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- [00:01]
Matt Lewis
Hello, I'm Matt Lewis.
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Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
And I'm Dr. Eleanor Jaenega.
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Matt Lewis
And we're just popping up here to tell you some insider info.
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Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
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Matt Lewis
With the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original.
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Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Documentaries, such as my new series on everyone's favorite conquerors, the Normans, or my.
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Matt Lewis
Recent exploration of the castles that made Britain.
- [00:29]
Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
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- [00:32]
Matt Lewis
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe or find the link in the show notes for this episode. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades, we cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here, find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The Hundred Years War, plague, trouble around every corner, and to top it all, a spectacular naval battle. Dan Jones is giving us all this and more in Lionhearts, the thrilling conclusion of his debut historical fiction trilogy that began with Essex dogs. As you'd expect from Dan, the history behind the narrative is impeccably researched and retold. We're going to focus on a particular moment that you may or may not have heard of before. What was a medieval naval battle like? And how did the battle of Winchelsea in 1350 set the tone for Anglo French relations? Dan is on hand to reveal all. Welcome back to God Medieval Dan. It's fantastic to have you with us again.
- [02:24]
Dan Jones
Well, it's lovely to come back. I like being invited back. It means I probably did something right or someone else dropped out.
- [02:30]
Matt Lewis
Oh. Or you need to come back and apologize.
- [02:34]
Dan Jones
That's the other one. Yeah.
- [02:36]
Matt Lewis
We're going to talk a little bit about Lionhearts, which is the conclusion of your historical fiction trilogy. And we're going to talk about one of the key moments that takes place in the book as well. But I wondered if you could help catch us up with the Essex dogs. What is going on at the opening of Lionhearts? When are we and what is happening?
- [02:55]
Dan Jones
Right, so as you say, this is the third novel in the trilogy. The first took place the Battle of Crecy 1346. The second was set at the Siege of Calais, 1346 through September 1347. We pick up the story the not quite a year later in 1348 in a border ship just approaching the city of Bordeaux. This is a ship that's been sent down as part of a fleet by King Edward iii, who's, you know, the king famous for launching the Hundred Years War. And the ship is part of a fleet that's making arrangements for the king's daughter, Princess Joan, to marry a Castilian prince. That prince will one day go on to be known as Pedro the Cruel when he become king of Castile. Now they're coming towards Bordeaux, but this being 1348, the Black Death, the plague that wiped out 60% of the population or thereabouts of Western Europe, all told, is heading in the other direction. So we, we start with this snapshot of several surviving members of the Essex dogs from books one and two getting their first glimpse of the Black Death.
- [04:09]
Matt Lewis
Is the Black Death a spanner in the works that you kind of couldn't avoid? It feels like something you wouldn't necessarily want to write into a rip roaring historical fiction story of battles and everything else, but I guess you can't ignore it when you're writing in this period.
- [04:21]
Dan Jones
I think the Black Death as spanner in the works is going to win the prize for 2025's understatement of the year. Matt? Yeah, Black Death, quite a spanner.
- [04:30]
Matt Lewis
It's just not a fun thing to write historical fiction about, is it?
- [04:33]
Dan Jones
Well, I don't know, it presents certain challenges. I mean, one of my favourite works of recent historical f is James Meek's To Calais in Ordinary Time, which is set right in the midst of the Black Death with three characters heading down to the south coast of England to go and join the garrison at Calais. And I found it an extraordinarily moving and inventive and creative book that was sort of on the precipice of a world about to change sort of very fundamentally. So I mean there are great possibilities with the Black Dead. It is not per se a cheerful subject, but it does, I think, allow possibility of, well, firstly kind of pinging some memories that certain of us may have of a recent pandemic. Although I don't try and overplay those too much. But there were. I found writing a book in 20245 about the black Death gave me some opportunities to have sort of wry little bits of fun. I mean, there's one character who presents very early on as what we might call a Black Death Denier thinks it's all been made up by the lords and the government. It really isn't too sure that they're being told the truth. And even when it's fake news, even when confronted with it, it's like, ah, it doesn't look too bad. Looks like a stack it off play, you know, so you can have some fun. I don't think that it's the job necessarily of historical fiction writer to always try and make the past about the present or indeed the historian. But the, the, you know, the. The Black Death presents certain opportunities in that way. I was really interested, and I was interested in this right from, you know, when I conceived the trilogy. I knew there was going to be a third volume that was in or around the Black Death. And it was really just deciding whether it was set, all set during the pandemic, or whether it was a book about the world just after. And I. I came to the conclusion when I really got into the weeds with Lionhearts, that I was very interested in the period just after the first wave of the Black Death, when the world is, you know, in. In Covid terms, re. Emerging from lockdown, such as it was. I mean, the things are not comparable, I stress. So this is where the book picks up. We have this opening chapter illustrating the world of the Black Death and a sort of snapshot to suggest infinite horrors. And then we skip forward to the spring of 1350, so about 18 months forward. So implied between the prologue and the first chapter is the worst pandemic the world's ever seen. I mean, I didn't feel that I was gonna gain a huge amount by describing that in kind of endless horrific detail. I thought that actually much easier to have people sort of poking their heads out of their front doors and going, wow, okay. Because, you know, the book itself is set after the really intense experiences that the characters have been through at the Battle of Crecy, at the Siege of Calais. And so I wanted this third volume to encapsulate a sort of, It's. It's happened now what do we do with the rest of our lives kind of feel.
