“Broadly speaking, these have remained the two poles of historical opinion ever since. Henry was either what the Edwardian scholar C. L. Kingsford called a “typical medieval hero” or the exemplar of all that was most depressing about the Middle Ages: a time of barbarity dressed up as chivalry, during which of the private ambitions of warlords were cloaked in the humbug of religion and used as the pretext to shed the blood of thousands, for the gain of a town here and a castle there, both of which might well be lost again the following year.”