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Essex Dogs Part 2 - Jonesing for Some More Bad History
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This is a two part series. Part one can be found here

It's also come to my attention that I didn't really give a good overview of Essex Dogs as a whole in the first part, which sometimes made it confusing when reading my post.

In short, the "Essex Dogs" consist of the grizzled Loveday FitzTalbot (their reluctant leader after the disappearance of "the Captain"), Scotsman (Scottish and angry), Pismire (small and angry), Millstone (a quiet killer), Father (an ex-priest who is useless at anything beyond drinking and murder), Romford (teenage drug addict from London's streets), Tebbe (an archer), Thorpe (another archer) and two Welsh brothers (the only competent members of the Dogs despite not speaking English). The whole company has been hired for the campaign by Sir Robert le Straunge, a fat, foppish incompetent.

The Dogs aren't natural soldiers, but rather bandits and strongmen who occasionally go to war but, given that only two have been out of England before the Crécy campaign, they haven't been to war since the Scottish campaigns of the mid to late 1330s. Loveday and Romford are the main POV characters, Loveday dealing with a sense of inadequacy as a leader and growing distaste for war, Romford dealing with being a drug addict and at war for the first time. The Dogs are - deliberately - broadly incompetent despite having a good initial start to the campaign and actually miss out on most of the real fighting prior to Crécy.

Part 3: Blood

9 - You Want a Nice Trebuchet, but you'll get a bad Poissy

Having left Caen, made their way to Rouen and found precious little in the way of crossings, the English army finally reaches the town of Poissy, where the bridge has been broken but left unguarded. While the bridge is being repaired, fifty or so Frenchmen arrive and begin building two counter-weight trebuchets to attack anyone trying to repair the broken span of the bridge. Northampton leads the attack across the single fifty pace long beam spanning the gap in the bridge, the French charge forwards, and fifteen of the French are lying dead and the rest are fleeing by the time the English have enough men across the river to attempt an attack of their own1.

When I first read the D-Day scene, I assumed that the "catapults" being used were traction catapults. That is, rather than using counterweights to power the machine, a team of men pull down sharply on ropes to launch the projectile. It's the oldest form of trebuchet and allows for quite a rapid rate of discharge and easy changes of aim, at the expense of limited range and projectile weight, which is exactly what you need when trying to sink moving targets like small boats2 .

This section on Poissy, however, confirms that we should be thinking about counterweight trebuchets3 . Simply put, you don't use slow shooting weapons that, by the very nature of their construction, can't be moved to re-aim at a moving target as anti-ship weaponry. If you were to be defending a beach with artillery then springalds, great crossbows and cannons would be much better suited to the task, since they have a longer range and can be more easily aimed at a moving target.

There's another problem: we know for sure that trebuchets weren't set up against the bridge at Poissy, although in this case the bad history is largely the fault of Richard Barber, not Dan Jones.

King Philippe is said in the Acta Bellicosa to have had numerous "machinas" - translated as "siege egines" by Barber - prepared in case the English occupied Poissy and could be besieged. While "machina" can refer to a stone throwing device it can also refer to all manner of other things, including "schemes"/"strategems"4 . Barber's translation seems to confirm their presence with the mention of "stones" found in the French wagons after the battle, but the published text says only that "crossbows and quarrels, and also victuals" were found and then plundered before the carts were burned5 .

But what if Barber's translation from the original manuscript is more accurate than the 19th century transcription? Fortunately the scribe who copied out the existing copy of the Acta Bellicosa had a very clear hand, and the manuscript has been digitised. Almost everyone should be able to see that "balistis et querulis" is the correct reading and, similarly, the transcription listing "five hundred" ("quingenta") French as having been killed as opposed to Barber's "fifty" (probably read as "quinquaginta")6 . This makes a lot of sense: Philippe was hurrying to Paris and didn't leave any sort of guard on the bridge, and the French reached the bridge only after the English had begun their desperate crossing, so there were no opportunities for siege engines to be erected7 .

This brings me to the description of the combat. Perhaps Jones can't be entirely blamed for taking Barber's translation at face value - although other authors have used the published transcription to argue for significant French casualties before now8 - his description of the battle nonetheless doesn't line up with the rest of the Acta Bellicosa. Quite apart from the French not reaching the bridge until after the English began to cross the single beam (sixty feet not fifty paces)9 , it was a fierce fight with the English on the northern side of the Seine at one point being driven away from the bridge and temporarily cut off from reinforcements10 .