- [07:37]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. And it's, I guess, another dimension that you can add to your characters, that this is an experience they've had to go through and endure. That that adds another dimension to the way that they will confront any more problems that they're likely to come across in the book.
- [07:49]
Dan Jones
I think so, yeah. And I think that actually one of the things that I was interested in was seeing how different characters reacted to the Experience of the Black Death, of everything they've been to in the first two books in different ways. And so we have Love Day, the main character, who's sort of carried us through the first two books and has always been coming through towards the end of his career, if you see what I mean. For him, this is slightly just one more thing. And just at the point that he thought he was able to sort of relax, you know, his part in fighting in the Hundred Years War was over. He's kind of got a retirement plan. He saved a little bit of silver from his adventure, as in France, and now just wants to sit and own a tavern and relax. Is now faced with a world that has sort of spun on a sixpence, as it were, and he has to reevaluate absolutely everything in his life at a point where he thought everything was certain. There are younger characters in the books for whom the Black Death and the prospect of war beginning again seem tremendously, well, exciting in a way that actually, to their normality as young people is catastrophic upheaval. And so they look upon the world with a fundamentally different attitude. And so there's this whole range in between. And I was also interested in, you know, in this nexus of plague and war, in testing the characters and just seeing which one they felt affected their lives more. I mean, you'll know this very well and from all the work you've done on the Middle Ages, that when you look particularly at the Black Death, one expects a sort of amass, massive moral and cultural panic of the sort that we lived through with COVID And you often don't really see it. You know, you see that. You see the sort of immediate effects and the incredible mortality. But there is a sense that this is just the sort of thing that happens only slightly worse than normal.
- [09:47]
Matt Lewis
And I think, because they had an explanation for it in a way that we don't, in that kind of. God is clearly upset with us, and we need to do something to put that right. It's almost like there's a way of rationalizing this terrible thing has happened and may eventually pass. And then it seems to me that probably we get less record of ordinary people's kind of grief and the impact that it has on them emotionally. And we can see a bit easier the impact that it has on their prospects of the creation of opportunity that comes along and then. Which the government is quick to stamp on and all of the problems that that will cause leading up to, like, the Peasants Revolt, maybe.
- [10:22]
Dan Jones
I think you're absolutely right, and I Think you're spot on and pinpointing that worldview in which when bad things happen, it's part of a sort of cosmic plan and one can actually live expecting bad things to happen because this really is deep baked into the nature of the world. Like that whole worldview, particular as it is, you're so right to the Middle Ages, is so alien to us now. In a world in which science has moved and replaced religion and particularly sort of late stage 20th century, 21st century, kind of the very, very late stage of the Industrial Revolution into the new communications and information technology revolutions, there is this sense that mankind really ought to be able to solve any problem. We ought to be able to science our way out of it. And that I think was what was so shocking about COVID 19. A relatively, if you compare it to the Black Death, innocuous world pandemic in terms of mortality, in terms of severity of the disease, if you didn't die from it. And I'm comparing it like for like now with the Black Death, but it just didn't fit, fit with our worldview in a way that the Black Death, you've hit the nail on the head, really does fit with that medieval worldview. So, you know, these are interesting things for historians and I think they're also interesting things for historical fiction writers because they just create these possibilities of throwing the reader into a world in which all the assumptions are just fundamentally different and you've got to kind of plunge into them and see the world through fresh new eyes.
