The 100 Years' War with Historian Dan Jones

26:29Konstantin Kisin:And one thing that we haven't touched on is the technology, because the English had superior technology, didn't they? And that's probably the main reason why they won. Superior, yes, although it looks inferior. So the longbow is the critical weapon on the English side for most of the Hundred Years' War. Battle of Cressey, 1346, you do actually see handguns on the field for the first, probably for the first time in Europe. So very, very crude handguns. It's not much more than fireworks, really. It makes a lot of noises. It scares the horses, but it's not Passchendaele. Do you know what I mean? So the battles like Crecy in particular, later under Henry V, Agincourt, are won by English longbowmen.

27:20Now you look at a longbow, it's a simple, apparently simple piece of technology. It's a long piece of U with a taut string and it shoots arrows, which it's not complicated.

27:36you sometimes hear described as the AK-47 of the Middle Ages, which is completely wrong. Because an AK-47, the success of the Kalashnikov, right, is that any idiot can pick up an AK-47 and fire it. It's pretty reliable. Just point and shoot. Almost nobody who hasn't, well, no, nobody who has not trained for years can pick up a longbow and shoot it. Have you ever tried to shoot a longbow? it's um you just can't do that i mean you unless you've trained a long time because the the long bows great advantages range and um it means it's very hard to draw so in order to draw you can't muscle along but you have to get right inside it and you have to have like extraordinarily strong back muscles in order to to get inside and fire this and sorry shoot this weapon effectively so So under Edward III, the English do something quite smart, which is they make it mandatory for everybody on a Sunday to practice shooting a longbow.

28:40So you have a whole population that's trained to use this simple and cheap weapon. So when they go into the field in France, for generation after generation, they've got these ranks upon ranks of cheap troops who can shoot a cheap weapon, which is absolutely deadly. It's got a longer range than a crossbow, which is a more expensive and more temperamental piece of technology because it's got more moving parts. And deployed correctly, ranks of longbowmen are very effective against a cavalry charge as well. Horses don't like charging into hail of longbow shot. and you can keep a bigger range. I mean, there's all sorts of advantages, but yeah, the critical piece of technology for most of the 100 years war on the English side is the longbow.

29:35And you see these victories all the way from 1346, Crecy, Ashen Court is the famous one, 1415, but even 1424, you've still got great longbow victories for the English.

29:47Francis Foster:And is that the reason that the French don't just go, oh, longbow, that looks good, we'll do that? Because it takes a lot of training. Or is it ideological on their part? because the knights, chivalry, charging down the plebs, it sounds like fun. It's a bit of both. It's a bit of both. I think there's an ideological preference for cavalry, a bit on the French side. And I think that going back to what we talked about with the kings of France still being in this phase where they're trying to extend their authority directly over their own realm, it's actually much harder for them to institute policies that in England you can institute quite directly.

30:27If 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. The power concentrated in English king's hands at this point and mediated through parliament and national gathering is considerable. And so there's a higher degree, I suppose, of...

30:53Francis Foster:Centralised authority. Centralised authority in England relative to France. That's really interesting. And so far be for me to be sceptical of God's involvement in all of this, but you mentioned that in that moment, in that time, it would have been a huge part of how people perceived the successes that Edward III is having on the field. Absolutely. Other than God's involvement and the longbow, are there other reasons why in that phase the English are as successful as they are? As you said, against the odds? Or is it just those two? Just God and the Longbow. That's all I need. What else do you need?

31:32Connected to this centralised authority, the English are also probably better at taxing the realm. So the relatively early development of Parliament in England in the Middle Ages, stemming to the 13th century, out of Magna Carta through the reforms of the middle of Henry III's reign in the 1250s and 1260s, create a relationship in which there's a kind of a negotiation mechanism between the whole realm and the king, which are these irregularly called parliaments, where the king, when things are functioning well, says, OK, I want to fight a war, calls a parliament, sets out the case for war. Parliament effectively appropriates the funds.

32:20They're quite efficiently collected and the king has easier access to the wealth of his own kingdom. So it becomes, I mean, of course, every time there's a war, everyone's constantly complaining about the tax. In fact, every time there's any tax of any sort, everyone's constantly complaining. Of course they are, except when people are winning. So if you look at, say, Henry V, who had a very successful time of the 100 years war in his reigns, early 15th century.

