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Welcome back.
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It's Dan here. You're about to be thrust into medieval France where there's villainy and violence all around. Yes, including from our friend Henry V. But thankfully here at this Is History, we only have angels. There are royal favourite subscribers on Patreon who are a curious bunch that dig deeper into the history behind each episode. Favorites also get the full video drop of our bonus episodes, plus ad free listening, early access to every episode, and signed copies of my books like Henry V as well as much more, including a weekly discussion thread. And this week's question is this. Who do you think is the bigger villain in this episode? Henry V or the broken French nobility? Be an angel, have your say@patreon.com how do you think our medieval forebears felt when they figured out how to create depth in painting? And yes, whilst art history thanks them, I'd hazard a guess and say it gave them a new way to hold their nearest and dearest even closer now. Today you can do that to near perpetuity with an Aura frame. It's a digital picture frame that allows you to share photos and videos from your phone or all year long. That means you don't actually need to buy that printed souvenir photo from the castle gift shop, but if you do want to feel extra special, all auraframes come with a premium gift box free of charge for a limited time. Visit auraframes.com and get $45 off Aura's best selling Carver Matte frames named number one by Wirecutter by using promo code Dan Jones at checkout, that's auraframes.com promo code Dan Jones. This exclusive Black Friday Cyber Monday deal is their best of the year, so order now. Before it ends, support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.
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Hey everybody, it's Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better with Jonathan Van Ness. If you care about protecting real religious freedom for people of all religions and for people who don't want to believe in any religion, there is an event that's happening for you. I need it on your radar. The Summit for Religious freedom or the SRF pronounced sir. It's three days of connection strategy and action in Washington, D.C. and online April 25th to 27th. You'll hear from authors, lawyers and policymakers. Join an organizing institute to level up your skills and even do a Hill Day to meet your representatives and tell them why church state separation matters. You guys, this isn't just a conference, it's a community on the move. If you're looking for a way to get off the sidelines and into this fight of pushing back against Christian nationalism and building a future where LGBTQ, LGBTQ + rights, reproductive freedom, and strong public schools are protected. This is for you. This is a movement for big change and collaboration that strengthens our democracy, protects public schools, reproductive and LGBTQ plus rights, and more. Come learn, organize and leave with a plan and friends. You can learn more@the srf.org.
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The ditch that surrounds the city of Ruan is a terrible thing to see. Everywhere on its dry bed are makeshift homes assembled from rubbish thrown over the city's cannon blasted walls. Inside these hovels live people, but they're only just recognizable as human. Thin, wasted and starving, many barely have the energy to stir. Mothers slump, clinging to malnourished babies. Old people lie shrunken eyed, too feeble even to stir. From time to time they look up through the gunsmoke to the battered walls, hoping some guard on the battlements will take pity and toss down a crust of bread. But inside Rouen, there's hardly enough bread to go around. That's why these poor wretches are here. The army of Henry V, Lancastrian King of England, has besieged their city. They've had no fresh food for months and starvation has begun to bite. These folk have been designated useless mouths and thrown out of the city. Normally, when this happens, a besieging army will allow unarmed citizens to pass pass through the siege lines and drift away as refugees. Not Henry. Rouen is the biggest city in Normandy and the gateway to the French capital, Paris. Breaking it is not just a huge military challenge, it's a psychological struggle. Henry wants the people of Rouen and everywhere else in France to recognize that there is no master but him. Him. He needs them to feel desperate, to feel hopeless. Day by hungry day, he's getting there. During breaks in the bombardment, the ditch folk beg the English soldiers for mercy. They're met with stony refusal. The most Henry will allow is for newborn babies to be hoisted up for baptism by priests. That means if they die, they won't go to hell. But living in the ditch is hardly any better. Every hour, things get worse. The cries of the people in no Man's Land get more plaintive, and it becomes ever clearer that Henry is deliberately creating hell on earth. Dan I'm dan jones and from sony music entertainment. This is history season 8 of a dynasty to die for. Episode 10 the road to rouen. Twenty years ago, I bought a cheap plane ticket to Croatia and visited