1356: A Novel

I've read a lot of Cornwell's stuff, and this is not his best. Some of the professional reviewers make me wonder if they really read this one or if they just took an earlier review, changed a few names, and resubmitted. As for the amateurs like myself--you are easily entertained by descriptions of a little swordplay.
This book at times seemed overly long with some unneccesary filler. Also, they are all beginning to run together for me, which might excuse the reviewers for just saying this is another fine historical novel by Cornwell- so lets just get a few beers. Here is the well worn plot: the hero, who is a great and feared, but misunderstood warrior with a heart of gold, goes on a road trip that involves a few minor battles, a bit of treachery and some good looking women. Eventually, he joins some other guys and they have a big battle at the end. The outcome of which is greatly influenced by our hero. He lives, women love him, and he becomes wealthy and powerful.
Nothing wrong with any of that, but sometimes Cornwell is just phoning it in. The last book of the Saxon tales seemed pointless. He said it would be six books long. We are now at six and nowhere near Northumbria. Come on B.C. wrap that baby up!
So realistically, on a scale just for Cornwell: a five for historical accuracy, but a one for originality, and a two in comparison to a couple that have seemed inspired. Lets call it a two overall.

It doesn't usually take me long to get through Bernard Cornwell novels. They're among the high spots of my reading life. Sharpe . . . Uhtred . . . Starbuck . . . Give me a story with one of these guys in it, and I'm gone for the next day or two. And it rarely takes me longer than that.

This one did. Thomas of Hookton is one of Cornwell's less mesmerizing protagonists. I wasn't expecting another installment featuring him. The third book in the Archer series had an ending with a note of finality in it.

However, in this installment, a few years (and the Black Plague) have passed, and Thomas is back in France, head of a war band sworn to the Earl of Northampton, marauding from a base in Gascony in the south of France. He gets onto the trail of La Malice, a legendary, Grail-like icon - the sword, legend had it, that Peter used to defend Jesus at Gethsemane, a relic that's come down through the recently vanquished Templars over the centuries, and something an aspiring cardinal also searches for to enhance his own bid for the papacy. Thomas, excommunicated as a heretic, is up against the church once more.

Thomas, his band hired by a lord to retrieve the latter's cheating, runaway wife, does so, but then in turn frees her from him after they see the lord's bestial treatment of her and her lover. The lord's men take Thomas's wife Genevieve and their son hostage in return. When she's mistreated - you know it's going to be Payback Time.

Meanwhile the greater struggle looms. The Prince of Wales is pillaging southern France, but French King Jean draws criticism for failing to go after him, destroy him, and protect the land. The French have knights galore, but they haven't really figured out how to fight the dreaded English longbowmen like Thomas yet. The story climaxes with the historic battle of Poitiers, the culmination of a complicated series of events where the English, hungry, outnumbered and cut off, are trying to either retreat or negotiate a surrender.

Thomas isn't a bad sort as Cornwellian protagonists go. He's Sharpe Lite. He has a rough and ready amiability, he's fought his way up from the ranks to be a leader, but Cornwell has never really given him a distinct character in the way of the others:

Sharpe? Needs no restating. He's totally Eastwoodian, Sean Bean's portrayal of him in the BBC series notwithstanding.

Starbuck has that whole paradoxical thing going as the runaway Yale student son of an abolitionist minister, who finds himself stuck in the South as the Civil War breaks out. He ends up in the Confederate Army and finds he's good at it, meanwhile falling in love with the whore-with-a-heart-of-gold daughter of his best redneck sergeant.

Uhtred is great fun as a rollicking, pagan Viking-style Saxon, happily slaughtering and fighting on his way to Valhalla. And he has the paradoxes that make him interesting: a Saxon raised by Vikings but now fighting them; a pagan fighting to preserve the Christian kingdom of Alfred the Great.

