TRIGGERnometry - The 100 Years' War with Historian Dan Jones

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00:00:55.560 The Hundred Years War, is that why we hate the French?

00:00:59.280 The Hundred Years' War is a shaking out of what these realms are going to be.

00:01:07.020 In 1328, when there was a succession crisis in the French crown,

00:01:12.580 the young king of England, Edward III, got into his head that one way around this

00:01:19.140 might be to claim to be the king of France himself.

00:01:24.440 That's the fundamental deep-down reason English kings are saying,

00:01:28.320 we should be kings of promise. 0.95

00:01:30.200 So, Dan, as you know, we're massive feminists on the show, 0.99

00:01:32.760 and so is all of our audience. 1.00

00:01:34.120 Yes, yes.

00:01:34.940 And it strikes me that we haven't addressed

00:01:36.780 the central figure in this whole story,

00:01:38.480 which is, of course, Joan of Arc.

00:01:42.340 Dan Jones, welcome back.

00:01:43.620 Thank you for having me.

00:01:44.440 It's great to have you on.

00:01:45.620 We're going to talk about the Hundred Year War.

00:01:47.360 It's going to be a great conversation.

00:01:49.360 And I was just saying to you before we started,

00:01:51.020 the last one we did about the Crusades

00:01:52.720 is absolutely smashed.

00:01:53.960 It was really, really fun,

00:01:56.020 and our audience enjoyed it.

00:01:57.560 So it's wonderful to have you back.

00:01:58.780 Thanks for coming. 0.93

00:02:00.520 The Hundred Years' War, is that why we hate the French?

00:02:04.200 Well, I suppose it's one of the ways that the relations between England and France are shaped.

00:02:11.340 I mean, if you think about any sporting occasion, I mean, we're recording this before the World Cup.

00:02:16.720 I don't know if England will play France in the World Cup or not.

00:02:19.600 But I guarantee that if they were to play France in the Soccer World Cup,

00:02:22.780 you would see some sort of montage before the event that referenced like the Battle of Agincourt

00:02:29.020 when the plucky English took on the might of the French stability and won. So it's like it's a sort

00:02:33.940 of, it's a common analogy for English-French relations. Is it why we hate the French? I don't

00:02:41.920 know if it's the specific cause, but it's definitely part of the kind of material that's

00:02:46.180 around. Yeah. I mean, I was only joking. I guess what, to give it the serious treatment that I

00:02:51.100 think the subject deserves. I think the best thing to do is to start by explaining actually

00:02:55.600 what we mean by England and France. Because I imagine at this point, countries don't really

00:03:00.720 exist in the way that we think about them now. These are more personal fiefdoms. And so is that

00:03:05.140 really where we should start with this? Yeah, that's probably a good place to start.

00:03:09.180 And in a sense, the Hundred Years' War is a shaking out of what these realms are going to be.

00:03:18.000 so if we go back before them into so just just by way of framing at the top usually when we talk

00:03:27.140 about the hundred years war we're talking from the about 1337 through to 1453 now you can extend

00:03:33.240 those in either direction mike livingston the great military historian has just written a book

00:03:37.340 called the 200 years war but by and large that's the core of the conflict we're talking about

00:03:41.820 now if you go before that you're absolutely right these are these are largely personal

00:03:46.520 fiefdoms. There's a fact of geography, which is since the last ice age, you know, Britain has been

00:03:51.980 an island and England is the sort of the dominant kingdom within that island archipelago. But if you

00:04:00.120 go back to the sort of the early into the high middle ages, the notion of what exact, which

00:04:10.020 bits are ruled by whom is not fixed. So, at the beginning of the Plantagenet era,

00:04:16.520 so it's after the Norman Conquest, 1154, Henry II takes over as King of England.

00:04:21.020 He rules England, Normandy, which is inherited effectively because of the Norman Conquest,

00:04:28.300 Anjou, Maine, Touraine, south of Normandy. There's a claim over Brittany and, by marriage,

00:04:34.120 the Duchy of Aquitaine, a huge sprawl of southwest France. Now, that adds up to about a third of the

00:04:38.400 territorial landmass of modern France, plus almost the entire Western seaboard. Now that

00:04:45.180 all answers ultimately to Henry II, King of England. But he's King of England and he's also

00:04:51.840 Duke or Count of a bunch of different places. So this is very much a sort of personal,

00:04:56.800 it's a set of fiefdoms held together by him. However, even at the beginning of the Hundred

00:05:03.100 Year's War, the early 14th century, you still have kings of England who are Dukes of Aquitaine

00:05:08.580 or Gascony, depending what you want to call it. So they still have this strong claim to

00:05:12.860 southwest France, centred on the capital of Bordeaux. They've got a kind of pipe dream

00:05:17.300 that really they ought to be ruling Normandy as Dukes of Normandy because of their descent

00:05:21.560 from William the Conqueror. And all of that is constantly in negotiation between English

00:05:27.220 and French kings. Who rules what and how and why? And it's only through the Hundred Years' War,

00:05:34.120 really, that you get to a situation where pretty much, even though Henry VIII might have still

00:05:40.160 fantasized that he was king of France, he's not. Not in the way that Henry V almost was and Henry

00:05:46.380 VI actually was. So the Hundred Years' War is like the kind of shaking out of those two kingdoms.

00:05:52.320 So the personal fiefdoms being critical here, who are the key players at the outset and prior to the outset of the Hundred Years' War?

00:06:00.780 Well, ultimately, it's the kings of England and kings of France.

00:06:04.980 So kings of England, well, from the 10th century onwards, there'd been a king of England rather than the heptarchy or whatever in the Anglo-Saxon period.

00:06:16.580 A king of England who rules, call it what England roughly looks like today.

00:06:22.320 um then you've got the kings of france whose whose situation is a little bit more complicated

00:06:30.020 you go all the way back to the time of charlemagne you know it's the late 8th century early 9th

00:06:34.940 century king of the franks well charlemagne ruled what's now france germany austria luxembourg

00:06:39.920 belgium the netherlands northern italy so on so on you know like the ec for the union more or less

00:06:45.660 well that's still in the dream of the european union there's a charlemagne prize given out every

00:06:49.680 year. That's the legacy of the rulers of Germany and the rulers of France. So it's in the minds

00:06:55.520 of the kings of France that they really ought to sort of be at least rulers of Western Francia,

00:07:02.860 as had been. So that's like, if we call Paris the capital, it's what we now call France.

00:07:10.220 But in reality, in the later Middle Ages, certainly the sort of early 13th century,

00:07:16.800 the kings of France didn't rule that much. Their power extended to a little island outside Paris.

00:07:22.460 And beyond that, it was just theoretical claim of sovereignty over all of these different powerful

00:07:28.380 lords within France. And the drive of French policy from the late 12th century, early 13th

00:07:35.340 century, Philip II Augustus is the king who really has the great vision, is to start expanding the

00:07:41.900 power of the kings of France back over France and to directly rule and to sort of squash down

00:07:51.340 the independence of these counts and dukes and rule directly. And that's a process that takes

00:07:55.800 a long time. Philip II goes some way towards doing it. At the beginning, just before the

00:08:01.720 Hundred Years' War, Philip IV gets a lot further. And then by the end of the Hundred Years' War,

00:08:08.420 with Charles VII, and then certainly by the time you get to Louis XI,

00:08:12.760 France is starting to look like what France is now.

00:08:15.300 So the power of the kings has really been extended properly

00:08:18.300 over those two kingdoms.

00:08:20.840 But part of that process for France means kicking the English out

00:08:24.500 because it's a very awkward situation for a French king

00:08:28.880 to have in his nobility a Duke of Aquitaine slash Gascony in particular

00:08:34.280 who's also the king of England.

00:08:36.760 because, I mean, the resources of that lord are at least equal

00:08:41.640 to the resources of the king of France.

00:08:43.180 So it becomes a not very biddable person within your realm.

00:08:46.840 So like from the French point of view,

00:08:48.520 getting the English out of the kingdom in their capacity as nobles

00:08:52.160 is a big part of this longer drive to create a greater France.

00:08:57.340 And how does that manifest itself in the war actually starting?

00:09:00.860 Well, the war starts over a very specific incident.

00:09:04.900 there'd been for decades generations these kind of squabbles between the kings of England and the

00:09:12.600 kings of France specifically over Gascony this bit in the southwest because as dukes of Gascony

00:09:20.600 English kings were technically obliged to come to the kings of France and pay homage to them you

00:09:27.100 kneel before them hands in theirs you know swear I will be your liege man and obey you because I'm

00:09:31.760 a noble of the French mobility. Now, no English king was, by and large, going to agree to do that.

