#852 - Dan Jones - The Untold Story Of England’s Greatest King

30:22What's the impact of the little ice age? What does it make happen? Well, one argument would be that the little ice age changes crop yields. It makes agriculture more difficult. It's just less conducive for easy human habitation of particularly colder climates like Northwest Europe. And that's, well, let's take the English case, that you have the combination of the little ice age and the the Black Death pandemic. And you find that there's massive population decrease, you know, the population of England drops from about six million down to roughly two million across of course, the 14th century and doesn't recover until the industrial revolution.

31:12And that's partly because lots of people just die in the black death, 50 to 60, maybe even 70 percent in some areas of people die of that disease. And it's also because it makes, you know, if you buy into the little ice age here, it makes living on marginal land more difficult. It means that, you know, basically the country you live in is less productive. of you can't squeeze as much out of it. And when you're close to subsistence economy, that's a bad margin for error isn't already there. Right, yeah, you know, you can't squeeze as much product out of the land you live in. That's the theory, but there's a million holes in the theory as well.

31:55And these are just, but of course there are, because whenever you deal with big history, history over long time, I mean, what's been one of the most phenomenally successful history books of the last 10, 15 years? It's Yuval Nohara Recepion's series and so on. Very attractive book to big popular audiences. Tens of millions of copies sold across the world. I should add for the record that this is a medieval historian by training who's out there selling all these books, so go the Middle Ages. But as I think for sort of the backlash against you, Valner Harari has somewhat started within the historical profession, maybe Motivators are a little bit out of envy, but certain people picking holes in big history, because big history is easy to pick holes in when you're sort of painting in broad brush strokes.

32:48This doesn't apply there and that doesn't apply.

32:53Yeah, like I say, the history is, writing history is so often about framing and about the lens. I like this idea of the lens and what are your parameters for looking at this? What kind of story are we looking to tell? So Henry rising to power. Oh yes, Henry the fifth, yeah. Exactly. How does he become king? He becomes king because he inherits the crown from his father, but he has a difficult ride through his father's brain.

33:28We left him at 16 years old, having nearly died on the battlefield of Shrewsbury. For the next 10 years, once he's recovered, he goes back to Wales and by degrees that the rebellion of Anglodora has put down, but it's hard and it's a hands -on training in the of war and of kingship, he has to learn how to besiege castles. How does that block down? Well, Glenda, it's the most frustrating story. It does not conform to Hollywood shape. He just sort of drifts away and disappears. And then one day there's a record that says, I think he's dead. Yeah, just story with no satisfying end. It was a shame.

34:10But Henry... So he has to learn on the job in Wales, how to besiege castles, how to deploy cannon, right ratios between you know, men and arms and archers when you're in the field, how to go back to an English parliament and beg for more money when the people in the parliament don't think you've spent the last lot of money properly, how to you know shift money around your own accounts to try and like pay for this stuff at your own pocket, how to convince people to stay in the field fighting when they haven't been paid for the last six weeks, eight weeks. A lot of persuasion and finance. persuasion and finds the boring stuff, you know, but no war has ever been possible without without that boring stuff, logistics, the money.

34:52So he has a good, you know, a good long training in that. Then his father's health starts to collapse, a series of skin complaints, probably circulatory conditions, series of strokes, and he becomes increasingly debilitated. And Prince Henry, The future, January the 5th, starts to move more and more to the centre of power. He starts to effectively operate as Regent, President of the Royal Council. He's immersing himself in foreign policy, the policy, particularly with regards to France, which is collapsing into civil war between faction two factions called the Begun diens and the Arminyaks. Deciding English policy, whose side do we go in on?

35:30Do we go in on a side at all? How do we get the best advantage for our realm out of their problems? He's got a deal with, you know, the whole problems of heresy, Lollardy, is it's called in those, it's Lollardy. Lollardy is, there was an, to be a Lollard is sort of insulting term at the time, a pejorative, but Lollard's basically followed the teachings of a radical Oxford Theologian called John Wickliffe. Wickliffe had come up with some ideas that Martin Luther would come up with again, if you like in the 16th century, that the sacraments weren't based in a marriage baptism, Eucharist and so forth, not all of them are based in Scripture.

36:14The church has far too much wealth and is basically corrupt, that there should be a big program of wealth redistribution by stripping wealth from the church and putting it into the state. That sort of thing. It is both heretical and usually by implication, seditious as well, because there are, as well as being a deviation from orthodox by which I mean Catholic Christianity, it is also bound up with rebellions against the state. So Henry's got all of these issues which he's learning to do as his father's deputy in effects. And he gets to the point when his father's really decrepit and old, well, actually not that old, but really decrepit and his health is badly failing where Henry and some of his closest allies on the Royal Council go to the king and so we think you should abdicate and the coming man should step up.

37:17It's not dissimilar from a let's drop Biden kind of move. And in this case, Biden refuses.

37:32But in this case, that's a good idea.

37:38Henry IV refuses, despite his growing decrepitude, is the physical pain of doing his job, the burden of both political difficulties and moral guilt that he carries around everywhere with him, Henry IV refuses to abdicate, because I think he knows that if he does that, he's going to land his son an heir, Henry, with all the same problems that he suffered throughout his life. Is abdication seen as usurping by the incumbent? And it's not quite, and in fact usually when a king is deposed in the Middle Ages, which isn't very often up until this point, so you happen once before, that was with Edward II.

38:22Depositions are framed as voluntary abdications that the king relinquishes the crown, rather than has it taken off him. In the case of Edward II, in the second, that's just a political fiction. What Henry V proposes to Henry is dad Henry IV is, is a voluntary abdication. Just hand it over, hand me the crown and let me get on with it and you can go and sort of go to the retirement home for. But I guess when you've got this existing heritage of people who didn't want to leave being forced out, the, this sort of poisons the well of, well, he did want to leave and he does want to hand it over to me.

39:00Well, how do we know? Just muddies the waters and it makes sense. It's going to leave, I think Henry the fourth just figures, this is going to leave his son with a question mark. Henry the fourth has a question mark hanging over his head. Which you think has potentially contributed to his poor health, to his sense of sort of existential malaise. So certainly the sense of existential malaise, yeah. And we don't know about the poor health, but it doesn't seem unlikely that you would probably know better than I do, but that somebody living with enormous levels of sort of stress and constant anxiety is probably that probably going to feed into your physical health at some point.

39:39Henry IV, I increasingly think a selfless way is like, no, I'm going to remain in office until I hide this out. Yeah, and I'm going to suffer this because it's the only way for you, son, to take over legitimately. But he really slaps Henry, future Henry V down, he really slaps him down, gives him such a telling off. And then he strips him of all power, completely ostracises him from any involved in the government whatsoever, reverses some of his key policies, particularly with regards to France, and makes it look like he's actually promoting his second son, Thomas, in the succession. Let's Henry believe that he's on the verge of being pushed out of, pushed out of, of line for the throne.

40:27It's, it's that level of, I'm going to, I'm going have to teach you a lesson. Why do you think he does that? Teach me a lesson. It's good to learn. And so what's the lesson he wants him to learn? That it's not as simple as he thinks. This is an incredible blunder to ask his father to abdicate the throne. And this is no small thing he's asked that is just a favor refused. That this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what's about what he's in line for, kingship. And he has to learn in this extremely hard lesson. And you don't think Henry IV was a pretty impressive person as well with good foresight.

41:03A very impressive person. And if you look over the course of his entire life, again, like Henry V, if you're only concentrating on these people's reigns, they look very different than if you blow out the story to examine their whole lives. Henry IV as Henry Bollingbrook had been one of the most glamorous, well -liked, sort of chivalrous, and dashing adventurous guys of his generation. He went to go and slash Richard the second up. Well, he'd staff him to death. That's where he ends up in rebellion, but before that, in happier times, when Henry V to be is a small child, his father is off fighting Jouce with Boussicot, the great French knight of the day, I mean the most famous knight in Europe, a guy who could do back flips in full armor and jump onto his horse from a standing style.

41:47No way, yeah, I need you to like Boussicot. So he'd gone to fight against the pagans of the Baltic with the Tutonic Knights on Crusade. He'd been... Is this just the implication of king to be warrior as well, or military, not just competent military strategist, but to have skill with weapon in hand, to have earned their stripes in a sort of way. Is that something that was expected of the king? Given that he was supposed to be adorned by God, I suppose also an assumption would be protected by God, and therefore, but you're throwing out the most important person onto the fucking field of battle, wielding a stick or a sharp thing.

