The Essex Dogs are a small company of men whom we meet in France during the huge English invasion of 1346. They arrive on the beaches of Normandy at dawn in high summer – storming out of the sea with 15,000 knights, men-at-arms, and archers. They are then swept along through the French countryside on what was known as a chevauchée – an exotic word for a campaign of terror designed to cow the local people into submission and reduce them to obedience to the English king instead of the French.
 

Dear Readers,

Every time I write a new history book I hit the road on book tour, visiting bookshops and bumping elbows with people like you. And when I do, someone always asks me: would you ever consider writing a novel?

For years I used to say no. My argument went like this: if you write a bad history book, you probably just got a few facts wrong. But if you write a bad novel, you’ve revealed to the world that you don’t really understand what it means to be a human. I was afraid I’d write a bad novel. I was a coward.

Essex Dogs is the first instalment of a trilogy of books – or maybe two – which digs deep into the dirty underbelly of the Hundred Years' War. That conflict, between England and various nearby medieval realms, is traditionally written up by chroniclers and historians as a war in which kings and their subjects clashed, with their fierce combat mitigated and dignified by the knightly code of chivalry.