Dan Jones (8:48)

Edward III on and make your own range of kick ass squad jackets and matching merch and make money at the same time. There's only one place to go. That's the sound you'll hear when you make another sale on Shopify. It's the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business. It doesn't have to be squad jackets. It can be anything. Art, plants, health or beauty. Shopify simplifies selling online and in person so you can successfully grow your business however you want to sell. Shopify has you covered with a shopfront ready POS system and it works with social media marketplaces too, like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. It's time to get serious about selling and get Shopify Today sign up for a £1 per month trial period at shopify.co.uk thisishistory all lowercase go to shopify.co.uk thisIshistory to take your business to the next level today. 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 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, English, 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.

Dan Jones (10:51)

Anyone who lived through the COVID 19 pandemic, which I'm assuming is like everyone listening right now, has seen firsthand how suddenly and dramatically the world can change when a pandemic hits. But even that was nothing compared to the horrors unleashed by the Black Death. The disease sweeps into Europe in 1347 and it's a catastrophic killer. 40, 50, sometimes 70% of any population it infects will die. For comparison, Covid had a worldwide mortality rate of around 1. When people are infected with the Black Death, they become feverish, sick, and black boils develop under their arms, and then, shockingly quickly, they die painful, horrible deaths. Imagine a disease as nasty and as deadly as Ebola, with an infection rate like the flu and three distinct ways for it to get into your body. Now you're kind of in the ballpark. This plague is not a great leveller. As with most disasters in human history, it tends to be more avoidable, if not survivable, if you're rich rather than poor. But being a king, queen, noble or bishop is no protection if the Black Death gets hold of you, as Edward III and his family are about to find out. First, though, we should Take a moment and understand what the Black Death is, where it comes from and how it manages to spread around virtually every realm in the west between 1347 and 1349. The disease is caused by bacteria, Yersinia pestis. Historians are now pretty sure that it first appears around the Tianshan Mountains between western China and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It probably originates in marmots, think a sort of chubby rodent with a squirrel's face on an otter's body. And it's spread by the fleas that live on marmots fur. But the disease proves able to jump between other flea carrying species, including gerbils, camels and critically black rats. Rats? Where humans go, rats go too. And at this time, humans are moving around a lot. Specifically, the disease is transported from Asia to Europe by the armies and traders of the Mongol Empire, which expands at ferocious speed. During the 13th century, the Mongols build the biggest unbroken land empire the world has ever seen. And chains of caravan trains travel from near Beijing to the Black Sea. Rats carrying plague infected fleas hitch a ride, moving the plague from east to west. In the mid-1340s, the plague gets into the shipping routes around Europe. It's most often said that the explosion happens in 1347 at a siege in the Black Sea port of Caffa, where a Mongol army has been attacking a town controlled by Genoese merchants. One way or another, either through refugees fleeing Caffa for Italy, or with grain shipments being sent after the siege is finished, plague rats get into Italy and from there the Black Death just erupts. And when it does, it's not pretty. Here's a chronicle of the day by a French friar. Those who fell ill lasted little more than two or three days, but died suddenly. Someone who was healthy one day could be dead and buried the next. Lumps suddenly appeared in their armpits or groin and their appearance was an infallible sign of death. Death and sickness came by imagination or by contact with others and subsequent contagion. For a healthy person who visited the sick hardly ever escaped death. Within a week of being bitten by a plague infected flea, the victim will get flu like symptoms, including fever and vomiting. When the bacteria gets into the lymph nodes, they swell up, turn black and occasionally burst. Strains of Yersinia pestis are still around today, but in most cases a doctor will give you a course of hardcore antibiotics, which, all being well, should sort you out. Of course, in the 14th century there are no antibiotics no one has ever heard of. Bacteria panic and scapegoating spread like wildfire. Here's our chronicler again. Men ascribed the pestilence to infected air or water because there was no famine or lack of food at this time, but on the contrary, a great abundance. The chronicler also reports that in many communities in Europe, rumours whipped around that wells had been poisoned by Jewish people, thousands of whom were murdered. But the chronicler quite rightly considers this insane. There must have been some other cause, such as, for instance, the will of God or corrupt humours and the badness of air and earth. A writer in Germany thinks the plague was caused by earthquakes releasing poisoned air into the atmosphere. An Oxford based astrologer blames a lunar eclipse in 1345 which began an hour after the moon rose. And at the same time the two planets were in conjunction in Aquarius, and Mars was with them in the same sign in the light of Jupiter. On this week's subscriber episode of this Is History Plus, I'll be explaining why people also blamed the Black Death on cross dressing, hot pants and sex parties. For now, all I'll say is that crazed explanations are a central part of the horrifying tragedy of the Black Death. People knew that they were living through something truly terrible, but at the same time they had no idea at all what they were really dealing with. Which brings us back to Bordeaux in the summer of 1348, with a fleet of English ships casually disembarking their crews and cargo, despite warnings from the city authorities that they should get out before it's too late. It's easy to ask, with hindsight, what the hell were they thinking? But in a sense, the question is pointless. They bring Princess Joan off the ship and move into lodgings in Bordeaux, at which point it very quickly becomes obvious what the mayor was talking about. They try to flee the city with Joan, but by this point it's too late. The sources aren't entirely clear about dates, but what is certain is that no marriage takes place between Princess Joan of England and Pedro of Castile. We don't need a chronicler to tell us why. We have the information direct from the hand of Edward iii himself. On 15 September 1348, he sends a letter to Pedro's father, King Alfonso XI of Castile. We're sure that your magnificence knows how. After much complicated negotiation about the intended marriage of the renowned Prince Pedro, your eldest son, and our most beloved daughter Joan, which was designed to nurture perpetual peace and create an indissoluble union between our royal houses, we sent our said daughter to Bordeaux en route for your territories in Spain. But see with what intense bitterness of heart we have to tell you this destructive death who seizes young and old alike, sparing no one and reducing rich and poor to the same level, has lamentably snatched from both of us our dearest daughter, whom we loved best of all, as her virtues demanded. Under the circumstances, this is an incredibly dignified letter, which must have been agonizing to Edward to dictate. But it's also a letter written at a time when almost every person in Edward's realm would have known a version of the devastation he's feeling. For by the autumn of 1348, the Black Death has jumped the English Channel, arriving via the ports of the south coast and is cutting a merciless, relentless path through the kingdom. Edward III has smashed all comers in warfare. In Yersinia Pestis has he finally met his.

