Bernard Cornwell · 2000 · overland

Bernard Cornwell's 2000 novel, the first of the Grail Quest. French raiders sack a Dorset village and take the lance of St George from its church, and the priest's bastard son follows them to France as an archer. The hunt runs through the sieges of Brittany and the Norman chevauchee to a slope above Crecy, where six thousand archers change what a battle is.

1. 1
   Hookton

   Raiders come out of the sea at the Dorset village of Hookton on Easter morning, kill the priest and carry off the lance of St George - and his son Thomas, who should have gone to Oxford, takes a bow and goes after them instead.

2. 2
   La Roche-Derrien

   He fights in Brittany with the English garrisons, learning the archer's trade in a war of sieges, raids and shifting local loyalties - and finds that the man who led the raid on Hookton is a French lord hunting the same relic.

3. 3
   Caen

   Edward's army lands in Normandy and storms Caen, and the chevauchee begins - a march designed to burn a province and force the French king to fight, with the archers doing most of the burning.

4. 4
   Crecy

   Cornered north of the Somme and made to stand, the English form up on a slope above Crecy - and the French chivalry rides uphill into arrows all afternoon, which settles the argument about what an English army is for.