The Crécy Campaign (with Dan Jones)

We knew how to do. Our headphones, our microphones. Both of us just nailed it immediately first try. I definitely had the microphone thing lockdown? Did you my end? Contrary to what people are saying, my microphone was on the entire time. It was fully, fully turned on. That wasn't the mistake I was making. You were brought back on this podcast by popular demand, that the people demanded you, and so we had to bring you back. But you were the Charles the second of podcast guests. Thank you

very much. That's probably my favorite Charles of all the three. Of all the three. So I was I was asking you before we started, how how is the new king over there? Well? I think that you guys are thinking about it a little bit more than we are. We we did, we had quite a lot of it last year, and now we're just The coronation will be along in a few months time, and I think we'll have another that'll go at it then. But by and large, no

one's playing it that much attention. I think. I think of the two of us, I am the only one who read Prince Harry's book. Is that true? That is true, assuming you did read it. I didn't read it. I have no reason to doubt you. And it's the sort of thing you would do that like professionally or actually curious. They sent me a copy, so this is full disclosure. As I got a copy for free, I don't know if I would have like shelled out for it. And then I was just curious as a document. I was

just like, so, what is this guy really saying? Did you find out? By the end of the book. Yes, I think he's past off, isn't it. He's really mad and I think he had a very sad family life. I felt bad for him by the end of it.

I was like, it must have been really lonely. Your dad never hugging you like that would have been awful, But I do kind of think he's mad about the wrong things a little bit, like he's holding these family grudges and I feel sorry for him, but it also feels like, I don't know if he realizes it's not that's not like the main problem with the monarchy. Yeah,

it does seem to be quite um. He does seem to have misconstrued and misconceived quite a lot of things that you would have thought like by the time you get to around the age of forty. He's a little bit younger than me, but you know, by the age of forty ish, you're supposed to have just started to work out certain things about your life situation. And he seems to have got some of them wrong, and the ones that he hasn't got wrong, he's reacted to in

a really bad way. It does seem as though he's the only one in this family who's gotten therapy, and so clearly a therapist is like it would have been nice if your dad hugged you, and then he's like yes, and then really decided to write a book about it. But was this a specialist therapist? Because I think it's like a certain you need a special like one that just does royals really like, basically you I could do it.

You seem you seem like you should be in the person that would do therapy, because you'd probably think about this more than than a normal therapist. It's true of the category of case. Do you know the most deranged thing that I've ever said out loud in my life to my husband? I said, I said the words, and I meant it is there's the really messed up part. I said, if I had married into the royal family, I would have been able to hack it. Like I would have been able to do it. I can follow

rules really well. I would wear that right now, polished colors. I wouldn't read the news. I would just like curtsy the right way. I would follow all the rules. But you've also done your research, like this is what I'm saying. I don't. I would have known when I was getting into I think, so do you? What do you wanted to do it? I mean absolutely think yourskin seems great, and like I'm not sure you harry a fit or whatever, But like, would you in in the abstract have wanted

that job at any level? No, it's to me that the job of being a royal. It seems like you are quietly drinking all day with people I don't know if I would like, I'm not a big drinker. And also you have to go to a lot of like ceremonial hospital openings. It feels like you're going to like three graduation ceremonies a day, and your kid is never graduating. Right, the job seems boring. I totally agree, And yet there is a small, like distinct subset category of people who well,

there's two on there. There's there's the people who are born into it and like totally deal with it, Like, yeah, okay, this is like a like I could have definitely been born into a much worse era in history or social position. I'm going to just accept that the cost of having all this great stuff is like a super boring job, even more boring than like being a square john in an office. Yeah, at least a square john in an office. You get to go have your fun without people making

fun of you. Well yeah, so, but there was more of a royals who are like, yo, I'm going to take this. I'll take this deal. It's not a perfect deal, but I sense there are other worst deals and the possible so that I can sort of sort of get my head of. The ones that definitely are unusual are the sort of K. Middlesen type people who look at that and think it through, so they do the thing you've done that possibly making didn't do, and then go,

oh no, no, that is actually what I want. That's the weird thing, and then doesn't seem to have any regret or or remorse, like, was right, that was what you want. She's very good at at what she has to do, which is being conventionally attractive and thin and wear clothing in public. Would you go to Mars if someone offered your ticket? Absolutely not. Now wants I want somebody and I don't care if his evil musk. I just I don't care who it is. I want a human being to go to Mars. But if you ask me,