- [11:56]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, yeah. You almost need to reprogram your, your mind and stop thinking like a 21st century person. The Battle of the Winchelsea is one of the key moments in the book and I wondered if we could focus a little bit on that because I think it's one of those battles that, that might go under the radar for a lot of people. It's not a particularly famous battle in the Hundred Years War, but it holds a bit of interest, I guess. So can you tell us what leads up to the Battle of WinChelsea? What brings two fleets against each other?
- [12:22]
Dan Jones
Well, the sort of medium term story, I suppose, is that the English and the French had both been pursuing an alliance with, with Castile. As I've said already in 1348, Edward III thought he'd got there by marrying his daughter, Princess Joan, to the Castilians, to the heir to the Castilian throne. And then that was scuppered by the Black Death. And it really ended the possibility in the immediate term of an Anglo Castilian Alliance.
- [12:52]
Matt Lewis
And it's scuppered by the fact that Joan dies of the Black Death, doesn't she?
- [12:55]
Dan Jones
That's quite right. Joan dies of the Black Death. And so the marriage is off. And that whole potential union between England and Castile, which was designed to be so fruitful in isolating France. And then, you know, and also in lending the considerable might of Castilian ships to the English side of the Hundred Years War, that opportunity was lost and the Castilians threw in with the French. And this is a very big problem for the English in the Hundred Years War. Even by the stage we're at in 1350 with the hundred Years War, multiple fronts are now open in this war and it's becoming extremely complicated for everybody involved. And so there are these sort of shifting patchworks of alliance. But anyway, Castile at this time is an important power to be courted, not least because the Channel is such. Is becoming more and more an important frontier of the Hundred Years War. I mean, England have taken Calais, so there is a bridgehead on the French mainland. There is of course, Bordeaux, Gascony and everything in the southwest of France. But there's a sense that the war could also quite easily come to England in the form of raiding. The raiding of towns like Winchelsea, like Portsmouth, like Southampton, like Hastings, know the sink ports. And then further along the coast to the west, these are all quite vulnerable to raids by, you could call them. They're not really navies, They're. They're pirates as much as anything, but they're the French. And Castilians are now taking aim at those, those, those towns. So England having been the, on the, in the third, late 1340s, very much the belligerent on the front foot. On the front foot, you're launching Chevreshe after Chevresher into French territory. Normandy and Gascony is now facing the possibility of being quite vulnerable on the south coast. So Castilian alliance matters and it goes the way of the French. The Castilian fleet during the spring of 1350 has really been menacing English shipping in the Channel. There's been a lot of sort of, to borrow a term from the classic HBO series the Wire, there's a lot of rip and run activity where they're boarding, robbing and sinking English mercantile ships at sea. That's a very bad problem when one of the key lines of English international trade is between England and Flanders. Raw wool going out to service the cloth trade in Flanders. Anyway, the Castilians have been up to no good in the Channel throughout the spring of 1350. By the early summer of 1350, it transpires that there is a big Castilian fleet at port in Flanders, loaded up to the gunwales with stolen goods and cloth that's been purchased in Flanders. And at some point that fleet is going to set sail back to Castile. It has to go before the autumn in order to divest all of this partially ill gotten gain. Edward iii, presiding over a realm now emerging from the shock of the Black Death, isn't going to stand for this. And so orders as many ships as he can get together to mass in the ports of the southeast, principally Sandwich, but also Winchelsea, and really lurks there throughout the weeks of the high summer, waiting for the Castilians to make their move so that he can try and intercept them, take revenge on the Castilians for the damage they've done to his, his kingdom's economy and national pride.
- [16:52]
Matt Lewis
And I guess we need to remember here that this is before England was quite the naval force that it will become. So it's easy to think of England having control of the seas, you know, policing the Channel, but England just simply isn't a big naval superpower at the moment.
- [17:07]
Dan Jones
No, it's not. And there have been sea battles sort of now and again when it's been most effective up until 1350. This tends to be when English ships go and raid French ports and burn fleets sitting in port. That's kind of what had happened at the Battle of Sluys in 1340 and prior to that, if we think back to the reign of King John, you see some examples then. But no, by and large you're right, Matt. The English are not a major naval power as they'll become certainly in the, in the 16th century when the King wants to assemble a navy for purposes of war, there are a few royal ships. And when I was researching Lionhearts, I had great fun down in the National Archives looking at the records for the fitting out of ships like the Jerusalem, which is one of the. And the Cog Thomas, which are two particularly large ships within Edwards III's core fleet. Very luxuriously appointed sort, sort of feather beds on board. And you can see all the entries for payment in the National Archives for these quite luxurious fittings for the ships as well as the banners and streamers and the sort of appurtenances of war. But largely when the English king wants to assemble more than about a dozen ships, they have to be impressed from merchants and, yeah, sort of forcibly taken and either either hired or forcibly taken and used for purposes of war, whether that's for transport or for fighting. So, no, we're not a great naval power at this time.
