In the popular imagination, and indeed for historians, the years between 1340 and 1360 were marked by momentous events, the great facts of any historical narrative. In 1346 Edward iii defeated the French at the battle of Crécy, and months later David, King of Scotland, was captured at Neville’s Cross. A decade later Edward, the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward iii, defeated an even larger French army at Poitiers, and the French king returned to England as a captive. But between these two triumphs England, along with the rest of Europe, was ravaged by the Black Death, and between a third and a half of the population perished. Richard Barber’s book gets to grips with the significance and meaning of the triumphs rather than exploring the impact of the disaster of the plague. So, this is not a political nor a social nor an economic history, though each of these approaches makes its appearance. Rather the approach is biographical and prosopographical, a significant narrative which places at the heart of its story the noble and knightly experience of the English king, and those with whom he felt comfortable. Barber has also taken to heart Marc Bloch’s revered dictum that the writings of historians ought to include a series of paragraphs at every turning point which answer the question, ‘how do I know what I am about to say?’. Fortunately Barber has a knack for storytelling, and despite the fact that he often discards a strict chronology in the lived experiences of his participants, especially when an explanation of actions requires a lengthy excursus, sometimes a whole chapter and occasionally an appendix, the writing is at a gallop and one is carried willingly along.

But this is also storytelling against the grain. To get close to the men to whom the king himself felt close Barber concentrates first on Edward’s own experiences, from his youth in the collapse of his father Edward ii’s kingship to his activities in the tournament and at war, especially at the battle of Crécy. Central to his enquiry is the Company of the Garter commenced in 1348 and possibly earlier. He contends that the company was essentially a memorial to the triumph and tragedy of Crécy, and that it emerged from the king’s own highly personal attempts to make sense of his own interests and experiences since his early campaigns in Scotland. This is important since the development was clearly not linear. Edward’s jousting companions, and he was a prodigious organiser of tournaments in the 1330s, did not on the whole become Garter Knights, nor was the king’s celebrated round table of 1344 any kind of precursor to the post-Crécy company but rather a kind of martial academy for the household knights. Edward iii was no Arthurian enthusiast and the Company of the Garter did not grow from such cultural conventions. It was rather a sudden and personal response to an event which must have overwhelmed the emotions of its participants. It is conventional now to eschew the history of events, as if more important continuities quickly softened their sharp edges. Barber’s book seeks to hone the edge that was Crécy and to restore its connection to the Company of the Garter. But the sources for the garter company, especially early sources, are thin and, although Barber squeezes their pips, the Garter itself cannot bear the whole weight of the book’s main title.

So, the approach must of necessity be contextual and as a result generates a big book of a core 500 pages as the author turns aside from his main themes to detail the necessary business of English and French politics, tournaments and military organisation, the chapels of St Stephen at Westminster and St George at Windsor, European military orders and fraternities, manuals of chivalry and heraldry, fashion and the organisation of war. The list is far from exhaustive though the browser of a review might fear that the reading might be. This is much more than mere assemblage, the kind of long book that modern research and writing can produce. Barber has been writing about these issues for more than forty years, and this book represents the summation of his mature thoughts on those issues that have seemed necessary to understand the lives of his central characters, Edward, the Black Prince, and Edward iii. It is about their mindset: Richard Barber seldom talks of culture in that modern fashion. In addition, although England is the book’s canvas, its sweep is European. Many of the first Garter Knights owed their allegiance to the English king but were not themselves English. So to a consummate synthesis Barber also adds new knowledge. Henry Eam, one of the first members of the company, is here properly identified as Heinken Oem, a Dutch squire who had come to England in the service of Count William ii of Hainault.

This synthesis of work on a bewildering range of contexts, supported throughout by original scholarship, makes the book an encyclopaedia of knightly culture in the fourteenth century, with sections on material culture, chivalric manuals, knightly works written in captivity, the use of the court of chivalry to foster knightly training in heraldry, and the cockpit of the reysen, the winter campaigns in Prussia, on which half the Garter Knights had served. But history is a humane discipline and it is in the accounts of battle that the book works at its best, no more so than in the account of Crécy. The battle was the end of a long campaign – its eventual outcome was never certain, and must have seemed unlikely as Edward’s army struggled south of the River Seine in search of a safe crossing. The success at Poissy by means of a 60ft- beam stretched over the river, across which a handful of men-at-arms and archers rushed to hold the other bank, is a well-known tale. On this occasion and many others Barber gives us the words of the contemporary chroniclers, discriminating between those who were there or reported the memories of those who had been, to which he adds sensible readings of local topography, clearly having carefully walked the site. It is a compelling tale wonderfully told.