would I be that? Yeah? But would you do that? I would say no. I would say I would be like the person to go to Mars. Yeah, Okay, after they do it for a while, I wonder is it the safety that you're worried about with Mars? Yeah? And it just seems, um, I don't know what I would be getting out of it. Yeah, the safety and and for what reward. I'm not a rock scientist. I don't know if I would be the best person to put there. I could see you as a rock scientist, that you've

got science in your locker, haven't you? That's true? Could would you wouldn't go to Mars? Why wouldn't you go to Mars? The safety so that I saw the Martian with mc damon and growing potatoes that tie us into Yeah, it looked It's just just just the length of the journey. You know, I'm a little I don't think it would be for me the length of the journey, you know, Dan, But people, I think a lot of people would say that being a historian would be boring. You've had to

spend a lot of time reading very old books. You don't find you don't find that barring. No, I don't. Actually I quite like it. Yeah, but I don't know a lot of m Are there a lot of people who looked at his story and when I think that's going to be boring? Because I think the case that we've been talking about is people who think something is going to be better than it is. I was pretty sure about what being his stor you didn't think it

was going to be like Indiana Jones. Now that's an archeologist, but he's sort of in the same it's the same academic. He's a professor. Oh, he's a he's a professor. That but that I wouldn't have done. I'm not a professor. I could never ever have been a professor. And that's actually important. So when I graduated from my degree in two two, I was going he went to Cambridge. He's not going to mention, but he went to Cambridge. You know, I don't. I like other people to bring it up

for me. And it's the real one as well, not there like proxy one in Massachusetts. When I graduated and I was thinking, only should I do like loads to more degrees and stay at Cambridge? Sort of everyone that had taught me and knew me was like, I don't think you'll like that. I don't think you're like any aspect of that's whatsoever. And so the life that I've

chosen is distinctly not that of an institutionalized profess. So it's the life where I just sort of do my own thing and read what I want to read, and write what I want to write, and sit in my little office in my pajamas. Now, this is an audio medium, but I do want people listening to this to know that Dan is in a very nice set of pajamas, sole set of pajamas, like he's in like notting Hill or something. I've never seen anyone in like a full

set of pajamas. And it's not that late that we're recording, but he got ready for bed. Yeah, but I knew that after we finished it would be about my bed time. And then I just thought I'd just be ready. I could just die straight into bed and just worm my way and I have a little you know sleep. Well, if we're talking about diving straight in, you're here because you have a novel that's coming out in the United States in paperback? Is it coming out in paperback or

hard hard back? Over here? Hardcover hardcover of course, yes, the real deal. I think we'd go hard yeah, hardcover, Yeah, hardcover of people that's right here, Yeah, yeah, that's us. Oh my gosh. And he's drinking wine. He just pulled a goblet of wine out from behind the behind the camera. It's almost it is. It's quite a large one glass, but with not much wine in it. So yeah, it does have a sort of goblet vibe to it's Monday night. I would not drink heavily on a Monday night. Of course.

Well we are here to talk, of course, about his wonderful novel Essex Dogs, which I had the privilege of reading. It's just a it's a wonderful novel. If you like this podcast because you like interesting stories from history well told. Obviously A Sex Dogs is a fictionalization, but it is based on a very true story. And that's what I would like to talk to you about. Oh, that would be fun. Let's do it. So tell me the story. And my achilles heel is French pronunciation because my Eastern

European tongue doesn't curl the right way. But the say the name of the campaign to save me from myself here, so as it's still is set in the Cressy campaign. Oh Cressy, that's I could have done that. You can say, reci Yeah, there's a little there's an accent that throughout the house made me near Chrissy. But but Cressy is fine. Um. So that's one of the first major campaigns of the Hundred Years War, which took place in the summer of the year thirty and forty six, which is right at

the start of the Hundred Years War. With Hundred Years War from thirty thirty seven through fifty three were loaded at the beginning with the Third Reign. I'm gonna I'm gonna interrupt before before we dive in for people who are just listening and and have heard probably the term Hundred Years War, but don't know exactly what it is. Can you set up a bit about what this conflict was and why they were fighting it for so long? Yeah? Absolutely,

and that is very very cool. The Hundred Years War is a dispute in the Late Middle Ages in the fourteenth and fifteenth century between the two royal rival houses of the Kingdoms of England on the one hand and France on the other. And at the very core of the dispute is who should be the King of France. Starts with the with the third who claims that he should be the rifle King of France because he has a claim through his mother and his cousin Philippa, who

is the King of France. Philip six, at the outset Hundreds War says, well, I beg to differ. I am actually the King of France and I have a claim through my father and my father the king of Brands. It's rather wasn't the King of France. But so there's a but he's he's got I think inarguably a better claim than Edward. However, there are other reasons for them disputing who's going to be the King of France, rather than they both want to be the King of France.