00:09:37.900 So this had always been a point of great friction between the two kings. To try and resolve that,

00:09:43.980 in 1328, when there was a succession crisis in the French crown, the young king of England,

00:09:53.040 and Edward III got into his head that one way around this might be to claim to be the King of

00:10:02.060 France himself. Now it took a little while for him to put that into action as policy, but 1328 you

00:10:07.160 have the succession crisis, and just under a decade later the young King of England, Edward III, is

00:10:12.180 like, right, in order to secure my position in Gascony and stop the threat of it being taken

00:10:20.680 away from me because I won't pay homage to the king of France. I myself am going to claim to

00:10:25.320 be king of France and that's going to be my excuse to kind of go for an expansive war

00:10:30.140 and the claim to be king of France is then something I can sort of use as a bargaining

00:10:35.840 chip to gain more and more and more within the kingdom of France and from that point it's like

00:10:41.420 well let's see how much we can actually get. So from Succession Crisis 28, from 1337 onwards

00:10:48.880 Kings of England register their claim to be King of France

00:10:52.420 and perpetually are going to war ostensibly to try and enforce that claim.

00:10:59.080 Now we can get into the question of what they really want out of it,

00:11:01.720 but that's the fundamental deep down reason English kings are saying

00:11:05.440 we should be kings of France.

00:11:06.540 And they make that claim by reference to a family tree.

00:11:11.240 boring you too much in 1328 the possible claimants for the kings of france amounted to edward the

00:11:19.420 third on the one hand and philip the sixth of france as it became philip of valois on the other

00:11:23.900 so so this is the the moment in the family tree which everyone's pointed to and saying the english

00:11:29.340 the val the house of valois should be the kings of france and i'm really glad that we've started

00:11:34.540 talking about edward the third because i was reading your book about the plantagenet and he is

00:11:38.800 just the most incredible historical figure,

00:11:42.420 particularly where he took England from

00:11:45.100 with the reign of Edward II,

00:11:47.080 which I think we should touch on,

00:11:49.300 to how he ascended to the throne.

00:11:52.100 Let's talk about Edward III briefly.

00:11:54.080 Yeah, Edward III is a pretty extraordinary character,

00:11:57.300 particularly, as you say,

00:11:59.080 being the eldest son of Edward II.

00:12:02.600 It was the opposite, right?

00:12:04.280 Edward II was somewhat the opposite.

00:12:05.840 I mean, Edward II was in a way the opposite.

00:12:08.800 There are several candidates for this, for the worst medieval king of England,

00:12:12.720 but Edward II's got to shout.

00:12:15.260 Edward II was in many ways the kind of the opposite of what you should be as a king.

00:12:21.080 Fundamentally just didn't understand what the office involved.

00:12:27.120 And his reign was politically dominated by a succession of,

00:12:32.720 a short succession, but a succession of favourites.

00:12:34.840 Piers Gaveston, early in the reign, his kind of adopted brother, possible lover, certainly his obsession, without whom he would basically do nothing, and with whom he was obsessed.

00:12:51.820 A series of crises at the beginning of Edward II's reign, where the barons of England couldn't stand having Gaveston around.

00:12:57.600 and they kept constantly trying to kick him out.

00:13:00.360 And Edward would try every devious mean to get him back

00:13:03.160 until Gaveston was murdered by the Barons of England.

00:13:06.580 Later, Edward took revenge for this.

00:13:08.500 And then, around the same time,

00:13:10.100 he fell under the spell of another favourite,

00:13:15.360 Hugh Dispencer the Younger.

00:13:18.800 Eventually, Edward was deposed,

00:13:21.620 forced to abdicate by his estranged wife,

00:13:25.020 Isabella of France, the daughter of

00:13:27.340 King of France, Philip IV,

00:13:29.020 and her lover, Roger Mortimer, a dissident

00:13:31.000 English noble, Anglo-Welsh noble.

00:13:33.920 They kicked Edward II

00:13:35.260 off the throne,

00:13:37.860 murdered him, 0.99

00:13:39.880 had him murdered in

00:13:41.160 Barclay Castle in 1328,

00:13:45.420 and

00:13:45.860 put his young, his teenage

00:13:47.600 son, Edward III, on the throne.

00:13:49.500 For the first three years, Edward III was kind of

00:13:51.460 a puppet.

00:13:53.040 He was a teenager, but in 1330, Edward III, aged 17, 18, took control of the kingdom in his own name.

00:14:04.640 And he did so with a group of young, kind of youngish nobles of his own generation around him.

00:14:10.960 And as that generation grew up, they kind of pieced back together politics.

00:14:17.980 You know, politics had been deeply fractured for a whole generation by the kind of old guard, Edward II and his kind of cronies on the one hand, his cousin Thomas Earl of Lancaster, other rebel lords on the other, and this deep division got into the bones of English politics.

00:14:35.340 And it took a long time to sort of start piecing them back together.

00:14:38.460 one of the means that edward the third found to bind together the new nobility the new generation

00:14:47.300 of nobles who were sort of his friends his allies his uh his you know his comrades was foreign war

00:14:55.720 um and it's in a sense it's one of the oldest stories in the historical book isn't it you've

00:15:01.700 got problems at home what do you do go go and go fight abroad um we see it every day and in every

00:15:08.120 historical era. Certainly it worked for Edward III. So he latches on seven years into his

00:15:15.740 independent reign in 1337 to this fact that he has this claim to the French crown that he wants

00:15:20.260 to go and enforce. And from that point on, his reign is really a succession of phases of

00:15:27.640 campaigning in France, which are miraculously successful. And I kind of use that word advisedly

00:15:34.040 because it does seem like, for a very long time,

00:15:36.700 God is smiling on Edward III's wish to be king of France.

00:15:41.720 He wins these spectacular, against-the-odds battlefield victories

00:15:47.040 at Crecy in 1346,

00:15:48.920 on his son, the Black Prince, Poitiers in 1356,

00:15:52.680 at C in 1350 at the Battle of Winchelsea.

00:15:56.480 It seems like he can't lose for a long time,

00:15:59.180 and he is this dashing, glamorous figure.

00:16:01.700 holds these great parties um you know creates the order of the garter as a you know elite

00:16:08.540 aristocratic club for his mates i mean he really he kind of he just has this instinctive understanding

00:16:15.560 for bringing people along with him and seeing the the english aristocracy as his allies and as i say

00:16:23.620 his friends as people with whom he has a common interest rather than kind of devious nobles who

00:16:29.040 are bound to be out to stab him in the back the minute he switches off.

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00:17:41.300 the notes are there when you need them without having to choose between listening and writing.

00:17:46.020 Get up to 20% off at plaud.ai using the code TRIGGER at checkout or click the link in the

00:17:53.060 the description. Thank you to Plourde for sponsoring today's episode. Because it's a

00:17:58.540 remarkable transformation in the fortunes of England when you look at Edward II, who was

00:18:05.340 essentially deposed, constantly at war with the barons. England was broke to where it was under

00:18:12.300 Edward III, who was this incredibly charismatic ruler, and then went and then stuffed the French

00:18:19.260 battle after battle after battle.

00:18:21.600 And can you talk also a little bit about,

00:18:23.420 you talk about against the odds,

00:18:24.940 I think it's worth explaining that piece of it as well.

00:18:28.020 Yes, I mean, it is a remarkable transformation.

00:18:30.300 And there's no doubt that if you take Edward's reign

00:18:32.980 at its highest point, let's say 1360

00:18:35.880 after the Treaty of Brittany,

00:18:37.020 where he effectively trades away the claim

00:18:40.160 to the French crown for a massive territorial grant

00:18:42.680 of Aquitaine in full sovereignty,

00:18:44.020 of other bits of France as well.

00:18:47.140 I mean, that's a hell of a turnaround in 30-odd years.

00:18:53.680 Sorry, what was your question, Constantine?

00:18:55.140 About the odds.

00:18:56.420 Yeah, and he does it against the odds victory.

00:19:00.480 I mean, the signature piece is the Battle of Crecy in 1346.

00:19:05.440 So, Edward's campaigns to France sort of get going in the early 1340s.

00:19:11.060 and in the summer of 1346 he decides to go for a really really you know a grand sally out against

00:19:21.880 the french so he lands on the beaches of normandy on the 12th of july 1346 15 000 men you've got a

00:19:28.040 picture a sort of medieval d-day of this enormous landing i mean on roughly on the same but not on

00:19:34.800 uh i don't think it was it wasn't a d-day beach but uh savalogue just up from utah beach on the

00:19:40.500 Cotetan Peninsula. He lands this huge army and they march off into France. The English tactics

00:19:48.260 at this point are what's usually described as chevauché tactics. It's the flying columns of

00:19:54.300 people burning, destroying, killing everything in their path. It's a war of terror. But the point

00:20:00.000 of the war of terror is to try and convince the people of Normandy in this case that resistance

00:20:05.660 is futile, that their king, Philip VI, is incapable of protecting them, and that actually, if they've

00:20:11.680 got any sense, they'll show their allegiance to the rival king, Edward III of England.