Jones' literary reconstruction is likely that there were only fifty combatants, on whom only a fraction were killed, but that Northampton deliberately spread the story that there were many thousands and that a thousand of them were killed11 , to contrast between Wynkeley's figure of a thousand killed (quoted in the chapter epigraph) and the Acta Bellicosa's figure of fifty. As I've already mentioned, the Acta really says that five hundred were killed rather than fifty, and in any case the French had twenty five banners, which were brought back to the army. This would at least have given a good ballpark figure for the number of opponents faced and would be impossible for Northampton to fake on such short notice, even if the number of dead were exaggerated12 .

About the only accurate part is that archery seems to have played the dominant role in the victory, as both French and English sources agree. Of course, since the Seine is close to 400 metres wide at this point, it's impossible that they were shooting from the south bank in order to cover the men-at-arms. Rather, those already across and those who had reached at least the gap must have won the day. It's not quite as difficult as it sounds - the crossbows still being in the carts suggests that the French weren't prepared for a missile duel - and most of the French seem to have been poorly armed men from the countryside with a stiffening of the urban militia from Amiens, so their opponents weren't exactly the toughest of nuts to crack. Nonetheless, it was an impressive feat of arms under the circumstances.

10 - White Stain, Wrong Battle

Desperate to cross the Somme and escape the French army, the English hear about a way across the Somme: the Blanchetaque, or "White Stain", a ford of stone that provides a way across the Somme. On reaching the edge of the marsh, a hundred yards from the river, they travel half a mile along it, then face off against the opposite bank, where French troops appear. A hundred men-at-arms cross at the ford on horseback, supported by thirty archers who stand at the edge of the river, outside of crossbow range but within longbow range, and they manage to win after a mounted combat in the middle of the ford13 .

Some elements of this are obviously based on Richard Wynkeley's letter, in particular there being a hundred men-at-arms and "some" archers being involved in forcing the crossing, although here "some" ("quibusdam") is probably a generic, indeterminate plural rather than a suggestion that there were only a very small number of archers. Wynkeley just doesn't care how many archers there were, much as how Edward III doesn't care about casualties from the infantry during the capture of Caen14 . We'll get back to this later.

Other elements, however, are more questionable. The army skirts Abbeville, then descends into a dry valley and follows it for a mile. At this point, the tidal flat is only a hundred yards on either side of the river. They then continue for another half mile, for a total distance of 1.5 miles/2.4km15 . At this point, there is "nothing but mud and water" ahead.

Given that the whole English army was camped at Acheux-en-Vimeu16 , it is difficult to understand how they could "skirt far around Abbeville", since they were already to the west of it. The Trie Ruisse, which leads from Acheux down to the Somme, would most likely have dried up during the summer, and the marshes around Petit Port and the other little hamlets may also probably have dried out a little, giving a similar terrain to that described in the book. The half mile march would have put them roughly opposite what is now Port-le-Grand, again matching the terrain described and also the location of the ford near Saigneville as related in the Grandes Chroniques17 .

Of course, it's possible that Jones meant that, instead of going down the valley through Miannay and Cahon to Petit Port at the edge of the Somme, the English army went north-west and then down into the valley that contains Mons and Boismont. This is still in line with English sources, which usually place the Blanchetaque at or very near to St-Valery, but makes the tidal flat so vast that it doesn't match the description in the book18 .

While I prefer a location closer to St-Valery for a number of reasons, I'm not going to ding Jones for choosing somewhere near Saigneville, because the location is genuinely unknowable, and there is at least some evidence pointing towards it19 . My point here is that, of the two possible locations for the crossing, Jones seems to have chosen the narrowest and it's still too wide to match the battle he describes.

If you want to see what I mean, the IGN (the Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière) has a wonderful service that lets you compare maps, including the two oldest detailed maps of France. When you come out at Petit Port and move a half mile downstream, the width between the two banks becomes about half a mile, if you assume that the two roads on the Cassini map are the last viable section of dry land. The distance between banks at Boismont is more than a mile. The water itself is quite broad, in the order of at least 200-300m, although the shifting nature of the region could mean more smaller channels or a single larger channel at the point.

