00:02:00.520The Hundred Years' War, is that why we hate the French?
00:02:04.200Well, I suppose it's one of the ways that the relations between England and France are shaped.
00:02:11.340I mean, if you think about any sporting occasion, I mean, we're recording this before the World Cup.
00:02:16.720I don't know if England will play France in the World Cup or not.
00:02:19.600But I guarantee that if they were to play France in the Soccer World Cup,
00:02:22.780you would see some sort of montage before the event that referenced like the Battle of Agincourt
00:02:29.020when the plucky English took on the might of the French stability and won. So it's like it's a sort
00:02:33.940of, it's a common analogy for English-French relations. Is it why we hate the French? I don't
00:02:41.920know if it's the specific cause, but it's definitely part of the kind of material that's
00:02:46.180around. Yeah. I mean, I was only joking. I guess what, to give it the serious treatment that I
00:02:51.100think the subject deserves. I think the best thing to do is to start by explaining actually
00:02:55.600what we mean by England and France. Because I imagine at this point, countries don't really
00:03:00.720exist in the way that we think about them now. These are more personal fiefdoms. And so is that
00:03:05.140really where we should start with this? Yeah, that's probably a good place to start.
00:03:09.180And in a sense, the Hundred Years' War is a shaking out of what these realms are going to be.
00:03:18.000so if we go back before them into so just just by way of framing at the top usually when we talk
00:03:27.140about the hundred years war we're talking from the about 1337 through to 1453 now you can extend
00:03:33.240those in either direction mike livingston the great military historian has just written a book
00:03:37.340called the 200 years war but by and large that's the core of the conflict we're talking about
00:03:41.820now if you go before that you're absolutely right these are these are largely personal
00:03:46.520fiefdoms. There's a fact of geography, which is since the last ice age, you know, Britain has been
00:03:51.980an island and England is the sort of the dominant kingdom within that island archipelago. But if you
00:04:00.120go back to the sort of the early into the high middle ages, the notion of what exact, which
00:04:10.020bits are ruled by whom is not fixed. So, at the beginning of the Plantagenet era,
00:04:16.520so it's after the Norman Conquest, 1154, Henry II takes over as King of England.
00:04:21.020He rules England, Normandy, which is inherited effectively because of the Norman Conquest,
00:04:28.300Anjou, Maine, Touraine, south of Normandy. There's a claim over Brittany and, by marriage,
00:04:34.120the Duchy of Aquitaine, a huge sprawl of southwest France. Now, that adds up to about a third of the
00:04:38.400territorial landmass of modern France, plus almost the entire Western seaboard. Now that
00:04:45.180all answers ultimately to Henry II, King of England. But he's King of England and he's also
00:04:51.840Duke or Count of a bunch of different places. So this is very much a sort of personal,
00:04:56.800it's a set of fiefdoms held together by him. However, even at the beginning of the Hundred
00:05:03.100Year's War, the early 14th century, you still have kings of England who are Dukes of Aquitaine
00:05:08.580or Gascony, depending what you want to call it. So they still have this strong claim to
00:05:12.860southwest France, centred on the capital of Bordeaux. They've got a kind of pipe dream
00:05:17.300that really they ought to be ruling Normandy as Dukes of Normandy because of their descent
00:05:21.560from William the Conqueror. And all of that is constantly in negotiation between English
00:05:27.220and French kings. Who rules what and how and why? And it's only through the Hundred Years' War,
00:05:34.120really, that you get to a situation where pretty much, even though Henry VIII might have still
00:05:40.160fantasized that he was king of France, he's not. Not in the way that Henry V almost was and Henry
00:05:46.380VI actually was. So the Hundred Years' War is like the kind of shaking out of those two kingdoms.
00:05:52.320So the personal fiefdoms being critical here, who are the key players at the outset and prior to the outset of the Hundred Years' War?
00:06:00.780Well, ultimately, it's the kings of England and kings of France.
00:06:04.980So 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.
00:06:16.580A king of England who rules, call it what England roughly looks like today.
00:06:22.320um then you've got the kings of france whose whose situation is a little bit more complicated
00:06:30.020you go all the way back to the time of charlemagne you know it's the late 8th century early 9th
00:06:34.940century king of the franks well charlemagne ruled what's now france germany austria luxembourg
00:06:39.920belgium the netherlands northern italy so on so on you know like the ec for the union more or less
00:06:45.660well that's still in the dream of the european union there's a charlemagne prize given out every
00:06:49.680year. That's the legacy of the rulers of Germany and the rulers of France. So it's in the minds
00:06:55.520of the kings of France that they really ought to sort of be at least rulers of Western Francia,
00:07:02.860as had been. So that's like, if we call Paris the capital, it's what we now call France.