00:20:18.520 This campaign goes on through the second half of July into August, but as it goes on, Edward finds

00:20:24.480 his lines stretched more and more and more, and he's losing men by a sort of basic attrition as

00:20:30.980 they besiege cities, as they, you know, as they fight skirmishes and so on. Philip's men fall back

00:20:37.980 and refuse to engage. They break the bridges over the River Seine. They break the bridges once the

00:20:43.360 English cross the Seine. Eventually they break the bridges over the River Somme. And eventually 0.68

00:20:46.400 they just wear the English down until things look pretty perilous for Edward because his lines are

00:20:52.460 overstretched and he's been in enemy territory for too long. And this all comes to a head in a

00:20:59.200 battle between the English and the French at Crecy, in which the French have sort of bided

00:21:07.240 their time and marshaled their resources well and bring up a far larger army than Edward has

00:21:12.540 and a far fresher army than Edward has, stuffed to the gills with knights, whereas Edward is now

00:21:19.800 quite heavily reliant on archers, you know, people of peasant stock, you know, inferior troops.

00:21:29.200 And yet Edward wins this extraordinary victory over the French, demolishes the French, kills hundreds of their knights, cream of French chivalry destroyed on the field, humiliates Philip and seems to draw down. 0.98

00:21:44.460 And this is something that's important, I think, throughout the Hundred Years' War, seems to draw down evidence of God's favour.

00:21:51.140 You win in battle in the Middle Ages. It's a form of trial.

00:21:57.220 I mean, you're asking,

00:21:58.620 there's very few battles

00:21:59.860 that are fought in the Middle Ages

00:22:01.040 for the reason that there is

00:22:02.940 enormous jeopardy in fighting a battle.

00:22:05.260 You fight a battle,

00:22:05.940 you're basically asking God

00:22:07.200 to judge your cause.

00:22:08.980 And that can go badly wrong

00:22:12.640 or it can go for you.

00:22:14.380 And at Crecy,

00:22:15.120 where Edward is by and large

00:22:16.220 forced to fight,

00:22:18.100 wins this miraculous victory.

00:22:19.440 It looks a lot like

00:22:20.380 God is smiling on his cause.

00:22:21.860 And it's a terrible humiliation 1.00

00:22:23.700 for the French.

00:22:24.800 Edward then goes,

00:22:25.800 having won this victory and fights another very very difficult battle of a totally different

00:22:31.680 sort this is a very this is a long winter siege um over the uh over the winter of 1346-7

00:22:38.520 um at Calais and so he besieges the coastal town of Calais obviously the nearest port between

00:22:44.240 on the French coast to England um besieges it for almost a year in really difficult conditions

00:22:52.420 but manages to break Calais as well

00:22:55.080 and so comes away from this Cressy campaign

00:22:57.440 with a bridgehead on the French coast

00:22:59.940 and this kind of burgeoning reputation

00:23:03.160 as the coming man of Western European politics.

00:23:07.460 He's proved himself against the odds

00:23:09.200 and it's the beginning of a succession of victories

00:23:11.920 throughout the 1350s then

00:23:13.520 with the interruption of the Black Death in 1348.

00:23:17.900 Obviously quite disruptive to campaign,

00:23:21.240 although they do campaign throughout the Black Death.

00:23:23.000 I say quite disruptive, but I do mean quite disruptive

00:23:26.240 because it doesn't shut, there's not mass lockdowns

00:23:30.740 of the way that we think in COVID terms. 0.92

00:23:32.720 I mean, people do get on with stuff in the Black Death,

00:23:34.660 albeit under somewhat difficult conditions.

00:23:39.200 So through the 1350s, Edward was dominant.

00:23:42.020 And the more dominant he is, the richer he gets.

00:23:44.400 You know, because one of the things that happens

00:23:47.320 if you win a lot of battles is you typically take a lot of prisoners.

00:23:51.240 valuable prisoners. It's not the done thing to kill knights, generally speaking, on the battlefield.

00:23:55.720 You've taken prisoner and there's a whole ransom market, a whole sort of secondary market in

00:24:02.360 ransoms. So you can mortgage people, you can, you know, they're third-party ransom agents,

00:24:08.760 so there's a huge financial market in ransoms. And you start to see across England places like

00:24:15.560 Warwick Castle, if you've ever been to Warwick Castle. It's a lovely day out these days but I

00:24:21.640 mean the grandeur of Warwick Castle owes a lot to the high point of the Hundred Years' War where the

00:24:26.760 earls of Warwick were big players in the Hundred Years' War and just came back, you know, laden

00:24:31.560 with gold. And the massive influx of wealth into the country was also helped after the Battle of

00:24:38.600 Poitiers in 1346 where the French King Jean II was taken prisoner himself and ransomed for millions

00:24:43.880 of billions and millions of gold echoes. And one thing that we haven't touched on is the technology

00:24:50.140 because the English had superior technology, didn't they? And that's probably the main reason

00:24:56.080 why they won. Superior, yes, although it looks inferior. So the longbow is the critical weapon

00:25:04.900 on the English side for most of the Hundred Years' War. Battle of Cressey, 1346, you do actually see

00:25:12.240 handguns on the field for the first

00:25:14.120 probably for the first time in Europe

00:25:15.900 but very, very crude handguns

00:25:17.900 and it's not much more than fireworks

00:25:20.220 really, it makes a lot of noises

00:25:21.480 it scares the horses but it's not

00:25:24.480 there's not Passchendaele

00:25:26.180 do you know what I mean?

00:25:27.820 So the battles

00:25:30.180 like Crecy in particular

00:25:31.560 later under Henry V, Agincourt are won by

00:25:34.280 English longbowmen

00:25:35.320 Now you look at a longbow

00:25:37.780 it's a simple, apparently simple

00:25:40.280 piece of technology it's a long piece of you um with a taut string and it shoots arrows which

00:25:47.400 it's not complicated um you sometimes hear described as the ak-47 of the middle ages which

00:25:55.940 is it's completely wrong because an ak-47 this is the success of the kalashnikov right is that 0.94

00:26:01.620 any idiot can pick up an ak-47 and fire and it's pretty reliable just point and shoot 0.98

00:26:07.380 almost nobody who hasn't well no nobody who has not trained for years can pick up a longbow and 1.00

00:26:15.540 shoot it if you ever tried to shoot a longbow it's um you just can't do it i mean you unless

00:26:23.280 you've trained a long time because the the longbows great advantages range and um

00:26:30.680 it means it's very hard to draw so in order to draw you can't like muscle a longbow you have

00:26:37.240 to get right inside it and you have to have like extraordinarily strong back muscles in order to

00:26:42.300 get inside and fire this and shoot this weapon effectively. So under Edward III, the English

00:26:49.960 do something quite smart, which is they make it mandatory for everybody on a Sunday to practice

00:26:55.060 shooting a longbow. So you have a whole population that's trained to use this simple and cheap

00:27:01.860 weapon. So when they go into the field in France, for generation after generation, they've got these 0.96

00:27:08.660 ranks upon ranks of cheap troops who can shoot a cheap weapon, which is absolutely deadly.

00:27:18.680 It's got a longer range than a crossbow, which is a more expensive and more, you know, and more

00:27:23.040 temperamental piece of technology because it's got more moving parts. And deployed correctly,

00:27:29.660 ranks of longbowmen 0.76

00:27:32.940 are very effective

00:27:34.840 against a cavalry charge as well

00:27:36.600 horses don't like charging into

00:27:38.900 hail of longbow shot

00:27:41.620 and you can keep

00:27:43.000 a bigger range, I mean there's all sorts

00:27:45.000 of advantages but yeah the critical

00:27:46.780 piece of technology

00:27:48.120 for most of the 100 years on the English side

00:27:50.780 is the longbow and you see these victories all the way

00:27:52.780 from 1346, Crecy

00:27:53.960 Ashentor is the famous one, 1415 but

00:27:56.500 even 1424

00:27:58.640 or you've still got great longbow victories for the English.

00:28:02.920 And is that the reason that the French don't just go,

00:28:05.980 oh, longbow, that looks good, we'll do that?

00:28:08.140 Because it takes a lot of training.

00:28:09.780 Or is it ideological on their part?

00:28:11.300 Because, you know, the knights, chivalry, you know, 1.00

00:28:15.040 charging down the plebs, it sounds like fun. 0.99

00:28:17.440 It's a bit of both.

00:28:18.040 It's a bit of both.

00:28:18.720 I think there's an ideological preference for cavalry,

00:28:25.220 a bit on the French side.

00:28:26.880 And I think that going back to what we talked about with the kings of France still being in this phase where they're trying to extend their authority directly over their own realm, it's much harder for them to institute policies that in England you can institute quite directly.

00:28:42.860 If the king says, and if the king says, I want everyone to train with a longbow in England on a Sunday and pass a parliamentary statute, that gets done.

00:28:55.220 The power concentrated in English king's hands at this point and mediated through parliament and national gathering is considerable.

00:29:06.820 And so there's a higher degree, I suppose, of centralized authority in England.

00:29:12.420 relative to France.

00:29:14.240 That's really interesting.

