The Perfect King Read Online Free PDF

to write about Edward III . Just three books purporting to describe his life were published in the last century, and none of these is a detailed study.' This might suggest that there is a shortage of writing, especially good writing, on Edward III . But if we look for books on aspects of his kingship we find an abundance in the form of studies of the Hundred Years War, chivalry, his sons (especially the Black Prince and John of Gaunt), his eminent ecclesiastical contemporaries, coinage, literary characters (especially Froissart, Chaucer and Langland), the development of parliament, the development of the English language, the Black Death, local government, the wool trade, social regulation, and the laws of treason. There is a willingness to write about his reign which is strangely contrasted by a reluctance to write about his character. Some scholarly articles, particularly Mark Ormrod's consideration of Edward's personal religion, are biographical, and repay repeated reading in an attempt to understand the man. But the vast bulk is like the flotsam which scatters the sea after the sinking of a great ship: it is obvious that something huge and magnificent was here, and has disappeared from view, but one struggles to see exactly what.
    This book is by no means the first work to restore Edward III to a more appropriate place in the pantheon of English kings. That distinction probably should go to two very different pieces of mid-twentieth-century scholarship. Edouard Perroy, a Professor of Medieval History at the Sorbonne, wrote his extraordinary book The Hundred Years War in 1943-44, while fighting for the French Resistance, or, as he put it, playing 'an exciting game of hide and seek with the Gestapo'.' He had no access to his research materials at the time but, in his words, 'suddenly flung into outlawry, abruptly parted from my familiar environment of students and books, I seemed, in contact with this present so harshly real, to gain a better understanding of the past'. And he added that as a result of his circumstances, certain actions had 'become more comprehensible; one is better placed to explain a surrender, or to excuse a revolt'. His Edward was a successful diplomat as well as a military leader, able to outmanoeuvre Philip of France at almost every opportunity: 'a political genius fertile in fresh ideas, but at the same time a cold calculator who drew up long-term plans, knew where he was going and what he wanted, and surpassed his adversary in the diplomatic sphere just as he crushed him on the field of battle'.' Perroy also destroyed the idea that the cause of the Hundred Years War was Edward's dynastic ambitions: 'nothing is further from the truth', was his view on the subject. 20 Everyone seriously interested in the fourteenth century has been in his debt ever since.
    The other pioneering rehabilitation was May McKisack's landmark lecture, 'Edward III and the historians', delivered in May 1959.' In a straightforward and brilliant piece of historical observation, in which practically every sentence is a revelation or a delight (and many are both), she at once showed how Edward III had been the victim - not the subject - of historians since the early nineteenth century. 'Historians whose whole thinking has been conditioned by notions of development, evolution and progress, sometimes find it hard to recognize fully or to remember consistently that these meant nothing to medieval man ...' Or 'Edward III in the days of his glory is hidden from us by the cloud of contemporary adulation ...' Wonderful. Perhaps this short lecture should be handed out to all history students in the hope that thereby a little wisdom can be shown to be a powerful tool in assessing a man's achievements. Its fifteen pages end with a final sentence which is the launch - pad for most modern writing on the king's character: 'For all his failings, it remains hard to deny an element of greatness in him, a courage and a magnanimity which go far to