in the retinue and effectively the bodyguard of the Prince of Wales, Edward of Woodstock, who was aged 16 at the time of the battle and nominally in command of the right hand division. Gower and Owain are deputed to act as escort to Grey as they ride into French territory to rescue a French merchant, Michiel Auclair and his daughter, informants of the English, before they are captured by French agents. France then was not yet a united country, rather it was a patchwork of duchies, all theoretically owing fealty to the French king, but some much more reluctantly than others. It is perfectly feasible that people like Auclair existed, particularly if his mercantile interests were in the wool trade, for it was wool, exported mainly to Flanders, that was the basis of English wealth. After many adventures the trio do succeed in rescuing Auclair and Eleanor and are back with the army in time for the great battle, which is well described. There is inevitably a certain amount of author’s licence in the story, the Black Prince’s armour was probably not black, but rather a Victorian invention, and the budding romance between a well-bred French girl and a rather less well-bred infantryman is somewhat unlikely. That said, many men at arms were titled and those who were not hoped that performance on the battlefield would lead to a title, and at a time when advancement was by prowess in the field and not merely by birth, perhaps Eleanor’s attraction to Gower is not impossible. All in all this is a cracking good read, without compromising on historical fact. We look forward to Gower and Owain’s next adventures.

Richard Foreman is the author of Crécy: Men-At-Arms, published by Sharpe Books.

Gordon Corrigan is a military historian and author of Crécy.