Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following people, without whom this book would not have been:

Michael Curtiz, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, Claude Raines et al for exciting my interest in the Middle Ages at an early age; Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones for showing me what the Middle Ages were really like; Norman Housley for encouraging my interest at an academic level; the late Alfred Burne, whose book The Crécy War inspired me to write about the Hundred Years War in particular; Jonathan Sumption, Michael Packe, R. J. Barber and H. J. Hewitt (along with countless others) for their scholarship; Tony Harcourt for technical advice about longbow archery and many other aspects of the medieval life; Duncan Cloud for his scholarship in medieval ecclesiastical Latin; and James Hale for advice, support, encouragement and, most important of all, faith.