Dervil in the Arthur series is more of an observer of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and the others, so I don't hold him to the same standard, although Cornwell in any case makes him reasonably interesting. You really don't want him overshadowing the Arthurian cast of characters, and Cornwell wisely doesn't do that.

I think the problem with the Archer books is the unrelentingly Christian era in which they're set. Cornwell as an atheist often makes churchmen the foil, but his plots elsewhere don't center on them as much. He can throw in a benign one here or there for balance, (usually a jolly one who knows how to fight from his previous life, beloved by the troops in the field) and he can side his characters with secular forces opposed to this or that church or religion.

In the Archer series, though, Cornwell has no choice: His world is surrounded by church on every side, and the McGuffins he chooses - the Grail earlier and now La Malice - are inherently religious. He can make Thomas the bastard son of a priest (tsk, tsk), he can excommunicate him and his wife Genevieve, he can have both tortured by the church. But in the end, even they have religious notions and longings and wonderings, and Cornwell just isn't that comfortable with any of this. And he rails a bit too much about it. It's also the only one of his historical series where he grapples with mystical objects like the Holy Grail, and now, La Malice. As this book evolves his take on them refines: Good or bad, these objects pose too much potential for misuse by power-hungry men, and that's probably true.

Meanwhile, he gets a few too many laughs out of the Tebow-like Roland, a tournament champion who has never fought in real war, who has pledged to remain a virgin after having a vision of the Virgin Mary, and who seems to believe that the stories in romances are true. He's just the sort to be taken in by the wicked Cardinal Bessieres' ploy of creating an elite, holy order to go after La Malice. It's a bit heavy-handed. How much do you want to mock someone for being good?

There are some issues with the war itself. Kings, nobles and knights chase each other around France in an endless war with very little other than plunder and conquest on their minds. The Scots side with French except when they're siding with the English. The French are against the English except when they side with them, as the Gascons seem to do. Got that? In Cornwell's other books the wars are better defined in terms of who's fighting and why.

I caught Cornwell reusing stock devices here. Thomas adopts a version of Sharpe's rules for his soldiers - they can't get drunk except when he tells them it's OK, and no raping. He seems to lean on the lurid a little more - women being stripped naked before being tortured, abused, and so on, particularly early in the book. This isn't unknown in Cornwell's stories but he leans on it a little more heavily here. I'm not sure why.

His portrayal of the Battle of Poitiers - of which not that much is known - is good, as his battle portrayals always are; you can picture things quite clearly, which most writers can't manage. (A lot of writers can't even keep you oriented when the bad guy chases the good guy down the street and into an alley.) I like that the battle actually doesn't hinge that much on the archers' role, which in this series previously, they almost always have. Cornwell eschews the melodramatic for the real and that's just fine with me.

Anyway, if you're a Cornwell fan, read it. If you haven't read him yet, pick another one to start with.

With "1356", Bernard Cornwell has closed the loop on the Holy Trinity of the great English victories in the Hundred Years War. Trailing only Agincourt and Crecy in importance, the Battle of Poitiers is the third of the great victories recorded by the English over their French foes as the English royal house sought to assert their claim to the throne of France in the 14th Century.

Fans of Cornwell's Grail Trilogy will be happy to see the return of Thomas of Hookton, the young scholar-turned-hellequin whose journey toward mastery in the craft of war - and to the finding of the greatest Christian holy relic of the Middle Ages, the Grail - was recounted in those books. Thomas is now the leader of a mercenary warband, accompanied by some of his hell-raising companions from his early days in Brittany under Will Skeat, and by his French wife, Genevieve. Cornwell brings back Thomas' one-time comrade-in-arms, the young Scotsman Robbie Douglas, to close the circle on their estranged friendship; also returning to the orbit of Thomas' life in this story is the rapacious and ambitious Cardinal Bessierès, who is once again in search of a holy relic - the sword of St Peter, called "La Malice".

