Harlequin (US title The Archer’s Tale) begins a series of stories set in the middle of the fourteenth century, an age when the four horsemen of the apocalypse seem to have been released over Europe. This first book tells how Thomas of Hookton leaves his native Dorset to fight aginst the French in Brittany and, afterwards, at the battle of Crecy in Picardy.
It is a tale of longbows and butchery, especially when England’s archers swarm into the Norman city of Caen. And over it all, like a dream, hovers the grail which is the epitome of chivalry and Christian decency, qualities which are in desperately short supply as the armies of France and England struggle at the beginning of what will be known as the Hundred Years War.
