The greatest show on Earth
They crashed together “with a noise like thunder that resounds to the very stars”. That’s how a contemporary poet described a clash of French and English knights in a shallow vale in what is now northern France 500 years ago.
English and French troops had fought one another in landscapes such as this for centuries. But this was a showdown with a difference. For these knights weren’t fighting to the death. Instead, they were jousting. And they were doing so as a grand expression of reconciliation in one of early modern Europe’s most famous peace summits – at a site that is now