Yet, in Jones' description of the attack, the English archers stand at the edge of the Somme and shoot right across to the crossbowmen on the other side. Leaving aside the fact that this exaggerates the range of the longbow in and of itself20 , for the English archers to have been shooting the French crossbowmen, the French must have been on the tidal flat or the English must have been shooting 6-700 metres with their longbows. Since the French crossbowmen couldn't have spanned their crossbows on the mud21 , they must have been on the bank, which means the English were shooting at least three times their realistic practical range.

Then there's the issue of there being only thirty archers. As I've already mentioned, Wynkeley almost certainly wasn't implying that there were very few archers when he said that "some" archers participated. There are two reasons for this. The first is that Edward III and Michael Northburgh are clear that the English crossed on a broader front than just the ford, as is Richard Wynkeley for that matter, which in turn suggests that there must have been a significant number of archers on either side of the ford itself22 . The Bourgeois of Valenciennes, who seems to have gotten his version of the events at the ford from Sir Wulfhard de Gistel, has the archers entering the water in front of the Welsh spearmen, with the men-at-arms coming behind these, although the Earl of Warwick and Godefroi d'Harcourt seem to be "before" either the men-at-arms or the whole of the English line23 .

The three eyewitness and one additional source who likely draws on eyewitness testimony allow us to get a pretty good idea of how the crossing was made: the archers, supported by spearmen, advanced across the mud on either side of the ford while the picked body of men-at-arms advanced up the centre, to break any enemy who stood their ground. But did the men-at-arms attack while mounted?

Probably not. The first clear24 reference to this is in the Chandos Herald, who has the hundred picked men-at-arms couching their lances and charging into the water, and this is later picked up by Froissart25 . This seems unlikely to me, given the narrowness of the path (6-10 men wide according to Northburgh), the large number of riders for such a space and the vulnerability of horses to any holes in the ford and the mud. If a horse was hit with a quarrel, for instance, it might well crash into the horses around it and send one or more of them off into the mud, and if it fell on a rider, the rider would quite probably drown in either water or mud. It would be much safer and allow a greater degree of flexibility if the men-at-arms were dismounted.

The story of the jousting may, however, be based in truth. Geoffrey le Baker records that, after the English had crossed and the French army had come up to the southern side of the Somme, there was jousting "both on the ford and on the shore"26 . This almost certainly includes the incident of Sir Thomas Colville crossing back over to joust with a French knight in a rather amicable piece of chivalric theatre, and there may have been other chivalric feats that are not specifically named but are included in le Baker's story27 . This then mutated over time into a marvellous chivalric joust on the ford, rather than the desperate, bloody struggle it must have been.

11 - You Want to Fight There? You've got to be Crécy!

Now, in the final chapter of the book, we get to the battle you've all been waiting for. Having crossed the Blanchetaque, the English army follows the edge of the forest east, then north until they come to a crossroads with a windmill beyond it. The carts are brought up to the crossroads, and a line is formed between the Foret de Crécy and another smaller forest on their right. Evidently this marks the front of the English line and they reorient to face what had been their rear, because when the action starts the Forest of Crécy is on their right. There is a gap of a thousand paces between the ends of the wall of carts, filled with eight ranks of men-at-arms, with rows of pits dug in front of the gap.

The Genoese advance, kill a single English archer, are massacred, and then the French vanguard double massacres them because they're in a dip in the ground and the Genoese - not seeing them - run right into them. The French vanguard then charges into the English vanguard, knocking Romford (our POV character for this chapter) out for most of the battle. By the time he regains consciousness, the Prince has been captured and the English vanguard has been pushed back from their position in the gap in the carts, although this is soon rectified. Romford spots the Prince as he's being dragged away and (probably) saves him with a well shot arrow. English reinforcements then pour out of the copse of trees to the left and finally break the French, effectively ending the battle28 .

As some of you may know, Kelly DeVries and Michael Livingston challenged the traditional location of the Battle of Crécy in 2015, arguing that it was between the Forest of Crécy and the Bois de But, just up above Domvast, and Michael Livingston then refined this somewhat in 202229 . Jones thanks Michael Livingston in his Author's Note for having the chance to look at his "superb and groundbreaking" manuscript (although it's neither), so you would think that he might have used the Livingston-DeVries revisionist site30 .

