A.J. Pollard

The most famous unsolved mystery. As an early victim of misinformation it is hardly surprising that this story survived. Richard had absolutely no reason to kill the young princes, whereas Henry VI needed to create the mystery of their deaths to validate his position.

There is no contemporary description of Richard that suggests any physical deformity. One mild comment that "one shoulder was higher than the other" escalated with each mention until eventually Thomas More's history of Richard claimed that he was "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than the right" and he continued with atrocious stories about his mother and his birth intended to create ominous portent. As Richard was killed at Bosworth in 1495 when More was a small child he had no personal knowledge of the king but his biography of Richard shows the extent of his toadying to the Tudors. His account influenced Shakespeare's play written 100 years after Richard III's death, when it was still acceptable to write unflattering accounts of the last Plantagenet king.

Written in 1997, well before the discovery of Richard's body in a parking lot in Leicester. Biographers take one side or the other but Pollard goes along with the traditional claim that he was a villain who murdered his two young nephews. Nothing I have read convinces me of his guilt.… (mere)

Many studies of Robin Hood either are purely literaryb or devote much inconclusive reasoning to trying to identify a historical Robin Hood based on the scanty pre-1400 sources. Pollard recognizes frankly tat we can know very little about the figure of Robin Hood from that fragmentary early material, so he devotes himself to asking the more answerable question: what can we know about the background and reception of the earliest surviving full-scale Robin Hood poems from the mid-fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries? He looks at these sources themselves and compares them with historical evidence about outlaws, fellowships, religious devotion (the original Robin being a devotee of the Virgin Mary) etc.… (mere)

Pollard insists in the preface that this isn't a biography, and indeed it isn't if one by that understands a portrait of a personality. What it is is a narrative of Talbot's military career in France, accompanied with thematic chapters looking at things like chivalry and the "business" side of war, such as the profits to be made from pillage and ransom.

Talbot was the chief English field commander during the final decades of the Hundred Years' War, when the English forces tried and eventually failed to hold on to their possessions in France. Fittingly, his death in battle at Castillon marked the effective end of the English war effort.

Despite never being able to turn the tide of the war, Talbot garnered great fame and respect as a dashing commander and chivalrous knight; the French, with a compartmentalization alien to modern minds, equally respected his gallantry and hated his cruelty. Commentators in later ages have tended to be less impressed; chivalry, to modern eyes, is little excuse for a general who loses a war, and to boot, in his two great battles is captured in one (Patay 1429) and defeated and killed in the other. Pollard suggests this is unfair even by modern standards - the war was principally lost because of the defection of England's Burgundian allies and the reconstruction of the French monarchy by Charles VII, and pitched battle, for all the fame of Agincourt, was of secondary importance in the Hundred Years' War. In his estimation, Talbot was a good, but not outstanding, commander, whose penchant for precipitate attack, however misplaced at Castillon, was usually employed with calculation and often with success in smaller actions. With someone else at the helm the English cause may have collapsed far sooner.

The book is highly readable and the chapters are free-standing - a reader less interested in administrative or theoretical matters might easily skip the thematic chapters and read just the narrative ones without missing anything necessary to follow the latter.… (mere)