Edward III and the Triumph of England by Richard Barber, review After that 1327 putsch in Nottingham Castle, when Edward was just 17, he ruled as very much his own man. His primary interests were war and chivalry, and he lost little time in practising them. Emulating his grandfather, Edward I, with a preliminary skirmish against the Scots, in 1337 he reasserted England's claim to rule France and crossed the Channel to affirm it in person. Crécy and Calais gave Edward an opportunity to indulge his fascination with chivalry. After Crécy, he awarded his eldest son Edward, the "Black Prince" of Wales, his spurs; and following the capitulation of Calais he yielded to the entreaties of his queen, Philippa of Hainault, and spared the six leading citizens, the Burghers of Calais, whom he had earmarked for execution to punish the city for its resistance. Barber shares his hero's love of chivalry and it is the valorous aspects of Edward's reign - his wars, his foundation of the Order of the Garter - which interest him and make the book sparkle with some of Edward's own glitz. The nuts and bolts of medieval kingship - such as the taxes the king levied on his subjects to finance his wars - are not investigated with such passion. Obsessed with the legend of King Arthur, Edward saw himself as a reincarnation of the mythical warrior king, and strove to recreate Camelot - right down to the Round Table which hangs today in Winchester Castle. Victorian Whig historians such as Bishop William Stubbs disapproved of Edward, regarding his military campaigns as ultimately futile, and his chivalry as meaningless PR for a hollow crown. Recently, however, Edward has enjoyed something of a revival, with Ian Mortimer's biography The Perfect King stressing the stability and order he brought to his kingdom, and hailing him as the monarch who transformed England from a feudal backwater to a great European power whose conquests stretched from Scotland to Spain. Barber's study is a brilliant coda to Mortimer's life, underlining the fact that Edward created the model for medieval monarchy, with his elite Garter Order becoming an ideal representation of the Crown's nobler virtues, which has endured to the present day. Edward's tragedy was that he reigned for too long. The sunset of his life was shadowed by the devastation of the Black Death, which killed up to a third of the population, probably including three of the king's own daughters. His beloved Philippa and son, Edward, in whom he had invested so much, died before him. Crippled by a stroke, he fell under the control of his grasping mistress, Alice Perrers, leaving a legacy of a bankrupt exchequer, an unfinished war and a discontented people to his inept grandson Richard II. It is not, however, this downside that interests Barber. True to the Garter's motto, "evil be to he who evil thinks," he takes Edward at his own value: a strong and wise ruler who did not let either the brutal realities of power or the tedious business of government get in the way of his own elevated conception of kingship. Could it be that Edward's dazzle has blinded Barber to the limitations of this "perfect king"? Edward III and the Triumph of England Richard Barber Allen Lane, £30, 672pp