The return of Bessières, and the repetition of the holy relic theme from the Grail Trilogy books, make "1356" feel somewhat formulaic, but that sense does not intrude while reading the book, or at least it didn't for me - it was only after I had finished that it struck me. While the reader is engrossed in the story, with its action, danger, and colorful dialogue, all that matters is the tale itself. A handful of new characters, including an Irishman named Keane - a reluctant divinity student; a young monk, Brother Michael, who doesn't really want to be a monk;, and Roland de Verrec, a supremely skillful knight who has read too many romantic tales of chivalry, are fine examples of Cornwell's skill in crafting personalities for his characters and bringing them to life. "1356" feels, in the aftermath, a bit like a return to the Grail stories all crammed into one volume, and the actual battle gets somewhat short shrift in favor of the search for "La Malice" and the renewed conflict between Thomas and Cardinal Bessières, it is nevertheless a rousing read and a worthy addition to the collection of any Cornwell fan.

3.5 stars

It took me a while for my attention to get drawn into this novel. Mainly because I discovered, only after I'd started reading the thing, that it's actually the fourth novel in Bernard Cornwell's Grail Quest series. Now, other people may have no problem picking up and reading a book from the middle of a series, but me? Um, yeah, that doesn't work for me. For better of worse, I tend to be rather OCD about book series: I hate reading books from the middle of one, and the idea of skipping around, reading the books out of order, positively drives me bonkers, giving me an eye twitch and the beginnings of a foamy mouth. So when I found out 1356 was number four in a series, I nearly screamed.* I also nearly stopped reading. However, I have such a backlog of ARCs I need to read and review that the notion of me trying to plow through the first three books (and that's only if I were able to find them at my local, woefully lacking, library in the first place) while still keeping up with my other ARCs just so I could be comfortable reading 1356 nearly gave me the same eye twitch as as the one I was trying to develop due to reading 1356 in the first place. (Wow, that was an exhausting sentence!) So I took myself in hand (which is an idiom I've always found vaguely naughty, most likely because of my brain's permanent dwelling place in a nice and comfy gutter), gave myself a stern talking to, and soldiered on with 1356, suffering only the occasional eye spasm in the process.

I also had a rough beginning with this book as for the longest time I couldn't identify with or be sympathetic to any of the characters. It took some time for them to mean anything to me, even the main character, Sir Thomas Hookton, aka le Bâtard, leader of the Hellequin, a band of mercenaries working in France while serving under the aegis of the Earl of Northampton. Eventually, though, I warmed up to Thomas and his band, especially Brother Michael and the Irishman, Keane (the latter mainly due to his adoption of a couple of wolfhounds away from the Frenchmen who were hunting down him and Thomas; as an animal lover, it was a particularly satisfying scene).

The story itself is interesting yet oddly forgettable. Revolving around a mythical sword said to be the sword of Saint Peter, a sword said to grant whoever bears it certain victory over his foes, both the French and English army have sent scouts to find it in order to aid their endeavors. (If the year of the book's title doesn't hold any significance for you, it was in that year the Battle of Poitiers took place, which was the second major engagement of the Hundred Years' War. Edward, also known as the Black Prince--for what reason is still debated among historians--the son of King Edward III, had raided France that year, his second chevauchée [a destructive raid designed to inflict severe economic disaster on the enemy] through that war-torn country, spurring King Jean II of France to pursue him. The two ultimately met at Poitiers, and even though the English army was outnumbered, road-weary, thirsty, and exhausted, and though the battle was long, the English came out on top, capturing around 2,000 members of the French aristocracy, including King Jean himself, whose ransom alone--six million gold écus--was equivalent to about a third of France's GNP.) So each side believes they are in the right and that this sword, la Malice, will bring God's wrath down upon their enemies. In between battle scenes and personal dramas revolving around Thomas and his band we watch as this sword gets shuffled around from place to place and from person to person as it falls into the hands of those who would hide it and those who would abuse it. Eventually it finds itself in the possession of Sculley, a wild Scotsman marginally under the control of the Lord of Douglas, on the side of King Jean. After a brief but bloody sword fight between Sculley and Thomas, the fate of la Malice was something of an anticlimax. Maybe that was the point, but it just seemed rather disappointing. And that was the overall sensation I took away from my reading experience. It just felt as though the book was missing something, as though I was only getting part of the story. Perhaps it's due to the fact that it is number four in a series. Perhaps it's better read as part of a whole, when all the pieces fit together into a larger, more detailed picture.

