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- [00:00]
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- [01:45]
Leanne (Marathon Runner)
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- [02:09]
Dan Jones
You like the power to do?
- [02:10]
Leanne (Marathon Runner)
Bank of America references to charitable organizations.
- [02:13]
Dan Jones
Is not an endorsement by bank of.
- [02:14]
Mia Sorrenti (Producer)
America Corporation welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with historian and broadcaster Dan Jones on War, Plague and Lionhearts. The Hundred Years War was an age defining conflict. The violent struggle between England and France spanned over a century and permanently transformed the art of European warfare itself. In his Essex Dogs trilogy, historian and author Dan Jones retells the battles and bloodshed throughout the eyes of the Essex Dogs, a fictional platoon. Now, as the series reaches its climax, Dan joined historian and broadcaster Alice Loxton at Smith Square hall to discuss War, Plague and the third and final instalment of the trilogy, Lionhearts if you'd like to listen to this episode in full and ad free, why not become an Intelligence squared member@intelligencesquared.com membership or tap the IQ2 extra button on Apple? Now let's join our host, Alice Loxton, with more.
- [03:24]
Alice Loxton
Thank you. Thank you so much for coming out tonight, everyone. It's wonderful to see you here in this beautiful space. Thank you to Intelligence Squared for having us. I am honored to have been asked to host this event with the wonderful Dan Jones. And I'm sure Dan needs no introduction. I'm sure many of you are great fans of his book. But if you are new, Dan is, of course someone who's done incredibly well, you know, presenting documentaries on tv. He's been doing all sorts of work with Netflix and many exciting projects coming up, which I'm sure you'll tell us all about. Dan, podcast host of this Is History. If you haven't listened to that, do give it a listen. And of course, many fiction and nonfiction books about the medieval world, all of which, or some of which are on sale today at the back with the wonderful Waterstones team. So. So I'm delighted and I've been a long admirer of Dan's work and as a fellow historian, so it's pretty exciting for me to be here. And I'm a great admirer of Dan doing all his work in getting people excited about history and the medieval world. So, Dan, welcome. It's wonderful to have you here.
- [04:33]
Dan Jones
What a lovely introduction. Thank you very much. I'm very excited to be talking to you as well, with all your sort of passion and enthusiasm for history.
- [04:41]
Alice Loxton
So let's dive into it. So you've done all this work for many years, non fiction?
- [04:46]
Dan Jones
Not that many years.
- [04:47]
Alice Loxton
Not that many years. He's only just getting going. You've been a nonfiction writer. You've been incredibly successful in that field. Tell us about how you came to write fiction. Is this something that you've long wanted to do? Were you nervous about doing it? How did you kind of fall into that, and how's it been so far?
- [05:07]
Dan Jones
Well, for a long time when I was writing nonfiction, people would say, do you think you'll ever write fiction? And I think that was probably a fair question because in the nonfiction works that I've written, I'd always leaned into kind of cinematic storytelling, biographical storytelling, you know, quite scenic, colorful approach to writing nonfiction. In fact, when I was first starting out as a nonfiction history writer, I'd written, read a lot of screenwriting books and a sort of buried screen Structure in the nonfiction to some extent. And so it was a natural question, I suppose, for people to say, would you ever write fiction? And I always used to immediately say, no, I would never do that. I would probably mess it up and bring shame on my family. And I would also sometimes reference my great deep fear, which was that it was one thing to write a bad work of nonfiction, probably just got a few things wrong. But if you wrote a bad novel, it would expose the fact that you didn't really understand what it meant to be a human being. And that, for me, felt like a much greater level of jeopardy. So I always used to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And then I got to writing my 10th history book, and I was about. I was coming up on 40 years old, and those two round numbers started playing on my mind a little bit, because secretly, deep down, for everything I was saying, I did want to write a novel, because everyone wants to write a novel because they think they can do it and they'll be so fantastic at it. What tipped me over the edge, so to speak, on more than one level was back in the summer of 2019, I interviewed George R.R. martin, the author of the Song of Ice and Fire novels, which returned into HBO's Game of Thrones. And George just seemed to be having the time of his life. I mean, he was a great consumer, is a great consumer of history. He reads so much history, but he was turning this history that he read into something else, into this sort of living, deep breathing world full of fascinating and fabulous characters that was seeped in history, but was something different. And I found that really inspiring. And after. And I'd sort of been cooking up, like little sketches and ideas for a while, and after that night, sort of interviewing and then having dinner with George, I was like, okay, you know what? I'm coming up on 40. I'm either gonna do this or I'm not. And so that's when I pitched to publishers what became the Essex Dogs trilogy. And I didn't bring shame on my family yet, at least not for that reason.