32:48England is probably under the highest tax burden it ever is in the Middle Ages, I can think. But Henry just keeps winning and winning and winning and winning. So people are generally happier to pay for a war win than winning. But in answer to your question, yeah, English kings have a somewhat better access to their And there are also fewer things to think about, in a sense, because there's something that pertains to the physical geography, I think, that also really matters. And this is a much bigger point about English and British history from the Middle Ages onwards. There are so many advantages to specifically where this big island and archipelago lies.

33:41The 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. But even in that case, England is heavily dominant. You never see Scotland until James VI comes along. You never see Scotland conquer England.

34:10So whereas France has... I mean, the French have much more to think about than just the English. I think this is also, to return to your joke at the beginning, the French kind of live rent-free in the English heads in a way that I don't... How dare you? It's not necessarily the same the other way around because, you know, let's just take one example.

34:31Francis Foster:Well, they have the Germans next to them. They have the Germans next to them. I mean, there's the question of what's going on on the Italian border. Like, what's the relationship with the papacy and where should, you know, at the same time as the Hundred Years' War, you've got this debate about whether the papacy should be in Rome or in Avignon, not technically in France, but basically in France. You've got questions about sovereignty in Flanders. There's a whole ton of stuff going on for French kings to think about in which the English are only one. I think, you know, maybe we talked about this when we talked about the Crusades.

35:02There'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. Sort of, the Muslims in the Middle East are like, yeah, okay, but we're quite busy fighting the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia here. And it's like way more to think about than just you lot. So perhaps something similar is going on.

35:25Francis Foster:All right, so the English have this structural advantage in terms of centralized power, taxation. They've got the technological advantage with the longbow. God clearly is on England's side, as we've established. Until he's not. And this is where I'm going with this. How do the wheels come off the bandwagon? You've got Edward III, brilliant. The son is a badass by all accounts, the Black Prince. How does the whole thing turn? Because ultimately, the Hundred Years' War is not a success for the English, right? No, and ultimately, the Hundred Years' War is a massive failure. The Hundred Years' War shakes out so that the English are completely kicked out of France, with the exception of Calais.

36:00But it depends where you stop the tape, you know. So Edward III, up until you have these victories we've talked about, Crecy, Poitiers, others. 1360, there's a settlement, Treaty of Bretigny. From that point on, the French start chipping away at the Bretigny settlement. Edward III is succeeded in 1377 not by his badass son, the Black Prince, who dies shortly before him of an illness picked up on campaign in Spain, but by his grandson, Richard II, who has no interest in fighting the French War whatsoever and is perfectly happy to, you know, if you asked him, he would have resigned away everything that England had ever won.

36:43It's just not his cup of tea at all. He's deposed in 1399. Henry IV, his cousin, picks things up. Henry V then launches a kind of really retro campaign, modelled in large part on Edward III's great victories, although strategically somewhat different, and wins a startling succession of victories between 1415, the Agincourt campaign, and his own sudden death in 1422. Henry V is taking advantage of a civil war in France between two factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, who are at war because the French king has gone mad, Charles VI. So Henry VI kind of inserts the English into this war, teams up eventually with the Burgundians, destroys French armies, conquers Normandy, gets all the way to the walls of Paris, and forces in 1420 a treaty on the French called the Treaty of Troyes, by which Henry V of England becomes, quote, heir and regent to the crown of France.

37:53When mad Charles VI dies, Henry V is going to be not only king of England, but king of France as well. Sort of like he's beaten the ultimate boss. Then Henry V dies at the age of 35 of dysentery and leaving an infant son not even one year old as his successor. So that's 1422. Now, things don't go immediately wrong for the English, which is remarkable, really. In fact, they stay pretty OK until 1429 when Joan of Arc comes along. But at the moment Joan of Arc rises in 1429, the English, with Burgundian support, sort of conquered everything in France down to the River Loire. And it's not unthinkable, the Siege of Orléans, that if they take Orléans, they're going to enter southern France and the full conquest of France is on the cards.

