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Well, my friends, you're about to have a night on the town in medieval London. But before you do, a quick reminder that you've got friends in our royal court over on Patreon. These friends, or royal favourites we like to call them, are passionate about the Middle Ages and help all of us delve deeper into the history behind every this is History episode. It's also a space where you can chat with me and my team and next month I'll be doing a special Ask Me Anything just just for the royal favourites. So don't miss out, get ad free listening bonus episodes and all that other Fun stuff on patreon.com thisishistory now on with the show. I'm going to let you in on a secret. My life began toiling away in a field, battling for scraps with fellow peasants. Then I convinced my feudal overlords to teach me how to read and write. Then I wrote some books and and then this podcast. But to impress my new overlords, there's a lot of work that needs doing. I wish I'd had Shopify when I first started out back in the Middle Ages. This commerce platform has been a game changer for millions of guilds, leagues and businesses around the world like Mattel and Heinz. To brands just getting started. You can pick from thousands of ready made templates to start an online store, get help writing product descriptions and to launch marketing campaigns within minutes. It's like having the Hanseatic League at the touch of a button. So turn your big business idea into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your 1 pound per month trial and start selling today at shopify.co.uk thisishistory Go to shopify.co.uk thisISHistory shopify.co.uk thisIShistory in the middle Ages, when the French king is captured and put into the Tower of London, France goes into full blown anarchy. If only this they'd had access to Indeed, they could have found the perfect replacement king straight away and saved the country from total meltdown. That's because when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Indeed Sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire fast. That makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. So while it's too late for medieval French revolutionaries, it's the perfect time for you to get your job seen by the right people fast. And listeners of this show will get a £100 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com dynasty just go to Indeed.com dynasty right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com dynasty terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. It's a balmy midsummer night in London, and though the curfew bell sounded long ago, there are still revellers in the street. England's capital is famous for having a hundred church steeples within the square mile. But for every house of God, there are at least two taverns. And on a night like tonight, those medieval dive bars can get pretty spicy. Take this group of lads. They're stumbling around the taverns of Eastcheap, a street that's a meat market for butchers by day and a meat market for boozehounds by night. It's way past midnight and the guys are looking for somewhere to have one for the road. No matter that they've already had about six for the road. But if London on a summer's night is a good place to find a drink, it's an even better place to find a punch up. And that's what they get. Exactly. What goes down in Eastcheap is now lost to the historical record, but this gang of feisty young rebellers stumble around the wrong corner of the or tread on the wrong toes, or take a leak against the wrong person's front door. Pretty soon there's a brawl. And if there's one thing that hasn't changed throughout history, it's a drunken punch up. Curses and blows are thrown, noses are broken and teeth rearranged. Predictably, it isn't long before the rozzas come wading in to break it up. There's no police force, but the mayor and sheriff's men arrive mob handed and drag a few of the worst offenders off for a night in the cells. When they get them there, they find that one of these lads is none other than the son of Henry IV, King of England. His name is Thomas, he's 21 years old and he's got rocks for fists as well as brains. The mayor leaves Thomas to sleep off the booze, then sends word to King Henry that he needs to have a stern chat with his son. Is the king fed up with Thomas for causing him this aggro? If he is, you'd struggle to know it, because far from punishing Thomas for his troublemaking, King Henry was is about to do something extraordinary for him. For years, Thomas has been the second son, overshadowed in family politics by his elder brother, the golden boy, Henry of Monmouth, Prince of Wales. But within Two years of the east cheap brawl. Everything will be stood on its head. Despite his hot headedness and wayward behavior, Thomas is about to be pushed to centre stage as his father's heir apparent. And unless Prince Henry does something spectacular, his career is heading for the scrap heap. I'm Dan Jones and from Sony Music Entertainment. This is history Season 8 of A Dynasty to Die For. Episode 4 Ballads and Brawls One of the joys and the difficulties of saying anything about