- [18:47]
Matt Lewis
And that kind of royal need for ships is sort of the origin of the Cinque Ports idea, isn't it, that this is. They have special privileges because the king can kind of go to them to secure shipping from merchants as and when they need it. And in return, the Cinque Ports get, like I say, certain privileges.
- [19:04]
Dan Jones
Yeah, that's right. And if you look at a town like, like Winchelsea, it's a good example of what, you know, we could almost call a public private partnership if it were happening in. In the 21st century. You know, this Winchelsea in particular had. So there'd been. There'd been another WinChelsea during the 13th, 12th, 11th, 12th 13th century that had been washed away by the sea. And Edward I had lent his backing to the building of a new Winchelsea, which is still the site where we see Winchelsea today. And it had been built with sort of two things in mind. Firstly, as somewhere that was going to be a sort of thriving little trading port, and secondly, somewhere that could be pressed into use as a military port as and when required. It's a fascinating town. It's still a fascinating town today. Early on, when I was writing Lionhearts, I went. In fact, I had a lovely day with my eldest daughter. We went down one very sunny early autumn day. And Winchelsea is a very picturesque town still, with a lot of the medi. Medieval buildings visible from. But also the. You can see Edward the First's plan. I mean, it is a grid system town, very, very carefully constructed. It's a. So I. This will mean more to, I suspect, to English listeners than it will to American or those outside England. But I call it a medieval Milton Keynes because it's built on a sort of perfect grid system. And underneath a lot of the older buildings there are undercrofts, there are little sort of cellars, which again dates to the. The original building of the town in the Middle Ages. So it's a fascinating place. It's changed somewhat over the years because of the shifting shape of the coastline, but you can really, really get a sense there, particularly as you stand next to one of the old sort of medieval fortified gate houses and look out to sea, you can really sense that this was somewhere that was. That was essential to trade and handy for military activity as well.
- [21:13]
Matt Lewis
So we've got Edward III needing to regain a bit of control in the Channel, also needing to gain face, you know, he's had all his shipping raiding looking like he can't protect his own merchants. Never a great look for a king. And presumably, you know, he needs to make sure that Trey can get between Gascony and England effectively. So all of these things are causing disruption, Edward, that he needs to sort out. As you say, he's there lurking, waiting for this Castilian fleet that he suspects is coming. Before we get on to what actually happens in the battle, do we have good sources for the Battle of Winchelsea?
- [21:49]
Dan Jones
We've got a couple of great chronicle accounts which sort of rely on one another and add little bits of detail to each other. There's Jean Lebel, Jeffrey Baker and particularly Jean Froissart, who, as usual, sort of read everything and then jazzed it all up in his own account. But there are good chronicle sources and it seems so there are sort of cliffs outside Winchelsea from when the battle happened. Queen Philippa and other members of the royal court watched it all unfold. I mean, slightly think of Elizabeth I Tilbury, although not quite, but there was a sort of spectators gallery. And it does seem that the most detailed sources had access to either were there or had access to people who'd been there. So there's quite vivid accounts of the progress of the battle and lots of great incidental detail about what was happening on deck, on the ships as well. And some really grisly accounts of the severe injuries that were sustained by people who took part in the battle, you know, coming back missing bits of themselves and bearing scars by which they would always remember having been there. So the sources are quite good. I say that with a note of slight hesitation, because over the course of writing this Essex Dogs trilogy, I mean, the first book deals with the Battle of Crecy and we are, as you know, Matt, incredibly spoiled for great sources about the Battle of Crecy. Not just the chronicle accounts, but the administrative accounts of Edward III's army on campaign, the kitchen diaries, you know, you can reconstruct what people ate every single day of the campaign and using the same source, exactly where they were. Loads of chronicle accounts on both sides, tons and tons and tons of. Of information about recruiting to the army. There's not that same sort of material with the Battle of Winchelsea. Putting my sort of historical fiction writer's hat on, that's partly a good thing and partly a bad thing. Writing a book about the Battle of Crecy was, in some senses wonderfully easy, because all you had to do was just Follow the day by day. You knew exactly where they were and the detail was just sort of presented there. But it, it did mean there wasn't much wriggle room or wiggle room to do the thing that novelists are supposed to do, which is invent. The second book in the series, Wolves of Winter, was set at the Siege of Calais, and the sources for that are much patchier. And so I would say that writing Lionhearts was somewhat closer to writing Wolves of Winter in terms of the availability of really detailed source material. What you do have, however, and this was true for all three books, is this incredible tableau denouement. Suddenly I've slipped into Frenchified English. But you see what I mean? You have these amazingly vivid scenes that the novel drives towards. In Wolves of Winter, it was the famous image, sculpted by Rodin, of the burghers of Calais coming out to beg for their lives, with Edward and Queen Philippa interceding. In this book, Lionhearts, we have just this amazing battle. And the scenes before the battle are incredibly sort of picturesque as described by the chroniclers. And the action of the battle is totally deranged in many ways. It's a really exciting feeling as a novelist, as the plot is progressing, where you know that you've got this huge set piece to work towards.