I'll give Jones this: he certainly subverted my expectation, because I'm not 100% sure where he has placed the battle. The forest of Crécy is on the left in Livingston's version of the battle, and the only evidence of a windmill in the area has it south-west of the crossroads (i.e. behind Livingston's lines), not to the north of the crossroads, where Jones has it. Even if Jones was locating the battle between the forest and the Bois de Crocq, the only attested windmill in that area is some 800m from where the battlelines would need to be drawn up and would have much of its vision obstructed by the Bois de Crocq. There's no mention of Marcheville, which surely would have been as prominent a landmark as the windmill.

Then there are more practical elements of the the arrangement, with a gap of a "thousand paces" filled with men-at-arms "eight ranks" deep. If we take the "pace" to be 30"/76.2cm rather than a 3ft and assume that each man occupied 1 metre, filling the gap with men eight ranks deep would require 6096 men, or at least twice as many men-at-arms as were in the entire English army, or 1.6 times as many men as Froissart's conservative estimate of the men the Prince had in his division31 ! It's also wider than the gap between the forest and the Bois de But, although you could fit such a gap between the forest and the Bois de Crocq if you were willing to allow the wings of archers to end in empty space, with nothing to protect them.

Looking at the site further, situating the battle between the forest and the Bois de But, but facing back along the Abbeville road, would necessarily see the soldiers billeted in Saint-Ricquer come up behind the position as they moved up the road to Marcheville, unless you want to assume they marched all the way back to Abbeville to join the army32 . On the other hand, while the position between the forest and the Bois de Crocq will block movement from both directions, it's on functionally flat terrain, with a windmill that doesn't have a clear (if any!) view of the battle and a right wing that either can't see the enemy until they're coming around the edge of the forest or hanging out there right in their path.

At this point I have to throw my hands up in the air and declare that I don't know where Jones intended to place the battle, but it's definitely not at the traditional or the revisionist location.

Part 4: Excursus

If you were hoping to see me get into the battle and what Jones gets right or wrong, I'm unfortunately going to have to disappoint you. Because there's no fully agreed upon version of the battle and this is a work of fiction, I'm not going to write up anything about it in the post, although I will say that I think his version of the battle is dead wrong and pretty rubbish.

These little bits and bobs are elements that I couldn't quite fit in or, as with the Northampton vs Leicester rivalry, turned out to Jones misreading the sources and invalidating the research I had done. Rather than throw it away, though I've popped it here so it doesn't go to waste. Also included are some thoughts on historical fiction and my problem with Essex Dogs from this perspective.

Northampton is Not Bigger than Leicester

This is the kind of pedantry that this sub is best at. Northampton was probably the wealthier town than Leicester in 1334 (or perhaps had been less effective at evading tax in 1332), as it paid 540 shillings instead of 533 shillings, but in 1377 Leicester had 2101 tax paying citizens while Northampton had 147733 . In 1086, Leicester had 322 houses, while Northampton had 316, which suggests that had probably always been the marginally larger town, while Leicester remains larger than Northampton in 1523, 1662, 1801 and 1862, so it's likely that this was always the case34 .

In other words, Leicester was the larger town and may have been better at tax evasion, since it was an English centre of cloth production, whereas the fairs at Northampton featured imported cloth, while also being fairly prominent in the wool export trade35 .

What's that, you say? This is probably a rhetorical device used by the Earl of Northampton playing on rivalry between his home city of Northampton and Leicester? Well then you're wrong on two counts. Firstly, it's clear from the text that we're meant to take this Leicester being smaller than Northampton36 .

Secondly, the surviving records suggest William de Bohun recruited almost no men from Northamptonshire but instead recruited heavily from Essex and his other lands, which seem to have been in Kent, Surry, Nottinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Essex, Suffolk, Rutland, Lincolnshire, Dorset, Buckinghamshire and Salop37 . Unfortunately the list of those who owed the feudal aid for Northamptonshire in 1346 has been lost, so it can't be definitively proven, but the available evidence does tend to argue against it.

One interesting piece of information before I wrap up this pedantic sideline: there is a reference to a "William of Northampton" in the 1327 lay subsidy for the town of Leicester, which might actually mean Northampton had interests in Leicester but not Northampton38 !

Bravado and Rouen

On hearing that King Philippe is in Rouen while out scouting, Godefroi d'Harcourt and a group of other men-at-arms, including Sir Thomas Holland, decide to make an attack on the suburbs of Rouen in order to strike fear into Philippe and the citizens of Rouen. It goes...poorly, and they charge into an ambush of crossbows, resulting in the deaths of two knights, Sir Richard de la Marsh and Sir James Basden39 .