- [07:45]
Alice Loxton
And how have you found it? I mean, it's quite a different experience writing fiction and the freedoms that that brings and the challenges as well.
- [07:54]
Dan Jones
Oh, yeah, it's definitely a different experience. And I think that it's a. It's physically a different experience. I mean, I feel like it's a different feeling in the body, in the mind. Everything about writing fiction is, for me, at any rate, is different from writing nonfiction. And this is something that actually, when I talked To George, he'd said. He said, there are two types of writers. There are architects and gardeners. And I would say that in writing nonfiction, I'd always been an architect. You know, there's a deep structure, there are underpinning kind of shapes. Everything is quite carefully planned before the writing happens, at least mentally, so that I know when I'm writing nonfiction, it's going to. The story is going to sit over the top of a really sort of premeditated grid. A story, architecture. And George said, well, he's a gardener. The gardener plants a seed and waters it and lets it grow, and you just sort of see what happens. And the idea of that as an approach to any sort of writing terrified me, honestly, because that was just so antithetical to the way that I'd set myself up as a nonfiction writer. And so when I started doing the Essex Dogs books, I just was like, well, he's probably wrong. I'm just going to architect the shit out of these. And so I sort of built this kind of careful structure of how I thought the book was going to go, and then sat there and really, for the first time in my life, stared at the tyrannous blank page and blink cursor, couldn't do it. And realized that, no, writing fiction is a completely different experience. And you have to surrender in many ways to the story. You know, you create characters, you give them scenarios. Those can be driven by history, informed by history, but once they're in that place, you have to find a way to let yourself. Or I had to find a way to let myself go and just let this story move. I found that really challenging. That was probably the hardest thing in writing fiction was that personal sense of surrender to a story. But once you get there, and I've heard, you know, a lot. I know a lot of writers say this, but I found it to be true. There's an amazing point in writing a novel where these characters start doing things on their own, and you sit down and write and you think they're going to do one thing, and they go and do something completely different, and you're really just clutching at their coattails and trying to keep up. And you know at that point that this thing is working, and that though you, the author, are of course in charge of this, and you will edit and shape and craft the story, it's really getting that feeling that it's getting away from you and you're just trying to keep up with it. That's a sweet spot. Now, I've never really encountered that Sort of that sensation as a nonfiction writer. And I think I'd be worried if I was experiencing it as a nonfiction writer. But now I feel like I've got this brilliant podcast where I can go back and forth and I'm writing a non fiction book at the moment, but there's a space for writing fiction there as well. And that. So I'm 44 years old now and I feel like in the last four years I've really kind of developed as a writer more than maybe I had since my early 20s.
- [10:54]
Alice Loxton
Yes. I mean, as someone who's written nonfiction and I think the publishing world is so divided into fiction and nonfiction in this very kind of black and white way. And all the best selling lists, you know, you look at them in separate ways and it's so interesting to me that you've now darted across into the other realm, you know, do you feel that you're now looking back on nonfiction? I suppose, in a completely different way. I mean, where do you feel you belong? Do you feel like you belong in both camps?
