Medieval (Simon Fairfax) Books in Order

The Medieval books are really the long story of Jamie de Grispere, later Sir James, as he grows from a young squire into a trusted knight and spy. The series opens in A Knight and a Spy 1410, with England unsettled, King Henry IV ill, and Prince Hal rising behind him. Sir Richard Whittington, merchant, power broker, and spymaster, needs someone skilled but easy to overlook. Jamie becomes that man, and once he steps into the role, the stakes get bigger with every book.

This is court politics with mud on its boots.

What makes the series work is the mix of personal growth and national danger. Jamie is brave, but he is also young, learning as he goes, and often caught between older men with armies, money, and private plans of their own. His missions pull him through London, France, Wales, the Scottish border, and later into Paris, Florence, and the Court of Aragon. He is not only fighting battles. He is carrying messages, guarding embassies, testing loyalties, and trying to spot betrayal before it turns deadly.

The books move toward Agincourt, but they are not only about one famous battle. Fairfax is interested in the years before it, when trade, church politics, piracy, rebellion, and succession fears all tangled together. Wool routes matter. Ports matter. Cathedrals matter. A delayed payment or a false rumor can be as dangerous as steel in close quarters. That gives the series a fuller texture than a simple march from one clash to the next. It feels like a working world, full of bargaining, fear, and competing claims to power.

The road to Agincourt is long.

Jamie also has the kind of supporting cast that helps a long historical series breathe. Friends, comrades, mentors, and enemies keep returning in new forms as the pressure rises year by year. So do the demands on Jamie himself. He has to balance loyalty to crown, household, family, and conscience, and those loyalties do not always line up neatly. One mission may solve the immediate problem, but it usually opens a larger one, which gives the series a strong forward pull.

If you like historical adventure with espionage at the center, this is where the appeal sits. The battles are there, but so are coded errands, political bargains, shifting alliances, and the constant fear that the wrong face at court could undo everything. Start with A Knight and a Spy 1410 for the cleanest entry point. A Knight and a Spy 1403 works best as a later prequel, once you already know the shape of Jamie's world and want to look back at where some of it began.