One of them is that you have an anomalous, weird position by the time he gets to the fourteenth century, which goes all the way back to the normal conquest of ten sixty six, whereby kings of England have lands in France, and sometimes that's Normandy and it's great s extent on the Henry. Second it's Normandy, Aquitaine and Gumain Brittany each other an like this, the huge sway either almost a third of the current territorial land mass of France is at some point held by English kings technically

as nobles of France. And that's a weird situation and changes and evolves throughout the plantation years. But by the time you get to end of the third there's still have a small amount of land Gascony, and the French kings aren't very happy about that, sterrritating to have another king as one of your lord's vassals Vassels. Yeah, so part of the reason for for this dispute over the crown of France is a kind of nuclear escalation of

this argument. End of the third sees that one of the best ways to counter phillips claim to kick him out of Gascony is to say, you can't kick me out of Gascony because actually I'm the King of France. And you know what, let's have a really long war about whether or not this is the case, and it goes generated a hundred years is underplaying. It just goes on for six notes, not quite a hundred and sixty

hundred and seventeen something. Once one of my favorite tidbits, I think from one of your books, the book on the Ward the Roses, is when fast forwarding obviously you know, a hundred years from this event, when I hope I'm doing this right, because it is from your book. Henry the sixth is trying to establish his claim in France and they're distributing propaganda posters, trying to trace his lineage back to St. Louis to be like, no, no, he's

he's right. Look at the poster that we made. They get right into it and it opens up this enormous kind of worms which which you then start seeing the domestic politics of England and France as well of people say, oh, no way, I should be the king because x y Z. I mean, that's that's what underpins the wars of the

Roses in England the fifteenth century. Your Plancaster quote unquote conflict for the crown is really some of the principles established in the Hundred As War, which are like I've not a better claim to the ground than you, and I'm going to fight you with my now enormous armies and improving siege weaponry and so on and so forth. Anyway, said back to the Hundred Years War as well as a dynastic dispute for the quote unquote dynastic dispute for the crown of France, it's such a draw in more

and more and more competence around Europe. So you have the Scots fighting the English, you have Castile drawn into this eventually, have sort of kingdoms of Portugal drawn into it. You have Flanders is an enormously important sort of theater of hot and Cold War. You have the sort of German states in the pressing campaign. You have the Battle of Crescy, as we hopefully get to, you have five

different kings on the battle. So this, this apparent sort of neighborly dispute between England and France, in fact spills out into basically the whole of Western Europe fighting each other in various combinations for generations. So now explain what the Cressy campaign is. We have King Edward the Third in England trying to retain his claim in France, and what happens. So at this point, which is thirty six,

the war is young. War is less than nine less and ten years old, and there have been already different spheres of operation open up. There's fighting going on down a gascony. There's been a great sea Battle of Choice there, which is sort of a modern Netherlands. But this is the first big invasion by one side of the other. So in July six d of the Third Lands approximately

fifteen thousand troops on one of the Normandy beaches. And whant to say Normandy beaches You probably think D Day World War two, and you're right to, because it is a beach on the cutting Tampa Peninsula of Normandy slightly up from what in the Second Worldar was called Utah Beach should a place called some Valo where Edwards put fifteen thousand men onto a beach, and you can sort

of imagine this as a medieval saving Private Ryan. In fact, the idea of a medieval saving Private Ryan, you know, medieval d Day was the first picture I had in my head the sparks what became the novel of Esex Dogs, because I felt like I'd never seen a kind of band of brothers saving Private Ryan, an American hard boiled version of a medieval amphibious invasion. But that's how the

