THE WHITE COMPANY

The White Company is a historical adventure novel by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, set during the Hundred Years' War. The story is set in England, France and Spain, in the years 1366 and 1367, against the background of the campaign of Edward the Black Prince, to restore Peter of Castile to the throne of the Kingdom of Castile. The climax of the book occurs before the Battle of Nájera. Doyle became inspired to write the novel after attending a lecture on the Middle Ages in 1889. After extensive research, The White Company was published in serialized form in 1891 in The Cornhill Magazine. The first edition was published simultaneously Smith Elder an Co. in the UK and by Thomas R. Crowell in the US. The novel was finished in the Summer of 1890, and it was published in instalments in The Cornhill Magazine between January and December 1891. The book was very successful, selling out rapidly; it also met with positive reviews. The novel is relatively unknown today, though it was very popular up through the Second World War. In fact, Doyle himself regarded this and his other historical novels more highly than the Sherlock Holmes adventures for which he is mainly remembered.