The literature of the Hundred Years War, from contemporary accounts to those for which it was recent history, exhibited a profound awareness of and fascination with the idea that the conflict was embedded in language. The irony was that ‘English’ national identity and language were fundamentally constituted by French conflict: the same wars that galvanised the impulse to articulate a robust national identity forced the recognition of the centrality of their own place in shaping that identity. This knowledge made each nationalistic act of articulation fraught with complexity and self-consciousness about the paradox on which it was predicated.

No doubt, had this book been able to widen its focus beyond the specific context of the Hundred Years War to medieval England's other frontiers, other histories and other self-made national narratives, the conclusions it could offer would be richer. The Hundred Years War was just one context, although it was unique and remarkable in its longevity, its hold over historical imagination (manifested in its ongoing myth-making) and its legacy for the ways in which England's history and language were conceived and debated. However, the narrower aim of this book has been to trace the conjunction between language and war in this single conflict, from the first chroniclers and poets to the playwrights who put it on the stage; from the performative linguistic mimesis in contemporary narratives to its literal performance. The Hundred Years War is not the only prism through which to look at these issues: in many ways, the questions concerning language, meaning and national identity that it engendered were only specific instantiations of questions at stake more globally, as this discussion has intimated at several points, and an investigation of their comparable surfacing in other political contexts would offer a fascinating analogue to this one.

However, the consciousness among its narrators that language functioned mimetically permits a glimpse not only of the contemporary presentation of the war, but the way in which that shaped the directions in which it would burgeon, as national myth, for two centuries afterwards. This consciousness manifested from lofty claims to textual immortality, to vituperative jingoism, to official constructions of a party line, to troubled meditations on the moral exigencies of war poetry, to explorations of the ways in which the mimesis of theatre was mirrored by the deceptive mimesis of language itself.