00:29:15.440 And so far for me to be sceptical

00:29:17.300 of Guards' involvement in all of this,

00:29:18.920 but you mentioned that in that moment,

00:29:20.920 in that time,

00:29:21.660 it would have been a huge part

00:29:23.120 of how people perceived the successes

00:29:25.680 that Edward III is having on the field.

00:29:27.700 Absolutely.

00:29:29.040 Other than Guards' involvement

00:29:30.440 and the longbow,

00:29:31.400 are there other reasons why in that phase

00:29:33.800 the English are as successful as they are,

00:29:36.180 as you said, against the odds?

00:29:39.220 Or is it just those two?

00:29:42.120 Just God and the Longbow.

00:29:44.080 That's all it means.

00:29:45.340 What else do you need?

00:29:48.400 Connected to this centralised authority,

00:29:51.080 the English are also probably better at taxing the realm.

00:29:56.520 So the relatively early development of Parliament in England

00:30:03.560 in the Middle Ages, stemming to the 13th century,

00:30:07.680 out of Magna Carta through the reforms of the middle of Henry III's reign

00:30:11.440 in the 1250s and 1260s create a relationship in which there's a kind of a negotiation mechanism

00:30:18.940 between the whole realm and the king which is part which are these irregularly called parliaments

00:30:25.580 where the king when things are functioning well says okay I want to fight a war calls a parliament

00:30:30.620 sets out the case for war parliaments effectively appropriates the funds um they're quite efficiently

00:30:37.100 collected and the king has has easier access to the wealth of his own kingdom so it becomes i mean

00:30:44.380 of course every time there's a war everyone's constantly complaining about the tax in fact

00:30:48.820 every time there's any tax of any sort everyone's constantly complaining of course they are except

00:30:53.660 when people are winning so if you look at say henry v who had a very successful um time of the

00:30:58.680 100 years war in his reigns early 15th century uh he he england is probably under the highest

00:31:06.900 tax burden

00:31:08.660 it ever is in the Middle Ages,

00:31:11.600 if I can think.

00:31:13.900 But Henry just keeps winning

00:31:15.160 and winning and winning and winning.

00:31:16.240 So people are generally happier

00:31:18.100 to pay for a war win than winning.

00:31:19.460 But in answer to your question,

00:31:21.240 English kings have a somewhat better access

00:31:23.920 to their own tax base.

00:31:25.960 And they also

00:31:27.280 have fewer things to think about,

00:31:30.420 in a sense, because there's

00:31:31.840 there's something that pertains to the physical geography, I think,

00:31:40.420 that also really matters.

00:31:42.800 And this is a much bigger point about English and British history

00:31:48.460 from the Middle Ages onwards.

00:31:50.340 There are so many advantages to specifically where this big island

00:31:54.240 and archipelago lies.

00:31:56.740 The defensibility, you know, the relative, you know, the few borders, the dominance of the English by and large over their neighbours, with the exception of the Scots, who typically ally with the French.

00:32:12.520 But even in that case, England is heavily dominant. You never see Scotland until, you know, James VI comes along, you never see Scotland conquer England.

00:32:22.660 so whereas France 0.65

00:32:27.820 I mean the French have much more

00:32:29.940 to think about than just the English

00:32:31.420 I think this is also

00:32:33.180 to return to your joke at the beginning 1.00

00:32:35.060 the French kind of live 0.92

00:32:37.880 rent free in the English heads 0.99

00:32:39.460 in a way that I don't

00:32:40.460 it's not necessarily the same

00:32:44.300 the other way around

00:32:45.060 because you know

00:32:45.560 let's just take one example

00:32:46.920 well they have the Germans next to them 0.90

00:32:48.920 they have the Germans next to them 0.67

00:32:50.220 I mean there's the question 0.85

00:32:51.100 of what's going on

00:32:51.820 on the Italian border

00:32:52.620 Like, what's the relationship with the papacy and where should, you know, at the same time as the Hundred Years War, you've got this debate about whether the papacy should be in Rome or in Avignon, not technically in France, but basically in France.

00:33:05.440 You've got questions about sovereignty in Flanders.

00:33:08.000 There's a whole ton of stuff going on for French kings to think about in which the English are only one. 0.85

00:33:15.000 I think, you know, maybe we talked about this when we talked about the Crusades, and there's something analogous there, which is, you know, in the Crusaders' minds, going out and conquering the kingdom of Jerusalem and kicking the Muslims out and doing them over is like, that's the number one thing. 0.55

00:33:29.360 Sort of, the Muslims in the Middle East are like, yeah, okay, but we're quite busy fighting the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia here, and it's like way more to think about than just you lot. 0.56

00:33:39.220 So, perhaps something similar is going on. 0.99

00:33:41.420 All right, so the English have this structural advantage

00:33:44.820 in terms of centralised power, taxation.

00:33:47.260 They've got the technological advantage with the longbow.

00:33:50.040 God clearly is on England's side, as we've established.

00:33:52.380 Until he's not.

00:33:53.760 And this is where I'm going with this.

00:33:55.440 How do the wheels come off the bandwagon?

00:33:57.420 You've got Edward III, brilliant.

00:34:00.040 The son is a badass by all accounts, the Black Prince.

00:34:03.860 How does the whole thing turn?

00:34:05.260 Because ultimately, the Hundred Years' War is not a success for the English, right?

00:34:08.500 No, and ultimately, the Hundred Years' War is a massive failure.

00:34:10.700 The Hundred Years' War shakes out so that the English are completely kicked out of France, with the exception of Calais.

00:34:16.120 But it depends where you stop the tape, you know.

00:34:19.340 So Edward III, up until you have these victories we've talked about.

00:34:23.900 Crecy, Poitiers, others.

00:34:28.180 1360, there's a settlement, Treaty of Bretigny.

00:34:31.060 From that point on, the French start chipping away at the Bretigny settlement.

00:34:36.020 Edward III is succeeded in 1377 not by his badass son, the Black Prince,

00:34:41.300 who dies shortly before him of an illness picked up on campaign in Spain,

00:34:47.380 but by his grandson, Richard II, who has no interest in fighting the French War whatsoever

00:34:52.520 and is perfectly happy to, you know, if you asked him,

00:34:56.240 he would have re-signed away everything that England had ever won.

00:34:59.180 It's just not his cup of tea at all.

00:35:01.700 He's deposed in 1399.

00:35:03.980 Henry IV, his cousin, picks things up.

00:35:07.640 Henry V then launches a kind of really retro campaign,

00:35:16.220 modelled in large part on Edward III's great victories,

00:35:20.760 although strategically somewhat different,

00:35:23.860 and wins a startling succession of victories between 1415,

00:35:30.660 the Agincourt campaign, and his own sudden death in 1422.

00:35:36.660 Henry V is taking advantage of a civil war in France

00:35:39.400 between two factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs,

00:35:42.760 who are at war because the French king has gone mad, Charles VI.

00:35:46.240 So Henry VI kind of inserts the English into this war,

00:35:49.220 teams up eventually with the Burgundians, destroys French armies, conquers Normandy,

00:35:57.620 gets all the way to the walls of Paris and forces in 1420 a treaty on the French called the Treaty

00:36:02.940 of Troyes by which Henry V of England becomes, quote, heir and regent to the crown of France.

00:36:09.360 When mad Charles VI dies, Henry V is going to be not only king of England, the king of France

00:36:13.960 as well. Sort of like he's beaten the ultimate boss. Then Henry V dies at the age of 35 of

00:36:20.400 dysentery and leaving an infant son, not even one year old, as his successor. So that's 1422. Now,

00:36:30.600 things don't go immediately wrong for the English, which is remarkable, really. In fact, they stay 0.96

00:36:36.860 pretty okay until 1429 when Joan of Arc comes along. But at the moment Joan of Arc rises in

00:36:45.220 1429, the English, with Burgundy in support, have sort of conquered everything in France down to the

00:36:50.500 River Loire. And it's not unthinkable, the Siege of Orleans, that if they take Orleans, they're going

00:36:56.760 to enter southern France, and the full conquest of France is on the cards. However, in 1435,

00:37:05.620 the Burgundians switch up on them and France reunites under the king Joan of Arcade helped

00:37:13.300 Charles VII and from that point on England is at a increasingly at a disadvantage partly because

00:37:22.840 largely because the king of England Henry VI and your fifth son who'd been an infant in 1422

00:37:29.040 has grown up to be absolutely uninterested in war absolutely incapable of domestic or foreign

00:37:35.100 government, shell-shocked in the face of the reality of power, completely hopeless England 0.90

00:37:42.560 dissolves into a sort of leaderless crisis of its own and the French start to chip, chip, chip away 0.57

00:37:49.840 at all the English possessions in France, in Normandy in particular, they take Maine back

00:37:55.020 until in 1453, the Battle of Castillon,

00:38:02.160 not only have they won back Normandy,

00:38:04.080 they also have shrunk Gascony, that bit in the southwest,

00:38:08.400 down to almost nothing, destroy the English in Gascony,

00:38:10.800 take Bordeaux, and it's all over.