- [11:21]
Dan Jones
I didn't know I was coming here for therapy. Where do I belong? I don't know. I suppose I'd always considered myself a writer. Right. And although that doesn't describe everything I've done in terms of writing history, in terms of, you know, talking about history, broadcasting history, I've done, I've approached historical storytelling, lots of different media, and I suppose that I think about fiction as one more of those, you know. Of course, you know, I'd written long form nonfiction books, I wrote a newspaper column for 10 years. I'd written a lot of magazine journalism when I was much younger. I'd written podcast scripts, written talks to deliver over the course of an hour. And so I suppose this felt like adding another form of writing. I mean, the material for me will probably always be somewhat related to history, but as a writer I'm interested in exploring different forms. You're right though. I mean, publishing does tend to have brackets and genres and, and it likes putting things in boxes because frankly, our friends at Waterstones, thank you for your service at the back, need to know which table to put the book on. I mean, that's a serious practical problem. And so you have to define yourself. This is advice I would give to any writers, aspirant writers out there. But you have to define yourself and know who you are and understand exactly where your books are going to sit in the shop. And unless one gets to a position where they have a shelf that exclusively says Dan Jones at the top, you know. And I'm writing as fast as I can. I hope that will come to pass at some point. Then you have to sort of know. So history is the topic. Fiction and nonfiction are my. In book terms are my forms.
- [13:13]
Alice Loxton
Sure. And I think those genres and those brackets get. The lines of those get even more blurred all the time. You know, there's a lot of people kind of playing. Playing with the genres or particularly narrative. Narrative nonfiction, I suppose. Sometimes reading like fiction and sometimes being presented like fiction, even, you know, in the covers and all that kind of thing.
- [13:31]
Dan Jones
I think. I think you're right. I mean, I can't pretend to be a great expert on publishing, but I'm interested in it, certainly. And I wonder if we're seeing a change or the change is already upon us within publishing terms, where readers will attach to a writer and follow them where they go. And maybe that's the case. I'm sure, you know, you could write anything you wanted. And you'll have a core of people that are attached to Alice Loxton and what you bring and what you have to remember then as the creator, as the sort of writer is okay. What do people come expecting from my writing, whether it's in fiction, whether it's in nonfiction? And I would hope that there's some connective tissue between the nonfiction and the fiction. And one of the ways I've tried to foreground that in the Essex Dogs novels, or at least to make that, you know, if I'm bringing people who primarily read nonfiction into the world of fiction, the way that I've tried to sort of soften that move between the genres is each chapter, for example, begins with a quote from a chronicle source. And then the chapter might run counterpoint to it. It'll play in the gaps in the sources so that these, the nonfiction and the fiction, are sharing a little sliver of the Venn diagram, at any rate, so that you can feel that these Essex Dogs novels in particular, whilst there is a level on which they're a caper and a romp and a meditation on what it means to be a man of a certain age and a certain time, they're also, in some ways a commentary on history and on the nature of historical sources. And the approach to storytelling is always in conversation with real historical sources. And there, I suppose, there lies a bridge between the fiction and the nonfiction.
- [15:22]
Alice Loxton
Sure. Yes. Well, we must get on to talking about your latest book, which is very exciting to have in front of us this beautiful gold cover, Lionhearts. And this is, of course, part of the trilogy, the Essex Jogs trilogy. Tell us, Dan, where have we left and where are we starting from in this book? And how have you approached it? The final part, the final crescendo, I suppose.
