The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle

Jonathan Sumption's The Hundred Years War, Volume I: Trial by Battle is a scholarly history of the first phase of the fourteenth century Anglo-French conflict, published by Faber and Faber and widely regarded as the standard multi volume treatment of the war in English. Sumption is a recognized historian, and the book's authority rests on extensive use of contemporary chronicle and administrative sources across both English and French archives. Its scale, a multi volume project sustained across decades, allowed a depth of detail that shorter surveys cannot match. Its limit is that this first volume covers only the war's opening phase, so a claim about a later stage of the conflict needs the corresponding later volume of the same series or a different dedicated source for that later period.