It has long been recognised that Shakespeare derived the core narrative outline of his history plays from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (Reference Holinshed1577), with Holinshed in turn drawing on Edward Hall’s influential Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (Reference Hall1548), a compilation that saw the problems resulting from Richard ii’s deposition finding their resolution in the Tudor accession. What is more difficult is to identify the range of sources that lay beyond Hall’s work. Some of the accounts that Hall used are obvious: Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia, for example, and such medieval chronicles as Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana. Sometimes, however, Hall refers to works that are more enigmatic. One such is an account that, in his prefatory list of sources under ‘Englishe writers’, he identifies simply as by ‘Ihon Basset’. What this account by the elusive Basset was, who its mysterious author could have been and whether or not the account had survived were all matters of contention. It was the young Oxford historian, Benedicta Rowe, who resolved the mystery in the 1920s, when she finally tracked down Basset’s chronicle in College of Arms ms M9, announcing her discovery in an article in the English Historical Review (Rowe Reference Rowe1926). Rowe’s achievement was to bring Basset’s narrative to wider public notice. What she did not do was produce an edition of the text, in large part because she was disappointed that the account broke off in 1429 just when the pace of events was quickening in the wake of Joan of Arc’s arrival at Orléans. The present edition by Curry and Ambühl is thus the first to publish the chronicle in full, accompanied by an English translation, and at the same time to provide a comprehensive critical commentary, which both examines the problems of authorship and composition and traces the narrative’s later use by the heralds and, more especially, by Edward Hall.

The Soldiers’ Chronicle, as it is termed here, an 18,000-word narrative in French, the language of chivalry, is remarkable for being the product of a team effort. At the head of the manuscript is an incipit in the hand of William Worcester, Sir John Fastolf’s secretary, which originally ascribed the composition to just one man, Peter Basset, but was subsequently amended to indicate the additional involvement of Christopher Hanson, a German and described as a follower of Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, and Luket Nantron, identified as a Parisian and another of Fastolf’s servants. A considerable part of the co-editors’ introduction is devoted to unravelling the complexities of the chronicle’s construction and identifying the respective contributions of the four authors listed. The suggestion made by the co-editors is that the narrative is in fact a compilation of two distinct parts: the first, a relatively brief account of Henry v’s conquest of Normandy between 1417 and 1422, which may have originated with Basset, and the second, a much fuller account of the years from 1422 to 1429, for which Hanson and Worcester were probably responsible, drawing in places, it seems, on Fastolf’s recollections; Nantron is seen only as the scribe. A notable feature of the chronicle, as Curry and Ambühl point out, is its inclusion of a variety of lists – of those present at battles, those who died or were captured and, above all and unusually, those who were appointed captains of garrisons. Much discussion is devoted to the question of where these lists could have come from, obvious sources such as muster rolls or heralds’ records being discounted for one reason or another, and the possibility allowed, in the light of the lists’ various inaccuracies, of oral recollection. Ultimately, however, the question is left unresolved. A matter admitting of much less doubt, however, is the reason for the lists’ inclusion: which is, the co-editors’ claim, because the authorial team interpreted chivalric deeds of arms to include the holding of military command, and not just the display of prowess in the field. As for the lists of defeated Frenchmen, these were included, they say, because they demonstrated the triumph and renown of the English who overcame them.

The later part of the Introduction, which attests to some masterly detective work by the co-editors, traces the later history of the chronicle, its probable ownership by the herald Christopher Barker, its passage into the possession of the College of Arms and the use made of it by Edward Hall and, through Hall, by another Tudor writer, the anonymous author of the verse monologue ‘How Thomas Montagu the Earl of Salisbury, in the Mids of his Glory, was Chanceably Slain with a Piece of Ordnance’. The discussion of the long and fascinating afterlife of the chronicle offers a model of what precise scholarship can teach us about the uses to which medieval historical writing was put in the mid-to late-sixteenth century in underpinning the Tudor view of the late medieval past.

Perhaps the most valuable insights offered by this new edition, however, are found in the careful reconstruction of its genesis in the circle of that formidable war veteran, Sir John Fastolf (d. 1459) of Caistor. A trend in recent historical writing has been to emphasise the importance of Fastolf’s circle in the preservation of texts relating to the war in France and in the production of new writings designed both to recall the glories of Henry v’s reign and to encourage the governments of Henry vi and Edward iv to emulate them. At the heart of this literary and rhetorical enterprise were William Worcester, Fastolf’s secretary, Christopher Hanson, the war veteran who served him in his years of retirement, and Luket Nantron, the scribe. The chronicle narrative that has come down to us in College of Arms ms M9 can now be seen as playing a significant part in this project, and the valuable work which Curry and Ambühl have done in bringing it to publication makes it possible for the first time for a modern audience to evaluate the chronicle’s importance as a source both for the military history of the 1420s and the nostalgia industry that grew up in the 1450s and 1460s around the memory of those long-lost days of glory.