42:34You know, is that, this was part for the course, only our stripes show us that your lead from the front type thing. The great seal, which is the sort of the authenticating device for all government documents in this time, shows the key. It's two -sided. It prints on a disc of wax, two images. The one side shows the King as judge or receptor. It sits in judgment over his people. He is the fount of justice of the law, of order. And on the other side, he's on horseback with a sword in it hand. Those are the two parts of the job. The job is in that sense simple, not easy, but it's simple. You provide, you are the source of law and you are the defender of the realm.

43:18And it's a hangover by the late 14th, 15th century for that to involve the king as commander in chief, literally fighting from the front. Not all kings do it. Edward III, a great sort of, quite a warrior king, tends to hang back in a sort of Napoleon role, you know, on on high ground, surveying and strategizing and directing. Henry V likes to lead from the front. The thick of it narrow in the face. He is prepared to put himself in harm's way. And a Shrewsbury does so. At Ashenko, does so. Whenever his style of leadership is demonstrative. And so even when there's not a fight to battle, so mostly it's siege craft.

44:04when he's directing a siege every morning. He will be doing the rounds, sort of patting people on the back. Micro -managing where the cannons. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Function. I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Function has been an absolute game -changer. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor everything from your heart health and your hormone levels to nutrient deficiency and stuff like thyroid function, they even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get on a typical annual physical.

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45:17I was getting can you explain? Let's say that you're Henry the fifth and you're Seeking pick anywhere anywhere of choice What's a what's his daily routine look like and what are they trying to achieve with the siege? what are the sort of tactics that are being used? So typically the object of the siege is to force the people in the place you'll be seaging to give it up. And that could be a castle, a town, or a fortified town, or a combination of castle and town. And you can only make and give it up by one of a few ways. Either you will scare them into giving it up, making it feel hopeless. There's no, you know, and under the laws of siege craft, you ask people to, you know, Let's say we're besieging Austin, Texas.

46:04You want to besiege Austin? I don't myself want to besiege Austin, Texas, but let's just say it. Okay. Right. So we surround the target and then you go to the leaders of the target. Joe Rogan. Yes, you go to Rogan and say, Rogan, you're under siege, brother. And are you going to give up? Or are we going to have to make you give up? And is this emissary to emissaries? Is this shouting it over the wall? Yeah, yeah, yeah, emissary to emissary. We're going to make you give it up. Are you going to say yes or no? If you say yes and give it up, that's fine. It will be theoretically a peaceable transfer of property.

46:47And you can negotiate terms. If you say no, I'm not giving it up, then it has to be taken by force. And if the besieging army do succeed in breaking into the city, then they are within their rights under the laws of war to massacre everybody in slave, rape, burn everything down, plunder the whole. But if you surrender after you said no, you can probably negotiate those terms, but you're in a much worse negotiating position. Big decision at the very beginning, yeah. But so what normally decided is That's, Rogan will say, okay, it's a qualified no. No, no, I'm not going to give up right away. But if, so I need an ally of Rogan, Jocko is Jocko based here.

47:39Yeah, he can be. Well, he needs to be based not here. He's not based here. Okay, so Rogan will say, I'm not going to go straight away, but if within the next 40 days, Jocco doesn't come and drive you all away from your besieging positions and relieve the city, then I'll give up. That's the deal. So then you have this sort of structured 40 days, like, you know, well, okay, this match, credit note. This match is going to last for 40 days. And now it's kind of a game, right? You've got the besieging army's got 40 days to attempt it. The defenders have 40 days to try and hold out. And Jocco's got 40 days to come and save broken.

48:19Okay. This is actually turning into like quite a perfect compelling drama. Yeah. And a believable one as well. Maybe we have a reality TV show on our hands. So then what is you've got your besieged place, let's say it's castle, seems like it's easiest to do it as a castle. This is Austin castle. Yep. Joe's at the top. Yep. And what are you doing? What are you throwing at it? Well, Henry Typically takes over a building, a city or a castle, but let's say a fortified city will typically have a enclosed centre walled bit with a fortified bit of the garrison defending it. Suburbs on the outside, no suburbs might include sort of fine building monasteries or fancy houses or whatnot.

49:06Presumably they're fucked. And everyone runs away and maybe burns it down so that the besieging army can't use it. But the Henry would typically take over a nice, the nicest house in the suburbs or on high ground in the strategically useful position and direct things from there. So we'll be living within a degree of sort of splendor and luxury. But then every day we'll sort of tuddle down from his palace to do a round of the positions to go see the people operating the cannon because we're now in the 15th century when there are cannon used to, cannon used in siege. Seed just the, the arches, the people who are just sort of standing around making sure no one gets in or out of the gates to bring food or weapons into the city.

49:56Yeah, it's going around making sure everyone from a royal stays high. He's very, Henry that's on the head. Slaps on the ass. Come on boys, we've got this. What's going wrong? Who's not happy? Who is happy? Who needs to be sort of switched out? Who's ill? Do we have, what are our supply? It's very hands on, very hands on. Very hands on. And that's part of his, Shakespeare picks up on this idea of him as, that's kind of man of the people. able to, he has him touring kind of incognito around the other soldiers and the eve of battle and moving amongst them and that's drawn from history. Henry was sort of in and around his people and he was good.

50:44I mean he was not like fun, you know, but he was a pretty chill dude. No, no chill, really. I mean he liked music and he was a sort of talented musician, love to read, had sort of calming hobbies, if you like, but and not possessed of like a manic energy, but it's kind of laser focus. And probably even more terrifying that way then, someone that's got a bit of a parasympathetic routine. Yeah. But then turns it on the next day and goes from dirt to clouds and high level stuff, ground floor stuff. Yeah. You can hear Henry's voice because he's the first English king routinely to write back from the front line to his people back in England in English.

51:32And that's a sort of propaganda move. It's a deliberate sort of, it's a galvanising kind of tactic. It's trying to get the word out of what's happening that everybody can understand. But because he dictates those letters, you can hear his voice. And at early 15th century English is pretty similar to modern English when it's written down. It would have sounded different spoken, different vowel sounds and so on, but still. So you hear him and he's got a really distinct voice and it's nagging, it's imperative, it's like, do this, there's no sort of frills. Do this, do it now. Why haven't you done it?

52:12It's always unwavering. Yeah, and and say and see that you fail not thereof he's always used that's his sort of standard formula It sounds very wordy to us, but it's see that you fail not thereof don't fuck this up Don't fuck this up. He's a real micromanager. There's his point at which He's in a you know, he's besieged town after town ground his way through Normandy You know imagine the allies going through Normandy in 1944. It's you know all the way through heading towards Paris and he's at this negotiating point where it looks like he's going to get the French, the Mad French King Charles VI to disinherit his only surviving son and make Henry the air and regions of the crown of France.

52:53That's the end goal of this war. It's within touching distance and Henry writes this letter back to the keeper of Pontifract Castle where now Charles Duke of Olyon is being kept one of the most high ranking prisoners from Ashencore and someone who has an alternative claim to the French crown. So potentially arrival. Well, he's one of Henry's prisoners. He's riding sort of drippy poetry in Pontifract Castle at this point. But Henry, from hundreds of miles away, is riding back to England, telling them to make sure that this guy is kept under lock and key. But it's not just that, he's like Mike. He's saying, yeah, make sure he's locked up, double the guard.

53:33Like, he's gonna try and tell you this, that and the other. don't you have any of that, you make sure that you don't listen to his sort of fine words and you keep him under lock key because if you don't do this, I'm going to be seriously pissed off. He's like, it's not just the, here's an instruction, it's a list of step -by -step. If you screw this up, you cannot say you didn't know what to do because I actually told you. Step -by -step, what to do? Is that a great leadership style? Some people would, I think, rankle under that degree of micromanagement. but it seems to work for him. Effective.

54:07Effective. What's he doing romantically? Nothing. Which is bizarre.

54:16Henry is, well, the French spy says, a more like a monk than a king. He, so the Prince Howell character, Shakespeare's vision of him as a young man, as a Prince, is of a sort of the womanizing dronkleria, of a thario, wasteroll gets up at midday, goes back to bed as soon as possible, or so on and so forth. That's mostly confected. There are little hints in some sources here and there, which alludes to Henry, being inflamed as much with the fires of Venus and of Mars, as a young man. He likes war, he likes girls. But there's vanishingly little bar these sort of quite oblique illusions here and there.

