Michael Livingston

King Henry V's victory over the French armies at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 is unquestionably one of the most famous battles in history.

The English invasion of France in 1415 saw them take the French port of Harfleur after a long siege, following which Henry was left with a sick and weakened army, which he chose to march across Normandy to the port of Calais against the wishes of his senior commanders. The French had assembled a superior force and shadowed the English Army before finally blocking its route. The battle that followed was an overwhelming victory for the English, with the French suffering horrific casualties.

Agincourt provides a new look at this famous battle. Mike Livingston goes back to the original sources, including the French battle plan that still survives today, to give a new interpretation, one that challenges the traditional site of the battlefield itself.

The battle of Crécy in 1346 is one of the most famous and widely studied military engagements in history. The repercussions of this battle were felt for hundreds of years, and the exploits of those fighting reached the status of legend. Yet cutting-edge research has shown that nearly everything that has been written about this dramatic event may be wrong.

In this new study, Michael Livingston reveals how modern scholars have used archived manuscripts, satellite technologies and traditional fieldwork to help unlock what was arguably the battle's greatest secret: the location of the now quiet fields where so many thousands died.

Crécy: Battle of Five Kings is a story of past and present. It is a new history of one of the most important battles of the Middle Ages: a compelling narrative account of the battle of Crécy that still adheres to the highest scholarly standards in its detail. 

Late in AD 937, four armies met in a place called Brunanburh. On one side stood the shield-wall of the expanding kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. On the other side stood a remarkable alliance of rival kings. The stakes were no less than the survival of the dream that would become England.

For centuries, its location has been lost. But today, an extraordinary effort may well have found the site of the long-lost battle of Brunanburh, over a thousand years after its bloodied fields witnessed history.

This groundbreaking new book tells the story of this remarkable discovery and delves into why and how the battle happened. Most importantly, though, it is about the men who fought and died at Brunanburh, and how much this forgotten struggle can tell us about who we are and how we relate to our past.