the life and times of Prince Henry of Monmouth is that someone else got there first. And not just anyone else. The most famous rendition written of Henry's life comes from the pen of the greatest writer in the history of the English language, Dan Jo. William Shakespeare. Over the course of three plays, Shakespeare gave us his version of Henry, who in his early life he calls Prince Hal. It's a memorable portrait and thanks to performances by Lawrence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh and more besides, it's one of the most memorable in all of Shakespeare's history plays. Hal is a roistering, swaggering, hard drinking, womanizing tavern lizard. He keeps low company, epitomised by his mate John Falstaff. He shows little sign of being a worthy heir to the Plantagenet throne, which his father, Henry IV won for the Lancastrian family at enormous personal and moral cost. In short, this guy's a basket case and it seems vanishingly unlikely that he's ever going to amount to anything. Then comes one of the greatest transformations in England's literary history. As is usual with Shakespeare, it's a masterclass in dramatic structure just in the nick of time. The riotous youth becomes a flinty young man. The trouble is, it's mostly a load of old bollocks. And it's a load of old bollocks because in drawing this portrait of a wayward prince, Shakespeare deftly, perhaps deliberately gets the wrong son. The guy out raising hell in the streets of London During Henry IV's reign wasn't Prince Henry. It was his brother Thomas, joined on occasion by the king's third son, John. At some point around 1410, a gentleman poet called Henry Scogan writes what's called his moral ballad, which he reads to all four of Henry IV's sons. The youngest is called Humphrey in a wine bar one evening. The moral ballad is a bit of a diatribe warning against youthful folly and sluggardry. On the surface it's aimed at all the brothers, but there is, I think, good reason to believe that it's mostly for Thomas and John. In fact, and this is speculation But I don't think wild speculation. It may well be that it's Henry who encourages Scogan to write his moral ballad in the hope of getting his brothers to clean up their acts. Because when we step back and look at what the evidence suggests Henry is actually up to at this point, it's not running about London with a traffic cone on his head and a Mankini on shouting, come on, lads, who wants their face smashed in? I don't want to make our boy sound like a total square, but all the indications are that he's about work, work and more work. Last episode, we heard how in 1410-1411, with King Henry's health on the slide and issues like heresy in England and war in France on the Hurry up, Prince Henry expands his brief from suppressing rebellions in Wales to running the Royal Council. This gets him into a political tug of war with Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. And though that doesn't always go his way, it means he always has plenty to do. If he's not roasting heretics in barrels, he's wrangling with parliaments for more cash to keep the government afloat. He's all over the details of maintaining the vital English military base at Calais. And he's in the weeds of French policy, where the English have to decide which side to back in the civil war between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, a conflict you can learn more about in our last miniseries, the Glass King. And when Henry gets a break from work, what's he up to? Well, so far as we can tell, he's reading. Around this time, we know, Henry buys a beautifully illustrated copy of Geoffrey Chaucer's English translation of Troilus and Crusader, one of the most famous tales set in the Trojan War. He also starts casting around for a writer whom he can commission to write the whole history of that war in English. Then Henry's onto the Master of Game, authored by his cousin, the Duke of York. This is full of wholesome advice from the hunting mad York, explaining that hunting is a good way for a man to eschew the seven deadly sins, that it cures illness because it makes you sweat, and that if you go hunting, you probably go to heaven. Finally, Henry also receives a book from a writer called Thomas Hoclave called the Regiment of Princes, which is a handbook for good kingship. In other words, the guy's to be read pile is off the scale, and it's my contention that while his brothers are out smashing skulls in Life London, Henry's working on his Goodreads reviews and wading through briefing notes for the next council meeting. Which brings us back to where we started this episode. What is Henry applying himself so diligently to? He's keeping the English government afloat, educating himself on the finer points of the Trojan War, and grooming himself for the art of kingship. So why is it that his father suddenly decides that it's knucklehead Thomas whom he wants to promote to the position of number one son while Prince Henry gets nothing? Well, like a snooty haired boy who thinks he's got his teachers wrapped around every finger, Prince Henry is about to learn that hubris has limits. And he's going to rouse his decrepit father back into action.