Cressy campaign starts. Edward the third says, you know what I'm after, France, and I'm gonna well, that is he actually going to try and take Philip's throne in Paris. Possibly He's certainly going to cause as much trouble for Philip the sixth of France as possible in northern France in order to discomfort him so much that possibly his nobles are rebelled against him and the people will start

to abandon their their fealty to him. So that's what Edwards, Edward sets about twelfth of July, he lands his huge army, probably over the course of the next few days. They DeCamp onto the beach. They are opposed by local militias, but the local militias who are opposing them soon see that this is an enormous, enormous army, I mean a gigantic invasion army. This is the biggest army that has ever been taken from England to France, and they're going

to do some some serious damage. So they would say the small militia who were on the coast, because Edwards kept his invasion plans or the location of his invasion at least secret spies of in in London for months and months, they knew an invasion was coming, but they had no idea where that parallels with d Day in are striking um, there's there's not much opposition and they start falling back and so Edward really has them the run of the Gotta Tupe Peninsula, this bit of Normandy

that sticks out going up to subar So between Normandy and Calais. So it's hard without drawing you a map, but there's a sort of pointy bit that's not Brittany Franz that's the bit of Normandy we're talking about. So and they come in right at the tip of it. And the French strategy for the first couple of weeks is essentially a Fabian one. Is to fall back, try and delay the English advances as much as possible by breaking bridges, by burning things, by but not by engaging.

And so the English do what will become a standard tactic of the Hundred Years War, and they sort of launched it in Earnest in thirteen forty six, and it's called the Cheval shape. So they set their army out essentially into the field to just burn and plunder and cause as much terror and mayhem as possible. It is to carve a path through the landscape, a path of terror. Now I wrote Essex Dogs. When I finished writing, I finished writing it's through March, shortly before the Russian invasion

of Ukraine. But if you can cast your mind back to Russian tactics at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, which was to burn and plunder and rape and kill and cause as much mayhem and terror as possible. That's borrowed directly from a long military playbook. And of the third did not invent the chevrochet. The Mongols have done it before. I'm sure you know in the Bronze Agent has happened. You know, we can go back probably as far as human history and mounted warriors anyway, go to

see examples of similar tactics. It wo, but this is like Edward really master the English master the chevrochet in war. And so the first sort of or probably half of the Gressive campaign is effectively one big, long, just campaign of absolute terror, as the English pushed through the Norman countryside through the sort of kas and all the stuff.

You again, if you know you're saving private Ryan or band of brothers, you know these little lanes and head English just burn a sway through it, heading for the major towns of Normandy, which will lead them to the same valley, and then they can go up river towards Paris. And so in your fictional version, we're joined by ten men in Essex, Doug. The story is ten men who are sort of more loyal to each other than any crown. Right.

So this story of the Christic campaign has been told in history and in fiction many times, but it struck me when I was thinking about it, or thinking more generally about the realities of warfare in this period, which is something I've written a reasonable amount about in my history books. Struck me that we very seldom see medieval warfare through the eyes of what in the World War two film you'd call the ordinary grunts, right, just the rank and file. The Chrissy Campaign is really famous in

medieval history for things that aristocrats and nobles do. There's there are lots of little famous sort of vignettes to set pieces. When end of the Third land on the beach of sam Lug, for example, he he trips over in the surf, bangs his nose into the sand and gets a nose bleed, and he has the quick wit to say, ah, this just shows the land wants me because I was worried this might be you know moment.

When we get to later in the campaign, at the Battle of Chrissy, the Black Prince supposedly performs great heroics.

He's in danger. His father refuses to come to his aid, so the story goes, this hasn't led him win his spurs, and this is you know, at sixteen years old, this is the Black Prince kind of magnificent emergence as a chivalric warrior, anyway, Chris, he throws up lots of these vignettes through the writings of chronicles like Jean Froissart and various others of that type, but we don't often hear anything at all in this campaign about what it was

like for ordinary people. Now, if we consider that in a medieval army of about fifteen thousand, somewhere between ten and would be what would call nobles and knights, that still that leads the vast majority of the army as not nobles and knights. And what I wanted to do was somehow or other capture the experience of one small group of warriors on this campaign who were ordinary people.