00:38:12.640 There's nothing left except for Calais by 1453.

00:38:17.740 And that then sparks in England the Wars of the Roses,

00:38:21.680 The civil war, the dynastic wars between what becomes known as the House of Lancaster and the House of York.

00:38:27.440 And from that point on, there's vanishingly little possibility of the English doing anything whatsoever except defending Calais.

00:38:34.140 There's a late stage hurrah in 1475 under Edward IV, Yorkist king, who tries to do a little bit of Henry V cosplay,

00:38:43.060 raises a big army for 13,000 men, takes it over to France.

00:38:46.600 But as soon as he gets there, he realises, I'm not really into this.

00:38:50.380 I'd rather be at home kind of squiring wenches and eating cakes, basically. 0.98

00:38:55.440 And so signed a deal with the French where they agreed to pay the English to just off and leave them alone. 0.77

00:39:01.700 Treaty of Piquigny of 1475.

00:39:05.240 The claim to the Kingdom of France is not dropped.

00:39:08.520 So Henry VIII, early in his reign, 1413, he's a young man, comes to the throne, decides he's going to do his own Henry V cosplay.

00:39:16.280 But again, it comes to nothing.

00:39:18.940 With the benefit of hindsight, 1453 is the end. 0.89

00:39:22.080 Once the English are being kicked out, 0.87

00:39:23.460 they're really not coming back in any meaningful sense. 1.00

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00:41:25.880 Dan, as you know, we're massive feminists on the show and so is all of our audience.

00:41:30.420 And it strikes me that we haven't addressed the central figure in this whole story, which is, of course, Joan of Arc.

00:41:35.280 Of course.

00:41:35.700 A miraculous character, genuinely one of the miraculous characters of history.

00:41:42.520 Yeah, an extraordinary character.

00:41:48.880 It's so difficult to disentangle, maybe this is true of a lot of characters, but it's extremely

00:41:54.740 true of Joan, to disentangle the real person from the shroud of myth and storytelling that

00:42:02.160 kind of that sits over the top of her but makes a material difference at this pivot point in the

00:42:10.360 hundred years war you know it's the siege of orleans 1429 the english seem to be ascendant

00:42:14.780 the direction of travel seems to be relentlessly south as in the english is pushing further and

00:42:20.700 further and further into what what remains of french held france and then suddenly this you

00:42:26.760 know, peasant girl from this weird bit of Eastern France turns up, you know, waving the flag and

00:42:32.780 saying, you know, God's spoken to me. I'm going to lead the Dauphin to his coronation around and 0.98

00:42:39.140 we're going to take back France. And then it actually happens. Well, not only does it happen, 0.55

00:42:46.140 but she plays an active role. She plays an active role. She's never been trained as a knight goes

00:42:50.380 into combat, leads men into battle. I mean, is there an... I ask this question genuinely. Is

00:42:56.340 Is there an explanation that does not include the divine

00:42:59.520 that actually can tell us what happened?

00:43:03.540 Yes.

00:43:03.800 I mean, I don't know how much sports fan you are,

00:43:06.540 but this idea of momentum and belief.

00:43:09.060 Like we talk about this in sports all the time,

00:43:10.820 that something will galvanize a team.

00:43:14.420 Sure, but isn't what happened a little bit more

00:43:17.060 like me turning up, persuading Pep Guardiola

00:43:20.340 that I should play up front, and then he sticks me up front

00:43:23.000 and we start smashing them in?

00:43:24.540 Isn't it a bit more like that?

00:43:26.340 No, because Joan wasn't smashing them in, you see.

00:43:31.060 It's like having this...

00:43:33.900 In a manner of speaking.

00:43:36.680 I'm sure you would be.

00:43:38.720 It's like having this incredible kind of mascot just suddenly.

00:43:42.380 But you can't disentangle it from the divine.

00:43:44.920 I know that you want to.

00:43:46.480 I'm not. I don't want to.

00:43:47.880 I'm asking if it's even possible.

00:43:50.180 No, I don't think you can.

00:43:51.240 You can't disentangle Joan of Arc's effect on the French.

00:43:56.340 at Orléans and for a little while thereafter, from the medieval worldview that God is active

00:44:04.980 in the world and through people at times. You just can't. There's a whole set of language

00:44:16.380 that is a modern language that we could use to describe Joan of Arc, and some of it would come

00:44:21.480 from the language of mental illness, and some of it would come from a sort of, you could use the

00:44:27.180 language of sort of the woo-woo realm, or sports psychology, or any of those things. I've just

00:44:34.360 picked the sports psychology one and tried that out, and you, ineffectively, as it turned out.

00:44:40.560 It's no good. You have to use the terms of the time, and the terms of the time are like,

00:44:44.300 there was this moment when God intervened. That's how it was understood by everybody at the time,

00:44:50.020 And so that's the best explanation.

00:44:52.720 It didn't last very long because God's intervention was time-limited through Joan.

00:44:59.680 She outlived her usefulness and the end of her story is a tragedy, really. 0.91

00:45:04.300 I mean, discarded by the French and then treated pretty appallingly

00:45:09.680 and in just basic human terms by the Burgundians and subsequently the English.

00:45:14.320 but then revived later.

00:45:19.780 Her revival is as much of a part of her story

00:45:23.940 as what actually happened at the time.

00:45:25.620 And this 19th, 20th century revival of Joan of Arc

00:45:30.640 as a symbol of Frenchness

00:45:32.680 and of the kind of miraculous,

00:45:37.900 the providential within the French character is important.

00:45:41.780 And, you know, you introduced her with a comment about feminism, 0.61

00:45:44.320 That's a part of Joan as well. 0.99

00:45:46.720 She drifts through different types of being an icon. 1.00

00:45:51.360 At the moment, she's a sort of partially feminist icon. 1.00

00:45:54.900 And it's not hard to see why, because she dons the male armour 1.00

00:45:59.720 and she comes into a man's world and she seems to materially affect it. 1.00

00:46:03.020 And she satisfies a lot of the yearnings of modern feminism. 1.00

00:46:07.700 But she also used to satisfy a lot of the yearnings 0.94

00:46:10.260 of modern French nationalism. 0.97

00:46:12.380 She's just a, she's a palimpsest. 1.00

00:46:13.980 You can write your own story onto her 1.00

00:46:15.880 and she still looks good standing there

00:46:17.940 with a helmet on and a flag on her.

00:46:19.420 So what you're saying is she's Claudio Ranieri

00:46:21.600 at Leicester City.

00:46:22.780 I knew that that was what I was looking for.

00:46:25.220 She's Claudio.

00:46:26.300 And now we've reduced the number of people

00:46:28.400 who get the references down to about three.

00:46:30.240 Well, at least three.

00:46:31.140 At least three.

00:46:32.360 But from a historian's perspective,

00:46:34.620 in a practical sense,

00:46:36.000 do you believe that the turnaround

00:46:37.800 in French fortune happens

00:46:39.920 if Joan of Arc doesn't come along

00:46:41.400 when she does?

00:46:42.340 Oh, what a great counterfactual.

00:46:44.180 Probably, eventually.

00:46:45.700 Really?

00:46:46.200 Probably.

00:46:47.440 How much further could the English

00:46:49.100 have pushed realistically?

00:46:50.980 I mean, behind the scenes,

00:46:53.460 Henry VI by this stage

00:46:54.940 was coming on for his eighth birthday.

00:46:59.660 Within five years,

00:47:01.000 it would be pretty clear

00:47:01.940 that this was not going to be

00:47:03.680 a military leader of any sort whatsoever.

00:47:06.760 So, I mean, the English willingness

00:47:09.680 to finance effectively a civil war in France,

00:47:13.800 which is what the English...

00:47:14.740 So the English kings, up until the Treaty of Troyes in 1420,

00:47:18.580 when Henry V signs this treaty that says,

00:47:20.620 I'm the heir and regents of the crown of France,

00:47:23.060 it's the war from the English taxpayers' perspective

00:47:26.900 is we're paying to win back what's ours by right.

00:47:32.720 Once the English king starts to make reality

00:47:36.940 of becoming the king of France,

00:47:38.620 so that it's the possibility he's going to wear these two crowns.

00:47:41.120 The English taxpayers get very cold feet and say,

00:47:44.900 well, if you're king of France, tax your French subjects

00:47:47.780 to pay to conquer the whole of your realm of France

00:47:49.700 because that ain't our concern anymore.

00:47:51.800 The whole calculus of the war shifts.

00:47:54.720 So to return to the question of the 1420s into 1430s,

00:47:59.160 had Joan of Arc not come along, and now I realize I'm flicked

00:48:01.880 and flicking back to be more of a structuralist than a great man.