Dan Jones (20:18)

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Dan Jones (21:05)

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Dan Jones (21:06)

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Dan Jones (21:29)

In September 1349, a clerk working for the Archbishop of Canterbury steps out of his Master's London office to take a break from from his work. He's met by an astonishing sight. Parading through the streets are dozens of solemn faced foreigners. From their accents they sound like Flemings. Every one of them is barefoot and stripped half naked, wearing only a linen cloth wrapped around their waist like a gym towel. They have hoods over their heads painted with red crosses and in their hands they all carry a whip with three tails, each tail tied in a knot with a nail sticking out of it. As these strange folk process solemnly along, they chant hymns and in time, each of them lashes the person walking in front of him on the back with his sharp, wicked scourge. Every so often, they lie down in the road and take turns to thrash each other even harder. Then they get up, blood streaming down their backs, put their day clothes back on and go home. The clerk marvels at the sight, but he knows it's not a one off. These guys are known as flagellants, and although they're officially frowned upon by the Church, they've been seen in cities all over Europe since the plague began. Their theory is that by doing such horrible, painful penance, they might be able to convince God to stop punishing the human race with the Black Death. As it happens, by the time the flagellants get to London, the plague is slowing down. So maybe they were onto something. Or then again, maybe they weren't. Either way, the effect the plague has had on the British Isles has been devastating. In the first place, there's the sheer scale of the loss of life. Local court records from the time make for bleak reading. Men and women dead, leaving lands, properties and animals to their relatives, who often don't come to claim them because they too are dead. In London and other cities, the burial grounds fill up and new lands have to be turned into graveyards. One of Edward III's great friends, Sir Walter Manny, buys 13 acres of land outside London's city walls, and tens of thousands of citizens are rolled into pits there. In the 16th century, one writer sees a stone cross standing there as a death memorial. The inscription reads, in the year of our Lord 13:49, during the reign of the great pestilence, this cemetery was consecrated in which there were buried more than 50,000 bodies, upon whose souls God have mercy. Amen. So many priests die that there aren't enough to hear confessions and administer the last rites. Edward loses two archbishops of Canterbury to the plague within three months. The Church has to make special rules so that dying people can make confession to any layperson, even to a woman if a man is not available. You know things are bad when a plague has the power to rock the medieval patriarchy. Edward doesn't lose any more of his children to the Black Death, but he has plenty to concern him all the same. It's not just the fact that his kingdom resembles a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie. Half the population dying is a serious political challenge to any state in any age. England in 1349 is no different. The most immediate problem is that there aren't enough workers to go round. It's not just priests. England is basically a farming economy, and it relies on human hands to plant and harvest crops, to rear and shear and slaughter animals. Buildings are Built and repaired by people. If your roof blows off your house, you need a roofer to put it back on. If the wheel falls off your cart, you need a wheelwright. And so on. Now, anyone who took the very first lesson in economics class will be thinking that this sounds like a good time for the workers who don't die in the Black Death. The plague has created a shortage in labour supply. So what should happen? Wages should go up. What's more, since half the people are dead, the plague should also mean that there's more land to go around. That means rents should go down. So if you're John the Not Dead farmhand, you should stand to make more money for working and pay less money in rent. Happy days. Well, no, because if you're Edward the Not Dead King, you know that you and your noble pals are facing a big financial crisis. The cost of managing your estates is going to skyrocket and your income from rents is going to fall off a cliff. The moralising writer John Gower sums this viewpoint up. He writes that English workers post plague are sluggish, they're scarce and they're grasping for the very little they do. They demand the highest pay. Edward has to do something. And what he does is to issue a set of laws called the Ordinance of Labourers. Under the Ordinance, it becomes illegal to take or pay more wages than were on offer before the pandemic. It becomes compulsory for everyone under 60 to work. It becomes illegal for employers to overhire staff. It's forbidden by law to give handouts to beggars. The government introduces price controls on food. To say this is heavy handed market interference would be putting it lightly. And it isn't exactly legislation drafted with the plight of the common man in mind. But whatever you want to say about Edward iii, this guy never claimed to be Bernie Sanders. His whole royal project, Black Death or no Black Death, has been about looking after the interests of the aristocracy so that he can rally them around his bigger project of showing Philip VI who's boss and maybe one day putting the crown of France on his own head. And with that in mind, in the middle of the plague, Edward comes up with an idea even more bold and considerably more brilliant than the Ordinance of Labourers. It's an idea that will appeal to the soul as well as the pocket of the greatest knights and nobles in England. An idea that will seek to turn Edward into a new King Arthur and his royal court at Windsor into a new Camelot. It's an idea that still lies at the heart of the British monarchy. To this day, and I'll be telling you all about it. Next time on this is History.

Dan Jones (29:10)

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