I also have to disagree with the blurb on the cover from George R.R. Martin in which he states "Bernard Cornwell does the best battle scenes of any writer I've ever read, past or present." Well, I'm very sorry George, but the author who writes the best battle scenes is still, to my mind, Conn Iggulden. Cornwell writes vivid, bloody, stirring scenes, to be sure, but they're nowhere near as atmospheric and breath-taking as Iggulden's. That's not to say Cornwell's writing is flawed. I've read his Warlord Chronicles, which tackled the story of King Arthur, and like those books, 1356 is a cracking good read. The dialogue is fast-paced, accessible without being overly-anachronistic, the story moves along and keeps your attention, doling out information in just the right amount without slowing down the action, and he allows the characters to develop as the story moves along so that by the end, though they may not be complex creatures, they're far from cardboard cutouts. At least for his "good guys"; Cornwell's bad guys in this novel tend to suffer slightly from the Black Hat Syndrome in that they're after one thing or one person, their motives for going after that thing or person are narrowly drawn (i.e. revenge or greed or simply because they're a black-hearted knave who loves being bad), and as such become near-caricatures of people. Basically, they're villains because they're villains and nothing more. Thomas is the most three-dimensional character of all; he's obviously one of the good 'uns, yet he does shady, even downright criminal things, he has conflicting emotions between what he's doing and what he should be doing--basically he behaves like a human being, especially one who's often placed between a rock and a hard place and must choose the lesser of two evils in order to move. (Two clichés in one sentence, woo hoo!) That said, I suppose the goal of most writers is for you, as the reader, to empathize with the good guys and Cornwell certainly accomplishes that. Or at least for me he did. Every time one of the characters found themselves in a perilous situation, I suffered along with them, heart beating rapidly, palms sweating, lips gnawed raw as my eyes zoomed across the page, reading as fast as I could in the hope that the character would soon find an escape.

So, yeah, despite some flaws and a slow start, in the end I would recommend this book as a good read. However, I do believe it would've been even better had I gotten to it after first reading the three books that came before it.

*It doesn't help that this brought up one of my biggest pet-peeves about book publishing: Why can't publishers identify a book that's part of a series? How difficult would it be to put a small number somewhere on the spine, or place, in small typeset, a sentence somewhere on the front cover informing potential readers that the book they're holding is #__ in a series? Or, at the very least, place a page at the front of the book listing the titles, in chronological order, that belong to a particular series, allowing the person holding said book to exclaim, "Hey, this is book #4 in the series! I need to read these other books first!" Really, would it put such a huge dent in their bottom line? I think not. In fact, doing so would encourage more sales, in my not-so-humble opinion: First of all, people wouldn't get ticked off about picking up a book in the middle of a series, and secondly, in my experience, people like to buy in bulk, so when they find the first (clearly labeled) book in a series, they tend to pick up the second one at the same time.

First posted on Amazon.co.uk on 8 October 2012

As so many others, I happen to be a fan of Bernard Cornwell. Accordingly, I bought and read this book which continues the story of Thomas Hookton, the English archer of Cornwell's previous trilogy and who has now been knighted and leads the Hellequin, a band of English and Gascon "mercenaries" during the first part of the Hundred Years War.

