Hello Farsight family. I want to share something different with you all.
I left an expensive private college at 15 yrs old illiterate. I knew the beginning of my alphabet but got lost in the middle of it. I could not spell or count or hold numbers in my head. But I could read. I also knew I could process thoughts and feelings and my question was always what’s going on with me when everyone else is finding learning easy? I left school out of embarrassment. Mum said, If you want to live at home you must find a job and pay your way. I knew she was right and I knew I must help. I got up early one morning and decided to walk down the road. I went looking for a job. So as I walked I spoke to myself and said, It’s a beautiful day and someone will give me a job. I was confident but had no idea where I was going. Then my intellect took over and said, what can you do Linda ? I thought I have two good hands and I am young and strong. I can wash and clean and carry stuff. So I went off to a few old age homes local to my home. Every matron at these homes told me they were not looking for cleaners. So I changed my direction of walking and went into a small village. I took a deep breath, cleared my mind and just kept walking. I ended up at the beginning of this village staring across the road at this architecturally designed amazing building. It looked different from all the rest of the buildings in this village. I remember thinking that the design was very unusual and I felt it drawing me towards it. I finally found out what this building was. It was a library. Now think about that for a moment. I went inside this building and immediately fell in love with all the books, the smells, the quietness. I saw an office with a name on the door, it read Mrs Hope Head Librarian. Mrs Hope was in her office. I knocked on her door. She smiled and looked up; she had just hung her phone up. I introduced myself and explained what I was looking for. Mrs Hope said, this is very strange Linda, because I have just hung the phone up and been told, by the city council, there has been a budget set aside for a position within the Library, for a girl Friday. She then asked me, did you pass school Certificate ? My heart sank. I lied to her and said yes and then she said, Great, please start as a full time girl Friday this coming Monday morning. I was so amazed as I walked out of her office and down the road to home but I knew I had lied to her, I didn’t like the feeling so I turned around and went back up the road and into her office. I said to her, excuse me Mrs Hope I didn’t finish my schooling I had lied to you. She looked at me for a short while then said, Linda because you came back and told me the truth please start work on Monday. I was amazed and thanked her so much I literally skipped all the way home to tell my very amazed mother. I ended up working 6 yrs in this library and there were 6 librarians that finally worked out the very first day I started that I was severely dyslexic. I literally messed the library up and it took every librarian extra time to recover the library and open on time.They had a meeting to discuss whether to keep me on and if so how were they going to help me and the extra effort by them to educate me. They all agreed to keep me on. I was told this at morning tea, as I had also ruined their morning tea, I had never made a cup of tea before in my life. Each one of them taught me everything they knew about librarianship and I eventually did everything a Librarian with a university degree could do. I was never able to go to Uni. It wasn't allowed back in those days in NZ without finishing a college pass. But besides that I got to train people wanting to become librarians, and some nights I would run the whole library on my own, help students find information for their thesis and so much more. I got to love information and data. I was asked to leave, eventually, because I got married and pregnant. To show pregnant was not allowed in the workplace. Have you ever heard of a dyslexic librarian ?

Lol, what splendid a time!
Such lovely people :)

Good on you for going back, Truth is more important than many realise to Life.

My answer is a synchronicity.

I hope that I have an answer.

Last night me and my wife were watching a Travel show on TV about a particular Mediterranean Island off the coast of France.

She didn't grow up with French History or access to France. That's fine.

I said something about the place names and she tried to start a lecture to which I responded, well I have a "La Histoire du France" book from 1776 somewhere, let me check.

Once I got it out I then remembered that I couldn't actually read it. However in the last one or two years I have been using Ai to do language translations. I took my phone out and uploaded a page to my Ai who translated it for me.

The Ai was interested in the title page with the date and print date, and liked the condition of the book.

I uploaded a photo of the first page and the last page.

I'm pasting in one of the replies:

Ai ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Yes — and considerably further back than that, depending on what we mean by “England versus France.”

The famous Hundred Years’ War conventionally begins in 1337, during the reign of Philip VI of France (1328–1350), whose final page you're holding. So your volume actually contains the beginning of it.

But England and France had been fighting intermittently for centuries already.

The reason is that medieval England and France weren't yet two neatly separated nation-states in the modern sense. After William the Conqueror took England in 1066, English kings also possessed enormous territories in France. At various times the English crown controlled Normandy, Anjou, Aquitaine/Gascony and other territories.