00:07:10.220But in reality, in the later Middle Ages, certainly the sort of early 13th century,
00:07:16.800the kings of France didn't rule that much. Their power extended to a little island outside Paris.
00:07:22.460And beyond that, it was just theoretical claim of sovereignty over all of these different powerful
00:07:28.380lords within France. And the drive of French policy from the late 12th century, early 13th
00:07:35.340century, Philip II Augustus is the king who really has the great vision, is to start expanding the
00:07:41.900power of the kings of France back over France and to directly rule and to sort of squash down
00:07:51.340the independence of these counts and dukes and rule directly. And that's a process that takes
00:07:55.800a long time. Philip II goes some way towards doing it. At the beginning, just before the
00:08:01.720Hundred Years' War, Philip IV gets a lot further. And then by the end of the Hundred Years' War,
00:08:08.420with Charles VII, and then certainly by the time you get to Louis XI,
00:08:12.760France is starting to look like what France is now.
00:08:15.300So the power of the kings has really been extended properly
00:12:15.260Edward II was in many ways the kind of the opposite of what you should be as a king.
00:12:21.080Fundamentally just didn't understand what the office involved.
00:12:27.120And his reign was politically dominated by a succession of,
00:12:32.720a short succession, but a succession of favourites.
00:12:34.840Piers 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.
00:12:51.820A series of crises at the beginning of Edward II's reign, where the barons of England couldn't stand having Gaveston around.
00:12:57.600and they kept constantly trying to kick him out.
00:13:00.360And Edward would try every devious mean to get him back
00:13:03.160until Gaveston was murdered by the Barons of England.
00:13:53.040He was a teenager, but in 1330, Edward III, aged 17, 18, took control of the kingdom in his own name.
00:14:04.640And he did so with a group of young, kind of youngish nobles of his own generation around him.
00:14:10.960And as that generation grew up, they kind of pieced back together politics.
00:14:17.980You 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.
00:14:35.340And it took a long time to sort of start piecing them back together.
00:14:38.460one of the means that edward the third found to bind together the new nobility the new generation
00:14:47.300of nobles who were sort of his friends his allies his uh his you know his comrades was foreign war
00:14:55.720um and it's in a sense it's one of the oldest stories in the historical book isn't it you've
00:15:01.700got problems at home what do you do go go and go fight abroad um we see it every day and in every
00:15:08.120historical era. Certainly it worked for Edward III. So he latches on seven years into his
00:15:15.740independent reign in 1337 to this fact that he has this claim to the French crown that he wants
00:15:20.260to go and enforce. And from that point on, his reign is really a succession of phases of
00:15:27.640campaigning in France, which are miraculously successful. And I kind of use that word advisedly
00:15:34.040because it does seem like, for a very long time,
00:15:36.700God is smiling on Edward III's wish to be king of France.
00:15:41.720He wins these spectacular, against-the-odds battlefield victories
00:19:54.300people burning, destroying, killing everything in their path. It's a war of terror. But the point
00:20:00.000of the war of terror is to try and convince the people of Normandy in this case that resistance
00:20:05.660is futile, that their king, Philip VI, is incapable of protecting them, and that actually, if they've
00:20:11.680got any sense, they'll show their allegiance to the rival king, Edward III of England.
00:20:18.520This campaign goes on through the second half of July into August, but as it goes on, Edward finds
00:20:24.480his lines stretched more and more and more, and he's losing men by a sort of basic attrition as
00:20:30.980they besiege cities, as they, you know, as they fight skirmishes and so on. Philip's men fall back
00:20:37.980and refuse to engage. They break the bridges over the River Seine. They break the bridges once the
00:20:43.360English cross the Seine. Eventually they break the bridges over the River Somme. And eventually0.68
00:20:46.400they just wear the English down until things look pretty perilous for Edward because his lines are
00:20:52.460overstretched and he's been in enemy territory for too long. And this all comes to a head in a
00:20:59.200battle between the English and the French at Crecy, in which the French have sort of bided
00:21:07.240their time and marshaled their resources well and bring up a far larger army than Edward has
00:21:12.540and a far fresher army than Edward has, stuffed to the gills with knights, whereas Edward is now
00:21:19.800quite heavily reliant on archers, you know, people of peasant stock, you know, inferior troops.