This book still has some of the qualities that made Bernard Cornwell's fame. The historical context, the two "Chevauchées" of the Prince of Wales in 1355 and 1356, are largely accurate although there are a couple of problems which I will come back to. The reader gets his usual dose of heavy fighting, with lots of blood and violence - although no sex, because this is something that Cornwell generally does not do in his novels. There is also yet another Quest, but for the sword of St Peter this time. The story also builds up to its climax - the battle of Poitiers - where Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, won a crushing victory and captured Jean II le Bon, the French king. By and large, the book reads well and the story is exciting, even if utterly predictable, but this is where the problems start piling up. At times, it seems like the author got somewhat careless or did not really put his heart into the story he was writing and the historical context in which it was taking place.
Starting with the story telling, I could not refrain from grunting, sighing and being disappointed because, at times, it descends into stereotypes. It reads like an adventure story for teenagers (and English teenagers, specifically), and it is rather implausible and biased.

First, the reader is asked to believe that the Hellequin were prevented to rape and kill the populations by their leader, making them somewhat more "virtuous" in an age when rape, slaughter, looting and burning where not only common practices on all sides, but were also the norm. This would make very exceptional when compared to all the other bands, whether Anglo-Gascon, French or any other "company" of professional soldiers across the whole of Western Europe at the time. This is highly unlikely, implausible, and even goes against whatever historical records we had. Anglo-Gascon war bands build themselves a rather atrocious reputation across France at the time for precisely these behaviours. The French bands were no better, of course, since all professional soldiers very much "lived on the country".

Second, many of the characters in the story tend to be stereotypes. There is the character of Thomas of Hookton himself, who seems to be a blend of several historical characters, but with all "unsympathetic" aspects removed. One seems to be the Bâtard de Mauleon, a Gascon war leader who served the English and was known for his ruthless efficiency, but also for quite a few atrocities. Another seems to be Hugh Calveley, another historical figure and an English soldier who commanded the archers on the English side at Crécy became the captain of one of the Great Companies and was one of the rare ones to die of natural causes at a ripe old age. The point here is that Thomas of Hookton appears both ruthlessly efficient and "nice", an association which was somewhat incompatible, given the troubled times. Some of the other characters are almost caricatures, as other reviewers have also noticed. We have a sadistic priest, a power crazy cardinal, a fat and cruel count and a vain, indecisive and incompetent King, just to mention a few of them. Of course, they are all French. In contrast with this, we have the veteran, gruff and no-nonsense Earl of Salisbury, our hero Thomas, protector and saviour of ladies in distress and even the Prince of Wales recast as a reborn Richard the Lionheart, although with a fondness for gambling and women. Moreover, the only two sympathetic characters - but both flawed - on the French side (a naïve and innocent French knight and a young Scots) both happen to change sides to fight for the English at Poitiers. I could not help finding that all of this was a bit too much, rather implausible and somewhat biased.

Then there is the historical context itself. This is perhaps where I was the most surprised and disappointed, because Bernard Cornwell's research is generally superb and comprehensive. In this book, he has - again - chosen to emphasize the discipline of the English forces and, above all, the lethal efficiency of the longbow archers against the ill-disciplined French. He also tends to oppose the respective leaderships on each side. While basically correct, these oppositions tend to be over-emphasized and sometimes lead to contradictions.

One of these contradictions arises when Chevauchées are mentioned. As Bernard Cornwell states both in the book and in his historical note, these were long-range raids whose purpose were to loot and destroy the enemy's economic resources, leaving him weakened and, ideally, unable to take the field and afford the expenses of future campaigns. This tactic was nothing new. It had been carried out for centuries (think of the so-called "harroying of the North" by William the Conqueror, for instance). Such tactics could be ruthlessly efficient but their aim was certainly not to draw the enemy into a set-piece battle. On the contrary, it was to create as much havoc as possible and retreat to friendly territory before the enemy army could be gathered in sufficient numbers and brought in to cut of the retreat. It was to increase their chances in what were essentially "hit-and-run" tactics on a large scale that the English "Chevauchées" of 1355 and 1356 only included a few thousand mounted men.