38:47However, in 1435, the Burgundians switch up on them and France reunites under the king Joan of Arc could help Charles VII. And from that point on, England is increasingly at a disadvantage, partly because, largely because, the King of England, Henry VI, Henry V's son, who'd been an infant in 1422, has grown up to be absolutely uninterested in war, absolutely incapable of domestic or foreign government, and shell-shocked in the face of the reality of power, completely hopeless England dissolves into a sort of leaderless crisis of its own and the French start to chip, chip, chip away at all the English possessions in France in Normandy in particular they take Maine back until in 1453 at the Battle of Castillon not only have they won back Normandy they also have shrunk Gascony that bit in the southwest down to almost nothing, destroy the English and Gascony, take Bordeaux, and it's all over.

39:56There's nothing left except for Calais by 1453. And that then sparks in England the Wars of the Roses, the civil war, the dynastic wars between what becomes known as the House of Lancaster and the House of York. And from that point on, there's vanishingly little possibility of the English doing anything whatsoever except defending Calais. There's a late stage hurrah in 1475 under Edward IV, Yorkist king, who tries to do a little bit of Henry V cosplay, raises a big army for 13 ,000 men, takes it over to France.

40:30Konstantin Kisin:But as soon as he gets there, he realises, I'm not really into this. I'd rather be at home kind of squiring wenches and eating cakes, basically. And so signed a deal with the French where they agreed to pay the English to just leave them alone. Treaty of Piquenny of 1475. The claim to the Kingdom of France is not dropped. So Henry VIII, early in his reign, 1413, he's a young man, comes to the throne, decides he's going to do his own Henry V cosplay, but again, it comes to nothing. With the benefit of hindsight, 1453 is the end. Once the English are being kicked out, they're really not coming back in any meaningful sense.

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43:10Francis Foster:Dan, as you know, we're massive feminists on the show and so is all of our audience. And it strikes me that we haven't addressed the central figure in this whole story, which is, of course, Joan of Arc. Of course. A miraculous character, genuinely. One of the miraculous characters of history. Yeah, an extraordinary character

43:32who's, it's so difficult to disentangle, maybe this is true of a lot of characters, but it's extremely true of Joan, to disentangle the real person from the sort of the shroud of myth and storytelling that kind of sits over the top of her, but makes a material difference at this pivot point in the Hundred Years' War. It's the Siege of Orleans, 1429. and the English seem to be ascendant. The direction of travel seems to be relentlessly south, as in the English is pushing further and further and further into what remains of French-held France. And then suddenly this peasant girl from this weird bit of eastern France turns up, waving the flag and saying, God's spoken to me, I'm going to lead the Dauphin to his coronation at Rhin and we're going to take back France, and then it actually happens.

44:28Francis Foster:Well, not only does it happen, but she plays an active role. She plays an active role. She's never been trained as a knight, goes into combat, leads men into battle. I mean, is there an... I ask this question genuinely. Is there an explanation that does not include the divine that actually can tell us what happened? Yes. I mean, I don't know how much from a sports fan you are, but this idea of momentum and belief. Like, we talk about this in sports all the time, that something will galvanize a team. Sure, but isn't what happened a little bit more like me turning up, persuading Pep Guardiola that I should play up front, and then he sticks me up front and we start smashing them in?

45:08Francis Foster:Isn't it a bit more like that? No, because Joan wasn't smashing them in, you see. It's like having this... In a manner of speaking. I'm sure you would be. It's like having this incredible kind of mascot just suddenly. But you can't disentangle it from the divine. I know that you want to. I don't want to. I'm asking if it's even possible. No, I don't think you can. You can't disentangle Joan of Arc's effect on the French at Orleans and for a little while thereafter from the medieval worldview that God is active in the world and through people at times. You just can't. And she, whatever, you know, there's a whole set of language that is a modern language that we could use to describe Joan of Arc.

46:04And some of it would come from the language of mental illness. And some of it would come from sort of, you could use the language of sort of like the woo-woo realm or sports psychology or any of those things. I've just picked the sports psychology one and tried that out, and you, ineffectively, as it turned out. It's no good. You have to use the terms of the time. And the terms of the time are like, there was this moment when God intervened. That's how it was understood by everybody at the time. And so that's the best explanation. It didn't last very long, because God's intervention was time-limited through Joan.

46:43She outlived her usefulness, and the end of her story is a tragedy, really. discarded by the French, and then treated pretty appallingly, in just basic human terms, by the Burgundians and subsequently the English.