- [25:33]
Matt Lewis
But did you enjoy having a bit more freedom than you had maybe in Essex Dogs?
- [25:37]
Dan Jones
I think I did. I mean, I think that certainly the books came in the right order for my personal development as a novelist, in the sense that when I wrote Essex Dogs, I'd never written more than a short story in my life before. And so it was very handy to have a little sort of, you know, a narrative rope to pull myself along with in terms of the day by day detail of the sources for the crazy campaign. And I think by the time I got to Lionhearts, I was feeling a bit more confident and so was never very disheartened not to have, you know, not to know what happened for the entire month of June, or whatever it might be. And this, this book as well, I, I wanted to set in two realms in a way that, that I, I, I definitely hadn't done with. Certainly with the first book with Essex Dogs, I wanted there to be a world of Winchelsea where Love Day and some of the Essex dogs are trying to deal with the aftermath of the Black Death, the sense that war is coming back to them whether they like it or not. And then I also wanted really for, for the first time to look at the Court of Ed III at home. And so there's a section of the book that's set in Windsor castle around the April 23rd St George's Day celebrations, such as they are seen through the eyes of Romford, the youngest member. Well, he was when the, the story started of the Essex dog. So I didn't mind having the freedom to sort of flick flack between those two different worlds and to see, to sort of do the high, low a little bit. Yeah.
- [27:29]
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- [28:13]
Matt Lewis
So if we, if we get back, back to Winchelsea, then what do we know about the two naval forces? Do we know how many ships they have? Do we know what kind of ships are they? Fairly evenly matched.
- [28:25]
Dan Jones
Fairly evenly matched in terms of numbers. Very unevenly matched in terms of quality and size of ships. There's a line by one of the Chroniclers that says that when the fleets finally approached one another, and you know, we're talking dozens of ships rather than hundreds, there's probably, probably four dozen, 50 or so ships on either side. But the Castilians have far bigger, far better ships. The line from the Chronicler says they towered over our ships like castles over cottages. And the difference in the. Just the sheer height above the water line of the Castilian ships to the English ships meant that the Castilians aboard the ships were able to just rain down projectiles. I mean, pretty basic stuff, rocks and iron bars and whatever. They were just much, much than the English, which made fighting difficult.
- [29:18]
Matt Lewis
How do the two fleets approach each other? If Edward must have been aware that he's the underdog here, he can't just plow in and go toe to toe with the Castilian fleet. Does he have a plan?
- [29:28]
Dan Jones
Well, you sound like a sensible military strategist, but maybe people around Edward III were saying such things, but the advice fell on deaf ears. The plan, insofar as we can tell, was to sort of hang around and wait until someone saw the Castilians coming. And so the English have these ships in Sandwich, in Winchelsea, in communication with each other and they're waiting. It's quite boring to wait, just in my experience and I think in most people's experience, and one of the best ways to pass time while waiting, certainly in my experience, is to get drunk. And so that's what happens aboard some, certainly of the English ships and definitely aboard Edward III's ship. One of his pals, Sir John Shandos, has recently been to Germany and has come back with. It's a bit like, you know, in the sort of around the turn of the century, somebody going to Berlin and coming back with a whole bunch of white label techno records. So John Shandos has come back with like all the latest cool German songs and dance moves. And so a party breaks out aboard Edward III's ship. The King himself, we hear from the Chronicles, was incredibly nattily dressed head to toe in black, despite it being the very last days of August. Black beaver skin, cap on his head and a sort of velvet jerkin and really looking very dashing. And Sir John Shandos breaks out the German tunes and everybody's drinking and Chandos is showing off the kind of dance moves and everyone's just really having a good time. It's I suppose like an Ibiza party boat, only with the prospect of impending war. And suddenly the cry goes up that, oh my God, guys, Castilians. And there's a sense that everyone's like, oh yeah, Croms. I'd forgotten about the old Castilians. We're having such a good time. So Edward gives the order that the English tactic in battle against these much larger ships is simply to sail into them.
