The Vintaine Books in Order

The Vintaine series drops you into the marching boots of English archers during the Hundred Years War. Rather than following kings and famous captains, Michael Jecks builds the story around Berenger Fripper and the small band of men he leads, a vintaine roughly the size of a platoon.

The first book opens in 1346 as Edward III’s army lands in Normandy. Berenger and his archers slog through hostile countryside, raiding for food and supplies, never quite sure where the French forces are or whether they will be overwhelmed on the march. When the army finally turns to make a stand near a small place called Crécy, the vintaine find themselves at the heart of a battle no one had expected to win.

Later novels take the same group, battered and changed, into the long siege of Calais and beyond. In Blood on the Sand, they are garrison troops trapped in a starving city, trying to hold the walls while spies and traitors work within. Blood of the Innocents moves forward ten years to the lead-up to Poitiers, showing how plague, loss and shifting fortunes have hollowed out and hardened the survivors.

The later volumes, Ashes of Rebellion and Treaty of Blood, explore what happens when men shaped by war have to live in the uneasy spaces between campaigns. Berenger’s company drifts through a France full of mercenary bands, peasant uprisings and half-kept treaties, discovering that peace can be as dangerous and morally murky as open conflict.

Jecks is more interested in mud, fear and boredom than in polished armour. The books dwell on long marches, bad food, disease and the constant calculation of risk that goes into every skirmish. Camaraderie in the vintaine is hard won, and not everyone makes it to the end of each campaign.

If you like your historical fiction to feel like listening to soldiers around a campfire, with all the rough humour, petty grievances and flashes of courage that implies, the Vintaine series is a strong fit.