00:48:03.820 person but deep down you wouldn't the English would not have had a the king was growing up to

00:48:11.480 be absolutely uninterested in war the English taxpayer would probably not have stomached much

00:48:16.680 more of this making the French pay for their own conquest was difficult at some point something had

00:48:24.340 to give and probably would have but Joan is this she's the spark right she's a spark and she gives

00:48:32.000 the French the belief momentarily that they can win this critical siege at Orléans and then the

00:48:40.740 momentum shifts. There you go. You believe in the great man of history unless it's a woman.

00:48:45.260 I believe in the great woman. I believe in the great woman. I'm just messing with you. 1.00

00:48:49.860 The more I read about history, particularly English history, the more I realise

00:48:54.340 it's really dependent on the king. Edward II, terrible, England was in the doldrums. I know

00:49:00.400 this is a simplistic view of it, Edward III, great king, England rose again. And you look at,

00:49:07.160 for instance, the Black Prince, who I think he developed dropsy, didn't he? Yeah. And you think, 0.99

00:49:12.820 how different would England have been if he hadn't have got sick and he could have ruled for

00:49:18.560 a longer period of time as Edward III? And maybe that would have deferred Richard II coming to the

00:49:24.800 who made a complete what's-it of it.

00:49:27.840 Yeah, this is right.

00:49:29.360 I mean, the quote-unquote great man theory of history

00:49:33.840 goes in and out of fashion, right?

00:49:36.220 When I was growing up, when I was studying,

00:49:38.180 it was well out of fashion, and everything was structuralist,

00:49:40.980 and the whole belief was really this concentration

00:49:44.500 on the character of leaders is for the birds.

00:49:48.480 It doesn't really make much difference.

00:49:49.980 That the history is the product of grander forces than this.

00:49:56.120 And here we are in the sort of early 2020s. 0.99

00:49:59.320 I think that you'd be a fool, right? 0.76

00:50:02.240 You know, we're living in an age where the personalities of the rulers of their superpowers are critical to the state of the world and this historical pivot point which we seem to be living. 0.97

00:50:17.140 If you take Tai Chi and China, I mean, his conception of Chinese history, his personal belief about how China should be and what it looks like, vitally important to Chinese policy.

00:50:29.340 Trump in the US, his disinterest in most of history, his kind of personal peccadilloes and notions of how things should be, absolutely critical to America's developments of power and Putin and Russia and so on and so on.

00:50:44.180 So, to take that back to the kings and queens of England, yeah, it does matter that Richard II was a sort of petulant kind of pacifist with a narcissistic personality disorder.

00:50:59.520 That's of material importance to English history, to your counterfactual. What if the Black Prince had not gone sick at Nehra and had succeeded as Edward IV? Things could have looked different. 0.65

00:51:13.780 I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean better. Of course, it could be a different kind of bad. The Black Prince was a fantastic general, but he probably lacked some of the kind of easy flexibility, the diplomatic kind of smarts that his father had.

00:51:36.500 He's a more rigid kind of militaristic leader. 0.52

00:51:40.600 That could or couldn't have been the best thing at that time.

00:51:45.040 Another good counterfactual is what if Henry V hadn't died

00:51:47.880 at the age of 35 in 1422?

00:51:52.020 What if Henry VI had had an apprenticeship?

00:51:54.440 Henry V's great advantage was that he became king at 26,

00:51:57.640 or one of his great advantages, king at 26,

00:51:59.740 after a long, difficult 13-year apprenticeship

00:52:02.080 where he was fighting, where he was standing in for his father,

00:52:05.720 when he was ruling as regent effectively when his father was ill.

00:52:08.960 He came to the throne like a complete politician.

00:52:13.380 Henry VI came to the throne at nine months old

00:52:16.180 and had to grow up as king.

00:52:18.800 You see a rough pattern across English history

00:52:21.540 of kings who have become kings as children

00:52:24.760 having a really difficult time.

00:52:26.800 They never have this opportunity to make mistakes.

00:52:29.040 They're growing up way too close to power.

00:52:33.080 So yes, there are all these counterfactuals

00:52:35.420 we can run. But I think that to your point, yeah, really, it does matter who exactly these people

00:52:42.140 are. And there are some advantages in this period to having a hereditary monarchy based

00:52:49.360 on primogeniture. In theory, it cuts down the likelihood of a gigantic civil war every time

00:52:57.340 you need to change care, because the rule is the rule is the rule. But it also introduces this

00:53:02.620 massive genetic lottery to uh to government like who've we got next oh christ oh or who've

00:53:13.000 got next yay the by chance i've always wondered about this dan though because you know there is

00:53:18.060 a saying the apple doesn't fall far from the tree like i'm not exactly like my dad but i've inherited

00:53:22.540 quite a bit from him i'm sure the same will be with my son but but what the story you tell it's

00:53:27.940 almost like, you know, the son is Nigel Farage, the father is Zach Polanski, and you just,

00:53:33.760 you go from Trump to Biden within one family. How does that happen?

00:53:38.500 Well, we've all seen this happen in families. It depends, you know, that,

00:53:42.420 it sounds like you've, you know, you admire your father from that.

00:53:46.960 Sure. Somewhat. Sure. In some ways. Yeah.

00:53:50.900 And, but there are, you know, we often see these cases where the child wants to become the opposite

00:53:56.600 of the parent, right?

00:53:58.380 Or the child takes after the other parent

00:54:02.360 or, you know, whatever it might be.

00:54:03.820 You know, we don't create these identicates

00:54:06.160 of our children.

00:54:08.040 And then, you know, you also have 0.99

00:54:09.600 the spoiled brat phenomenon, right?

00:54:11.560 It's like the kid who grows up

00:54:13.600 not having to struggle.

00:54:15.660 This is a sort of trope,

00:54:17.700 a mainstay of history.

00:54:20.100 I'm not just talking about kings and queens,

00:54:21.620 but I can't remember who someone's written about this.

00:54:26.080 you know, one of those oldie-timey Malcolm Gladwell-type people, you know, John Ronson

00:54:32.020 or someone wrote a study of, you know, kids of successful people. They don't have to,

00:54:36.540 or very seldom do they have to really struggle themselves, and sometimes it's the struggle

00:54:41.080 that makes you. So, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons why, oh, you know, if you take Edward

00:54:48.560 II as an example, well, he was the younger kid. He was the baby of the family. He was like the

00:54:53.640 14th or 16th kid to be born, right?

00:54:55.400 And we were supposed to have King Alfonso,

00:54:58.160 his elder brother, Henry VIII,

00:55:01.300 who was supposed to be King Arthur.

00:55:03.180 And then King Arthur was no more,

00:55:06.240 and it was the younger son who was sort of the spare,

00:55:08.580 who was thrust into the limelight,

00:55:11.440 having grown up preparing for something totally different.

00:55:14.780 So, I mean, this is what makes it fascinating.

00:55:18.580 And I'm glad, to slightly rehearse an earlier point,

00:55:21.740 I'm glad that we're back in this age

00:55:23.640 in which people are taking personality and history seriously

00:55:26.540 because it just makes it more approachable and meaningful

00:55:32.900 and this faceless era of total structuralism within history

00:55:39.920 I found quite depressing.

00:55:41.800 I like the people.

00:55:43.620 Taking the historian's eye and looking at our society

00:55:47.620 and our civilisation, there's been a lot of talk about

00:55:50.540 the West is in decline, all of that kind of stuff. From your perspective, what do you see then? Do you

00:55:55.960 think we are in a lull, in a bit of a dip, or do you see it as being terminal? Is the West in decline?

00:56:03.860 No, I don't. I mean, I think these sort of grand arguments are really attractive, right? We love

00:56:12.720 to talk in epic terms. The idea that increasingly, and this is a sort of sidebar, but increasingly

00:56:20.740 with the hybridization of human thinking and machine thinking, we like to think in binaries

00:56:29.540 as well. It's this or it's this. We're in decline or we're in ascendancy. Well, history

00:56:34.540 We don't want too much like that.

00:56:36.160 But it seems fairly likely that right now we're living at an inflection point.

00:56:46.100 And the future, because of the technological revolution we're living through,

00:56:54.000 which is being applied across the board from warfare to employment to, I mean,

00:56:59.760 you know, almost every facet of life is undergoing rapid change, that this is an era of opportunity.

00:57:10.460 And I think in some ways, it's being thought about at a leadership level more seriously in

00:57:20.160 the East than in the West. I think, you know, I mentioned she earlier on, I think

00:57:28.540 he may not be right in his analysis of history

00:57:32.740 or his assessment of Chinese likely superiority.

00:57:41.020 I don't know that he is completely right in that,

00:57:43.140 and I don't think that his assessment of American weakness

00:57:45.400 is totally accurate either.

00:57:48.220 But he's certainly thinking seriously

00:57:51.040 about the historical moment.

