The Lances of Lynwood

Complete and unabridged, with 50 full-page plates by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jan van Goyen and Philip James de Loutherbourg. France, 1360s: a boy of a knightly house is left with a castle, a baby heir and no money, in a country where the Free Companies take what they like — and Bertrand du Guesclin is on the other side. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and worked from the chronicles; the Black Prince's Spanish campaign here is history, and so is the ransom system that ran the whole war. Fifty plates by painters including Tissier and Bowes follow the castles, keeps and cliff-top strongholds that give this tale of chivalry its ground.