00:21:29.200And 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
00:21:44.460And this is something that's important, I think, throughout the Hundred Years' War, seems to draw down evidence of God's favour.
00:21:51.140You win in battle in the Middle Ages. It's a form of trial.
00:28:26.880And 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.
00:28:42.860If 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.
00:28:55.220The power concentrated in English king's hands at this point and mediated through parliament and national gathering is considerable.
00:29:06.820And so there's a higher degree, I suppose, of centralized authority in England.
00:31:56.740The 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.
00:32:12.520But 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.
00:32:52.620Like, 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.
00:33:05.440You've got questions about sovereignty in Flanders.
00:33:08.000There's a whole ton of stuff going on for French kings to think about in which the English are only one.0.85
00:33:15.000I 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
00:33:29.360Sort 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
00:33:39.220So, perhaps something similar is going on.0.99
00:33:41.420All right, so the English have this structural advantage
00:33:44.820in terms of centralised power, taxation.
00:33:47.260They've got the technological advantage with the longbow.
00:33:50.040God clearly is on England's side, as we've established.
00:49:36.220When I was growing up, when I was studying,
00:49:38.180it was well out of fashion, and everything was structuralist,
00:49:40.980and the whole belief was really this concentration
00:49:44.500on the character of leaders is for the birds.
00:49:48.480It doesn't really make much difference.
00:49:49.980That the history is the product of grander forces than this.
00:49:56.120And here we are in the sort of early 2020s.0.99
00:49:59.320I think that you'd be a fool, right?0.76
00:50:02.240You 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
00:50:17.140If 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.
00:50:29.340Trump 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.
00:50:44.180So, 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.
00:50:59.520That'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
00:51:13.780I 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.
00:51:36.500He's a more rigid kind of militaristic leader.0.52
00:51:40.600That could or couldn't have been the best thing at that time.
00:51:45.040Another good counterfactual is what if Henry V hadn't died
01:08:08.480I mean, I think that the part of the toxicity of politics is that it's now optimising for a different set of media.
01:08:15.660And 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.
01:08:26.600And maybe a bit on the news, but who knows.
01:08:31.180Whereas now it would all have been thinking about optimising for a totally different media, which rewards a totally different style of thing.
01:08:37.980And 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.
01:09:16.760dominated by a completely different set of thinking
01:09:19.320and knows it can just dig its heels in
01:09:21.140and not be bid and can run a completely different set of policies
01:09:25.760and vanishing and then you plug in the lack of appeal
01:09:31.860of a political career to really elite, forceful thinkers.
01:09:37.000I mean, there are tons of problems with politics at the moment
01:09:40.560and to sort of plug this into the great man theory,
01:09:45.480one of the superficially appealing, but I think probably troubling trends that I hear a lot is
01:09:59.080people saying, well, what we need is a benign dictator. Because they're so disillusioned with
01:10:03.240the failure of political process that they want an easy answer. They want, okay, well, give me a
01:10:08.360great man. Give me somebody who's going to come in and just ride roughshod over process.
01:10:15.480that's part of the appeal of of trump this you know this outsider who rides into politics and
01:10:22.440it's part of the appeal of farage as well he said i'm gonna you know i'm outside all this i don't
01:10:26.580deal with all this i just come in and speak straight sense and we get on with it well yes to
01:10:32.020an extent but um do we even need to rehearse the dangers of creating dictatorship maybe we do
01:10:44.420Maybe 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.
01:11:00.660the sort of the disappearance into sort of abstraction of what was the what was the world
01:11:05.760like last time that there was you know it's that all the international kind of institutions were
01:11:12.680sort of discarded and you know the falling into spheres of interest became the the way that
01:11:19.900politics well what what was it actually like what happened that's now something that's in
01:11:24.960the history books to which most people let's be honest don't pay attention my grandma died
01:11:29.960earlier this year at nearly the age of 100
01:11:32.420and when my mum was clearing out her house
01:11:34.600she found the handwritten war memories.
01:11:37.000My grandfather, who'd been 15 or 16 years old
01:11:40.300when he went to sea with the Merchant Navy
01:11:41.700in the Second World War, the outbreak of the Second World War.
01:14:12.780And 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.
01:14:23.920Let's hope he doesn't end up the same way.
01:14:30.240I've never thought about, for all that Keir Starmer is a wanker, I've never thought about him as Edward II.
01:14:36.460But 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.
01:14:51.140I don't necessarily think that that's the leadership that we've got at the moment.