55:03He doesn't have many notches on his bedpost, and when he becomes king he's apparently completely chased. Now put that into the context of sort of medieval kings in general and you had Henry I who fathered 22 illegitimate children, Henry II, you know, keeping sort of endless numbers of concubines, and drawn rather immorally and disgustingly from girls who are wards of his court, in fact in Henry II's case, none of that with Henry V. He has his heart set on getting married to the youngest daughter of the French King Charles VI, that's Catherine de Ballaure, who he does in fact marry in 1420, and he won't touch anyone else until he's got her, seems they marry, she's pregnant within months and bears his son and air who becomes Henry the sixth in time.

55:56But Henry is, it's all business. It's all business. To an almost pathological degree, you could say, or you could look at the guy and say this is, it's just extraordinary for somebody to have that level of, he has an amazing level of clarity about what he wants to do. And an exceptional ability to execute on it without distraction, without deviation, without sort of surrendering to his appetites and losing focus. It's an unusual combination. What I'm finding interesting is, and again, as a historical ignoramus, there is a meme, there is a caricature of the sort of cheese and wine dealing with the gout king, you know, very opulent, very sort of sitting by, ordering the people around, being entertained, drinking the meat, and maybe they went to war before a little bit, but they don't want to, and lazy.

57:18And it seems like, given all of those opportunities, power at a pretty young age, I'm going to guess 26 is probably pretty young. Pretty old. Well, it's, it's, it's, you're in the slot at 26. It's exactly the right age. You've got on the one hand, Kings like Richard II, it becomes King at 10 years old. Bad, bad idea. Okay. Do you not make it? That's like the Justin Bieber, McColley Culkin approach. Yes. Yes. Right. Yes. That's a very good example. I mean, Richard II is crowned in 1377 after decades of drift and political decline under his grandfather, Edward III, who he succeeds. And he's crowned and he brought to power and he's told, you are the Messiah, basically.

58:06You are the sort of solution to all our problems. Great things to tell it to our old. Yeah, yeah. It's political rhetoric, but how does a ten -year -old differentiate between political rhetoric and and absolutely everybody who's anybody telling him he's the best thing to slice bread. And it becomes a big psychological problem for it to the second. He never really gets that idea out of his head. So you don't really want your king to be nine years old. Yeah, 26, he's sort of relatively old to become king, but not too old, if that makes sense. I mean, he's not Charles III becoming king in his 70s.

58:43You know, I mean, after, you know, that really is Biden. Okay. Adjunco, Adjunco, big, Adjunco, the big one. This is, you know, who was that gig that Oasis did? Nebworth. This is Nebworth for Oasis, right? Crowning glory until they come back and sell expensive tickets. Well, sort of, except that it's one of the first things he does. So it's like, it's like if Oasis's kind of second gig was Nebworth.

59:14It's a big mistake. It's a huge blunder. Ashencore should never ever have been fought. It was ridiculous. And it's, again, there's word miraculous that they won, but they won because they had to win. What's the story? Why were they in Agencore? So, Henry becomes King of Fertig - and Henry becomes King of Fertig - and his first thing he's fixated on straight away is going to France, making the most of conditions that may never present themselves again where the French King is mad, the country is driven with factionalism, you've got the Begundians, the Arminyacs, at each other's throats, there's never been a better time to pursue what has for generations, been the high goal of English foreign policy which is to take the crown of France and conquer back large swathes of lands that had been English in the past.

1:00:11So he wants to strike, strike hard, strike first, no mercy, whatever they say in Cobra Kai. He was crowning 1413, 1415, he takes this huge army by sea across the English Channel to the coast of Normandy to besiege the town of Haafler, which is on the south side of the mouth of the river Sen. And they've been seated for a few months and reduced the city, you know, they take the city. Joe Rogan gives up, if you like. Jocco doesn't come. And then Henry has a decision to make. It's getting quite late in the year in the campaigning season. You don't want to be fighting seagulls over the winter because you're sitting outside in the open air and the weather's bad and you're starving.

1:01:02No thank you. So it's getting into October time. So there's not time to go in the siege another city. He doesn't have enough men to do so anyway. They've been dying in droves of camp disease from living in unsamitary conditions in the siege. He needs to leave some men in Half -Lert to defend it in case the French jockeau comes and tries to take it back. But he feels like he needs one more win. He's spent a lot of money and basically pushed all of his political capital from the D 'Haz as a virtue of becoming king into this one campaign. And he just seems to feel like he needs one more thing. So sometimes I'll use he wants the battle to win, but I'm not sure that's absolutely accurate.

1:01:52His army is in no state, fit state to fight a battle, as becomes evident. So he takes eight days worth of provisions and says anyone who's fit to March, basically March with me, we're going to the only other English town held on the French side of the channel, which is Calais, which has been seized by Edward III and the Black Prince in 1347. It's an English sort of militarized enclave. So Henry's like, we're going to run, almost literally run, from Afla to Calais. Is that basically him saying to the French, look at us, look at how strong we are. You can't stop us, you French fucks. Yeah, basically.

1:02:28What are you gonna do? You can't do it. And it's to show you the people of France, their king is inadequate. No, no, no, no, no, I can't touch me. So running down the street, knocking on everyone's door, flicking the visas, they come out and come on and then like, jump in, you make a car. Have a go if you're odd enough. Yeah. And you make a car and off you go and leaving everyone like fuming behind you. And he almost goes, for the first sort of few days, it goes fine. And then they hit the geographical, the inconvenient geographical fact that to make that journey from half -flur to Cala, you got to cross quite a few rivers.

1:03:03And one of them is really big. It's called the River Som. And there are bridges across it, but the French start breaking all the bridges. There had been a forwarding place called the Blanche tack, where it was the third at Guards Cross during the crazy campaign of the third and fourthies. but that's been some mind. It's been made impossible or no one knows where it is. It's not quite sure. One of those two things. So the French stop breaking the bridges. Henry gets like driven away from Calais. He's going up river along the Somme looking for somewhere to cross. And they keep breaking the bridges.

1:03:32And meanwhile, the French in Paris have got their shit together and raised an army. And they're coming towards Henry to cut him off. So Henry's army is getting increasingly tired. They're living rough. They're starving. Well, not starving. On the edge of starving. Do you know how many are at this stage? The numbers are just a constant course of minor disagreement between historians, but it's, he may, something like 8 ,000 maybe, something like that. And the French at Agencour have significantly more, maybe double, maybe more than double. So they head the English off and eventually, they do manage across the song and then they start heading back towards Kale, but they're cut off by the French army, who, and it becomes obvious they're gonna have to fight.

1:04:22There's gonna have to be a showdown. There's no mystery about what either side is gonna do. The English have, it's like a soccer match, right? You've got football match, you've got Barcelona are gonna pay like Tiki Taka, little sort of short passes, pressing game, and I don't know. Stoke City in the old days, you're gonna play with it. who fit longbowl and just hack them in midfield. It's like that, both sides have their tactics. The English are going to use the longbowman to create a funnel and then try and goad the French cavalry. The French can use the heavy cavalry to try and break up the positions of longbowmen.

1:05:03The English are going to try and funnel the French into a killing zone in the middle of their arches where they can just shoot arrows and cause absolute panic and chaos. Henry tells his archers, you know, when it's clear that battle is likely and perhaps inevitable, each to prepare for themselves a six -foot pole sharpened at both ends, that they can drive into the ground in front of them when it comes to battle, so that any horse is charging at them will either shy away, refuse or be gawred on these poles. So that's a basic line of defence against French cavalry charge. But the French have a weight of numbers, their armies fresh, they know they feel they know what the English are going to do and that that's going to help.

1:05:46They've got to the game tape. Yes, exactly. So it becomes like a sporting match, both sides have the game plan who can execute, who wants it more. And who wants it more? The English. And the English who got Henry the Fifth in charge. And that's not just, oh, it's Henry the Fifth, he's in charge. He's in charge. There's no question. The French have about five different people who all think they're in charge. And some who don't turn up. And it's just poor leadership. And the king isn't there because the king's sort of mad. The dough fan's not there because they don't want to risk him being captured.

