(SIGNED PRE-ORDER) Dan Jones : Henry V

SIGNED PRE-ORDER

WITH SPRAYED EDGES 

Published 12/09/24

Henry V reigned over England for only nine years and four months, and died at the age
of just 35, but he looms over the landscape of the late Middle Ages and beyond.
The victor of Agincourt was a model king for his successors. Shakespeare’s version of
Henry V saw his youthful folly redirected to sober statesmanship, and in the dark days of
World War II, Henry’s victories in France were recounted in British propaganda. Churchill
called Henry ‘a gleam of splendour in the dark, troubled story of medieval England’,
while for one modern medievalist, Henry was, quite simply, ‘the greatest man who ever
ruled England’.

For Dan Jones, Henry is one of the most intriguing characters in all medieval history, but
one of the hardest to pin down. He was a hardened, sometimes brutal, warrior, yet he
was also creative and artistic, with a bookish temperament. He was a leader who made
many mistakes, who misjudged his friends and family members, yet always seemed to
triumph when it mattered.

As king, he saved a shattered country from economic ruin, put down rebellions and
secured England’s borders; in foreign diplomacy, he made England a serious player
once more. Yet through his conquests in northern France, he sowed the seeds for three
generations of calamity at home, in the form of the Wars of the Roses.

Dan Jones’s life of Henry V provides unprecedented insight into the critical first 26 years
of his life before he became king. Both a standalone biography and a completion of
Dan’s sequence of English medieval histories that began with The Plantagenets and
The Hollow Crown, Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of England’s greatest king
from our best-selling medieval historian.