- [31:33]
Matt Lewis
So he's just going to go toe to toe with a much stronger.
- [31:36]
Dan Jones
He's gonna go toe to toe. He's just going to go kamikaze into the side of these Castilian ships. And I, well, I try and imagine the order going out in, in Lionhearts. It's an extraordinary move from Edward iii.
- [31:53]
Matt Lewis
Who'S.
- [31:56]
Dan Jones
He'S not in my mind at any rate this reckless, usually quite a calculated, level headed, pragmatic, willing to take.
- [32:08]
Matt Lewis
Risks certainly, but also willing to wait for the tactical advantage.
- [32:12]
Dan Jones
Yeah, it's kind of weird. And you know, I think this is one of these occasions where a great moving force in history is people being drunk. And I think Edward III is really drunk and it's like, okay, well there they are, here we are, let's go get them, lads. And the techno music, the German Music goes off and here we go. It's a huge gamble that nearly goes very, very wrong. The English ram raid. The Castilians punch big holes in the sides of some of the Castilian ships, but are then sort of locked together with these ships and out of control, some cases taking on water. The Black Prince's ship, the Bilbao, starts to sink and he has to be rescued from aboard his own sh. The Black Prince being Edward III's eldest son and heir. The fighting is astonishingly vicious and as I said, the Castilian ships being much bigger once they've been sailed into, now really have the advantage of position because the English ships are kind of locked into them. And so the English are pelted relentlessly with all the missiles and projectiles that the Castilian can. Castilians can take aim with. There is a lot of bloodshed. However, Edward III's gamble pays off. And by and by, I think a lot of this, as usual with English armies in the Hundred Years War is because the English have put a lot of longbow men aboard these ships. The battle turns in, in the, the favor of the English. I suppose it's worth saying, although I'm sure most listeners will know this, that a ship battle, a naval battle in the 14th century, kind of resembles a land battle only on ships. I'm not, I hope, being too facetious there, there are cannon at this point, cannon, primitive cannon, had been deployed on the battlefield at Crecy in 1346. But we're not talking about ships armed with kind of, you know, rows and rows and rows of cannon so they can fight from, from far away. There's, it's longbows, crossbows try and board the opponent's ship and then hand to hand fighting. And the, the longbowmen aboard Edward's ships, as so often happens, have the advantage over, over the Castilians. And we have accounts of them fighting. They, there are tables aboard the ships and benches which are turned over and uses barricades from behind which the, the archers shoot. And yeah, eventually they turn the tide in favor of the English, manage to board the ships and then start hurling the Castilians overboard. And that's why this battle, as well as sometimes being known as the Battle of Winchelsea, is also known as the Battle of Espanol Soul Mer. The Battle of the Spanish in the Sea.
- [35:11]
Matt Lewis
Sounds like a very English way of christening a battle.
- [35:13]
Dan Jones
Clues in the name.
- [35:14]
Matt Lewis
What happened? We chucked the Spanish in the sea. It's interesting though, isn't it, that by the time we're in the middle of the 14th century, there doesn't seem to be recognizable naval battle tactics. Like you say, they simply take land battle tactics and put it on sea. It's almost like no one sat down and thought, is there a better way to do this? Is that just because naval battles don't happen often enough for someone to be concerned about that, or do they genuinely view these tactics as the best way to fight at sea?
- [35:41]
Dan Jones
I think it's the best way to fight at sea in this sea. I think if you go out the eastern Mediterranean and you read battles of the Crusader era, naval clashes, if you've got Venetians, Byzantines, those powers of the eastern Mediterranean at this time, where you've got much sort of sleeker, slicker, more maneuverable galleys, where you've got Greek fire, things look somewhat different. But what we're really seeing in, you know, in the English Channel, Bay of Biscay at this point is merchant ships kind of tussling with each other. And the primary purpose of these seas is as a economic route for the various trades of this part of the world, of cloth, of wine, of salt, you know, so that there is, they're not really optimizing for fighting lots of battles. So when one does come along, as I said earlier, it tends to be either one lot, burn the other lot's ships while they're in port, or if they are to clash at sea. Yeah, it's much more like a land battle.