1:06:20So there's that's the castle writing crap poetry. Right. No, so he's an azure. He gets put in the castle writing crap poetry because he's captured an azure. Right. So you've got you've got divided leadership on the one hand and you've got but tight, united, determined leadership, and a sense that if we lose, we all die. And if Henry doesn't die, then his reign may well be over after two years when he goes home. What would have happened had the British have lost there? If Henry, if the English had lost, English, I suppose, a small Welsh contingent had lost. Well, there'd been a big rebellion on—sorry, there'd been a big plot against the crown on the eve of departure for Asian call, and then there's the Southampton plot in which there's a concoction, a glomeration of all the dank memes of Henry the fourth train, like, Oh England, the Earl of March, who's lots of people saw as being the rightful heir to the throne, Richard the second isn't really dead, he's gonna come back.

1:07:22John Old Castle, Henry's mate, who's a heretic, who'd been imprisoned in the Tower of London and then escaped, they're all gonna get together they're in a sort of, you know, what's the opposite of the Avengers? Right. They're like suicides squad. Suicide squad are going to come together and they're going to knock in real. So that had been on the eve of departure of what became the Asian Corps campaign had Henry gone back, having lost the battle of Asian Corps. Um, and then probably he would have found Half -Law undefendable because the French would have down the tail would have been up. They would have gone to Half -Law and taken it back.

1:07:58He had his credibility, he had been shot to pieces, all the benefits of having, yes, you inherited the crown legitimately would have been kind of as nothing. So he's legitimate, but he's useless and he'd have had almost instantly a rebellion, I would have thought. Okay. He wins. But he wins. And he goes back and there's like, and he wins against, apparently against the odds. It's not apparently. He wins against the odds. He wins in dramatic fashion and they take tons of prisoners and it's a bloody brutal battle. He's not far from being killed in the battle because he fights in the thick of it.

1:08:41He has an axe swung at his head and dents, takes off one of the flurons of his crown. Several of his allies over the course of the Auffloh campaign in an Asian called battle, a key noble allies are killed or die of disease. There's big posturally comes back victorious and there's a sort of triumph through the streets of London to celebrate this miraculous victory that's the equivalent of a sort of Olympic opening ceremony in modern terms. There's unbridled joy and Henry sits in the middle of it, somber dressed in dark clothing. All thanks are to God, not to me, they only come through me to God and he'll allow us people to celebrate, but he's incredibly clear.

1:09:25This is not about me. This is because I'm God's instrument. He's a man of intense seriousness. Intensity and seriousness. Yes. Intense seriousness. That's really it. He's a serious guy. Even his touchy -feely interests, if you like, are serious. The harp and the re -lite music. He likes the right music, play music. he likes to read, he likes wrestling. He likes to watch wrestling, you know. He's a kind of MMA, jujitsu guy. But like there's not a big hint. A really as jokko, isn't he? He's quite jokko. Very jokko. He's quite jokko. Apart from the haircut, because of course there's the famous pudding bowl haircut.

1:10:06Why is he out of that? You do see other images of, you do see images of other people with similar tattoos from this time. This is like the, it's the haircut of the day. Right. It's a bit like if you look at the Beatles in the 50s, right? I mean, it wasn't only the Beatles that had that haircut But they became associated just you've mentioned Oasis already the feathered mancunian horror show that is still some veterans of that age I'm meant to say including the Gallagher brothers themselves Just of a time and they yeah, they weren't the only ones to have it but in other news this episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon.

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1:11:27Right now, you can get $5 off your next order by going to the link in the description below or heading to magicspoon .com slash modern wisdom or looking for magicspoon in your nearest grocery store. That's $5 off at magicspoon .com slash modern wisdom. When it comes to Henry as a person as he's sort of growing into maturity, what ways was he most impressive, what were the real advantages that his constitution, his personality was made above and then where were his biggest flaws or weaknesses? We sort of touched on a lot of the advantages already. There is this ability to drill down, as Tony Blair is saying, to the issues, to identify what needs to be done, what the issue actually is.

1:12:17There's an acute political sensitivity. So to give you an example, when he comes to the throne, the first thing he does is not announce the war. It's to go to the English Midlands and take the entire apparatus and machinery of the English judicial system, the courts, as well as the parliament, to the Midlands, where there's serious rioting, serious disorder, and to hammer that, then to hold a parliament and invite people to criticise him. Invite people to bring their grievances. Come, tell me what's wrong, and I will, if I can, address it, and if I can't tell you why I can't address it. It's listening first.

1:12:54He's a great listener, he's a great consultant, he's great at

1:13:02taking criticism on board without viewing it as personal and becoming irate, angry, aggressive or otherwise. And he's very strong at stating what he's going to do and then doing it. He's clarity and simplicity of objective and then execution.

1:13:27Tells you he's going to extremely harsh. He's a disciplinarian. He is unsentimental to the point of being quite scary. His friends at least twice. His friends, Henry Lord Scroop, who on the eve of the Argent Court campaign learns of the Southampton plot against Henry and doesn't reveal it in time, Henry has an execute. Chopps is one of his good friends head off for disloyalty. There's no special pleading because you're a friend of the king. Same is true of John Oldcastle, the model for Fustoff and Fulstoff in Shakespeare's Henry. He's a lot like Harritic when Henry becomes king, Fulst, when Henry becomes king, Oldcastle refuses to abduar his heresy, he carries on like flaunting it, thinking he's going to rely on his friendship with the king to make that okay, and Henry does not protect him.

1:14:25Friend or no friend, ally or no ally. He will be brought before the appropriate courts, whatever. An old castle, as his sentence to Bernd's death as a heretic, and escapes from the Tower of London and turns into a sort of, you know, an arch -reval for the rest of his life. When old castles run to ground, there's no sympathy because he was a friend of the king. He Bernd and hanged at the same time and a Lollard. gallows. What's that mean? It means you're strung up, you're hanged in chains. And the neck? Yeah. Right. And you're burned at the same time. Rope around the neck and you know, you've changed the gallows, right?

1:15:06And you're there's a file that's under you and eventually this is special. This is a special special treatment. Right. It's symbolic. I mean, is that hungron encoded? Is that still happening? Yeah, there's still some of that going about. Yeah. What's that for? Is that worse? That seems to us. It depends how much you like being... Well, yes, neither of them are good, but they are both very symbolic. So, there's been killed on a lot of gallows, burned at hanged. It's not just like, how painful can we make this? The idea is, the fire is for your heresy, and the hanging is for your treachery, because old castle had been leading rebellions against the crown.

1:15:44And you will suffer the penalties of both crimes. hanging drawing, quartering is the same thing. The hanging is for being a thief, the drawing on the hurdle is for something else, the beheading is for this, the cutting your bollocks off and throwing them in the fire is for the other. Each component of this has a visual meaning. In this age of semi -literacy, by which I mean not all the population are literate and no media, no mass media. The presentation of things, the optics. Symbolism when? Yes, it's always symbolism. French is more clinical with the guillotine. As much later though. Is it? Yeah, that's French Revolution, that's 18th century video.

1:16:33What are they doing? Much the same thing. I mean, it's probably more barbaric and in some ways less symbolic in France. There's a lot That's cutting all your skin off while you're still alive. Cutting all your skin off. How do you do that? Like a special sharp knife? Imagine peeling a banana. Only the banana is a human being. Okay. Yes, a sharp knife. A butcher, you're a butcher. And you're strapped down, laid down, standing? You were sort of held still, strapped to... Cross type thing. Yeah. And then like potato, big potato, a peeler. Yeah, yeah. Not nice. I mean, so the Philip IV Philip the Pharaoh Franz, the early 14th century, does a lot of nasty executions.

1:17:22There are a couple of guys who are accused of having affairs with the wives of Philip's sons, okay, so the princes, wives, cop off with a couple of knights and they're caught, they're flayed in public. During the, during Henry V's time, The count of Arminiac is two factions, begun to enter Arminiac, so it permanently with each other's throats. The count of Arminiac is killed and it's said, and this isn't totally unbelievable that he is flayed and then goose feathers are stuck to these bloody kind of muscles. and then the blood dries and then they're pulled out one by one. Well, okay, that just seems like insulting.

1:18:11It seems like a lot of effort to go to when you've already flayed the guy. I think that might not be completely true. There are a lot of testicles stuff coming them off. Why? Yeah, I mean... Yeah, the castration is typically a part of hand -drawing quartering. Right. You get those chopped off for, if there's been a sort of sexual component to your deviance. Oh right, so there's levels of hanging drawing and quartering. You can only get different. Yeah, there's like, you know, you go to the car wash and you can have the sort of bronze, the silver or the gold. It's like, how much do you want like the blackened rims and the tire treatment or you just want a quick sort of jet wash?