47:01But then revived later. Her revival is as much of a part of her story as what actually happened at the time. and this 19th, 20th century revival of Joan of Arc as a symbol of Frenchness and of the kind of miraculous, the providential within the French character is important. And, you know, you introduced her with a comment about feminism. That's a part of Joan as well. You know, she's now... She drifts through different types of being an icon. At the moment, she's a sort of partially feminist icon, right? I mean, and it's not hard to see why, because she dons the male armour and she comes into a man's world and she seems to materially affect it.

47:46And she satisfies a lot of the yearnings of modern feminism. But she also used to satisfy a lot of the yearnings of modern French nationalism. She's just a palimpsest. You can write your own story onto her and she still looks good standing there with a helmet on and the flag on her.

48:03Konstantin Kisin:So what you're saying is she's Claudio Ranieri at Leicester City. I knew that that was what I was looking for. She's Claudio.

48:10Francis Foster:And now we've reduced the number of people who get the references down to about three. At least three. At least three. But from a historian's perspective, in a practical sense, do you believe that the turnaround in French fortune happens if Joan of Arc doesn't come along when she does? Oh, what a great counterfactual. Probably, eventually. Really? Probably. How much further could the English have pushed realistically? I mean, behind the scenes, Henry VI by this stage was coming on for his eighth birthday. Within five years, it would be pretty clear that this was not going to be a military leader of any sort whatsoever.

48:50So, I mean, the English willingness to finance effectively a civil war in France, which is what the English... up until the Treaty of Twain 1420, when Henry V signs this treaty that says, I'm the heir and regents of the crown of France. It's the war from the English taxpayers' perspective is we're paying to win back what's ours by right. Once the English king starts to make reality of becoming the king of France, so that it's the possibility he's going to wear these two crowns, the English taxpayers get very cold feet and say, well if you're king of France tax your French subjects to pay to conquer the whole of your realm of France because that ain't our concern anymore.

49:35The whole calculus of the war shifts. So to return to the question of the 1420s into 1430s had Joan of Arc not come along and now I realise I'm flick-flacking back to being more of a structuralist than a great man.

49:49Konstantin Kisin:But deep down the English would not have had a the king was growing up to be absolutely uninterested in war the English taxpayer would probably not have stomached much more of this. Making the French pay for their own conquest was difficult. At some point, something had to give and probably would have. But Joan is this, she's the spark, right? She's the spark and she gives the French the belief momentarily that they can win this critical siege at Oléon and then the momentum shifts.

50:26Francis Foster:There you go. You believe in the great man of history, unless it's a woman. I believe in the great woman. I'm just messing with you.

50:33Konstantin Kisin:The more I read about history, particularly English history, the more I realise it's really dependent on the king. Edward II, terrible. England was in the doldrums. I know this is a simplistic view of it. Edward III, great king. England rose again. And you look at, for instance, the Black Prince, who I think he developed dropsy, didn't he? And you think, how different would England have been if he hadn't have got sick and he could have ruled for a longer period of time as Edward III? And maybe that would have deferred Richard II coming to the throne, who made a complete what's-it of it. Yeah, this is right.

51:13I mean, the quote-unquote great man theory of history goes in and out of fashion, right? When I was growing up and I was studying, it was well out of fashion. And everything was structuralist. And the whole belief was really this concentration on the character of leaders is for the birds. It doesn't really make much difference. The history is the product of grander forces than this. And here we are in the sort of early 2020s. I think that you'd be a fool, right? You know, we're living in an age where the personalities of the rulers of their superpowers powers are critical to the state of the world and this historical pivot point which we seem to be living.

52:01If you take Xi 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. Trump in the US, his disinterest in most of history, his kind of personal peccadilloes and and notions of how things should be absolutely critical to America's developments of power, Putin and Russia, and so on and so on. So to take that back to the kings and queens of England, yeah, it does matter that Richard II was a sort of petulant kind of pacifist with a narcissistic personality disorder. That's of material importance to English history.

