Jonathan Sumption: In Conversation

Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption, is not only just one of five barristers to have been promoted directly from the bar to become Justice of the Supreme Court. He is also a formidable historian and author who has recently completed his epic study of the Hundred Years' War, the fifth volume of which was published in 2023 to widespread and resounding acclaim. We therefore jumped at the chance provided by Chalke History Festival to chat with him about the War, and law, and so much more.

You're at Chalke History Festival talking about your book, The Hundred Years' War: Triumph and Illusion, which is the fifth and final instalment of your Hundred Years’ War series. Could you tell me a bit about it, please?

I began writing about the Hundred Years’ War in 1979. So, I was at it for 43 years. It's consumed a large part of my life, although I've also moonlighted as a lawyer. One notices the importance of a project like that when it comes to an end, and you contemplate a vast hole in what's been your existence for many years. I wanted a project that would take not the whole of the rest of my life, but the greater part of it. Something that would live with me for a long time after I left academic life. I had started my career as an Oxford don, teaching history. This was, in a way, compensation for a world that I had liked a great deal after I'd moved into a different one.

The war itself lasted longer than a hundred years. It was a war which lies at the origin of the state system of Western Europe. It played a large part in the creation of the three major nation states of Europe as it then was: England, France and Castile, which became the kernel of Spain (Italy and Germany were not nation states until many centuries later). The war embraced the whole of Europe, not just England, France and Scotland, who were the three main participants, but all the neighbouring countries. There were campaigns fought in Italy, in Portugal, in Castile, in Germany and Switzerland, in the Low CountriesA region in western Europe which includes Belgium and the Netherlands.. The sheer range of these wars offered a very interesting prospect of writing about something that really embraced all European history for a period of 130 years.

What are the myths that sustain a war for that duration? The initial reasons must change and morph.

There were two separate sections of the war, the fourteenth century wars and the fifteenth century wars. The fourteenth century wars were essentially fought to enable the kings of England to retain their possessions in southwestern France. They had been constantly eroded for decades before the war began by the centralizing instincts of the French kings, and Edward III wanted to recover lost ground; he wanted to expand the Duchy of Aquitaine to its previous limits and more. And he wanted, I believe, to create a land bridge to the Channel, because Bordeaux was relatively inaccessible from England, by dominating the Atlantic provinces of France: Poitou, Brittany, if possible Normandy. Those were the war aims. The claim to the throne was just a tactical device. Not every scholar would accept that, but I'm absolutely sure that Edward III never actually expected to see himself seated on the throne of France. We know that whenever there were serious negotiations to settle the dispute, he was always prepared to give the claim up in return for a suitable territorial settlement. Edward III pursued the war by a method you can only really describe as terrorism. He mounted fast moving raids across southern France in the hope of bringing pressure to bear on the French kings to concede some of his territorial demands. This failed completely, partly because that's not the way politics works, and partly because the Loire was a major strategic barrier. And the only way, really, of bringing pressure to bear on the French kings was to conduct the war in the north, in the political heart of France, not in the south.

The fifteenth century war was completely different. First of all, it was a war based on an attempt by Henry V to occupy large parts of France. He occupied Normandy with a standing army, about four dozen permanent garrisons and a very elaborate administration based in Rouen. And he spread his control over the whole of northern France, using as surrogates the dukes of BurgundyAn extremely powerful and wealthy historical region based mainly in the central and eastern areas of France, but with fluctuating spheres of influence over time. and their allies. And it was different in another respect, which is that there was a serious prospect, or at least seemed to be at one stage, that Henry V might actually make himself king of France. As a result of the DauphinThe title given to the heir apparent of the French throne.'s murder of the duke of Burgundy in 1419, the Dauphin was repudiated as the heir to the throne by the most powerful of the many noble princes, Philip  duke of Burgundy. So, in alliance with the duke of Burgundy, Henry V was able to establish a high degree of control over everything north of the Loire. Ultimately, he failed because of a particularly brilliant generation of French administrators who created perfect replicas of the Parisian institutions of government, but based in Poitiers and Bourges. Once a stable government under the Dauphin's control had been established south of the Loire, there was frankly no prospect that the English were ever going to conquer the whole of France, and everything went pear-shaped from that point onwards. That's a thumbnail sketch of a rather complicated series of wars.

Why do you think there's so much interest still in the Hundred Years’ War?

