There is normally more than one way of writing about a particular historical subject or period. A book with a title such as this one could have concentrated on narrative and analysis of the political, military, and diplomatic aspects of the Hundred Years War. The task was carried out, in remarkable circumstances, more than forty years ago by a good friend of England, the French historian, Edouard Perroy. With justice, his book is still regarded as the soundest narrative account of the war available to English-speaking readers. For all the criticisms which can be levelled against it, the work remains a successful attempt to make sense of the complicated relationship which existed between England and France over a period of more than a century at the end of the Middle Ages.

But the demands of modern approaches to the teaching of the subject, as well as the influence of research, have tended to move the writing of history away from narrative towards that of the study of themes. The influence of the ‘Annales’ school of historical writing has been largely to place the study of war in the wider social, economic, and cultural background of the societies in which it was fought, to make war part of ‘total’ history. Such an approach has been characteristic of much of the best historical writing of the last generation or so. In 1962 Piero Pieri addressed a Parisian audience on how he saw military history ‘spilling over’ into other aspects and specialisms of history, creating chain reactions which would bind them all together.