52:46To your counterfactual, what if the Black Prince had not gotten sick in there and had succeeded as Edward IV. Things could have looked different. I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean better. Of course, it could be a different kind of bad. The Black Prince was a fantastic general, but he probably lacked some of the kind of easy flexibility,

53:16the diplomatic kind of smarts that his father had. He was a more rigid kind of militaristic leader. That could or couldn't have been the best thing at that time. Another good counterfactual is what if Henry V hadn't died at the age of 35 in 1422? What if Henry VI had had an apprenticeship? Henry V's great advantage was that he became king at 26, or one of his great advantages, King at 26, after a long, difficult 13-year apprenticeship where he was fighting, where he was standing in for his father, when he was ruling as regent effectively when his father was ill, he came to the throne like a complete politician.

53:57Henry VI came to the throne at nine months old and had to grow up as king. You see a rough pattern across English history of kings who have become kings as children having a really difficult time. They never have this opportunity to make mistakes. They're growing up way too close to power. So yes, there are all these counterfactuals we can run. But I think that to your point, yeah, really, it does matter who exactly these people are. And there are some advantages in this period to having a hereditary monarchy based on primogeniture. in theory, it cuts down the likelihood of a gigantic civil war every time you need to change care, because the rule is the rule is the rule.

54:45But it also introduces this massive genetic lottery to government. Like, who have we got next? Oh, Christ. Or who have we got next? Yay, by chance.

54:58Francis Foster:I've always wondered about this, Dan, though, because, you know, there is the saying, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Like, I'm not exactly like my dad, but I've inherited quite a bit from him. I'm sure the same will be with my son. But the story you tell, it's almost like, you know, the son is Nigel Farage, the father is Zach Polanski. And you just, you go from Trump to Biden within one family. How does that happen? Well, we've all seen this happen in families. It depends, you know, that, it sounds like you've, you know, you admire your father from that. Sure. Well, somewhat, sure, in some ways, yeah.

55:36But we often see these cases where the child wants to become the opposite of the parent, right? Or the child takes after the other parent or whatever it might be. We don't create these identicates of our children. And you also have the spoiled brat phenomenon, right? Like the kid who grows up not having to struggle. this is a sort of trope a mainstay of history i'm not just talking about kings and queens but um i can't remember who someone's written about this you know one of those oldie timey malcolm gladwell type people you know just john ronson or someone wrote a study of you know kids of successful people they don't have to or very seldom do they have to really struggle themselves and sometimes it's the struggle that makes you.

56:26So, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons why. Oh, you know, if you take Edward II as an example, well, he was the younger kid. He was the baby of the family. He was like the 14th or 16th kid to be born, right? And we were supposed to have King Alfonso, his elder brother, Henry VIII, who was supposed to be King Arthur. And then King Arthur was no more and it was the younger son who was sort of the spare, who's thrust into the limelight, having grown up preparing for something totally different.

56:59Konstantin Kisin:So, I mean, this is what makes it fascinating. And I'm glad, to slightly rehearse an earlier point, I'm glad that we're back in this age which people are taking personality and history seriously because it just makes it more approachable and meaningful and this faceless era of total structuralism within history, I found quite depressing. I like the people. Taking the historian's eye and looking at our society and our civilisation, there's been a lot of talk about, you know, the West is in decline, all of that kind of stuff. From your perspective, what do you see there? Do you think we are in a lull, in a bit of a dip, or do you see it as being terminal?

57:46is the West in decline? No, I mean, I think these sort of grand arguments are really attractive, right? We love to talk in epic terms. The idea that, and increasingly, and this is a sort of sidebar, but increasingly with the hybridization of human thinking and machine thinking, we like to think in binaries as well. It's this or it's this. We're in decline or we're in ascendancy. Well, history don't work too much like that. But it seems fairly likely that right now we're living at an inflection point. and that the future, because of the technological revolution we're living through, which is being applied across the board from warfare to employment to, I mean, you know, almost every facet of life is undergoing rapid change, that this is an era of opportunity.

58:56and I think in some ways it's being thought about at a leadership level more seriously in the East than in the West.

59:09I mentioned Xi earlier on. I think he may not be right in his analysis of history or his assessment of Chinese likely superiority. I don't know that he is completely right in that, and I don't think that his assessment of American weakness is totally accurate either. But he's certainly thinking seriously about the historical moment. I think that in the West there's a recognition that, oh, something's up. but it's not being necessarily gripped hard by anyone at the moment. In government, I think it's being gripped pretty hard by people at the top of the tech industry and there's a strong argument to say that the people at the top of the big tech companies at the moment are the effective rulers of the world in many ways by proxy.