the city of Dubrovnik, that dusty, orange roofed jewel of dalmatia which juts out proudly into the deep, impossible blue of the Adriatic Sea. Now, in my opinion, Dubrovnik is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, maybe in the world. In those days, however, Dubrovnik wasn't as popular a tourist destination as it is today. For one thing, it hadn't yet been the setting for King's Landing in Game of Thrones. For another, it was only a decade recovered from the Yugoslavian civil war, during which it had been the center of a brutal seven month siege. Although the old city had recovered and been rebuilt, there were still signs of the siege everywhere, not least in the people being hard up, young travelers. We stayed for about 20 quid a night in the guest room of an old Croatian lady. I'll never forget listening to her tell us in broken German and sign language about the siege and the day her husband walked down the hill to the old town to buy bread and milk. She told him not to go, that it was dangerous. He went anyway. He was shot dead by a sniper and she never saw him again. The siege of Dubrovnik had been lifted on the last day of May 1992, but for her, it would last the rest of her life. My point here is that siege warfare in any age is pretty terrible. From the Trojan War to the Middle Ages to the conflicts of today, sieges have reliably produced a miserable cocktail of bombardment, atrocity, disease, starvation and generalized misery. The siege of Rouen in 1418-19 is no exception. In fact, it may just rank as one of the grimmest episodes in the whole of the Hundred Years War. It shows Henry V had his most single minded and ruthless. Henry was never exactly Mr. Cuddles, but even by his standards, this is fearsome. So how did we get here? Well, as we heard last time, in 1417, Henry lands in Normandy and takes aim at William the Conqueror's old stomping ground of Culne. He blasts that fair city to bits, installs a new government of Normandy among the rubble and snaffles the best books from the city's libraries. Then he presses on through Normandy, heading for the next major target on his list. Rouen, the Big fish. The Norman capital is a huge and prosperous city that sits on the river Seine, about 100 miles downriver from the French capital. It's been in French hands for more than 200 years, since Philip Augustus took it from King John back in 1203. Listen. Back to this is History Season 3, Episode 3 and its bonus episode. If you want to remember what happened then, taking Rouen back would be One in the eye for the French, it would probably spark the color collapse of most of the rest of Normandy. And it would put Henry another step closer to his goal of claiming the French crown. As he puts it in a letter he writes home to England. Rouen is the most notable place in France. Except for Paris, of course. Rouen's not an easy target. It has a population of 20,000 and a garrison of 1500 professional soldiers. Huge walls defend it. The suburbs have been burned well in advance of Henry's arrival, and the citizens have been ordered to lay down six months worth of supplies. So, in fact, Rouen is a bit of a beast. But Henry is up for a challenge. He has momentum behind him. Fresh English troops arrive, bolstering the core of battle hardened veterans who have been on campaign with Henry for months and in some cases, for years. And he has a plan. With a city this size, cannon and siege towers won't be enough to break it. The deadliest weapon is going to be hunger. Henry is a student of history. He knows that when his great grandfather Edward III broke calais back in 1347, citizens were reduced to eating cats, horses, dogs and rats, leaving them contemplating cannibalism. Henry wants to bring Rouen to the same hideous desperation. So when his army arrives there at the end of July 1418, he splits his troops into four divisions and and sends each one of them to guard a city gate. They dig communication trenches, joining up these Boer camps. And Henry makes it his daily business to travel between each one, keeping morale up by handing out free beer and wine and occasionally ordering the hanging of someone who's broken camp discipline. Then Henry comes up with a scheme to blockade the River Seine. He has posts driven into the riverbed with chains strung between them, bank to bank to prevent any river traffic moving. He sends regular naval patrols further along the river to challenge anyone who might be lurking up or downstream. Thinking of running the blockade. And all the way down at the mouth of the Seine, near Harfleur, he has bigger ships, which he's borrowed from England's longtime allies in Portugal. Their mission is to patrol and deny access to anyone the English don't approve of. It's a stranglehold, and it's quick to take effect. Before Henry arrived, the citizens of Rouen were supposed to be laying down half a year's worth of supplies. Within 10 weeks, they've run through them. The only way Rouen is going to be able to survive is if Paris dispatches forces to fend off Henry's assault. Sadly for them, events in the French capital have taken a brutally nasty turn. And the prospect of rescue from the court of Charles VI has never seemed further away. When I was a little boy in.