I think it's mainly because people regard it as a very colourful war, and in some ways it was. There were extraordinary personalities involved: Edward III, the Black Prince, Richard II, Henry V, to name only the kings or semi-kings, but also captains like Walter Manny, Salisbury, and other extraordinarily interesting figures, some of whom rose from relatively humble origins through the war to become rich and famous. Joan of Arc is a figure who has really only recently been possible to write about objectively, in France at any rate, where she is the centre of so many myths. So, I think the interest in it lies in the personalities involved who are genuinely colourful, and the stories which are also colourful. But the colour is in some ways misleading. Actually it was a grubby war.

I think all wars are, aren't they?

All wars tend to be. The Hundred Years’ War was particularly grubby because it was fought largely at the expense – and not just financially – of civilians who were not directly involved, but whose lives were completely ruined. It was a war of attritionA prolonged period of conflict during which each side seeks to wear down the other by a series of small-scale actions., in both the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, which was exceptionally destructive even by the standards of medieval and early modern wars.

In the Middle Ages the distinction between civilians and soldiers was much looser than it has become since. There were already uniforms which marked out soldiers, but the war was fought not simply by armies in the pay of the two leading belligerents. It was also fought by large numbers of bands of brigands, most of whom were loosely associated with one side or the, so the distinction was never that easy to draw. Civilians were regarded as fair game. Those who thought about it at all, and there weren't all that many who tried to theorize, looked upon it like that. The civil lawyer Honoré Bouvet, for example, whose textbook on the laws of war was probably the most widely read book of its kind during the period, said that civilians provide the productive resources on which the belligerents depend, and therefore their destruction was a perfectly legitimate act of war. That's not just theoretical: when the Black Prince conducted his great raid across the breadth of southern France in the mid-1350s, he instructed his officials to study the tax records of the towns he passed through, so that he could see what resources they provided for war. There was a general feeling that the only people who were entitled to the protection of the law of arms were pilgrims and clergymen and heralds, and all three of those categories found that the protection given to them by the laws of war was only very occasional and sporadic. They were among the victims, too, but possibly less often than other kinds of civilians. It was also a war fought by civilians in another sense, which is that, like all wars, they're basically fought as much by administrators as by soldiers. The organizational problems associated with the English campaigns in France were enormous: requisitioning ships, collecting enormous stocks of provisions, organizing supply trains. These things depended on the contribution of administrators everywhere. It was a bureaucratic war, just as all wars have been subsequently.

Is it the military side of it, or is it the politics, or is it the social side that you find most fascinating?

It's all three. I find a relentless narrativeA story; in the writing of history it usually describes an approach that favours story over analysis. of battles rather dull. It seems to me that the interest of the war lies in the connection between all of those things: the connection of campaigns with war aims; the connection between war aims and diplomacy; and the whole business of organizing a society which had very, very thin margins of wealth over the levels required for subsistence. That's really why, in both England and France, the war was the origin of their national identity. National identity before the war in both England and France had been a sentiment shared by bureaucrats and bishops but not by many others. In the course of the war, the state became much closer to the everyday life of ordinary people, and that created bonds between them.This I think lies at the origin of national feeling, particularly perhaps in England where the culture only became authentically English in the course of the wars.

Middle English was the language spoken by most Englishmen in the fourteenth century, but it was still natural for noblemen and the patrician elites of towns to speak in Anglo-Norman French, a language which was basically French but pronounced in a way that made it quite difficult for authentic Frenchmen to understand. Chaucer says that the Prioress spoke French, 'after the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe'.'After the school of Stratford le Bow [a London suburb], For the French of Paris was to her unknown. And the feeling was mutual: Parisians would have had great difficulty understanding Anglo-Norman French. By the end of the war, English was virtually the universal language in England. Anglo-Norman French was a declining language because the range of experience possessed by the people who spoke it was limited, so it developed very slowly. It didn't have the richness of experience that French-French or English-English had.

How much do you think the legal training, the legal approach, impacts your writing and your love of history?

It's the other way around. I was formed as a historian and my attitude to law has always been strongly influenced by that. Law has become in recent years an idealistic discipline. A lot of people become lawyers because they believe that it is a way of organizing society in a shape they like, or think they'd like. I, as a historian, have always been sceptical of the ability of any single generation, or even several generations in succession, to reform the shape of any society. That's something for which I'm eternally grateful to the Victorian pedagogues who designed the Oxford history syllabus. You had to learn about the history of a single society, England, from the end of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the twentieth century. You had to study the organic development of a complex society over a long period. If you do that, you quickly learn how little influence idealists have over the development of any society, except maybe over a very, very long period. You become sceptical about the importance of law for any other purpose than sorting out people's disputes.