1:00:11and I think that we will certainly look back on this period mining it for all sorts of clues about how the world that would ever unfold by say 2050 comes to look like but this talk of is the Western terminal decline it's very tempting but it's things don't really work like that

1:00:34Francis Foster:Well you added the terminal part I think the terminal is where, that's where it becomes a bit of a tenuous claim. But I think if you were to look at the civilizations that you outlined and their relative positions and directions of travel, you could hardly look at Europe in particular and say this is Western Europe. And this is a... Oh, there are a lot of metrics that are very worrying. Yeah. Of course there are. Birth rate, the growing inequality gaps, the basic ability of young people to find a stake in the essential bits of society, you know, as a matter of course.

1:01:18The grand problem of the size of the state that now afflicts so many Western countries, you know, the basic unaffordability of what's been set up. And the lack of a seriously clearly stated alternative for the post-war settlement. That's part of the story of our times. What are we now? June, we're talking in the UK, in a period where the prime minister is a sort of lame duck. there's no you know political arithmetic that should allow for this but has completely failed to articulate any policy vision of how this country should move into the future has just sort of said well we'll just kind of see what happens and there's a clear awareness among you know you don't have to be a student of politics you can just be any gazer down the pub Where are we going?

1:02:18What are we doing?

1:02:21What are we going to do about all of these obvious problems, which are the failure seriously to tackle the social dislocations of immigration? As I say, the employment opportunities of young people coming into the workplace, what are we doing about it? So there's a decline in the quality of leadership and there are some pretty worrying metrics out there.

1:02:50Francis Foster:Well, this is what I was going to say. If we take your comments about the great man of history theory, it sort of feels like we've got 10 duds in a row, basically. Well, yes, I agree. I do agree. There's not a lack of people with ideas out there. Not a lot of them want to go into frontline politics. for reasons we can discuss. Something else that's happened in the UK, not so much in America, well, possibly in the States as well, does have a medieval analogy. And I promise that I don't believe everything has a medieval analogy, but this does. In the Wars of the Roses, which is that English Civil War I mentioned, which follows on from the Hundred Years' War, which we've been discussing, after about a generation of polarized politics as we'd call it of like factionalism and of the decay of central authority and growing lawlessness and and social dislocation and economic drift the smart analyses of the time all tended to say what's happened is that we've introduced what they call it variance into our politics, which is to say there's a toxicity in the political process, which is the irreconcilability of factions, which is the bitter quality of politics, which is the negativity.

1:04:21That in itself is the problem. And the constant churn of leaders is in itself the problem. And I think if you look at British politics over the last 10 years, let's say, or even let's say, yeah, certainly 10 years since Brexit, but maybe going back to 2008, a financial crisis, you could say that the problem in itself is now the kind of the writhing and the disaffection, that that self-perpetuates. And the moment that you, you know, we're looking at ditching the Prime Minister, because as the chant goes, Keir Starmer's a wanker.

1:04:58Konstantin Kisin:That's like, everyone thinks that. But then the next reaction to that is, well, fuck off and get someone else. And as soon as that person hits a sticky patch, fuck off and get someone else. They become the wanker. They become the wanker. And the reaction to the wanker is to ditch them straight away. And so what you then have is a politics that, on a sort of pragmatic level, can go nowhere because it never gets beyond, like, its first trimester or whatever. You know, like, the government can't develop, grow, institute policies, have people in charge of departments that can do the really sensible, boring stuff and kind of turn departments around.

1:05:39If you think about the success stories in British politics over the time we're talking about, they tend to be where someone stuck around for a bit in a job. You know, while Michael Gove was in charge of education, you know there was there was the possibility of serious reform slow reform but what we're about to see in the UK is you change change the I mean already the health secretary where Streeton quit having actually started to make slow progress on on the big problems of the NHS and then quit because of factional politics within the party and so now someone else will come in and it all starts again so so these constant restarting the variance that's in the politics is a is now a central part of the problem.

1:06:18And it shouldn't be at the moment, because in the UK you have a government which was elected with a gigantic parliamentary majority.