1:18:59The box, the bronze is as described hanging, you're tied to a hurdle and dragged by a horse through the streets. That's the drawing hanging, sort of a strung up to almost dead, and then your head's chopped off and your body's chopped into quarters and sent to the four corners of the realm. But as I say, you can add in between the hanging and the beheading and the quartering, you can add in a bit of castration, a bit of disembowelment. These are optional extras you pay more for. Right, okay. Yeah, like a McFlurry at the end. Yeah, right. Right, okay. You might have heard me say that I took me at testosterone level from 495 to a thousand and six last year.

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1:20:49Yeah, I mean, Henry Vsrain has a weird shape. So, as in core 1415, the next four years are taken up with the conquest of Normandy. By 1420, his victories have added up and the French and such dire straits that he forces on the Treaty of Trois, by which he replaces the Doe fans as the heir to the realm. So, with Minute Charles VI dies, Henry will become King of France as well as England. Has he got this bird yet? But he, I think you're referring to Catherine de Valois, that bird, yes, he marries her after the treat you're trying. That's part of its, it's part of the agreement. Good deal. Great deal and they've got a big dowry as well.

1:21:32So the whole thing works out very well. This is where in 1420 Henry goes back to England to raise some more money to keep fighting because now the Doe fan is not dead. He believes this in heriton. He's not happy about it. So they've got to deal with the Doe fan stamp out that, you know, what it affects when we become as a French civil war, Henry's fighting. Raises money in England for that, occasioned by much grumbling, because people don't want to pay for a French civil war. Understandably, leaves his brother Thomas in charge while he goes back to raise him on the end. Thomas gets himself killed.

1:22:04You asked about Henry's weaknesses as a leader, and I didn't answer you properly. Henry's weaknesses as a leader are, I think it's very hard to keep up with him, and he He doesn't optimise particularly sensitively for the fact that not everybody else is Henry V. So he leaves his brother Thomas and charge, and second of the four brothers, and Thomas kind of internally goaded, I think, by the fact he missed Agingor because he was ill, he's never sort of played a big role in a battle as his brother has, tries to have his moment and charges French and Scottish troops at Bogey and is killed. Henry has to come back to France and I think then is also confronted with another of his sort of the problems of his style of leadership which is not really easy to deputise for this guy.

1:22:58He's really critical to the whole operation. It's the sort of, it's the, the, the Tesla worry of how do we cope if we don't have it Elon Musk, do you know what I mean? So that's a problem for him. Anyway, he goes to the competence, cursive competence. There you go. And there, but it's so he's back in France and he carries on siege craft and grinding away in this his French Civil War and then he dies of dysentery like that. You've seen the film France. Have you seen the film No Country For Old Men? No. Then you won't get this reference. But for most of No Country For Old Men, it looks like, I think it's Josh Brolin.

1:23:44Well, it doesn't look like he is the main character and then about two -thirds of the way through he just sort of dies and the film carries on for another third and it's like wait what? And it's just like really sudden and there's no big fanfare about it. That's the kind of Henry the Fissure. It's like it's missing an act. He's just triumphed. It's like, what's he going to do next? How does he finish this off? Will he just catch his dysentery and very quickly dies at the age of 35 at the peak of his powers? And it's shocking, absolutely shocking to his people. I mean, on the French side as well as the English side, I mean, his body is taken back from Wad of Ancestral Way, he dies to England for burial in Westminster and it's taken back slowly through Normandy by stages and everywhere these massive outpourings of grief and shock that this great conqueror who looked like an English Alexander has been cut down in his prime and no one really knows what's going to happen next.

1:24:40Is there turmoil because of that? There's surprisingly little turmoil in fact and that I think is something you have to factor are in, the great criticism of Henry V is that by virtue, the curse of competence that you've mentioned, he goes so far that it's very difficult for everyone who comes after him to deal with his legacy. But he leaves as his heir, a child less than one year in age, Henry VI. But he is surrounded by veterans of Henry's reign and people who have fought alongside him. principally Henry's brothers John Duke of Bedford and Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and what happens is John Duke of Bedford takes over in France managing the Charles VI, the French King dies six weeks after Henry so the English French Kingdom becomes a reality.

1:25:35Henry's brother John stays in France and manages that very effectively for seven years at least still Jane of Art comes along and then until 1435 really when John dies he's got command of this. In England things you know the long -standing veterans of Henry's reign, how should you gloss to Henry both of it, Bishop of Winchester, they kind of hold the thing together. But 30 years after Henry's death everything comes crashing down in France. I mean by degrees the English possessions in France are reconquered by the French. This puts incredible pressure on the English government. Henry VI, the young boy, grows up to be an idiot.

1:26:23Completely sort of poor guy, he grows up as king from one year old and the whole experience is overwhelming, confusing and horrible to him. And he is a sort of timid pacifist, You know, it couldn't get more different from his more interested in sort of architecture I mean, he's responsible for eating college chapel King's College Cambridge There's a beautiful masterpieces of late Gothic architecture, but he ain't no soldier and he never He never knows his father. He never has it just as Henry V has such a in -depth apprenticeship Henry VI has no apprenticeship. What is it? It is what happens there.

1:26:59How does How does Henry V said a sub for the War of the Roses? Well, because Henry VI reign is such a disaster, by 1453 all the English possessions in France and not just those Henry had conquered, but everything they ever had except for Calais, all goes. A Castillon 1453, the last of Gaskinillia, the area of Amplodot in the southwest is lost, which had been in English hands for hundreds of years. And the backlash at home in England is horrible. And you have this split into the factions, which are now known as the House of Lancaster in New York and you just have this, the Civil War breaks out and it racks England for 30 years until Richard III loses the Baddler Bosworth in 485 and arguably even after that, the problems don't go away until Henry Dex reign.

1:27:47So the question is where do you root all that? You could root in 1399 with the removal of Richard II, that tear in the fabric of the universe. I've described that would be the sort of the Shakespeare structure across the eight English history plays, original sin here, redemption, paid for in blood at the other end of the story. You could root it as lots of people do if they don't like Henry V in Henry overextending, putting too much pressure on England by having the weight of the burden of the King of France. I think the biggest problem is that Henry dies when he dies because it leaves his son 17 years away from becoming an adult.

1:28:29What that means is nobody until Henry VI It becomes an adult, can renegotiate the terms of Henry V's triumph and victory. They can't unpick the treaty made because they're not the king. Only the king can do that and the king can't do it till he's an adult, legally. So you have 17 years in which everyone has to just try and stick, you know, freeze time and just hold what's been held. That doesn't go very well. It goes terribly. If Henry V had lived, even another 10, even the five years, my feeling is he would probably have settled matters with the Doe fan, brought the war to an end. His mind was on bigger things, his mind was on Jerusalem on crusading.

1:29:06In his last campaign he was taking a stack of books to read which included histories of the first crusade. He had a fellow out in the Eastern Mediterranean actually mapping Egypt's Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, as we call them now, the Holy Lands. The papal schism had been settled in 1417. That was a situation where you had three rival or popes, or claiming to be the Pope, that had been settled the Council of Constance, and you only had now had one, so Christendom was too inextent united. It was politically expedient for Henry to settle the English French War, and then he could have all have gone off under his leadership to Jerusalem to fight a crusade.

1:29:42That, I think, was the missing third act, and that's what he would have done, had he lived. In the course of that, he would have had an agreement to negotiate the Treaty of Troye. I don't doubt that he would have done that. It was too aggressive the first one. It was very hard. We just inherited the Doe fan, the Doe fan, but left the Doe fan alive. So you had a, and you had France like partitioned basically along the Lois. So you had the Kingdom of Bourge in the South and then you had the English Angler Begundian Kingdom in the North is not in a sustainable situation. So there would have had to be a permanent settlement, what that looked like, who knows, but Henry would have had the authority to do it.

1:30:17trouble is once he dies abruptly nobody has the authority to fix things on the English side. So they just, they didn't kind of survival mode rather than creative mode. Isn't it an interesting comment on the like melancholy mundanity of life that you have this guy I would such a heroic story that dies by shitting himself just out of nowhere while he's in the middle of everything. And it's a really sort of nice stark reminder that the personification, the stories, the symbolism, all of the stuff that we said, that's how people think, that's how they like to come up with the way that things occur.