And so I created this little platoon really called the Essets Dogs, who are quite typical of what we know of the rank and file of medieval armies in this period, in that they're not professional soldiers, because there are no professional armies in this point. They are sort of just

you call immerce and mercenary freebooters. Chances, you know, in in war time they will seek out military contracts and go fight for whoever is paying, and in peace time they'll use exactly the same skills for whatever jobs require them and that tends to be sort of thieving piracy. If you need someone beating up poojical, you know they did. So there are a group of violent of men pH violence is their profession, but not all of them are

violent men. And so within this group you have some people who are unthinkingly committed to the profession of fighting and causing mayhem, and there are some who are new to it and don't really know what they've gotten themselves into. And there are some most or best epitomized by their leader Loveday, who was into a birth, starting to have

second thoughts. And so you what we see unfold across their adventures within the Crazy Campaign is the dissolving of the bond between that group q as they all Osten's. We try and keep the group to get you know, they're they're committed. They're all verbally and in some sense mentally committed to one another to keeping this this band together. But actually it's it's all going to ship inside the

end of the Beatles. You know, everyone wants this thing to continue, but it's it's you know, it has to be has to finish. Although by the end of Crescy and the Siege of Calais. It's a victory for the English, isn't it? At this point. That's the thing about the Creasy campaign. You have this Chevrochet, you have several big

sort of dramatic scenes in Norman towns. At Saalo con Rouen, you have drama dramatic crossings of two rivers, the River Seine and the north of that, the River So and then you have this enormous battle at Cressy at the end of August six, which is a seemingly miraculous victory for the English. Subsequent to that they go off to Calais, beseach Calais. That's the topic of the book I'm writing at the moment, which is a sequel Dresserslves the Wolves

of Winter. Sorry to spoil the ending. Wikipedia would do the job just as well. So of spoiling, I mean, not a not a wristing a novel. No, but AI might be might be close behind, and I think GBT four might have and I like to say five for the actually four that's going to catch me, I think, so yeah. And then well then you have the Siege of Calais which follows, which is a very different cattle fish.

If the Cresty campaign lasts roughly seven weeks. The Calais campaign is an eleven month siege which ends with them starving the people out of Calais. But yeah, the the end fronduct of the of the Crest Cambais is they take Calais and that's in English hands. Until Mary Tudors right, it is wild to consider starving a city out as

a victory. Yeah, but that's that's the tactic in medieval siegecraft, by and large, just hang around until someone gets bored and gives up, or gets hungry and gives up, and the victory is that Calais falls into English hands. And this is not just why we took a city military terms, there's an enormous economic component to this warfare. Now in Essex Dogs, when I try and show really really up with the camera locked to this very small group of men, is what does the war look like from this in

this claustrophobic environment of the single military platoon. What I'm trying to do with the siege of Calais in Wolves of Winter is to show actually one of the other interests in this war, because we've all heard the cliche talking about British and American an Allied activity in the Middle East over the course of our lifetimes. Ah, it's all about the oil. It's just all about money. Well, that's that's kind of people say that because there's a lot big part of that. That's true. It's also true

in the Middle Ages that it's about the economy. And Calais is an enormously important strategic town halfway between between France and Flanders. It controls are very narrow, the narrowest bit of the English Channel. It's in easy reach of the most economically prosperous sports towns in southern England, and it's the sinc Ports. It's been a haven for pirates for years and years and years who can pray on

passing shipping. It's both a menace and an incredibly it will be a bridge head for any further English military operation. But fundamentally, once the siege of Catwan's Calais falls in thirty seven, Edward the Third clears out everyone who lives in Calais invites in the richest merchants from England to take over this town and run it as an economic contropoe on the continent. Again not new thinking, this was exactly what had happened in the Holy Land during the Crusades.

The same thing had happened the Crusades. Yes, they had a big religious purpose to go to Jerusalem. But then there was the thing that kept every and interested was the economic viability of the port. Tack. Well, this is the sort of the same in the hundred Years ward. That's there's a massive financial imperative to doing this, And the only reason that these wars are possible is because people are prepared to lend ed with the third astonishing

amounts of money. Astonishing amount of He bankrupts bank, he bankrupts the body bank, He almost bankrupts the Fresco Baldi. He he's running up these gigantic debts to syndicates of merchants from the richest towns in England to continue paying for this war. And they're all very happy to continue financing the war because war is fantastic for business. The more money they lend him, he mortgages. It actually creates