00:57:55.160 I think that in the West,

00:57:57.240 there's a recognition that oh something's up but it's not being necessarily gripped

00:58:05.800 hard by anyone at the moment um in government i think it's being gripped pretty hard by

00:58:13.620 people at the top of the tech industry and there's a strong argument to say that the people at the

00:58:19.340 top of the big tech companies at the moment are the effective rulers of the world in many ways

00:58:24.360 by proxy um and i i think that we will certainly look back on this period

00:58:34.020 um mining it for all sorts of clues about how the world that we that whatever unfolds by say 2050

00:58:41.740 comes to look like but this talk of is the you know is the western terminal decline

00:58:46.900 it's very tempting but it's things don't really work well you added the terminal part i think the

00:58:52.800 terminal is where the that's where it becomes a bit of a tenuous claim yeah but i think if you

00:58:58.960 were to look at the civilizations that you outlined and their relative positions and

00:59:04.540 directions of travel you can hardly look the europe in particular and say this is western

00:59:08.820 europe and this and this is a oh there are a lot of metrics that are very worrying yeah of course

00:59:13.160 are up. Birth rate, the growing inequality gaps, the basic ability of young people to

00:59:24.600 find a stake in the essential bits of society as a matter of course.

00:59:35.240 The grand problem of the size of the state that now afflicts so many Western countries,

00:59:41.960 is the basic unaffordability of what's been set up

00:59:45.360 and the lack of a seriously, clearly stated alternative

00:59:51.200 for the post-war settlement.

00:59:52.940 That's part of the story of our times.

00:59:54.900 What are we now?

00:59:56.800 June, we're talking in the UK, 0.96

01:00:00.120 in a period where the Prime Minister is a sort of lame duck.

01:00:06.160 There's no political arithmetic that should allow for this,

01:00:10.520 but has completely failed to articulate any policy vision

01:00:15.320 of how this country should move into the future,

01:00:19.920 has just sort of said, well, we'll just kind of see what happens.

01:00:23.680 And there's a clear awareness among, you know,

01:00:27.540 you don't have to be a student of politics,

01:00:28.960 you can just be any gazing down the pub who could just say,

01:00:32.260 well, where are we going? What are we doing?

01:00:35.240 What are we going to do about all of these obvious problems 1.00

01:00:40.220 which are, you know, the failure seriously to tackle the social dislocations of immigration.

01:00:48.360 The, as I say, you know, the employment opportunities of young people coming into the world.

01:00:56.480 What are we doing about it?

01:00:58.220 So there's a decline in the quality of leadership and there are some pretty worrying metrics out there.

01:01:06.500 Well, this is what I was going to say.

01:01:07.900 If we take your comments about the great man of history theory,

01:01:12.880 it sort of feels like we've got 10 duds in a row, basically.

01:01:18.000 Well, yes, I agree.

01:01:19.860 I do agree.

01:01:21.960 There's not a lack of people with ideas out there.

01:01:25.140 Not a lot of them want to go into frontline politics

01:01:27.300 for reasons we can discuss.

01:01:30.920 us, something else that's happened in the UK, not so much in America, well, possibly in the States

01:01:38.180 as well, that does have a medieval analogy. And I promise that I don't believe everything has a

01:01:43.580 medieval analogy, but this does. In the Wars of the Roses, which is that English civil war I

01:01:48.460 mentioned, which follows on from the Hundred Years' War, which we've been discussing, after about a

01:01:54.320 generation of polarized politics, as we'd call it, of like factionalism and of the decay of

01:02:02.960 central authority and growing lawlessness and social dislocation and economic drift.

01:02:10.220 The smart analyses of the time all tended to say what's happened is that we've introduced what

01:02:19.900 they call variance into our politics, which is to say there's a toxicity in the political process

01:02:27.460 which is the irreconcilability of factions, which is the bitter quality of politics,

01:02:35.520 which is the negativity. That in itself is the problem. And the constant churn of leaders

01:02:41.760 is in itself the problem. And I think if you look at British politics over the last

01:02:47.080 10 years, let's say, or even let's say, yeah, certainly 10 years of Brexit, but maybe going

01:02:53.440 back to 2008, a financial crisis, you could say that the problem in itself is now the kind of

01:03:01.500 the writhing and the disaffection, that that self-perpetuates. And the moment that you,

01:03:07.560 you know, we're looking at ditching the Prime Minister, because as the chant goes, 0.99

01:03:12.340 Keir Starmer as a wanker. 0.95

01:03:14.780 That's like, everyone thinks that. 0.98

01:03:17.520 But then the next reaction to that is, 1.00

01:03:19.980 well, fuck off and get someone else. 1.00

01:03:21.320 Right. 1.00

01:03:22.580 And as soon as that person hits a sticky patch, 1.00

01:03:26.180 fuck off and get someone else. 1.00

01:03:26.820 They become the wanker. 1.00

01:03:27.660 They become the wanker. 1.00

01:03:28.640 And the reaction to the wanker is to ditch them straight away. 0.95

01:03:32.200 And so what you then have is a politics that,

01:03:35.000 on a sort of pragmatic level, can go nowhere

01:03:38.640 because it never gets beyond, like, its first trimester or whatever.

01:03:44.100 You know, like, the government can't develop, grow,

01:03:46.600 institute policies, have people in charge of departments

01:03:49.980 that can do the really sensible, boring stuff

01:03:52.660 and kind of turn departments around.

01:03:55.180 If you think about the success stories in British politics

01:03:58.420 over the time we're talking about,

01:04:00.020 they tend to be where someone stuck around for a bit in a job.

01:04:03.060 You know, while Michael Gove was in charge of education,

01:04:05.200 you know there was there was there was the possibility of serious reform slow reform but

01:04:09.740 what we're about to see in the uk is you change change the i mean already the health secretary

01:04:15.200 where street and quit having actually started to make slow progress on on the big problems of the

01:04:20.920 nhs and then quit because of factional politics within the party and so now someone else will

01:04:25.480 come in and it all starts again so so these constant restarting the variance that's in the

01:04:30.260 politics is a is now a central part of the problem and it shouldn't be at the moment because in the

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01:06:09.660 Yeah, I'm in two minds about all of those points because on the last point, yes, it's true they got

01:06:14.660 a massive majority, but they only got it because reform destroyed the Conservative Party, my

01:06:19.280 subjective opinion. And then on the other stuff, I mean, the toxicity of politics is something that

01:06:24.720 I think everyone is really concerned about. But I also think, I imagine someone else sitting here

01:06:29.940 making the opposite argument and saying the toxicity of politics is the consequence of the

01:06:34.600 fact of where the country's at. And then, of course, you add the technological piece on top

01:06:40.860 of that, which is we now, I mean, I've given this example a thousand times, but I really do think

01:06:45.180 It just explains everything.

01:06:48.480 On YouTube, I was many years ago sitting later than I watching YouTube

01:06:52.000 because I didn't have kids then.

01:06:53.900 Oh, you'll soon be doing that, but you'll be watching Cocoa Mellon with him.

01:06:57.100 Well, what I was watching was William Hague and John Prescott

01:07:00.760 having a parliamentary debate when they were both deputy to the leader.

01:07:06.020 And it's a game.

01:07:07.620 It's a playful game because the social media isn't there.

01:07:12.040 They're not trying to get a hit on TV yet quite.

01:07:16.180 So William Hague takes the piss out of John Prescott basically not being able to speak

01:07:20.380 properly.

01:07:21.280 And John Prescott doesn't say, look at these snobby Tories abusing the hard work and working 0.51

01:07:27.780 classes.

01:07:28.260 He says, on this side of the house, we may get the words wrong, but we get the judgment 0.61

01:07:31.520 right.

01:07:32.320 In other words, it's a game that's played according to a set of respectful rules, even

01:07:35.760 if the parties are, they're not enemies, they're opponents, right?

01:07:39.120 and then you have technology like we have now,

01:07:42.080 which changes that completely.

01:07:43.320 And now everyone stands up in Parliament

01:07:45.320 so that they get a clip on Twitter or on whatever.

01:07:50.980 And I think that's why it's...

01:07:53.600 I hear and agree with people when they say politics is toxic,

01:07:57.980 but then I kind of go, well, A, you've got the technological piece, 0.61

01:08:02.360 and then the country is kind of f***ed, 0.87

01:08:04.160 and you have to unf*** it for people to become untoxic about it. 0.98

01:08:07.260 I think we probably agree.

01:08:08.480 I mean, I think that the part of the toxicity of politics is that it's now optimising for a different set of media.

01:08:15.660 And just as, I mean, Haig and Prescott in the example you've given were probably somewhat, somewhere, maybe optimising for the parliamentary sketch writers up in the gallery.

01:08:26.280 That's right.

01:08:26.600 And maybe a bit on the news, but who knows.

01:08:31.180 Whereas now it would all have been thinking about optimising for a totally different media, which rewards a totally different style of thing.

01:08:37.980 And the obsession, that obsession with optimizing for social media, for all sorts of reasons, one of which is it gives you like definable metrics, which, you know, it's jobs worthiness.