- [15:46]
Dan Jones
Well, by way of quick precisi and apologies, actually, no apologies. If you've read the two books, I hope you've read and enjoyed the first two books. And if you haven't, I hope you will. Essex Dogs began with the titular Essex Dogs, a sort of small platoon, for want of a better term, of ordinary soldiers in the Hundred Years War in 1346, getting off a boat on a beach in Normandy, a medieval D day, if you like. Only it's not 1944, it's 1346, 13th of July, 1346, and they're getting off the ships onto the beach not far from Omaha beach, and it's the beginning of the march that becomes the Crecy Campaign. And we take the story follows the dogs through to the Battle of Crecy a little bit later in that summer. So the action takes place over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1346. They have many adventures along the way. In the second book, which follows continuous from the first, we found those who'd made it through that first adventure moving on to the wars of Calais, which was where Edward III's campaign did indeed go. And if Essex Dogs was a medieval D day. Wolves of Winter, the second book in the series I conceived as a medieval Stalingrad. It was a bitter 11 month siege across the winter of 1346-7. And I wanted to try and recreate from the perspective of ordinary soldiers outside the besieged city and from the perspective of people within the besieged city, what the reality of a medieval siege could possibly have looked like. And so that was Wolves of Winter. And we left the characters in that book outside the walls of Calais shortly after the scene that was made immortalized, I suppose, by August Rodin in that great sculpture. Well, it doesn't stand too far away from here. One of the cast of the sculpture, anyway, the Burghers of Calais, where the citizens of Calais came out of the city to plead for the lives of everyone else who was in there with nooses around their necks to sort of throw themselves on the floor before an irate Edward III and Edward's queen pled for their lives and so on and so on. We've just seen that scene at the end of Wolves of Winter. The next thing that happens historically after 1347 is 1348. And if anyone knows anything about medieval history, then they'll associate that with one thing and one thing only, and that's the arrival of the Black Death. 1347, 48, the Black Death, the worst pandemic in known human history, arrives in Western Europe, wiping out 60% of the population. Now, when I sort of first conceived this trilogy, I was quite clear in my mind that it was going to be a crazy book and a Calais book. And then I sort of scribbled vaguely as a check to be cashed by future Dan Jones, Black Death, question mark, question mark, exclamation mark, question mark. Now, as I said earlier on, I conceived this trilogy in 2019 and about a year later, a pandemic that, mercifully, nothing like the pandemic that arrived in 1348, arrived in Western Europe, and it was the COVID 19 pandemic. And coming out the other side of that, I was not totally of the opinion that anyone would want to read a pandemic novel. I was certainly of the opinion that I did not want to write a pandemic novel. So where we pick up in Lionhearts is a prologue that happens in 1348. Some of the Essex dogs, having mostly sort of scattered at the end of the second book, end up on a ship that goes. This is a real mission, a ship that goes down from England to Bordeaux to deliver the trousseau of One of Edward III's daughters called Joan, who was going down to Bordeaux to get married to the heir to the throne of Castile, the future Pedro the Cruel. When she did that, the Black Death was unfortunately coming in the other direction. And so we have a snapshot of Bordeaux in the grip of the plague. And then we fast forward from the prologue to the meat of the book, which the plague happens. And we pick up the story in the aftermath of the pandemic because I felt there was something much more interesting in writing a post pandemic novel about the Middle Ages than in writing the sort of, you know, the actual pandemic bit. And of course, James Meek had done that so brilliantly in To Calais in Ordinary Time that I felt I couldn't really top that. Anyway, so the guts of this story picks up, those of the Essex dogs remaining as they try and piece their lives back together in different ways on the back of war and plague. And one of them, Love Day, the very first dog that we met at the beginning of book one, is trying to live a peaceful retirement as a landlord in a pub in a sort of quite ostensibly sleepy coastal town in southern England. And another of the characters, Romford is trying to forget absolutely everything that's gone before and reinvent himself with some of the war booty he picked up in the second novel at the court of King Edward. So we get to see Windsor Castle at its peak at the beginning at the end of the Black Death and the beginning of the Order of the Garter.
- [20:56]
Alice Loxton
Thrilling. So tell me.
- [20:58]
Dan Jones
Thanks. Write me an Amazon. I thought you were going to keep going.
- [21:01]
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- [21:01]
Dan Jones
I mean. But you should say something. I suppose.