1:31:05Much of the time even with the ones that are blessed from above. they don't get the fanfare ending. No, and the way that that sort of rationalized in, you know, the very oldest stories is the the caprice of fate, the caprice of God, call it what you will. Lady Fortuna did not bless them. Yeah, all the wheel of fortune, things sort of go up and then come down. You just don't know what's going to happen, right? And that's, it's always salientry. It makes for a w - you know, as a writer, it makes - I found writing - It's severely unsatisfying ending. Well, it's a great challenge if you're a - I mean, I'm a nonfiction writer.

1:31:46I love story architect to story shape and I try and write history with a - with my mind somewhat on how to package this - this story whilst remaining historically credible accurate research searched for noted all the rest of it. Compelling, compelling to a reading audience that is probably most used to, compelling to a reading audience that's probably most used to Hollywood shapes. And the Henry this reigns a challenge in that sense because it doesn't have a neat third act. Here as journey gets chopped off at seven o 'clock. Why has he become controversial recently?

1:32:28Well, there's one of the most common criticisms you'll hear about Henry these days, as that he was cruel, he was cold, he was barbaric, he was brutal. Particularly at the Battle of Aging Corps where he ordered the killing of French prisoners, which in battlefield terms was a perfectly reasoned and perhaps even reasonable decision to take in the Battle of Asian core. The English had appeared to win, they'd taken lots of prisoners, but then it looked like a French were coming back, or you know, people who'd fled the battlefield were returning. People were turning up late, that there was going to be a second bit of the battle, and there were French everywhere among the English.

1:33:10You can't just tell them to go and stand over there somewhere and wait for this next bit to happen, or go back to a start, we're going to do some more battling. Henry gives an order in the moment that is Kilmall. Kilmall. French could easily have done the same thing. They'd taken the Oriflam, this was sacred battle banner that was kept at Sandini, which was said to have been Charlemagne, which was, in fact, dated from the reign of Louis VI in the Native Middle Ages. But once the Oriflam was taken from Sandini, it meant such a funny name. But no quarter given on the battlefield, no prisoners, Kilmall.

1:33:47And once so that kill them all on the English side, not unreasonable. The people who were pissed off about it were the English ordinary English archers. They thought they'd got like life -changing paydays because once they'd taken these high ranking French prisoners, they could be sold for huge ransoms. Once they're dead, they're worth anything. So it was the English, a lot of the English refuse to do it. And Henry had to send around a hit squad to kill these... Oh, there's unscrupulous guys that all go and chop their heads off. Yeah. Someone's got to do this, kill him. Kill him now. You've got to kill him now.

1:34:17So, now that I am in no sense in favor of mass slaughter, I hope, but probably don't need to say that. But if you put yourself into the mind world of the of the early 15th century and the specific situation of Ashenko, he said there's no other choice. He had to do it. But he is criticized today for that action, and for, you know, the criticisms are, value judgments about his character, cold, brutal, sometimes called misogynist. Yeah, I know. So look, but this is not a problem that's specific or unique to Henry V studies or even medieval studies. This is a broader trend in history at the moment, which is the historian's job is not a find out what happened, be tell story, the historians sort of lots of historians today optimize for go round history as if you're sort of time traveling policemen berating history for not matching up to 21st century piety's or exercise in in borrowed guilt hand -ringing.

1:35:34Judging the actions of yesterday by the values of today. This sort of like a massacistic apology culture of, let's look at the, there was a book published a few years ago called I think like 52 times Britain was a bellend. The most British book, The Night of the Lava. Yes, written by a Brit. Yeah, and a sort of like, I think, partly comic, but definitely 100 % summing up in that title, the factuous kind of six form common room approach to history, which is let's be outraged, and let's assume that outrage and kind of in, you know, borrow the, either borrow guilt or or parade us. It's interesting about who it's on behalf of, especially if it's your people that they did it against.

1:36:28Yes, well, there's two forms. I mean, there's like, my people were hard done by form. And then there's, my people weren't hard done by, but I'd like to pursue my trade within this intellectual milieu. So why don't I become a warrior on the behalf of the downtrodden in general or this specific group? There was a, I'd never finished sapiens and I opened it up on my audible on a plane. And I realized why I'd bailed out of a particular chapter that I'd been deep in. And it was talking about the unfair gender inequality that was sort of replete through humanity's heritage. Yes. Talking about how women were, they didn't get to do as much big game hunting and they didn't get to do X, Y and Z.

1:37:23And it's really interesting because there was recently a study that came out about 18 months ago, two years ago, that said, tried to repeal the women that didn't do as much big game hunting as men, hypothesis. and upon further inspection, there was a lot of very unethical behaviour done. The way that big game hunting was labeled, that if it happened once, it was the equivalent of that being, it didn't matter. There was no difference between a man doing a thousand times in a woman doing it once. That big game was repurposed in many different ways so that it could pretty much mean anything. Anyway, so I came up with the, I've heard of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

1:38:04This is the soft bigotry of male expectations that anything that a man does is seen as being inherently superior, more preferable, and by either not attributing that action to a woman or by saying that women can't do that thing, you are somehow derogating them, that is them being downtrodden, which implicit, the thing that women do is less valuable than men, is an incredibly misogynist perspective to take. What is it about child rearing and gathering and berries, which inherently makes it less important than what it seems like, my reading of the evidence, big game hunting was net negative for energy.

1:38:50Like, calorically, it was net negative. Right, better to hunt and gather. Fucking great to portray around. Look at the trophy. It's like a social exercise more than it was a the culinary exercise and that you would actually be much better off trying to get grouse and fucking rabbits and squirrels and whatever the hell else it is that they, you know, like little bits and pieces. So all of that together is just to say that I opened up this book to a point that I definitely bailed out of previously where there was a lot of sort of hararian hand -ringing about this thing and it makes me feel, I don't know, like I get that everybody's entitled to an opinion, if you're the guy that's written this book about all of this stuff then why not tell us what you think about them.

1:39:33But then there's another bit of me that likes historians to be a bit more like scientists and to say, this is what happened in a compelling way. And based on the best evidence, this is what we think was going on without having to then make the value. And of course, that wasn't it. And of course, that was like, if you explain to me the fact that Henry V slaughtered 4 ,000 Frenchmen because he was worried that more Frenchmen when we're going to come. You don't need to tell me that, and of course that was a bad thing to do. I could say, yes. And the question is then, who are you as writer signaling to by that statement?

1:40:10By tacking on the value judgment, particularly the value judgment, which is that, and this was sort of terrible, and this brings shame on our nation today, and we should apologize for it. You can go further and further down the reparations to the French. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. It's internal tribe signaling, isn't it? It's saying to the people who you're trying to impress that you are hip to their set of... Performative empathy. There you go. You've got to phrase for everything, but I think that's a good one. But you see it everywhere, don't you? All professions, once they build a higher You want to say build institutions once they build like jobs to strive for or to maintain whether those are sort of jobs within a University or whether those are just positions within a sort of publishing industry or whatever it might be People start just Optimizing and writing for That tribe that group Purity spiral gets ever more pure right, but what's this feel like for you as someone who although you might not look it, bit of an old hand, when it comes to history, 20, 25 years or so, you've been publishing stuff around this.

1:41:30What is that, you know, we talked a good bit over the last few years, you seem to be a pretty straight shooting sort of bloke, both in front of the scenes and behind the scenes, is that something that you're having to keep your eye on a little bit, this sort of change, the shifting requirement to morally condemn or not underfoot or they're just a people not bothered about you because you got tattoos. I don't care that much. I don't not care at all because I think that would be pretty, you'd be pretty weird not to give any fucks at all about anybody and that's a pretty lonely existence. But I definitely don't feel like the thing I need to do most when I write or do my podcast or whatever is, oh, I must make sure that I'm sort of staying true to the values of this particular group.

1:42:31I'm interested in doing things lots of different ways. So with books, it's my readers. It's readers. I'll read is going to dig this story. That's all I really care about. I don't have a really hard, nailed, down, fixed political ideology. I think you'd probably agree that once you become an ideologue, you probably sacrifice your intellectual rigor and your independence and your intelligence to a degree. So I've done all sorts of things, which people have looked at, sort of as political sort of choices in my work. I write on the one hand, I've written lots of quite traditional and you might even call them small -sea conservative historical works about royalty and about battles and such like.

