Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King is on the shelves in bookstores and, I hope, in the hands of readers. I’m enormously excited to share it with you.
And I do mean you, because the only reason I can imagine you’re reading this is that you’ve read and enjoyed one (or hopefully more!) of my books over the years.
In fact, if you don’t mind, I wanted to take a minute to look back over the last few busy years — to take stock and, well, thank you for the part you’ve played in all that’s happened to me.
This is my third “battle” book in three years, all from Osprey Books: Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England (2021), Crécy: Battle of Five Kings (2022), and now Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King (2023).
When I committed to writing the first of these books, I didn’t know that I’d be writing all three, but I’ve come to view them as something of a trilogy. They fit together in structure, theme, and intent. They also share a conversational style meant to welcome anyone and everyone into the joy of history — not just the remarkable events themselves but how we know what we know about them. I want the scholarship in these books to stand up to the rigor of my academic colleagues, but I want the words themselves to be accessible to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject.
Unintended this “Battle Trilogy” might have been, but looking back I can see how the three books not only lay bare the ways I approach both history and conflict analysis, but also reveal the ways I’ve grown as a writer.
I don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with my earlier work. I am proud of each of these books. I mean only that most authors get better as they go along, as they build upon what works and find ways to build anew what doesn’t. I’m no different.
I love all my books.
But I do think Agincourt is my best yet.
And part of the thanks for that, I’m sure, is how the strange turns of life have meant that across the three years that these three books appeared, I published five others.
Seriously.
I hadn’t even stopped to think about how many there were until I was updating my CV with this latest publication. Here’s the timeline from 2021 to the present:
- January 13, 2021: 1066: A Guide to the Battles and the Campaigns (with Kelly DeVries).
- May 11, 2021: Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England.
- June 6, 2021: Of Knyghthode and Battaile (with Trevor Russell Smith).
- September 30, 2021: Iceborn (Seaborn #2).
- June 7, 2022: Crécy: Battle of Five Kings.
- November 8, 2022: The Origins of The Wheel of Time: The Legends and Mythologies that Inspired Robert Jordan.
- March 9, 2023: Stormborn (Seaborn #3).
- October 10, 2023: Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King.
During this same stretch of time I also finished another book that’s still to come, which will total nine books in just under 37 months:
- February 1, 2024: The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae (with Myke Cole).
I can assure you that having co-authors for three of these books very much helped to keep the line of production moving along (not to mention enabling me to learn from Kelly, Trevor, and Myke). Believe me, I’m not sitting here patting myself on the back. Instead I’m sitting here in bewildered gratitude that I was blessed with so many opportunities … and recognizing that any way you look at it, that list adds up to me writing a lot of words. And since writing, like any skill, gets better with practice, I’d be bitterly disappointed in myself if those hundreds of thousands of words hadn’t taught me how to tell a better story.
The other thing I’m recognizing is how varied those nine stories have been. That list includes the popular histories of my Battle Trilogy and The Killing Ground, but it also has the absolutely specialized academic work of editing a Middle English poem (Of Knyghthode and Battaile). It has Origins, which is part biography, part literary study, and part oh-my-gods-I’m-behind-the-scenes of a beloved fantasy series and its author. Oh, and it has the second and third novels of my Seaborn fantasy trilogy, which were written for audiobook (though they’ll soon be coming out in print!).
I assure you that I didn’t intend to whiplash myself through this mix of genres. I certainly didn’t intend to write so many books in so brief a window! But chances came along that I knew I couldn’t pass up, and this concentrated experience has absolutely honed the way I approach stories and the audiences I share them with.
Which, as I said above, must surely include you. So let me close by thanking you — truly, humbly, from the bottom of my heart — for being here. No matter the stories I might want to tell, I couldn’t be a storyteller without an audience. I’m grateful that you’re willing to listen to me.
And with that, I should probably let you get back to reading Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King.
And I’ll get back to writing the next story: a new history of the Hundred Years War. More news on that as I have it!