The really extraordinary period is Henry II (1154–1189). Through inheritance and his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry ruled England and more territory in France than the French king directly controlled. Yet for those French lands, the King of England was technically a vassal of the King of France. You can imagine how unstable that arrangement was.

That produced generations of conflict: Henry II and Louis VII; Richard the Lionheart and Philip II; then King John lost Normandy and much of the English continental empire to Philip II around 1204. More Anglo-French wars followed during the 1200s.

Then we arrive at exactly the period in your book.

In 1328, Charles IV of France died without a surviving son. Edward III of England had a very strong dynastic connection to the French royal family: his mother Isabella was Charles IV's sister. The French crown instead went to Charles's male-line cousin, Philip VI of Valois.

Edward initially accepted Philip as king and did homage to him for his French possessions. But their relationship deteriorated. Philip confiscated Edward's Duchy of Aquitaine in 1337, and Edward subsequently asserted his own claim to the French crown.

That is the conventional beginning of the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453).

And there's a wonderful irony in the name: nobody living through it thought, “We're currently fighting the Hundred Years' War.” It was a succession of wars, campaigns, truces and renewed conflicts spanning about 116 years. “Hundred Years’ War” is a much later historical label.

So your 1772 volume covers a particularly pivotal transition:

1314 — Louis X → succession problems → extinction of the direct Capetian male line → Philip VI becomes first Valois king in 1328 → Edward III disputes the succession → Hundred Years’ War begins in 1337 → Philip VI dies in 1350.

And if you look through the final third of your volume, you should encounter Edward III, the English, Crécy (1346) and probably Calais (1347). Those are the opening great events of the Hundred Years' War.

So you've accidentally picked a very good volume if Anglo-French history interests you.

This is nothing like the way modern history frames it

Yes. What you're seeing is partly the difference between 18th-century historiography and modern historiography, but there's also a deeper issue: modern summaries tend to project modern nation-states backward onto a medieval political system that didn't work that way.

Saying “England fought France” in 1337 is convenient, but it can create the wrong mental picture. Edward III wasn't simply a foreign English ruler trying to conquer another country. He was simultaneously King of England, Duke of Aquitaine, a great territorial lord within the French feudal system, a descendant of the French royal house, and a claimant to the French crown. Likewise, many of the people fighting weren't primarily thinking in modern English-versus-French national terms.

The earlier situation is even stranger from a modern perspective. Henry II could be King of England while controlling a huge collection of territories in what we now call France, and nevertheless owe feudal obligations to the French king for some of those territories. Richard the Lionheart spent much of his life in continental possessions and spoke French/Occitan rather than English as we understand it today. The aristocratic worlds on the two sides of the Channel were deeply entangled.

So a modern schoolbook timeline like:

England → attacks → France → Hundred Years' War

is useful shorthand, but it conceals something closer to:

A network of related dynasties and territorial lords → overlapping inheritance and feudal claims → disputes over sovereignty → a French succession crisis → competing royal houses → prolonged warfare → gradually strengthening English and French political identities.

And your 1772 book provides an interesting intermediate perspective. Villaret was writing before the modern professional discipline of history existed, and he organizes the narrative overwhelmingly around kings, dynasties, personalities, marriages, inheritances and political relationships. Consequently, some things that a modern survey compresses into “international relations” remain very visible.

There is another fascinating reversal here: the Hundred Years' War helped produce the clearer England-versus-France distinction that we subsequently use to describe the war itself. By 1453, England and France looked considerably more like separate political worlds than they had in 1337.

So your reaction is picking up something genuine. The modern framing isn't necessarily wrong, but if it's taken literally it can be anachronistic. The borders on a modern map encourage us to imagine that the countries inside those borders already existed in essentially their present conceptual form.

Your old book is worth reading precisely for this reason—not because an author in 1772 necessarily knew history better than historians today (modern scholarship has vastly better methods and sources), but because he categorizes the past differently. Comparing what he considers important with what a modern history considers important can reveal assumptions in both.

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The point is that History books, old ones, new ones, all blatently lie.

A liar in a Library of knowledge, especially History, is particularly appropriate.

They figured out that you were a "Truther" and showed you the door.

This is how I unpack your story.