a mortgage to pay for these wars. He says, give me the money now, and you can take over to the tax revenues of all these different rich ports around England. So the whole merchants take over the ports, all the Yarmouth merchants take over the tax of the ports of Yarmouth, the London merchants in London, and some of the Dover and so so once you really start getting under the skin of this war, which looks like if you read Quassa Nights and nobles doing heroic deeds, that's just all like,

that's the that's the icing. This is really just about merchants and pirates struggling financial dominance and poor grunts dying because of it. If we're talking, you know, chivalric deeds. I feel like the legend of Edward the Black Prince, who is the son of King Edward the third. Obviously Edward dies and never takes the throne, you know, leads to challenges in the world the roses. But he's in my understanding in British culture, very much seen as a

gallant hero. How did you portray him in your book, she answered, in a non leading question. How nice, she to asked, Yeah, it was it was the Black Print's eldest son of Edward third, does have this this grand reputation as the sort of paragonal of chivalry. It's it's him, It's Henry the fifth after him, and it's leverage of the line art before him. I don't think he would have wanted to run into any of those three. Ah. Actually I was concerned a dark alley, but anywhere ever, well,

I would I I'm very charming in a lady. They would be very nice to me. They wouldn't. That's learns the horrible thing that they really, absolutely massively would. None of those three men would be nice to you at all. They would be ghastly to you, and there would be ghastly to me as well, because I would be a sort of Welsh peasant person. So um. But it is the Blackfrint. He has this great reputation. I think. Is it's great that he never became king, because the reputation

will have evaporated. He was, by no means as subtle as his father. He was in later life an extraordinarily effective war lords medieval military tactician, if not a strategist. He was being brute, absolutely like Henry the Fit, absolutely brutal in an age which demanded that labine large of its military leaders in the Kressy campaign. He's often romanticized as having been this kind of sixteen year old is first time on campaign, and so the story goes based

on very very thin evidence. He quits himself immensely. Well, well, what do we mean he quits himself. Well, he sort of doesn't really do anything for the whole of the campaign because he's been babysat by the Marshal of the Army, Thomas Beecham, Earl of Warwick, and the Constable of the Army, William to Boone, Earl Northampton. When he does sort of have an opportunity to do anything, the first thing he does of real note during the campaign is sack a monastery.

Then he allows then a bit later, once his father has issued instructions they're on the run from Phillip's army. At this point between the sen and Song, on no account are we stopping to sack monasteries. He lets his then sack another monastery, for which twenty of his men are hanged summarily by his father. And then when we get to the Battle of Crescy well Edward, the Black

Prince comports himself in quite a strange way. He's placed he sort of front and center of the action, but he doesn't really obey orders or seem to understand the tactics of the battle very well, and he allows himself to be pulled out of the English lines and effectively captured and his standard face and this is a big disaster in the in the heat of the battle for

the English. Now, the legend goes that he had been seen around it and his father was who was commanding the battle from the rear, up on a windmill so he could see across the whole battlefield. His father was informed that he was in trouble and said, oh, you know, let it, let him win. His spurs had improved himself a man. But none of that in point of historical fact.

And it's been some amazing research on crazy. Historical research on crazy recently by Michael Livingstone, which has revised the location of the battlefield and everything basically happened on the battlefield says that that's really not what happened at all. He was captured and he was enormously lucky to be rescued m hm um and his father was extremely annoyed with him after the battle. Anyway, So in my not knowing all this, as I'm trying to write the Black

Prince into the story of Essex Dogs, I also asked myself. Well, firstly, you say, well, people can change out their career. And I asked myself, what would a sixteen year old placed in charge of an army when his dad's also the king, actually be like? And my answer was not so. Well, there's a degree of petulance, which, to go back to the beginning of our conversation, one does see sometimes in princes of the royal blood there's an enormal carmanorum. Yeah,

thank you, enormous amon of arrogance. There's a total irresponsibility. And since I was trying to write a fun novel and there's almost nothing that's known in reality about the Black Prince's character from this time, it's not written afterwards by people just seeking to lionize him, I thought, well, let's make him a drunk, Let's make him a sufficious little swine, but also a guy who has beat And then here's Harry again, has had to deal with the fact of a father as a king. His father has

been king since he was fifty. His father is not deemed to all his school plays. Let's say he's he's a horrible little shit because he's lonely, but that doesn't excuse his atrocious behavior. Throughout Essex songs, and that we have a mirror character among the Essex songs is called Romford, who's also sixteen, but who's a sort of street kid from London who has been found his way into this group of theirs. Told of the last minute, literally as

