Complete and unabridged, with 53 full-page plates by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Dominic Serres and Gustave Courbet. A novice leaves his abbey for the world in 1366, joins a company of English archers under a knight of the old school, and marches into France where chivalry is already a business. Doyle thought this his best book by far and was baffled that readers wanted detective stories instead; he researched the fourteenth century for a year and put the longbow, not the sword, at the center. Fifty-three plates of castle, siege, and pilgrim scenes, among them works by Courbet and Meissonier, follow the archers from abbey walls to the fortresses of France.