This is actually proof that Jones has read Livingstone and Witzel's The Road to Crécy, which is the only secondary source to suggest some kind of ambush occurred in the suburbs of Rouen, and any bad history is mostly theirs40 . The Bourgeois of Valenciennes, who does appear to have had some sources from the English camp, claims that Thomas Holland and Richard de la Marche chose to make a daring attack on their own - not as part of a reconnaissance force - and (so far as I can make out) "they killed two men and wounded more", not that two English knights were killed41 .

We also don't know when this attacked occurred. Livingstone and Witzel have put it on the 6th of August, because most of the Inquisitions Post Mortem into Sir John Dauney's lands put it on this date, but there is considerable confusion, with one inquisition suggesting he died on the 3rd, two on the 6th and another on the 13th. The writ itself was given on the 18th of August, which probably suggests the 6th or 13th rather than the 3rd, but otherwise we have no reason to think that he was killed in an attack on the suburbs of Rouen42 . This is the period where active skirmishing and the occasional foray across the river in boats began to happen again, after all.

Of course, John Dauney might have died in a reckless attack on the suburbs of Rouen, but we also have no evidence that that Richard de la Marche was killed, and the chronicler reporting the incident certainly didn't think he had been. It's also entirely possible that the chronicler was misinformed or misinterpreted the information he was given and that Richard de la Vache might have been Holland's companion or that Richard Talbot - who was wounded along with Holland during an attack on a castle during the march to Paris - was Holland's companion in a foolish endeavour43. Ultimately Richard de la Marche dying isn't supported by the sources, and the death of John Dauney is very tenuous at best.

Thoughts on Essex Dogs Historical Fiction

As I mentioned in my first post, I read AJ MacKenzie's A Flight of Arrows and Michael Jeck's Fields of Glory before writing these two posts in order to be sure that it was Essex Dogs and not just the genre that I had an issue with. They're two very different books, written by two very different authors who have two very different stories to tell.

A Flight of Arrows is written by a husband and wife team under the pen name AJ MacKenzie. Yep, as you might have guessed, they're Marilyn Livingston and Morgen Witzel, the authors of The Road to Crécy, and they bring the full weight of their study of not just the campaign but also the period. Some of the history is a little dated (the "fifteen arrows a minute" bit hasn't been relevant since 2005 and The Great Warbow), but at the same time they've also dug deep into elements of history not usually mentioned even in academic accounts. That diplomatic mission Geoffrey of Maldon went on that I mentioned in the last part? That's both a new bit of research for them and a minor plot element.

The story itself is a thriller: during the scattered skirmishes just after the English landings at Saint-Vaast, an English knight is killed after he stumbles on traitors to the English army. The protagonist, a herald named Simon Merrivale, works to unravel the conspiracy and prevent the English army from coming apart at the seams, while the traitors do their best to ensure the destruction of the army and then the downfall of King Philippe. Thematically, it's heavy on investigation, diplomacy and skullduggery, but also includes all the major skirmishes and fights from an observer's perspective.

Fields of Glory is what Dan Jones wanted Essex Dogs to be. It's a story of an understrength vintaine, with fifteen men instead of twenty, attached to Sir John de Sulley and their experience as mounted archers in the campaign. Their leader (Berenger) is a grizzled veteran loner, and they've adopted a street kid as part mascot, part general dogsbody. During the sack of Caen they adopt Béatrice, a French woman whose father was killed in part for a joke at the expense of King Philippe and who was also regarded as a bit of a witch because her father had also made gunpowder.

The story bounces between extreme paranoia following the initial landing, supreme confidence (and even overconfidence) after encountering little resistance and then a growing sense of dread as there is no more easy plunder and the English have to scramble to be just one step ahead of the French. The vintaine takes casualties throughout the campaign, including wounded men who later recover, and by the time of Crécy they're very pessimistic about their chances.

Thematically, the book is very heavy on the experience of war, with the contrasting attitudes and experiences of Berenger, a veteran who is beginning to lose his taste for it, and "Donkey", the young boy who starts off wanting to kill every Frenchmen and comes to see both the horror of it all but also the humanity of the French. Although Jecks is not a scholar and doesn't seem to have even consulted the full range of secondary - let alone primary - sources, he nonetheless manages to capture the experience of the English and their desperation to cross first the Seine and then the Somme and the mental toll that constantly being in skirmishes causes very well.