they're getting on the boat to leave France. He's trying to run away from England and succeeds. He and the Prince cross paths with for Romford emotionally disastrous consequences and for the Prince absolutely no consequences whatsoever. He learns nothing, he sees nothing, he's he's completely untouched by the gentle

suffering of his his little acolyte. And so there's a kind of it's not quite a romance between them at all, but there is a collision of these two sixteen year olds in war that I found quite interesting to write. I was going to ask, I don't want to do another too much about leaving question, but there is a little interesting thing you play with around sexuality, and can you talk a little bit about the fluidity maybe of sexuality in the th hundreds that maybe modern audiences don't

understand necessarily or want to think about. Yeah, there's look at this quite a lot of really respectable authors and I can't possibly include myself in that bracket, but you know, there's there's there's proper writers writing about the Middle Ages

at the moment. The temptation, of course, for modern novelists approaching the Middle Ages is to just dump twenty one century priorities onto this canvas because it's like it's a cool mash up and I get it, it's heynani no, but guess what, we're all sort of gender fluid or whatever it might be. Because some of these novels are great in their way, but I found it like, not that satisfying a thing for me to do, to go

to go and do that. And what I tried to draw out in Essex Dogs, particularly in this story I've alluded to between Romford and the Black Prince, is something about what sexuality was like in the Middle Ages, which is not so categorized, let's say, as it is now. Yeah, we have in the tw first century a weirdly nineteen century pseudo scientifical scientific sort of approach that we've we've put into gender and sexuality that were we to see it in terms of ethnicity and like the shapes of

heads and ship. You go, oh my god, that's the wackiest end of the wackiest, wackiest end of nineteenth century pseudoscience. But we've we've sort of got a version of that around section in the Middle Age. You don't have any of that. You've got lots of really wacky, weird nonsense science, but it doesn't seem to have been applied to categorizing sexuality. So the love between men, which we would probably categorize as homosexual, isn't really thought of in that way. As

the Middle Ages. There are distinct categories of sexual in misconduct. Well, there's really one which is buggery. That's how to make anything that as we were telling me, yeah, son of yeah, there's that, and then there's everything else, or rather there's there's what's a legit in the church law in terms of sexual conduct, which is very strictly by this stage defined as sex between one man and one woman for the purposes of procreation. And then there's everything else, which

is pretty my guinet, which could be gathered about. Now that's a very strict church definition and it's not very well policed, and I don't think it's very well observed or eBay if that is definitely not very well observed or obeyed by ordinary people. But as regards you know, the sort of versions of same sex attraction, which in the twenty fi century we would be extremely keen to categorize and delineate and make sort of names for and acronyms and hashtags and stuff like. That's that's us. They

just don't do that. I'm not like passing judgment, really, I'm just saying that that's not how it works in the Middle Ages. When you try and make the Middle Ages do that, it doesn't ring very true. So what I try to do, as it stokes, it's just play with this idea that there is an attraction certainly from Romford side. Yes, that came across as as a reader. Yeah, older men are attracted to Romford. Robert doesn't really know what he's about because he's just like a fiend and

a drifter. He quite likes the Prince, but he doesn't it doesn't sort of torture himself by asking what that makes him. He just has this kind of attraction towards the Prince, which is in some sense sexual, but it's also in that is sexual attraction is indistinguishable from a role that Romford is given as a squire, as a sort of social inferior to the prince. So he's sort of he looks at him with this kind of daunted

admiration which spills over into sexual attraction. But that's so much of that is part of his feeling, like the social difference between them, and you can't unpick in the Middle Ages that the difference for me between social longing and sexual longing. They're bound up in the same thing. And so the love story such as is between them is quite subtle. I think it's certainly in its resolution, yeah, yeah, and doesn't push it into the psychological component of romance

that we are familiar. And that that really something I've tried to do throughout Essex Dogs Is is showing you the Middle Ages with as little twenty one century psychological intrusion as is possible without making it just totally confusing and weird. So they do in order to make it comprehensible, they speak in a sort of form of modern idium, but they don't do things. Even the sympathetic characters don't aren't really sympathetic in ways that are we would find

sympathetic in a novel set in contemporary time. I find that challenge so relatable. I wrote a book and another book coming out in February that takes place in the early eight hundreds, and I tried to keep everything as heldable for a modern audience as I could, while still maintaining the feel of, you know, the regency period, pre