Such as strategy of attrition made perfect sense for the English given that the Kingdom of England was both poorer and much less populated than France (England's population at the beginning of the war and before the Great Plague has been estimated at 3 million, about a quarter of that of the Kingdom of France). It also offered the advantage of paying the army on the enemy's resources and of recouping the large costs of fitting out the expeditions. However, they were far from being entirely successful. As the book hints at a couple of time, they did not have siege equipment, which would have slowed them down considerably, and could not afford to get bogged down into besieging well-fortified and well-defended cities or castles. So if the first assault was repulsed, they were likely to retreat, rather than persist and allow the French time enough to gather a large army and close with them.
On the other hand, the French strategy was to gather a large enough army to catch the English invaders, trap them and force them to fight in the most unfavourable conditions possible, and crush them. It took time to gather an army such as it would outnumber the English force. Besides, at a time when there were no permanent royal army, the place of gathering could only be determined once the English raid had already begun. Finally, the English raiding force was at its most vulnerable towards the end of the campaign season, when it would be slowed down by its plunder and would be starting to make its way home. With this in mind, all three of the most crushing English victories (Crécy, Poitiers, and Azincourt) were battles that were won against the odds, when a smaller, tired and hungry English army got trapped and forced to fight a battle after a long campaign season by a larger French army that was pursuing it.

Another element that is somewhat missing from Bernard Cornwell's book is the state of the Kingdom of France and the context of the English "Cheveauchées" in 1355 and 1356. The author's claim that Jean II did not react to the 1355 raid because he was indecisive is somewhat biased and he is telling only part of the story here. The year before, a major rebellion had erupted in Normandy under Charles King of Navarre and Count of Evreux, who had a better claim to the throne of France than the Valois (And whom the English quickly supported). Charles (nicknames the Bad) also had the Constable of France (that is the supreme leader of the French army after the King) murdered. In addition, the King's coffers were empty, which, given the years of warfare and the Great Plague, is not entirely surprising. So, the King had his hand full with a major threat much closer to Paris and had no money to pay for an army for a distant expedition. There was therefore no way he could put a stop to the Prince of Wales' raiding in the South of France before he solved these two more immediate problems.

This is where the differences in respective leadership and legitimacy came in play. Philippe VI de Valois was not a great warrior-king; neither was his son Jean II le Bon. Although, in both cases, their incompetence may have been exaggerated, they did commit what appears, with hindsight, to be huge blunders by attacking the entrenched English army rather than starving it out. This, however, would have been seen as "cowardly" and contrary to chivalry. More to the point, one of the main problems of the Valois Kings was their ability to be obeyed - or their lack of it - by the nobles. Their greatest nobles and captains all tended to believe they knew better than anyone else what needed to be done and the Kings' power and authority, being rather weak, allowed for this. This state of affairs was of course exacerbated by the time of Azincourt, when the French King at the time - Charles VI -had gone mad. This meant poor discipline, a lack of coordination on the French side and even an unwillingness to fight under someone else's orders. The consequences of this could be quite devastating without the English having anything to do about it. At Crécy, the French knight trampled over the King's Genoese mercenary crossbowmen, essentially putting them out of the fight and depriving their side of any chance to counter the English long bows. At Poitiers, a third of the army, under the command of the King's own brother refused to assault the English positions, contrary to orders, and retreating without even fighting.

To conclude, this book, while still good, is not worth more than three stars. In addition to the bibliography mentioned in Bernard Cornwell's historical note, I can recommend two other books, if only to have a more objective view than what the author has come up with:
- One is Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror", first published in 1978, and the chapter of the battle of Poitiers in particular
- The other one is the last volume of Maurice Druon's "Accursed Kings" series, with is titled "Quant un roi perd la France" (When a king loses France"), first printed in 1977, and which is on Jean II le Bon's reign, and Poitiers in particular. The story is told by the cardinal of Talleyrand-Périgord who tried in vain to prevent the battle. I am not sure whether it has been translated into English (unlike the previous volumes in the series, I could not find it in English on Amazon.co.uk), but it is a rather superb read.

