Edward III

Samuel Eli Cohen approaches each historical project through close research before developing plot structure or character arcs. His television adaptation of the life of Edward III required work with medieval chronicles, diplomatic records, genealogical archives, and modern scholarly interpretations of the fourteenth century. The research process helped him understand Edward’s world not only as a sequence of military events but as a landscape shaped by chivalry, plague, politics, and shifting alliances.

Portrait of Young Edward III from medieval manuscript at the British Library

For this project, Cohen draws on archives and research libraries that preserve records of medieval England and France. The National Archives in Kew hold royal administrative documents, chancery rolls, parliamentary rolls, and legal records that reveal the structure of Edward’s government. The British Library provides access to illuminated manuscripts, medieval chronicles, genealogical rolls, and early printed editions of key narrative sources. He also consults digitized materials from the Royal Armouries, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and manuscript libraries in Oxford and Cambridge. These collections contain battlefield accounts, letters, treaties, muster rolls, and descriptions of court ceremony. Together they provide a picture of Edward’s world as one shaped by warcraft, politics, and symbolic performance.

Along with archival sources, Cohen studies the major historians who have shaped modern understanding of Edward III. Ian Mortimer’s biography presents Edward as a charismatic and transformative ruler whose reign strengthened English identity. Mortimer writes that Edward understood spectacle as a political tool, an idea that helped Cohen build the thematic core of the series. Jonathan Sumption’s multivolume history of The Hundred Years War offers a more restrained and analytical perspective. Sumption describes Edward as a calculating and persistent military strategist who pursued advantage with consistent focus. These interpretations differ in tone and emphasis. Mortimer highlights personality, while Sumption highlights policy. The contrast between these authors helped Cohen construct a protagonist who is both theatrical and politically astute.

Other major historians add further dimensions. Mark Ormrod’s work on Edward’s kingship traces how the monarch balanced patronage, finance, and legitimacy. His emphasis on bureaucracy and governance informed Cohen’s portrayal of court politics. Philippe Contamine’s studies on medieval warfare provided context for the methods, constraints, and symbolic weight of English and French military actions. Christopher Allmand’s work on the Hundred Years War emphasized the social consequences of conflict, which Cohen drew on when building secondary characters around Edward. These scholars often disagree about the motivations behind key decisions, but they share a commitment to presenting the reign as dynamic and multifaceted. Their disagreements helped Cohen write characters whose perspectives on Edward vary with their loyalties and fears.

Cohen also worked with translations of primary narrative sources. Froissart’s Chroniques remain one of the richest accounts of the period. Froissart records that Edward sought glory on the battlefield and cultivated an image of chivalric magnificence, a quotation that became central to the protagonist’s early portrayal. The Vita Edwardi Secundi and the Anonimalle Chronicle provided contrasting views of the transition from Edward II to Edward III. The Scalacronica and the Brut Chronicle deepened his understanding of regional and class-based perspectives. These sources often contradict one another, and Cohen used those contradictions to generate narrative tension. What one chronicler praises, another condemns. This variation allowed him to shape characters whose understanding of the king is conditioned by the texts they would have encountered in their own lives.

Edward III, 1312-1377

Cohen’s research method remains consistent across projects. He begins by identifying fixed historical points that can be verified through documents and chronicles. He then studies the gaps between these points and imagines the pressures and motivations that might have shaped decisions. When historians or chroniclers disagree, he treats disagreement as an opportunity rather than a flaw. One interpretation can influence a noble’s view of the king, while another shapes the understanding of a soldier, a courtier, or a foreign rival. This method produces a world where characters argue not only through dialogue but also through conflicting readings of the past.

The Edward III research process continues to shape Cohen’s approach to later medieval stories. It confirmed the importance of working from world to character rather than character to world. By grounding narrative decisions in archival records, chronicles, and modern scholarship, he aims to write stories that reflect the complexity of political life in a period defined by power, loyalty, warfare, and personal ambition.