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1:07:53Francis Foster:Yeah, I'm in two minds about all of those points because on the last point, yes, it's true they got a massive majority, but they only got it because reform destroyed the Conservative Party, my subjective opinion. And then on the other stuff, I mean, the toxicity of politics is something that I think everyone is really concerned about. But I also think, I imagine someone else sitting here making the opposite argument and saying the toxicity of politics is the consequence of the fact of where the country's at. And then, of course, you add the technological piece on top of that, which is we now, I mean, I've given this example a thousand times, but I really do think it just explains everything.

1:08:32Francis Foster:On YouTube, I was many years ago sitting late at night watching YouTube because I didn't have kids then. Oh, you'll soon be doing that, be watching Cote Mellon with him. Well, what I was watching was William Hague and John Prescott having a parliamentary debate when they were both deputy to the leader. And it's a game. It's a playful game because the social media isn't there. They're not trying to get a hit on TV yet quite. So William Hague takes the piss out of John Prescott basically not being able to speak properly. And John Prescott doesn't say, look at these snobby Tories abusing the hard work and working classes.

1:09:12Francis Foster:He says, on this side of the house, we may get the words wrong, but we get the judgment right. In other words, it's a game that's played according to a set of respectful rules, even if the parties are, they're not enemies, their opponents, right? And then you have technology like we have now. We changes that completely. And now everyone stands up in parliament so that they get a clip on Twitter or on whatever. And I think that's why it's... I hear and agree with people when they say politics is toxic, but then I kind of go, well, A, you've got the technological piece, and then the country is kind of f***ed, and you have to unf*** it for people to become un-toxic about it.

1:09:51I think we'd probably agree. I mean, I think that the part of the toxicity of politics is that it's now optimising for a different set of media. And just as, I mean, Haig and Prescott, in the example you've given, were probably somewhat, somewhere, maybe optimising for the parliamentary sketch writers up in the gallery. That's right. And maybe a bit on the news, but who knows. Whereas now, it would all have been thinking about optimising for a totally different media, which rewards a totally different style of it. And the obsession, that obsession with optimizing for social media for all sorts of reasons, one of which is it gives you like definable metrics, which, you know, it's jobs worthiness.

1:10:37That's part of the poison in... Part of the reason why it's incredibly hard for anyone to actually do anything in politics, because all the frontline politicians are just thinking about how this is going to clip up for Instagram. You have behind the scenes the blob, as it's often called, but a civil service which is dominated by a completely different set of thinking and those that can just dig its heels in and not be bid and can run a completely different set of policies. And vanishing out. And then you plug in the lack of appeal of a political career to really elite, forceful thinkers. I mean, there are tons of problems with politics at the moment.

1:11:26And to sort of plug this into the great man theory, one of the superficially appealing, but I think probably troubling trends that I hear a lot is people saying, well, what we need is a benign dictator. because they're so disillusioned with the failure of political process that they want an easy answer. They want, OK, well, give me a great man. Give me somebody who's going to come in and just ride roughshod over process. That's part of the appeal of Trump. This outsider who rides into politics. And it's part of the appeal of Farage as well. He said, I'm outside all this. I don't deal with all this.

1:12:11I just come in and speak straight sense and we get on with it. Well, yes, to an extent. But do we even need to rehearse the dangers of creating dictatorship? Maybe we do. Maybe that's another part of what we're grappling with at the moment is the receding out-of-living memory of the 1930s and 40s and the 20s, for that matter. The sort of disappearance into sort of abstraction of what was the world like last time that there was, you know, that all the international kind of institutions were sort of discarded and, you know, the falling into spheres of interest became the way that politics were. What was it actually like?

1:13:06What happened? That's now something that's in the history books to which most people, let's be honest, don't pay attention. My grandma died earlier this year at nearly the age of 100, and when my mum was clearing out her house, she found the handwritten war memories. My grandfather, who'd been 15 or 16 years old when he went to sea with the Merchant Navy in the Second World War, the outbreak of the Second World War, 12 or 14 pages. And it's his memories of sailing around the Atlantic, and he sailed around the whole world in the Merchant Navy, being pursued by U-boats, blown up in the Thames by a German mine, survived that, you know, all sorts of adventures.