I have been a big fan of Bernard Cornwell's books. This one however wasn't up to his usual standards. At times I felt like I was reading a book geared to young teen readers, rather than adults.

I'm a fan of Cornwell. His bloody battle tales of Utred, Arthur, and the English archers have kept me pounding away on my StairMaster and made transcontinental flights bearable. "1356" is the weakest of the Cornwell novels I've read and heard through ear buds. He is a master of the great sprawling battles and individual fight scenes. 1356 does not disappoint in those regards. It does disappoint in character development and plot.

1356 is an action adventure set in, you guessed it, 1356, when the out-numbered English defeated the French in the Battle of Poitiers. The battle was one of the several major engagements of the 100 Years War between France and England. It was decisive in the sense that the King of France, Jean II, was captured and Edward, Prince of Wales ("the Black Prince") proved himself a brilliant commander. Nevertheless, the War carried on for decades after and through multiple more monarchies on both sides of the Channel.

Thomas of Hookton, hero of Cornwell's "Grail Quest" series is the protagonist of 1356. The book is a stand-alone story, but there are references which connect the tale to the world Cornwell has created in the series. Unfortunately, there is insufficient back story, so Thomas and his coterie do not feel fully drawn.

The plot is motivated by the search for a magical sword, the weapon Peter used to defend Jesus when Christ was arrested for trial and crucifixion. The sword-relic is called 'La Malice'. The legend attached to La Malice is that whoever wields the sword cannot be defeated, and so it could determine the outcome of the war between the French and English. Thomas seeks the sword for the English, while his sworn enemy, a despicable Cardinal, pursues the relic for the Church and France. Although, the Cardinal's ulterior motive is that he plans to use the power of La Malice to propel him to the Papacy.

1356, like all Cornwell historical novels, is well researched. He brings to life long dead historical characters and recreates events with flourish. The battles and fights get the blood up. It's just not as strong a book re plot and character as the others I've so enjoyed. [[ASIN:B007TAF1JY MONSTERS OF THE MIDWAY The Death, Resurrection, and Redemption of Chicago Football]]

First of all, I have read all of the Richard Sharpe series and found them to be brilliant.....however, Bernard Cornwell must be slipping and looking just to fill pages with alot of words. If he mentions once the making of an English archer's bow from a yew and the specifics of the arrow, he does it at least a dozen times. I got so tired of it, I was personally ready to equip them all with slingshots just to include something new.

Now, on to the possible heresy of his wife and Thomas of Hookton's own condemnation by the Church....please, I got the gist of it after the first six renditions of the story.

C'mon Bernard....you're better than this!!

I have read all of Mr. Cornwell's novels (with the exception of the Sharpe series) and have always looked forward to any new ones he publishes, whether they be about the time of Alfred the Great or the period of the 100 Years War. I just finished 1356 and found that I skipped my way through a lot of it, which was unusual. I think maybe I am just tired of the constant scrapes that the hero of this book (somehow)finds his way out of - no matter how bleak the situation looks, something always happens or someone always appears to help him out of the current jam. The whole time I was reading, I was reminded of the M*A*S*H episode where Hawkeye was reading a newsletter that Frank Burns was sending to his patients back home and stated something along the lines that "your exploits make Superman look like a fairy". I always get my Cornwell books from the library, so I do not have buyer's remorse, but I still felt cheated. I know that the hero isn't supposed to die, but...

After the disappointment of Mr. Cornwell's last book, Death of Kings, I was hesitant to spend $17 on this ebook. Now after reading it I realize I should've waited for it to go on sale. It seems that this book and Death of Kings were spit out to meet a deadline and fulfill a contractual obligation to produce a book. Mr. Cornwell remains a favorite author of mine for his earlier writings. I will not spend so much on his future writings until he finds his groove again.