It's perhaps a little unfair to compare Jones, a first time historical novelist, to veterans of historical fiction. Writing fiction is much different from writing narrative history, and few of the skills are very transferable. With that said, it is useful to compare some aspects of these two books with Essex Dogs to show that sticking closer to history can create a better story.

To start with, Jecks uses the landings at Saint-Vaast to set the French up as a credible threat. He favours Clifford J Rogers' interpretation, with about a thousand French attacking the initial landing party. The characters treat this as a serious threat, moreso as they don't have any spare arrows unloaded at the time, and the battle is hard fought. Although the English will repeatedly win throughout the campaign in part because of their longbows, this initial setup of the French as dangerous opponents not to be underestimated remains a constant refrain throughout the book. They might often be too few to make a real difference, and they might not always chose the ideal place to fight, but the French are always a constant danger and the army's numbers and morale both wears down over time as a result of all of these little skirmishes.

In comparison, the French in Essex Dogs are generally pretty pathetic and this seems to be by design. Jones deliberately underplays the size and effectiveness of the French wherever possible, omitting battles or skirmishes when he can to make it seem like the French are to cowardly to fight the English, and as a result you never really get a sense that the French are dangerous. Where as in Fields of Glory a handful of French youths with crossbows can kill and injure several English in an ambush, in Essex Dogs the French youths left behind in Saint-Lo are incapable of doing anything beyond shouting insults at the English. The tension is far less in Essex Dogs as a result.

On another tack, let's look at the Black Prince. in A Flight of Arrows, Edward III allows the Black Prince a fair degree of free range, even allowing him to bring Hugh Despenser (whose father had notoriously been Edward II's favourite) from the King's battle into the vanguard, even though Roger Mortimer (whose father had overthrown Edward II and ensured Hugh's father died a traitor's death) is part of it. The whole campaign is Edward allowing the Black Prince to "win his spurs", which means letting him make mistakes as he tries to work out how to command men. At first he is certainly out of his depth, drinking too much and deliberately losing at dice in order to try and make men think favourably about him, but over the course of the campaign he slowly works things out and manages to become a good leader of men.

In Essex Dogs, the Black Prince is a useless butt monkey. He's a spoiled, drunken fool who gambles using loaded dice and even at Crécy he doesn't achieve anything beyond getting captured. Now, I'm not opposed to the Black Prince being portrayed negatively, and I can certainly see him being somewhat immature and not fully ready to lead on his own, but the idea that Edward would let his son get to the point he's at during the campaign doesn't even match Jones' depiction of him as a stern, almost godlike king who wants his son to be a proper knight and leader of men. Jones makes the Prince almost completely passive - even when the sources mention that the Prince ordered an attack or the like Jones strips all responsibility away from him - and incapable of anything much more than daily drunkenness.

There's certainly a narrative in the primary sources that can be reasonably be construed as the Prince struggling to maintain command or, alternatively, being too brash and eager for battle. Almost all the instances of poor discipline, for instance, relate to the vanguard. The attack on Caen, for instance, was initiated by the men of the Prince's vanguard, and this is repeated time and again throughout the march to Crécy. Even at Crécy, the Chronicle of the Este Family has Edward III gnashing his teeth after he has to sally to rescue the Black Prince after he advances too far, while the Bourgeois of Valenciennes say the Prince ashamed when his father asks him how he likes war now after the same rescue. Making the Prince completely incompetent, though doesn't really allow for much nuance or character growth.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point fairly clear by now. Other authors have worked within history to create fairly plausible versions of the campaign, even when they haven't had Jones' training in history, that are also filled with inter-personal tension as well as a constant threat of the French. Jones has decided to make the French a bit of a joke - much like the Black Prince - and he definitely hasn't made up for it with inter-personal tension or character work. Sir Thomas Holland is about the only 3D character in Essex Dogs, and that might just be because he's a side character!

If you want something that follows the English army day by day and manages to work a wide ranging conspiracy in between the historical events, then you'll enjoy A Flight of Arrows. If you want to read about the ordinary soldier and his experience on the campaign, then Fields of Glory has you covered. Essex Dogs can be safely avoided and discarded.

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