- [21:10]
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- [22:43]
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- [23:12]
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- [23:46]
Alice Loxton
But, Dan, you keep coming back to this medieval period and this, you know, in general, I suppose, in all of your writing, you keep coming back. And it's unusual in some ways, or perhaps it's not. But, you know, a lot of historians will dart around promiscuous, promiscuous. Perhaps you could say, why is it? I mean, as you've just, I suppose, illustrated, it is such a thrilling time. But, you know, you could say that about lots of moments in history. What is it for you that keeps bringing you back to these years? And why do you think so many people are so interested to read about them?
- [24:18]
Dan Jones
Well, great question. I never meant to be medieval. This is totally an accident. So I'll tell you a bit about how that happened and then I'll explain why I've stayed and where I've stayed. I've got to go back, I suppose, to. Not all the way to the Middle Ages, but I must have been 17 years old and I'd enjoyed history at school and I'd got a place to go and read history at Cambridge, and I really didn't know anything about what I was doing. And I asked my history teacher, Mr. Green, because you get sent a form if you're going to read history at Cambridge, or you did in those days, would be the summer of 1999, get a form that says, what do you want to study? And we'd done a lot of Tudors and Nazis, a lot of Tudors and Nazis at A level, if I had nothing else, I thought I'd knock that on ahead for a bit. So I said, Mr. Green, Mr. Green, what shall I put? And I don't think he was fully engaged in the question. It was like the last day of term. And honestly, I just wanted to go down Shandos park in Buckingham and drink eight cans of Foster's and smoke a deck of Benton and Hedges with my mates, frankly. So neither of our minds were fully trained on the question. He went, I don't know. What about medieval? I went, that will do. I ticked the box and put it in the envelope and thought nothing else of it, nothing else of it, until about the 2nd or 3rd of October, 1399, when I was sitting in the office with John Parry, my director of studies at Pembroke, Cambridge, saying, so, you want to be a medieval? He was to this, you want to be a medievalist? To me, like that was a sort of perverse Thing to do, a depraved choice of subject. I said, yeah, I guess so, if that's what it says on the form, mate, I don't know. He said, right, well, you can go. I'm going to send you to Sydney, Sussex, to see Helen Castor. She's a young, promising academic. And Helen Castor, I mean, known to you and I'm sure known to many, if not all of the audience here, is a completely brilliant medievalist. And so I, autumn of 99, went, and she taught me everything I knew, I know now, about the Middle Ages, and was absolutely captivating, incredibly charismatic, so thoughtful, such a sort of deft and flexible kind of mind. Really took. Took me through paper three in those days was a survey of England from it was King John through to the Henry vi. And I was just. I was just kind of hooked. And I kept going back to the Middle Ages. Now, why did I. What hooked me on it? Well, I found that this. This was a time where things were both strange and familiar, often at the same time. And it felt really as sort of on the balance between, you know, at one moment you could look at this world and either see something that had helped forge our world today, be it politically, constitutionally, with Magna Carta or with, you know, something like the. Well, now we could look at the Black Death and connected to pandemics, we could look at the sort of birth of the universities, any of these many, many things that the Middle Ages helped sort of form in the world we know today. And you can look at the people and sometimes go, well, I kind of get where they're coming from or how that particular bit of their brain was working. And then you kind of turn a corner, as it were, and you're like, whoa, I'm on another planet here. What are you guys doing? Thinking, talking about why are you behaving in this utterly bizarre way? And I love that sort of, you know, that liminal space between the strange and the familiar. And I feel that I've never tired of finding that within the Middle Ages. And I've never tired, certainly with regards to the novels, of trying to play with the idea of sort of empathy bridges between the Middle Ages and today. And that's a delicate thing to do because you don't, you know, you don't want to approach the Middle Ages and say, ah, they were just like us in different clothes, just not the case. But you also. One doesn't want to say, this is a time so far away that it's nothing to do with us either. So I'm interested in saying, how much of this world can we pull towards us and what's the point to which it just won't come any closer?
