These tennis balls are an early, de luxe version of the prawn cocktail flavour crisp: trivial objects blown up to gigantic proportions as evidence of continental disdain for England and thus transformed in a casus belli. As Jonathan Sumption puts it in his magisterial history of the Hundred Years War, ‘The story of the tennis balls, supposedly sent to Henry V by the Dauphin [not the king] with the message that he would do better to amuse himself at home than to meddle in France, was not just a conceit of Shakespeare’s. Variants of it circulated in Henry’s lifetime. It is a fable, but like many
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