- [36:51]
Matt Lewis
Yeah. Do we have a sense of how long this battle lasts? Because if these ships are getting kind of knotted together and there is, you know, missiles flying around everywhere and then hand to hand fighting, it must have been pretty intense and frightening. Does this go on for a long time or is it a fairly quick affair?
- [37:07]
Dan Jones
No, it's, it's an all dayer really, and indeed an all nighter as well. And so this is hours and hours and hours of sort of slow motion tussling really. Eventually kind of about half of the Castilian fleet manages to limp away, but the English capture the other half. I mean, there's a really heavy fallout on both sides. The Castilians lose thousands of men and half their ships. But the English sustained some severe and in some senses self inflicted damage both to their ships and to their troops as well. And as I mentioned earlier, there are these sort of really quite horrifying accounts of the, the injuries that people come back having sustained with their sort of ears hanging, noses hanging off and eyes gouged out and you know, limbs and, and fingers and such missing. But it's presented and here this is sort of slightly reminiscent of Shakespeare's Henry V. You know, it's presented in the Chronicles as well. You know, anyone who, who you see in years to come bearing these injuries, they can say they were there, they were at this sort of this massive tear up in the, in the Channel which in its day was, well, we can certainly say a good deal more famous than it is now. And this, I think it's worth contextualizing it in Edward III's sort of run of astonishing victories. I mean he was just unbeatable at this stage and from arguably from Schloss, but certainly from Crecy onwards. This run of 10 plus years from Crecy through to Poitiers in 1356, he just couldn't lose. And eventually that I think became self sustaining idea that the English were on land or at sea just too much for anybody who came up against them. And it was, it was a massive part of Edward III building this golden reputation as at that point the greatest of all the medieval kings that England had.
- [39:31]
Unknown Speaker
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- [40:16]
Matt Lewis
He's almost able to harness that, that kind of legend going before his armies that you know, even before we face them, we, we're pretty sure we're going to lose. Which then as you say becomes a kind of self fulfilling fear or prophecy that the French are sort of starting on the back foot all the time.
- [40:31]
Dan Jones
Yeah, and this is also in some ways Edward Swansong as a military commander because the last time that he and the Black Prince are in the field together and after that it's really his son, the Black Prince and, and you know, and sons actually John of Gaunt gets involved towards the end of the reign as well who take over the frontline leadership of English armies in the field.
- [40:55]
Matt Lewis
So we've got drunk Edward with stupid battle tactics, but somehow he wins, albeit with fairly heavy losses of life and limb on both Sides too. Was it fun throwing the Essex dogs into the middle of all of that absolute carnage?
- [41:12]
Dan Jones
It's fun for me, not so much fun for them. Yeah, look, I'm in a position now where I first came up with, started sketching these characters in like 2017 and this third book published 25. So it's the guts of a 10 year project. And it's been incredibly good fun for one thing, to see these campaigns and battles that I'd written about from a sort of historical perspective, often occupying the viewpoint of Edward or maybe the Black Prince or whatever. It's been incredibly fun, but also I think in some ways historically instructive to look at these big moments in the Hundred Years War through the eyes of quote unquote, ordinary people. I mean, the Essex dogs are fictionalized. They're not based on real individuals from the Hundred Years War. I would have dearly loved in non fiction to write a sort of Band of Brothers, easy Company account of a campaign in the Hundred Years War. But insofar as I can tell, or I know that's just not possible based on the evidence that survived.
- [42:32]
Matt Lewis
Before we leave the Battle of Wintersea altogether, I wondered if you could give us an idea of what you think is the, the legacy in the wider context of the Hundred Years War of the Battle of Winchelsea. Because I think it's one of those that you can, as you say, it's an English victory at a time when Edward is building up this huge head of steam and seems to be unstoppable the last time that he and the Black Prince fight together. But it's also kind of a bit of a nothing victory. Nothing really comes out of it. It doesn't really change anything. Is it important or is it easy to overestimate or should we remember it better than we do?