- [28:18]
Alice Loxton
So when you're writing, I suppose, you know, often fiction, it carries. Because you can identify with the characters. When you're talking about figures from the medieval period, did you, you know, how did you kind of approach making these realistic figures that might have uncomfortable values to. Compared to us today? And how did you keep them on side with us, I suppose, as people we might relate to?
- [28:49]
Dan Jones
Yeah, that's a great question. And in a way, I just sort of let them do the job themselves, if that makes any sense. What I had in my mind. Well, I'll tell you how I wrote the first. The first scene in Essex Dogs was really the sort of. The test of it. I had in my mind that I wanted to play in fiction, in a sort of thought experiment. And this had come from. When would it have been? Would have been the 1st of January, 2019. I'd rented this house in Normandy, quite close to the Normandy beaches, and a bunch of my friends had come and stayed for New Year. And on New Year's Day, we went down to Omaha beach and, you know, it was a sort of blustery day, and we were kind of walking off the night before and so on, and we, you know, it's a. You must have been to Omaha Beach a million times. It's an incredibly moving and profound place to go. And as we were. We were walking, we were kind of reflecting on, you know, what would you have done in such a situation. We were talking a little bit about why here, you know, all of those things that are pretty banal, I suppose, but naturally occur to you when you're walking on that beach. And I came away from that thinking not only about the. The familiar idea of d Day in 1944, whether it's familiar because we've read a history, you know, James Holland's history book about it, or whether. Because we've seen Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers or played whatever computer, Call of duty, World War II or, you know, or seen the Bob Capper photos or whatever it might be. You know, that's a. That's a familiar scene. And I was thinking, well, the same thing happened, more or less different weapons, not Messerschmitts and machine guns and barbed wire, but trebuchets and, you know, and horses and spiky things and longbows and crossbows and what have you. The same thing, or a version of this happened in 1346. Is it possible to write this, the medieval version of this setup? What does it look like and how does it feel? And I went. I mean, there's not much you can read of the ordinary soldiers experience. Experience of 1346. That's part of the purpose of writing this book, is it's a historical investigation into that exact topic. But I read an awful lot about D Day itself, and I read a particular article that was published in the Atlant. Yeah, the Atlantic magazine in the 60s, early 60s, I think it was an oral history of D Day called First Wave Omaha Beach. And it was mostly just the reminiscences of a lot of. Mostly American veterans who'd come ashore in that First Wave photographed by Bob Capper. And so I had that in my mind. I got really, really into the weeds with, like, the technical details of Edward III's campaign. Exactly what did they bring? You know, you can get into the administrative records and see how many horses, how many rolls of ch. How many pigs, how many, whatever, you know, it might be, were brought ashore there. And then just sort of fused them together and thought, well, I'll create these medieval characters and then just let them go in this scene and see who they become. And by and large, I let them become who they wanted to. They showed themselves to want to become. So you had Loveday, who showed himself to be a sort of, you know, a guy coming to the end of his career deeply uncertain about whether he's done the right thing in doing all the bad things that he's done, only certain that the thing that sort of motivates him to keep going is to look after the people he now reluctantly has responsibility for a sort of, you know, a reluctant, an ambivalent sort of hero in many ways. But then a character will leap into frame, like Father, who bears the closest resemblance to the landlord of my local pub. Total bastard. Right. And. Well, all right, I guess you're along for the ride as well. And I know he's a lot of people's favorite character because he's just. He's really bad. But honestly, if you want to see, just come down the Beehive and I'm going to show you. Like, I. I probably toned it down a bit, you know, Anyway, so, yeah, I'm rambling on.
- [33:17]
Alice Loxton
No, well, so without giving any spoilers, perhaps you could tease a few of the things that people might be able to expect from the final part of the trilogy.
- [33:30]
Dan Jones
Without giving any spoilers.
- [33:31]
Alice Loxton
No spoilers.
