Black prince or white knight?

We cannot know for sure how Edward the Black Prince earned his sobriquet. For some it was the volatile mixture of his aggressive temperament and brutal conduct in war; for others it derives from his armour, as displayed on his tomb at Canterbury Cathedral. The cover of Michael Jones’s splendid new biography of this compelling warrior depicts the latter, with Edward arrayed in his suit of plate, his long moustache drooping over the mail of his aventail and the palms of his gauntlets pressed together in prayer, as if seeking God’s forgiveness for all the death and misery he has wrought in his bloody career.

Jones convincingly argues that Edward should not be too readily condemned, as he often is by a more censorious modern age. Although he readily admits that ‘the Prince’s conduct was not flawless’, his purpose here is to present the case for a more positive historical evaluation of his subject to a broad readership, thereby rescuing the Prince from his ‘black’ reputation and restoring the more approbatory verdict of contemporaries.