- [43:05]
Dan Jones
I think it's, you know, given that there's a sort of a strand that runs through English history of, of naval development and naval warfare, which, which, you know, runs from King John's reign, if not, if not, not even earlier, from, you know, King Alfred or whatever, all the way through to, you know, the, the heyday of the English Navy patrolling the world seas in the 18th and 19th and the centuries and even up until the two world wars. It's a landmark along the way. It's an interesting battle. It has this kind of preposterous and amusing and kind of slightly scary set piece when the King's sort of drunk and dancing as the battle begins. I think that its legacy we've talked about Somewhat in the Hundred Years War, it bolsters Edward's reputation in terms of what are the immediate effects of the Battle of Winchelsea for the security of the Channel. Actually the very next year, the Castilians are still out there and still causing trouble. And well, as you know, as we move through the 14th century, the English south coast is never really secure so long as the Hundred Years War is going on. So it's not a sort of seismic game changer in the way that the Battle of Poitiers where Jean II is captured is though, in the way that the Battle of Agincourt, you know, which gives Henry V so much momentum to roll through those campaigns of the next four years in France and take the French crown is it's in the same, not, not in the same league as the Battle of Castillon in 1453 where the English finally kicked out of France. You know, that being said, it's part of this incredibly important phase of these victories in the 1340s and 50s that set Edward III up and in some ways actually ensure that the Hundred Years War is going to be the 100 years war and not just the sort of 15 to 17 years war, you know. So I think that in its place in that phase of the Hundred Years War, it's apparent proof that Edward was unbeatable on sea as well as on land. And then it's kind of interesting role in the longer journey of English naval power. All make it a pretty interesting battle. But the thing is with writing fiction, that doesn't really matter. And Bernard Cornwell told me this years ago, he said, when you're writing history, you have the big story and the little story. The big story are these kind of huge world changing moments and the little sort of the lives of people are these kind of anecdotes that they just dangle off at their color. They're incidental. When you're writing fiction, everything's flipped on its head. And the big story, the sort of the cosmic importance of the battle, its legacy historically, is all that's background. It doesn't pertain to the lives really of the characters involved. Everything that matters in this story is what's there in front of these characters right now. And things that would be utterly trivial in the grand scheme of history are the most important things in the world is relationships, friendships, partnerships, brotherhood, survival, loss, hope, or all of these things are the business of the novel. And that's, that's what makes writing history and fiction so different, wonderful.
- [46:19]
Matt Lewis
And that's why people should go and Read Lionhearts.
- [46:21]
Dan Jones
God bless you.
- [46:22]
Matt Lewis
Before I let you go. What are you working on next? Anything you can tell us about any more fiction, any more non fiction?
- [46:28]
Dan Jones
I don't have another fiction book book in the works at the moment, although I've got two and a half ideas and I've got to decide between them. I am writing a non fiction book about castles and it will go from the Bronze Age to the nuclear Age. It's called the Castle and it's about the development of castles over. Well, you know, we cast, cast the lens very wide. It's almost 3,000 years. But the particular development not just of the buildings but of the mythology of the kind of the dream fantasy of the castle. So it goes from the Trojan War to kind of Disneyland. So I'm having an amazing time writing that at the moment. And that's for next autumn. Autumn 2026.
- [47:13]
Matt Lewis
That's something to look forward to. Is that just an excuse to go to Disneyland? No.
- [47:17]
Dan Jones
How dare you. It's an excuse to go to. I was actually out at. I was actually out at Schliemann's archaeological site of Troy Hisarlach in Turkey two or three weeks ago. So totally amazing. So it's not so much Disneyland that grabs me as there are, you know, I've seen a lot of castles, but there are one or two I've had my eye on for a long time and this is a great reason to go and see them.
- [47:44]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I saw that you were out investigating Troy and now I know why.
- [47:47]
Dan Jones
Heard it here first.
- [47:49]
Matt Lewis
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dan. It's been an absolute pleasure to catch up with you, to catch up with the Essex dogs and to hear about their grand hurrah at the Battle of Winchelsea. And hopefully people enjoy reading Lionhearts. Thank you very much for joining us, Dan. If you want to find out more about the fate of the Essex dogs, then Dan's latest novel, Lionhearts is out now, complete with their experiences of the Battle of Winchelsea. You can find Dan's previous visit to talk about the opening novel of the trilogy in our back catalogue, as well as some great episodes on the Hundred Years War, including Jonathan Sumption's visit to the podcast to explain how it all ended. Dan was also here not too long ago to talk about his biography of Henry V. There are new instalments of God medieval every Tuesday and Friday. So please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentary with a new release every week and all of History Hits podcasts ad free. Head to historyhit.com subscribe. Go on, you know you want it. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.
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Unknown Speaker
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Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
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Dan Jones
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Dan Jones
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