Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/142

 134 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January his Henry the Fifth, and rejoice to find that it was left so nearly as he would have wished it to appear. It is marked by all the author's old painstaking accumulation of material, fullness of detail, and richness of illustration in copious notes. He was so wedded to his own method that we should not expect, or perhaps desire, to find any departure from it in his latest work. Still he seems to have curbed in some measure his fancy for crowding his text with medievalisms and his tendency to digress on more or less irrelevant topics. As a consequence the main narrative is improved ; it has gained in interest, is easier to read and follow, and leaves a clearer impression of the course of events. The digressions are still there, but the longest of them are gathered in separate chaptera ; so we get over fifty pages on John, duke of Berry, which teem with curious information gleaned from sources not easily accessible ; we are glad to have the chapter, but cannot refrain from feeling that it is rather extraneous to the reign of Henry the Fifth. In a less degree the like criticism applies to the chapter called ' Burial ', where a dozen pages are filled with informa- tion about the funerals and tombs of those who fell at Agincourt. The whole volume of over 400 pages covers a period of just twelve months from the landing at Harfleur in August 1415 to Bedford's naval victory in the same month of the next year. Naturally the main interest centres round Agincourt. A long chapter is devoted to the battle, and this is followed by a much longer one, which though entitled ' The Dead ' is in great part taken up with a discussion of excuses for the French defeat, and the contradictions of modern accounts, drawn from all manner of sources, good, bad, and indifferent, without any weighing of their relative importance. The result is to leave the reader in a stupor of confusion, and it seems to have had much the same effect on the author. In the presence of ' all these intricate contradictions ' Dr. Wylie con- cluded by a word of caution against 'the subtle and fascinating form of self- deception which underlies the construction of plans ', and makes merry over modern savants with their pictorial representations of pretty squares, oblongs, and triangles ; their contradictions, he thought, can but serve as a pictorial warning and emphasize that ' we have not yet arrived at certainty in regard to the first essential features of that eventful day and on the existing data I fear we never shall '. But is not the trouble rather due to the author's method, and failure to sift out the chaff and use only the good grain ? It may be doubted whether any historian can describe a battle, if he has not in the first instance formed, at all events in his own mind, a plan of the opposing forces. To do so graphically it is necessary to have some accurate information as to the topography of the site. In the case of Agincourt this is not lacking. We know that the battle was fought in an open field between the wooded 'illages of Agincourt and Tramecourt, the ground rising slightly from Maisoncelles at the south to the French position on the road to Ruisseauville. We may be confident also that the actual battle was fought close to the junction of the cross- roads, where the carnage, as Dr. Wylie (p. 225) points out, must have been thickest, and where the burial enclosure still remains. This is the point where the woods of Agincourt and Tramecourt come nearest together, the intervening space being about 1,200 yards across. Though Dr. Wylie