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The Middle Ages, I loved window shopping at the market. The sharp clink of the blacksmith making the day's most fashionable armour plates. But the next week, the stall disappeared.
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I was devastated.
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The mob in the Parisian streets are after blood. They're out in their thousands, waving weapons and tools, mutinous with anger at the state of their realm. It's summer 1418 and Henry V is preparing to march on Rouen. But for years now, there's been a vacuum at the heart of French government and no one in power seems capable or even very interested in trying to fix it. It's a very long and complicated story, so if you want the grim granular details, listen back to our last miniseries, the Glass King. For now, what you need to know is this, that King Francis Charles VI has gone mad. And in his absence, a long running blood feud within the French court has boiled over into an all out civil war. The two factions, the Burgundians led by John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, and the Armagnacs, led by the Count of Armagnac, are Much more focused on infighting than on defending the kingdom from foreign invasion. The King's only remaining son, the Dauphin Charles, is a 15 year old who is still a pawn to be fought over by the grown ups. So you can understand why tempers are running hot in Paris. If things stay this way for much longer, they'll all be eating fish and chips by Christmas and talking about the weather this month. And believe me, it changes from month to month. The mob are being mostly influenced by the Burgundians. A couple of weeks ago, Burgundian troops snuck into Paris and started stirring up trouble. Since then, there's been violence in the streets almost every day. But today, June 13 feels different. The King and Queen are being guarded by Burgundians, but the Dauphin has left Paris with the Armagnacs. Now there are rumours that an Armagnac army is heading back towards Paris to attack the city and try and win it back. Did I tell you civil wars were easy to follow? No, dear listener, I did not. What is easy to follow is this. The Count of Armagnac himself is in prison in the Conciergerie. That's the royal palace, courthouse and prison on the riverbank. He's been locked up by the Burgundians. And now, as the public mood becomes murderous, the mob decide they want to see him come to worse grief. On June 13, they head down to the prison. Waving their clubs and axes, they smash their way into the Conciergerie, drag any Armagnacs they can find out of their cells and beat them to death. Some of the victims have their faces slashed with knives. Then the mob find the. What exactly happens to him is the matter of some conjecture. The most lurid account is one written up by an English chronicler. This alleges that the Count is pulled from his cell and hung upside down by his bootstraps. Then he's flayed alive. But that's just the start. Since having all his skin cut off is not regarded as sufficiently nasty, goose feathers are stuck to the Count's exposed flesh with his own blood. Then, when the blood has scabbed and dried, the goose feathers are yanked off one by one. Now, whether this is possible, let alone true, is a matter I'll leave you to figure out for yourselves. Just don't try it at home, ok? My feeling is that this is propaganda confected to persuade the English back home that the French are a bunch of sick, depraved animals who deserve no better than Henry V is giving them. Be that as it May as of June 13, 1418, the Count of Armagnac is dead. Paris remains in more or less nightly uproar. John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy has control over King Charles VI and his queen Isabeau of Bavaria. But the 15 year old Dauphin has scarpered. He's down in the city of Bourges, 150 miles south of Paris. Far from getting their act together, uniting and showing a combined front to the English pigdurges who are marching through their kingdom, the French are totally absorbed in their own catastrophic self owning psychodrama. Which is why, to get back to where we started a few minutes ago. When Henry hermetically seals Rouen, there isn't a sniff of serious interest in stopping him from Paris. So Henry is given free reign to crush what remains of the city and its useless mouths. He orders English troops to deny ordinary citizens from passing safely through his siege lines. And when winter sets in, those trapped in the the ditches begin to die of hunger and exposure. Cursing France rather than the invading English King Henry cannot possibly like what he sees outside Rouen. But he knows enough about what cruelty can deliver. Turning the psychological screws on Rouen is the surest way to force it to submit. As the year 1419 approaches, Henry knows it won't take long before one of France's most prestigious cities finally snaps and surrenders into his hands.
