Lion Hearts (Essex Dogs Trilogy)
When I was a schoolboy we learnt about the Hundred Years’ War as a series of great battles which the English usually won, although surprisingly they lost the war. Closer inspection showed that the battles occurred at long intervals, sometimes decades apart, so what happened in between? In truth the Hundred Years’ War is itself an historical fiction, an historian’s name applied to a series of wars and truces, some lasting 20 years, including two treaties designed to end the conflict. With equal justice one might call the two World Wars the second Thirty Years’ War.
Lion Hearts, the last of Dan Jones’ Essex Dogs trilogy, is set in one of these in-between years, in 1350. This was three years after the siege of Calais, the setting for the previous book, Wolves of Winter, and two years after the Black Death, which carried off perhaps 40% of Europe’s population. The first third of the book is set in the Sussex port of Winchelsea, where Loveday, a survivor of Crecy and Calais, is trying to set up a new life as an innkeeper. Circumstances, however, reunite him with his former comrades who fought alongside him in France and draw him into fresh battles. This time the enemy are the Castilian pirates who are harassing the south coast.
As with his earlier books, Jones is adept at giving us a worm’s eye view of the war as seen by the men-at-arms and the archers, although we also have scenes of courtly life at Windsor. Though the campaigns in France are in abeyance, there is plenty of action, told with Jones’s usual verve and scholarly accuracy. A worthy conclusion to a fine trilogy.