1:43:20But I produced, I executive produced a drama about Ambulin where she's played by JD Turner Smith, he's black. And I've worked on a series of books with the brilliant artist Marina Amaral, which was called the first one, the colour of time, and the world of flame, or we did one, it was called a woman's world, which is a history of these were colourised photographs from 1850 through 1950, and we decided to tell the story just through women's stories. And that could look like a sort of, you know, woki, boo, who, snowflakey, whatever you, you know, that all the terms are, I was just interested in that story.

1:43:58I was just interested in that story. And when we did the ambulance show, I just thought that was a cool, interesting way to tell that story. I wasn't like, oh, God, this is great. You know, political agenda, I want to pursue. I was like, this is cool. Brimming with sort of left -leaning requirement to tell everybody how virtuous you are or on the other side, this sort of hatred of the present to try and glorify the past. Yeah, I am. This is something increasingly that I'm noticing, despite what both sides of the internet that seem to think, I don't actually really care that much about politics.

1:44:33I found them interesting from a human nature perspective, and it's fascinating to see how they're warping to people and the way that they see the world and the way that they relate to others. But I realized that one of the most guaranteed ways to achieve them, a lot of distaste for your work is to actually align with each side different at different times. Because I think the world is becoming increasingly tribal and what that means is that everybody is looking for just reliable allies. It's the term that comes to me. So the more obscure or ridiculous the belief that you have to hold onto is the more we can be assured that Dan's sweet.

1:45:19Don't worry about Dan. Dan believes, Pete's a gay, J6E, like he's flat -earth stuff, or Dan believes that children don't have a sex, they pick whatever you're sort of lefty opinion is, don't worry about Dan. Dan is prepared to deny most common sense and reality in order to, he's gonna adhere to the ideology. And what that means is we have someone who, If he was with us on the last thing, we can be reliable, he's with us on the next thing. The problem is, if you were with us on the last thing and not with us on this thing, we go, what's he gonna do next time? And it actually is an unreliable ally.

1:46:00And a lot of the time, absurd ideological beliefs are shows of fealty to your own team and the threat displays to the other. And any admission, any wavering in, if I know your opinion on gun control, I should know your opinion on abortion and on immigration and on taxation and on what we should be doing overseas, and any time that you waver, it doesn't fit into either what I think your pre -prescribed model should be or what your compatriots or current allies think that it should be that onesie that you've just zipped up and put on. If you have a deviate from that, that's seen by the other side as lack of conviction and as your own side as a sort of lack of commitment.

1:46:40Yes, it's a very strange approach to politics because And I do have political opinions and political thoughts and I'm in my private life and I try not to tack it too hard. Keep them to yourself. But I do think that this is a strange moment politically for the reasons that you've just touched upon where politics in the UK and in the US is roughly pretty much bipartisan. And I'm not sorry, bipartisan, it's pretty a partisan, you can two sides, right? But those two sides are both coalitions and they're uneasy coalitions. And it's so weird to think that anyone could like hold, could agree with the entire package of either democratic or Republican views as expressed by the two current candidates in the election.

1:47:30Or likewise, back in the UK, where I live, that you could agree with labor on absolutely everything. or I mean the Tory party, this was the Tory party in the UK's cause of their great collapses that they couldn't hold the coalition together under the force of Brexit, a polarising debate which didn't map cleanly onto the party politics. So it wrenched this coalition apart. And it just showed that it would be so foolish to think that you either one thing Or the other because with those political definitions, just how very seldom do they map onto one individual sort of package of thoughts? Yeah, I've been obsessed with this.

1:48:15I called it mono thinking. And I just don't know. I'm yet to meet anybody that is a true monofinker. I eat their actual beliefs. Map onto the prescribed beliefs of one party or the other. Everybody is idiosyncratic. Everybody deviates in small ways or another. And yeah, I think if you know one of somebody's beliefs and from it you can accurately predict everything else They're probably not a serious thing and they're probably kidding to themselves Are they lying to you or they're trying to say something that makes them feel socially signaling in one form or another? So yeah, it's a it is an interesting time and if you've been able to provide a little bit more perspective By taking every back to the medieval times.

1:48:58I think that's probably not about it I think this is one of the other reasons why shows like yours was just like rest his history, guys like Dan Karlin. Even, maybe to actually know, I disagree with what I was about to say, I was about to say Graham Hancock actually think Graham plays into the current sort of milieu that's going on, the ambiance. I think one of the reasons that people are enjoying history is that it feels more grounded, that it feels like, okay, well, at least we know stuff that's happening. and when we don't know, we say we don't know. Yes, and history has a role to play. A significant role to play in culture and politics at the moment.

1:49:40It has a number of roles. And one of the roles is escape from the present. I think that a lot of people are finding the nature, the content, the delivery of present day politics to be weirous and frightening and depressing and the cause of great anxiety. And for some people, but still want to have sort of think intellectually about things. So we're treating to great literature, or treating to history as a sort of welcome place to put your mind and to exercise your mind without turning over the anxieties of the moment. It can also be a great contextualizer. That's one of the things the history is, that's one of the reasons the history's taught because it allows us to gain better perspective on the world we live in to recognize themes and patterns that are sort of inherent to human behaviour over centuries millennia, whatever it might be.

1:50:40And then there's the skill set that history, the study of history provides, it was ought to be a balanced weighing of evidence and a decision making that is nominally, although this does not always happen in practice, free from ideology that you look at history and your question is basically what happened, not trying to sort of, this is not the case, obviously, lots of schools of history, like Marxism being one of the most obvious of them, you're not looking at history as a way of validating some theory you have about the universe and then just hammering it into shape. that you're taking a lot of evidence about a complex moment in time in which to return to an earlier part of our conversation, great forces collide with individual personalities and you're trying to get to the bottom of what happened and why and weighing the evidence and coming up with a balanced and nuanced and intelligent response.

1:51:48That would be good if we could do that in more fields than just history, right? if that debates on the great issues of the day could be thought about and analyzed from an evidence -based standpoint and in the spirit of intelligent, respectful debates and discourse, that would be terrific. That would be the opposite of a lot of politics in the internet age. Well, I think David Parales got this idea called the Never Ending Now and he basically says that almost all of the content you consume today will have been created within the last 24 hours. When you think that even Snapchat and Instagram stories are purposefully designed to expire after 24 hours.

1:52:29Yeah. And the story of the moment, I mean, how quickly we forgot that Biden had that debate and that Trump was shot and that, you know, you could do to get to Brat Summer, you know, now it's P Diddy or whatever. And the pace that everything moves at convinces you and the incentives are there from the news to convince you that this happening right now is the most important thing. Because if the thing that happened yesterday was the most important thing, you don't need to read what happened today. Yes. And it's a lie. And I think that reading history, which I don't do enough of, makes, I get the same sense as when I look up through a tree.

1:53:08So if I look up through a tree, there's this sort of down regulation that happens to me. And I start breathing a little bit more slowly. in my vision, the peripherals of my vision open up a little bit more and I start to, I can feel my body and my mind sort of just release a little bit. I feel like I'm less tight and less tense. And especially I've read a lot of Ryan's stuff and he've just come from his place. He's great. Reading a lot of Ryan's stuff, reading your book. It just gives me this sense of perspective, you know, like a big arc, big, big fucking bridge. And I think, wow, look at all the way over there.

1:53:41Not can we just still hear and look at the, I can see with perspective these sort of cycles up and down and they thought it was the end and it wasn't the end and then they thought it was going to be great and it wasn't great. You know, I really, it gives you a degree of perspective that the never ending now has robbed from us all. Yeah, and I think any escape from that, be it history or as I say, be it sort of literature is just incredibly good for our minds at the moment and the way that the hybridization of, I can say I know, a heraririda. I believe this, the hybridization of human mind and machine mind isn't in the future, it has already happened and it always happening in real time.

1:54:28Over my lifetime, I'm 43 now and over my lifetime, this is what's happened. First, it was about humans became operators of machines, of basically databases. And that database type thinking, you know, parodied with the phrase, computer says, no, when a human looks up from the screen and can't make a human decision because it doesn't fit within the parameters of the database they're punching in. And that has been rolled out to almost everywhere. and now the version of it is, we have like fused our minds with social media, known as algorithms. Anyway, yeah, the algorithm, let's just call it, inaccurate as that phrase is.

1:55:10So that, and it would seem most obvious in our political thinking, but I started in some historical thinking as well, we are optimizing for, right, the wittingly or unwittingly, what's the thing that's most likely to be popular on the internet and on social media. And that typically is something that's extremely expressed in an extreme way, without any nuance at all, and designed to be as either sort of clawingly pleasing to our own tribe or enraging to the other tribe, ideally both, as possible. And our minds are so plastic and our addiction to cell phones is so, uh, it's societally complete, but we've, we've, we've already done it.