1:13:43And I remember him telling, not telling many of those stories, but I remember him. I remember him as being somebody who still, and my grandmother, both my grandmothers spoke about the Second World War and it was within, it was not within my memory, it was not within my parents' memory, but it was in our family's memory. Everybody knew somebody who'd served or been affected by the Second World War, who'd been affected by this set of disastrous political unravelings, that the whole of the post-war settlement was designed to mitigate against happening again. And now all of that, vanishingly few veterans left, and most nobody knows one.

1:14:26So all of that has receded, and it's like that settlement is clearly looking pretty tatty, and there needs to be a new one for a new world with new technologies and new modes of thought. However, to lean back on things that were tried and tested to destruction in the 30s and 40s is...

1:14:52Francis Foster:No, I definitely agree with you that that sentiment is rising. I'm not sure I quite agree that Farage is attempting to be a dictator. No, I don't agree with that either. But I agree that part of his appeal is being the outsider. Let me be really clear. I don't think Farage has those dictatorial instincts. In fact, I think he actively doesn't. Quite the opposite. I agree. But I think that his appeal is that he seems to be, you know, if I go down the pub, not many people talk about reform policies, but they know Nigel. Like Nigel. It's Nigel. And it's this idea that there's a guy out there who gets it, put him in charge.

1:15:34That'll do. Now, I don't know that it will do.

1:15:39Francis Foster:We'll find out. We will probably find out. We'll probably find out. Sir, were you going to jump in? Because I was going to say that reading your book about the Plantagenets,

1:15:52Konstantin Kisin:it just opened my eyes to strong and weak leadership. Yeah. And I look at Keir Starmer and what's happening with the West Streetings of the world He's called his ministers. And it just reminds me of Edward II and the nobles.

1:16:07Francis Foster:Let's hope he doesn't end up the same way. The way that read was quite brutal. I've never thought about, for all that Kirsten, Marie's a wanker. I've never thought about him as Edward II. But I'll say this. The effective leaders are the Edward III who understand how to bring people with them and who are able to galvanize and empower people around them. I don't necessarily think that that's the leadership that we've got at the moment. And the key to whoever is the leader that stands a chance of really delivering some meaningful change in this country will be somebody who has the strength of character to bring a strong team along with them.

1:17:00and if not to do the serious thinking themselves, to have that among them. I know you're going to talk to my old pal David Starkey soon enough and that's some of the thinking he's doing right at the moment. The awareness that it's quite likely that the next but one leader of this country or next but two or whatever after the next general election will be Nigel Farage, not unimaginable at all. the work has to be in place for that. There's a moral responsibility for the work to be in place to make that a serious government, a serious government with serious thought running through and a serious analysis and a clear, clearly explained and defined set of policies that go beyond the personality.

1:17:50Because it's, yeah, the strong leadership thing, a lot of that is vested in personality, but personality is just not enough. personality has to come along with and be able to be a vehicle to articulate policy.

1:18:04Francis Foster:Yeah, no, that's completely true. And from your lips to God's ears, and frankly, whoever is elected, I would hope that is all true, right? Whether it's Zach Polanski or Nigel Farage.

1:18:14Konstantin Kisin:Final question is always the same. What's the one thing that we're not talking about?

1:18:18Francis Foster:We really should be. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Castles. I never, well, I was too modest. I genuinely love a castle. I'm glad you love a castle. I love a castle as well. And we were talking before we came on that there was a piece of YouGov research done in 2024 that said 70 % of, no, 77 % of people think castles are the best thing in the whole of the Middle Ages. And I would count myself among them. So you've written a book about them. Written a book about them. This is, I mean, it's castles in the biggest, broadest sense, 3 ,000 years of history goes from the Bronze Age, you know, the origins of castles in the kind of, I mean, it starts with Troy, you know, the citadel, siege of the wars, not only the birth of what becomes castles, but the birth of Western literature.

1:19:00It charts its way all the way through to nuclear bunkers. So it's like, it's the big, it's the big history of, it's the history of structures, but it also asks a kind of deeper question, which is how do we protect the things that we love and care about?

1:19:15Francis Foster:Wonderful. Well, I haven't had a chance to read it, but I definitely look forward to it. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming back on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where Dan's going to answer your questions. How much were common soldiers paid? If you're a longbowman in the English army, how much would you be paid? Or was the promise of loot your only reward?

1:19:59We'll be right back.