- [33:35]
Dan Jones
Well, it was very interesting to write a book that was set in England. The first two novels in the series are, as I've said, set in France. Edward III considered it England, but no one else was sort of playing along. And this is the whole business of the Hundred Years War. So to bring these characters home, I found very interesting. And then to play with that aftermath of the Black Death. So we find Love Day running a tavern, essentially, and telling himself over and over again, yep, this is what I want. This is fantastic. This is great. Gosh, Glad I don't have any fighting to do. That old fighting that was getting a bit much. Isn't this fantastic? And clearly not convincing anybody. Then running into. I'd been nerdily interested because I studied, when I was much younger, medieval legal history. I'd become quite interested in the labor laws that were passed in the aftermath of the Black Death, which is an emergency piece of legislation rushed through in 1349 and then made into a statute in 1351 which suppressed wages. I mean, basic economic supply and demand. Half the people die, wages shoot up because there's now a scarcity of labor. The government, not necessarily having read their Adam Smith because it hadn't been written at that point, still recognized what was going on and so passed a raft of legislation saying, uh, no way Wages cut pre pandemic levels and no higher. And you, you'll be punished and put in the stocks or whatever if you. If you break, if you either pay or receive excessive wages. So from that rather dry and dusty piece of legislation, I try and sort of bring out a story that doesn't necessarily go so great for. For poor old Loveday. The second part of the story, as I've already intimated, concerns Romford. And I was really eager to see having sort of, you know, Romford had dotted around in the first two books. Dotted, maybe too weak an adjective, but he'd been around the King, the Black Prince, you know, these. On the fringes of this world. But I wanted to throw him a bit more firmly into the midst of the Royal Queen. And I wanted to see more of the Royal court than we'd seen so far, because I had a feeling that the Royal Court, emerging from the sort of lockdown, as it were, of the Black Death, would be a kind of an edgy sort of place. And, you know, the guys at the National Archives helped me dig right into the nitty gritty of the records of the Royal court in the very aftermath of the. The Black Death. This is a book that's full of naval warfare, because the main enemy at this point is The Castilians and the English are set to fight them at sea. So we got right into the details of building the ships. But also in a parallel development, Edward III is rebuilding Windsor Castle. So we see Windsor Castle, but it's half a building site. And I really have got the receipts of, you know, the felled trees that are being delivered. And you see Rumford turn up in tow with Sir Thomas Holland, one eyed knight, who sort of war hero who we've met in a few of the books before, and his old new wife Joan, the fair maid of Kent, who is maybe my favorite character in the entire series. Had a lot of fun writing Joanie. So we see the court and then as I said, and the ships on the COVID will give away. This builds towards one of my favorite battles in the whole of the Hundred Years War, which is the Battle of Winchelsea, which is a sea battle fought against the Castilians. And much as in book one there's a famous scene from the Battle of Crecy which if you know anything about it, you know, which is the Black Prince gets into trouble. And Edward III says, well, let the boy win his spurs in Calais, as I've already said. There's this scene with the burghers of Calais coming out to plead for their lives. With the Battle of Winchelsea, there's a scene preserved by the great chronicler Jean Froissart. Whereas the English are waiting for the Castilians to sail past the south coast and they're going to intercept the Castilian navy. Edward III has a party on the deck of his ship and his mate John Chandos has come back from Germany and he's got the latest dance tunes and the latest dance moves. It's like someone coming back from Berlin with all the white label techno records, right? And so there's this lovely scene where Shandos, they're pissing it up on deck of the ship going, where are the Castilians? Hey John, play us a tune. And they're sort of prancing about and dancing and they're getting more and more drunk and then someone goes, oh Christ, it's the Castilians. Oh my God. Okay, Chandos, enough. We've got to go get them. And then for one reason or another, which the records don't quite explain, is Edward III gives a bizarre order to go ram raiding Castilian ships. And this book aims to make sense, just as the first book aims to make sense of why he might say that the Black Prince ought to win his spurs. This book aims to make sense in its court scenes just why a man might give such a bizarre order in the heat of battle.
- [38:53]
Mia Sorrenti (Producer)
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future events, why not head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program.
- [39:30]
Dan Jones
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