There have been lawyers in the past, like Sir Edward Coke in the early seventeenth century, who have given law a large, idealistic element. Coke was an important figure in creating that sort of culture. He believed that the entire constitutionA body of fundamental principles and established precedents by which a state governs itself; or the composition of something. of England could be found in the words of Magna Carta, a view that no sensible historian would now endorse. But Coke deployed law in support of his views about the constitution, and about politics, and about relations between the Crown and parliament. The two periods in which law has had the strongest ideological ambitions are the first half of the seventeenth century and the period from about 1970 to maybe ten years ago.

What do you think changed ten years ago?

I think that judges became more sceptical of the kind of legal activism they had taken for granted before that. This is something that is still in progress and it may not continue, one just doesn't know. There was certainly a period of half a century when law was a powerfully idealistic subject. It still is in some areas: a lot of human rights enthusiasts believe it is a means by which law can improve the lot of society. I'm sceptical about those claims, and I have other problems about human rights. But it is really the modern equivalent of the sort of line that Coke was taking in the early seventeenth century, directed, of course, to completely different values, but with the same general approach.

Is it wise to look for parallels in the past and apply them to a modern setting?

I don't think the question is whether it's wise. Humanity does not change much. Humanity's technical capacity to do things does change, but its essential instincts don't. It's therefore quite instructive to look at completely disparate periods and see similarities.

Is it useful (which I think may be the correct translation of your word 'wise')? Probably not, because the circumstances are so different that you can't take lessons from one and apply them to the other. What you can do is understand humanity better by looking at both, but you have to know about the period in between. One of my quarrels with history as it's taught in so many schools, is what I would call the ‘gobbet approach’, where you take a bit of Buddhism, a bit of Christianity, a bit of the Roman Empire, a bit of the Anglo-Saxons, and a bit of seventeenth-century England, and you jump around from one to the other. I think this is a completely useless way of understanding the development of human societies. It is much better to concentrate on one society over a long period of time. That's the one thing that current generations of school children are not enabled to do, unless they have very enlightened teachers who are prepared to look beyond the syllabus.

And so few teachers have the time, or perhaps the inclination.

They don't have the inclination because of the obsession with exam results. What they're trying to do is to get them to the next stage, which depends on exam results. Any time spent off-syllabus is taken away from cramming facts into their heads which will help them do that. This is a useful way of passing examinations. It's not a useful way of understanding society.

As a former Oxford don, does it feel as if that pressure for results, rather than a love of learning, is being pushed higher and higher up?

Yes, that's been a trend now for quite a number of years. And it's absolutely true. Examinations are really the enemy of understanding. They involve a lot of rote learning, and they involve islands of knowledge, which, because they are never connected up, are never going to lead to any kind of real understanding.

What do you think of this pressure to focus on STEM, the mathematical and scientific subjects, over the humanities?

I think it is justified by the economic importance of the STEM subjects. Education has a variety of purposes, and I think one of them is undoubtedly to qualify people to earn a living that is useful to themselves and to those around them. I don't think there's any escape from that. The humanities can be acquired voluntarily out of school, which is not true of, say, physics. So, I am not unsympathetic to the priority often accorded to STEM subjects. I think that if you are going to teach history, you need to do it properly, or you're not achieving anything. Do you have to teach history? I think it's useful, but possibly not essential. You always have to perfect your knowledge as an adult by continuing to demonstrate your curiosity about the world. History is a very useful way of satisfying curiosity about the world, but we've got plenty of time in which to do that, whereas we haven't got plenty of time in which to learn about trigonometry or physics.

What's your plan now that you’ve completed the Hundred Years’ War series?

I am beginning to write a history of the French Wars of Religion. It's got to be about France because of all the European countries, apart from my own, it's probably the country that I feel I know best. The range of sources for the wars of religion is extraordinary. That's why I've decided to move forward by a hundred years and write about that.

Will it be a series of volumes?

I'm 75. You can't start writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at 75, so it's one volume.

When are we going to see this hitting the shelves?

I asked my GP whether she would be willing to give me ten years, and she said Yes. So that's the target. But since I've missed most of the other literary targets that I've had in my lifetime, I wouldn't count on it.

Assuming you had a safety bubble, is there any particular time you would like to have been in or seen?

I would like to have been a prince bishop of Würzburg in the eighteenth century. First of all, you have quite a nice house. The decoration of the Bishop's palace at Würzburg is one of the great masterpieces of Baroque architecture and painting. Secondly, you were undisputed ruler of a manageable part of Germany in a particularly civilized period of European history. So, if I was looking for enjoyment and were exempt from toothache, that's where I would go.

If you could bring people from history to a dinner party, if language were no barrier so they could all understand each other, who would you have?

I think they were all barbarians, so I would give up on that one!

You can buy Lord Sumption's latest book, The Hundred Years' War: Triumph and Illusion, here.