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Guards posted to the door of John the Fearless chamber part and the thin bedraggled messengers from Ruon are shown into the warm, luxuriously appointed room. Like the great lord he supposes himself to be, John the Fearless offers them refreshments after their long journey and even longer ordeal behind the shuttered gates of their city. But weak as they are, the messengers can't accept it. They fall on their knees before the Duke with tears screaming down their faces. Then they describe to him the horrors they've seen over the past few weeks and months. Rouen, they tell him, is on its last legs. Those citizens who are still alive are near deranged with starvation. If they don't give up, they're all going to die of malnourishment. And if by some chance they don't, then when Henry eventually blasts a hole in the city walls they can't repair, then they'll die at the hands of his rampaging troops. They plead with John the Fearless to do something to help them. Then they tell him that if he doesn't help, their descendants will wreak terrible vengeance on him, his children and grandchildren, and his name will live forever in the annals of French infamy. That's the sort of thing it's quite hard for a chap to hear, unmoved. And even John the Fearless, who considers himself a bit of a badass, has his heart softened a little by this sorry tale. He agrees to send help to the people of Rouen as soon as he's able to. But once the messengers are gone, John the Fearless drags his heels. He sends out summonses for troops, which he can do, since he has charge of Charles vi. He even takes the mad old king to the Abbey of St. Denis to bring out the French battle flag known as the Oriflamme. Birdie does all this in slow motion so that Christmas approaches, then comes, and there's no sign of any help for Rouen. Literally every person inside the city is Tiny Tim. So On New Year's Day, 1419, the people of Rouen decide that enough is enough. They make a collective resolution not to eat any more mice and rats, thank you very much, and send send word out to Henry that they're finally prepared to treat for peace. A small group of representatives of the military garrison go out to meet Henry at his siege headquarters in a monastery just east of the city. Before they state their terms for an end to the siege, they ask Henry if he'll extend his charity to the poor, freezing, starving folk who are shivering in the city ditch. Show a bit of mercy, they say. Henry fixes them with his steeliest glare and simply replies, fellas, who put them there? Then he states his own terms. Rome will surrender unconditionally. It already belongs to him, and if anyone should resist him any further, then his vengeance will be so horrible that men will speak of me until doomsday. On January 13th, Rouen formally surrenders. English scouts who go in to examine the city find the streets so filthy and disgusting from six months of besiegement that they insist there's a collective clean up by the star starving citizens before Henry will come and release them from their torment. Once this is done, Henry does indeed enter the city to mark the official end to the siege. An eyewitness describes what it looks like. The people are but bones and bare skin with hollow eyes and visage sharp. He writes, they are unlike living men but the dead. Parades of clergy holding crosses go before Henry as he trots into this zombie city mounted on a black horse decked in gold cloth and inspecting what is now unquestionably his property. Now and then he stops to kiss a crucifix. The choir of his private chapel sing a Latin hymn. It is called Qui est magnus Dominus. That means who is the great Lord? And the answer, very simply, is Henry V. The Lancastrian King of England is a one man war machine who never knows when to stop and doesn't care about who he mows down to clinch victory. And that's why he is surely now one giant step closer to being the first Plantagenet king of France. Join Henry's onward march next time on this is History. And there we have it. Henry almost on the home stretch to Paris. But this week I want your say about how he got there and who let him. Because no one's hands are clean this episode. So I want to know who was the greater villain, Henry or the fractured French court. To join the discussion with the royal favourites, head to patreon.com thisishistory while you're there, you can stick around to watch more videos made exclusively for the royal favourites, like bonus episodes and studio updates from me and the team. Plus loads of other great stuff. It's all there for you@patreon.com thisishistory I'd love to see you there.
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