The Fighting Essex Soldier: Recruitment, war and society in the fourteenth century, [ed] Christopher Thornton, Jennifer Ward and Neil Wiffen, Essex Publications, 2017, 178p, £18-99. ISBN 978-1-909291-88-1.

Ten years ago The Historian (97, Winter 2007, pp6-13) published an article entitled ‘What did you do in the Hundred Years War, Daddy?, with our Past President Professor Anne Curry as one of the co-contributors. This article revealed the availability of greater source material to inform our understanding of the military dimension of life in medieval England.

The Fighting Essex Soldier is part of the further study which has followed that earlier pioneering research, revealing just what can be discovered by investigations in the local county level. There is valuable material about the aristocratic and yeoman leadership but more remarkable is the depths of information that has emerged about ordinary participants in the military struggles of the Hundred Years War. Much is revealed about the ordinary soldiers and mariners who were part of these dramatic events. This is a recommendation in itself.

However Christopher Thornton and his colleagues make two highly significant wider extrapolations from their research. They reveals that the degree of association that the ordinary soldiers had developed played some part in Essex being at the centre of the Peasants Revolt in 1381; and they also argue that the expertise that Essex mariners began to develop in their international travels at this time later produced the maritime prowess for which England became so formidable in the later Tudor period. These are the formative fruits of detailed and thoughtful historical research.