01:08:52.460 that's part of the poison

01:08:54.540 part of the

01:08:57.480 reason why it's incredibly

01:08:59.500 hard for anyone to actually do anything

01:09:01.700 in politics

01:09:03.720 because all the front line politicians

01:09:05.300 are just thinking about how this is going to

01:09:07.160 clip up for Instagram

01:09:08.440 you have behind the scenes

01:09:11.540 the blob

01:09:13.760 as it's often called

01:09:15.100 but a civil service which is

01:09:16.760 dominated by a completely different set of thinking

01:09:19.320 and knows it can just dig its heels in

01:09:21.140 and not be bid and can run a completely different set of policies

01:09:25.760 and vanishing and then you plug in the lack of appeal

01:09:31.860 of a political career to really elite, forceful thinkers.

01:09:37.000 I mean, there are tons of problems with politics at the moment

01:09:40.560 and to sort of plug this into the great man theory,

01:09:45.480 one of the superficially appealing, but I think probably troubling trends that I hear a lot is

01:09:59.080 people saying, well, what we need is a benign dictator. Because they're so disillusioned with

01:10:03.240 the failure of political process that they want an easy answer. They want, okay, well, give me a

01:10:08.360 great man. Give me somebody who's going to come in and just ride roughshod over process.

01:10:15.480 that's part of the appeal of of trump this you know this outsider who rides into politics and

01:10:22.440 it's part of the appeal of farage as well he said i'm gonna you know i'm outside all this i don't

01:10:26.580 deal with all this i just come in and speak straight sense and we get on with it well yes to

01:10:32.020 an extent but um do we even need to rehearse the dangers of creating dictatorship maybe we do

01:10:44.420 Maybe that's another part of what we're grappling with at the moment is the receding out of living memory of the 1930s and 40s and the 20s, for that matter.

01:11:00.660 the sort of the disappearance into sort of abstraction of what was the what was the world

01:11:05.760 like last time that there was you know it's that all the international kind of institutions were

01:11:12.680 sort of discarded and you know the falling into spheres of interest became the the way that

01:11:19.900 politics well what what was it actually like what happened that's now something that's in

01:11:24.960 the history books to which most people let's be honest don't pay attention my grandma died

01:11:29.960 earlier this year at nearly the age of 100

01:11:32.420 and when my mum was clearing out her house

01:11:34.600 she found the handwritten war memories.

01:11:37.000 My grandfather, who'd been 15 or 16 years old

01:11:40.300 when he went to sea with the Merchant Navy

01:11:41.700 in the Second World War, the outbreak of the Second World War.

01:11:44.140 12 or 14 pages.

01:11:46.140 And this is memories of sailing around the Atlantic.

01:11:48.960 I mean, we sailed around the whole world

01:11:50.240 in the Merchant Navy being pursued by U-boats,

01:11:53.420 blown up in the Thames by German mines, survived that.

01:11:56.000 You know, all sorts of adventures.

01:11:57.800 and I remember him telling not not telling many of those stories but I remember him I remember him

01:12:05.800 as being somebody who still who's and my grandmother both my grandmothers spoke about

01:12:12.520 the second world war and it was within it was not within my memory it was not within my parents

01:12:16.520 memory but it was in our family's memory everybody knew somebody who'd served or been affected by the

01:12:21.880 second world war who'd been affected by this set of um of disastrous political unravelings

01:12:29.740 that the whole of the post-war settlement was designed to mitigate against happening again

01:12:35.400 and now all of that how many you know vanishingly few veterans left and most most nobody knows one

01:12:42.340 so all of that has receded and it's like that settlement is clearly you know looking pretty

01:12:50.160 tattie and there needs to be a new one for a new world with new technologies and new modes of

01:12:56.640 thought. However, to lean back on things that were tried and tested to destruction in the 30s and 40s.

01:13:08.380 No, I definitely agree with you that that sentiment is rising. I'm not sure I quite

01:13:11.960 agree that Farage is attempting to be a dictator. No, I don't agree with that either. But I agree

01:13:16.500 that part of his appeal is being the outsider.

01:13:20.360 Let me be really clear.

01:13:21.420 I don't think Farage has those dictatorial instincts.

01:13:25.000 In fact, I think he actively doesn't.

01:13:26.980 Quite the opposite, I agree.

01:13:28.740 But I think that his appeal is that he seems to be,

01:13:33.260 you know, if I go down to the pub,

01:13:36.900 not many people talk about reform policies,

01:13:41.180 but they know Nigel, like Nigel.

01:13:43.980 It's Nigel.

01:13:44.900 and it's this idea that there's a guy out there

01:13:47.940 who gets it, put him in charge, that'll do.

01:13:52.160 Now, I don't know that it will do.

01:13:55.800 We'll find out.

01:13:57.100 We will probably find out.

01:13:59.460 We'll probably find out.

01:14:00.840 Sorry, were you going to jump in?

01:14:01.740 No, because I was going to say that

01:14:04.060 reading your book about the Plantagenets,

01:14:08.620 it just opened my eyes to strong and weak leadership.

01:14:12.640 Yeah.

01:14:12.780 And I look at Keir Starmer and what's happening with the West Streetings of the world and his ministers, and it just reminds me of Edward II and the nobles.

01:14:23.920 Let's hope he doesn't end up the same way.

01:14:27.500 The way that read was quite brutal.

01:14:30.240 I've never thought about, for all that Keir Starmer is a wanker, I've never thought about him as Edward II.

01:14:36.460 But I'll say this, the effective leaders are the Edward III's who understand how to bring people with them and who are able to galvanize and empower people around them.

01:14:51.140 I don't necessarily think that that's the leadership that we've got at the moment.

01:14:55.380 and the key to whoever is the leader

01:15:01.480 that stands a chance of really delivering

01:15:05.480 some meaningful change in this country

01:15:07.840 will be somebody who has the strength of character

01:15:10.800 to bring a strong team along with them

01:15:14.480 and if not to do the serious thinking themselves,

01:15:20.180 to have that among them.

01:15:21.740 I know you're going to talk to my old pal David Starkey

01:15:24.060 soon enough and that's some of the thinking he's doing right at the moment um you know the the

01:15:29.700 awareness that it's it's quite likely that the next but one leader of this country or next but

01:15:36.200 two or whatever after the next general election will be Nigel Farage not unimaginable at all

01:15:42.480 um the work has to be in place for that there's a moral responsibility for the work to be in place

01:15:49.220 to make that a serious government,

01:15:51.680 a serious government with serious thought running through

01:15:54.280 and a serious analysis and a clearly explained

01:15:59.660 and defined set of policies that go beyond the personality.

01:16:05.640 Because the strong leadership thing,

01:16:09.000 a lot of that is vested in personality,

01:16:10.880 but personality is just not enough.

01:16:13.580 Personality has to come along with

01:16:15.740 and be able to be a vehicle to articulate policy.

01:16:20.380 Yeah, no, that's completely true.

01:16:22.040 And from your lips to God's ears,

01:16:23.540 and frankly, whoever is elected,

01:16:25.300 I would hope that is all true, right?

01:16:27.560 Whether it's Frank Polanski or Nigel Farage.

01:16:30.680 Final question is always the same.

01:16:32.480 What's the one thing that we're not talking about?

01:16:34.460 We really should be.

01:16:36.340 What's the one thing we're not talking about

01:16:38.840 that we really should be?

01:16:40.880 Castles.

01:16:41.460 I never...

01:16:41.880 I genuinely love a castle.

01:16:44.300 I'm glad you love a castle.

01:16:45.200 I love a castle as well, and we were talking before we came on

01:16:48.040 that there was a piece of YouGov research done in 2024

01:16:51.420 that said 77% of people think castles are the best thing

01:16:56.680 in the whole of the Middle Ages, and I would count myself among them.

01:17:00.180 You've written a book about them.

01:17:01.100 I've written a book about them.

01:17:02.520 It's castles in the biggest, broadest sense.

01:17:05.180 3,000 years of history goes from the Bronze Age.

01:17:07.680 The origins of castles starts with Troy, the citadel,

01:17:12.060 siege of the wars, not only the birth

01:17:14.180 of what becomes castles, but the birth of Western

01:17:16.040 literature. It charts its way all the way

01:17:18.140 through to nuclear bunkers. So it's like, it's the

01:17:20.020 big, it's the big history

01:17:22.300 of, it's the history

01:17:24.060 of structures, but it also asks a kind of

01:17:26.160 deeper question, which is

01:17:27.240 how do we protect the things that we love

01:17:29.920 and care about? Wonderful. Well, I

01:17:32.160 haven't had a chance to read it, but I definitely

01:17:34.080 look forward to it. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming

01:17:36.100 back on. Pleasure. Head on over

01:17:38.000 to triggerpod.co.uk where

01:17:40.080 Dan's going to answer your questions.

01:17:42.060 How much were common soldiers paid, if you're a longbowman in the English army, let's say,

01:17:47.240 how much would you be paid, or was the promise of loot your only reward?

01:18:12.060 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - July 01, 2026

The 100 Years' War with Historian Dan Jones

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