1:55:58We've like fused our minds. You didn't have to put a chip into your brain. You should have put a fucking phone in your pocket and like, and make it buzzing in an addictive way. I, I like, and I've got, I've got a kid's range from toddler to teenager and, um, I grew up without this shit and so at least I can remember the before time. Remember the four times, but I am increasing. Maybe this is just a function of becoming an old geezer and everyone gets this, but I'm displeased when I look at some of these developments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, it's worried. It is one of those things where every generation is adamant that the one coming after them is broken.

1:56:36Of course. You can go back and see concerns about the printing press or concerns about people listening to too much music or concerns about them listening to the radio or watching the television or watching cable or what. And I do get the sense that what we have, the technology that we've already got and what we're on the cusp of probably having more of is a difference of kind, not just a difference of degree. I feel like it's a step change in the addictive nature, the ability to really tap in and linguically hijack what we're doing to really play on the dopaminergic system and to get people to, it's not an addiction.

1:57:13I use the words interchangeably, it's a compulsion, and you are compulsively using your phone. If you have a sit on a plane next to somebody, they pull their phone out and swipe up and move through the apps, knowing that they don't have signal. Why are they doing that? Because it's just like, you know, the hamster running on the wheel, so to speak. But yeah, I think it'll be interesting to look back in 50 or 100 years time and I wonder whether we'll look back with horror in the same way as I think we'll probably look at factory farming or the way that we would look at putting children down chimneys or the way that we would look at, you know, ladies licking rayon or argon or whatever it was on the end of those paintbrushes and think look at what we exposed our heritage to.

1:58:00How are we doing it? I mean, the research has started to trickle out. I know it's not conclusive, but you shouldn't have given these fucking kids TikTok, right? Basically, this has been a very, very bad thing to have done. And yes, I'm sure you're right. Or I'm not sure you're right. I can't be sure you're right. But I feel instinctively that you're right on that. I think, just slightly return to this idea about what is the value of history. I think a good example is to look at what we're living through now with this communications revolution in the saturation of this new communications technology throughout society, the speed of information distribution, the advent of the printing press in the 15th century is I think probably a good comparator.

1:58:51Maybe we talked about this when I was running Piers and Throne, I can't remember, but you have this revolution in how to communicate. People are able to you know, communicate radically faster, much greater speed, they're able, more people are able to communicate and publish. And so what do they do? They start saying more and more like weird and like outrageous stuff. And you get like characters like Martin Luther is not only saying like really random stuff at that point, but is able to communicate it around Europe at lightning speed. The Proxima Caster's now gone to zero. Right. So what you get is like more and more publishing, more and more pushes to the extreme.

1:59:35It leaks into politics. Politics becomes incredibly polarized and you end up with the reformation. Communications revolution ends up with a reformation first of moral value and then that feeds into political systems. and I'm afraid the story of the Reformation, if we're at the beginning of it, doesn't is not one that ends particularly happily. It goes on for a long time and it gets ever more divisive and bloody. But I'm spitballing in a sense. I'm not, again, I'm not, you've all know Harari, I haven't been gifted with the ability to see into the future. But I do think that if you've never read a book and don't know what the Reformation is or didn't know when the printing press was invented, then you're slightly hamstrung in trying to figure you navigate your way through the world we're in at the moment.

2:00:23You don't... This is the first time this has ever happened. You don't have any sort of models to go, hmm, like, I wonder if this is a bit like the reformation or hmm, I wonder if this is a bit like the industrial revolution. If you don't even fucking know what those things are, then you just can't think. Or you're trying to sort of think without any models. You're making the job so much harder for yourself. So obviously Henry V, Great Buck really accessible, opens with an awesome story, you're a great writer and I love your podcast and everyone should go and buy it. If you were to prescribe people after they've had a crack at learning more about England's greatest leader.

2:01:00What other areas of history, periods of history, do you find particularly down regulating? Do you find, I read this and I get a really lovely perspective. Yeah, yeah, where else would you, where else in history would you send a literary time traveler? I'm quite interested, although very ignorant about, so the ancient Greek and Roman world, I like to dabble through that, I read very general kind of books about that, I find that

2:01:33fascinating. It's literature rather than history, we were talking before we began this interview about Dominic Cummings, so he had as a guest on the show. And I, although I didn't agree with Brexite, and you know, in the current world, you might have thought I would never read Dominic Cummings. I try and read his substack, read his blogs, because I think he's an original thinker, and a good and interesting writer. And he blogged a few years, quite a few years ago, now maybe four years ago, about Tolstoy. And I went on a real slow -burn Tolstoy jagged through Warren Peace and Anna Karenina because Dominic Cummins had mentioned Warren Peace as being the greatest novel and the one from which you could learn the most about the subtle workings of political groups.

2:02:21And I really slowly read Warren Peace and Anna Karenina, which they designed to be read slowly. They're in this very short chapter, oh, sorry, not designed to be read slowly, but they're constructed so that you can read them piecemeal over a long, long time. And that's been my kind of go to disappear into another world. And you know, Warren Pieces obviously set in the early 19th century Anna Karenina in the about the 1870s. I'm by no means a tall, a specialist in those historical periods, but that's kind of part of the joy. And this is a fictional rendering of Russian society, even if in real historical settings.

2:03:00But what I found about Tolstoy, and this is what Cummings said, you would find about Tolstoy is that you just, you disappear completely immersed into this world and it's something that's very good to read at the age that I am now, as I've said, I'm in my early 40s and once you've seen a fair bit of life and a fair bit of adult life and political life or whatever it might be, you really get tall story. I mean, I don't think I would have understood any of it or no more than half of it is a 20 year old. There's a 40 year old, 41 year old, 42 year old, 43 year old. It's like this guy just seemed to see everything, everything.

2:03:46And even though he's not like a great, one can't tell so well in English translation, but doesn't come across as a great prose stylist, doesn't matter. He's just saw everything and his ability to capture and render, even with his own sort of bizarre cocktail of prejudices about certain stuff. It doesn't matter. He just has this sort of eye. And so he's been my, um, so 19th century Russia's been my like happy place to disappear to recently. That's cool. Dan Jones, ladies and gentlemen, dude, I love you a bit. Where should people go? To keep up with the date with the things that you do. Um, I write a sub -stack.

2:04:20It's called history, comma, etc. I, uh, I do a, uh, when that sort of functions my mailing lists, if you want to find out about the new, new books, new tour dates, new podcast episodes, it's all on there. And I do a monthly Q &A session on there for engaged readers and listeners. The podcast is this is history and that comes out every Tuesday. And the books are in all good bookstores. How are you on the plague, Black Death stuff? How are you on that? I mean, I know a bit about it. Should we do an episode on that some point soon? Yeah, we could do that. Could you a little reading up in them? Could we do an episode on that?

2:05:02And watching, I've been falling asleep to stories of me, Asma, and all sorts of other stuff. Well, I mean, I'm riding a novel at the moment that's said in 1350. It's a post -pandemic novel. And the first chapter is all about, like, first encounter with the plague. And it's based on a real incident. My first two novels follow this ordinary group of soldiers in the beginning of a hundred years' war battle accresed in Siege of Calais. In 1348, a bunch of veterans of those campaigns got on boats and went to escort Joan the daughter of Edward III to Bordeaux, where she was going to be married to the heir to the Castilian throne, who became Peter of the cruel eventually.

2:05:46And when they got to Bordeaux, the mayor sort of came out on the shore and was like, do not come here, the plague is here. And they go, eh, never mind that. And she goes into the city and dies of the plague. And then, you know, two months later, it's in England and it just races its way through. So I've been, that takes up, that's the sort of prologue bit of my book, them going to Bordeaux and that happening and then the rest of the novel is then in 1350 in this world that's just coming out of lockdown, if it is. So it will be, but it's on my mind at the moment. So next week when that comes out.

2:06:25I would love to have that conversation. Yeah, we should do. We should. Thank you for coming to see me. My pleasure. Want the same expert advice you get from the pros in the store while shopping online at discounttire .com? Meet Treadwell, your personal online tire guide that matches you with the perfect tire for your vehicle. Get your best match in one minute or less with Treadwell by Discount Tire. Let's get you taken care of.