regid spirit in this sense. But my copy had a her and I went back and forth a lot because I wanted to have characters say okay, and she was like, you can't, and I was like, I know it's not historically accurate, but to me, it conveys sort of a youthfulness and a teenage, you know, conversationality that a younger character would do. That I kept them. So it's like even the mistakes that I mistakes, I put an air quotes I made. I think I tried to make us

deliberate choices for the text. As you know, I absolutely loved Nat, Thank you very much. Cannot wait through immortality, and I I think you're brilliant. And I just I read that that first boview was in like one. I didn't. I didn't put him up to this. You absolutely didn't.

You absolutely didn't felt it barely knew when I bought it and I read it in one go and I was transfixed by I remember as I was reading, I was send your message, say this is just such like I was transported to that to Edinburgh at that time, and I thought that you just handled all of the stuff that I've been agonized I was agonizing over as I was writing Essex Stalks at the time. I was reading that just like it just felt and I'm sure effortless it's not the right word, because no, no, I

I agonized when those lists too. You have to make those the sort of choices, but as a result that you end up with feels just you know, once the reader falls under your spell in anatomy, you know they're just they're they're in that world and it just everything feels right. And I think you've got to You've got to earn that. And don't know, I think you know, as you know, I thought you you earned it magnificently

in that book. But I think any writer has you have to earn the right to do things that aren't period accurate within a period book. Then that means getting an awful lot of stuff right or close to right. So that you're then you you then say okay, well you earn the reader's trust and they're going to go with you even when it is clear that you're doing

things that are not possible in that period. So in essence, dogs, you know you've said, you have people saying okay, I I really struggled with I'm writing a book about men in an army. How am I going to have them speak to one another? Because they's got to be somewhat profane. But the profanity of the Middle Ages is blasphemy for the fundamentally, our profanity is schatology and and it's and it's sexual. That's how we swear. But so I had a lot of trouble about am I going to use

the F word in this? And eventually yeah, I use fairly liberally to punctuate military speech to because you have to translate dialogue from communicate it to a modern audience what you need to convey. It's part of the Tiffany for oublem, right, the Tiffany problem. Yeah, it's a So it's that's just sort of the colloquial name for it. The fact that like if someone hears the name Tiffany,

they're they're like, oh, let's go to the mall. But Tiffany is a name that existed in the Middle Ages and the him you know, and for for years and hundreds of years. But if you wrote a historical fiction book and made your main character named Tiffany, it would seem wrong even if it's right. And so the typically problem is a is a colloquial version that someone told to me when I was writing anatomy, where sometimes you have to make things a little wrong so they feel right.

To monorn readers, do you know what I love that? I've never heard it describes the Tiffany problem before, But it's that's that says that says everything. I always think. It's like castles, you know, I like Headed Castle a famous watch watch Dan Jans Walk Your Castles on Netflix. Please please squander your life in this pursuit. But they're the wrong cut, you know, you see them now. They're

so bland. All medieval churches that's just devoid almost there the usually devoid of wall paintings and color and no with whitewash. If I went down the Windsor Castle Runch is about five miles down the road from my house with my tin of whitewash, and I just whitewash one of the towers. I reckonized, I reckon trees and laws would be dusted off. But they in the Middle Ages, it would not be unusual to have a sort of

a bright new colored castle. But we just think so even if you saw it on ILM, you'd say that's absolutely non to These people don't know anything about the Middle Age, So you're right. This is a version of the Tiffany. I call it the white washing windsor castle white washing winter castle problem, copyrighted Dan Jones. Another thing I also think, I mean, I I loved ethex Dogs, I like I thought it was just I felt like

I was learning. This was a period of history I didn't know much about, and it made a battle feel so immediate and personal when I tend to be so bored by military history. It was so brilliantly done. Your characters are so well sketched, and I think that your use of violence and gore is so well placed. You don't use it gratuitously, but you convey how brutal these battles were. Well. Thank you. And there's I don't read a lot of military fiction, and I don't write. I

mean I sort of some of them the books. In books like The Crusade, you can't get away from it, but the political as well as military, and it's not you know, I'm not a battle nerd, really, but I am a kind of people. And if one of the techniques that I tried, or the main technique I tried to use an Essex Dogs in order not to have very sort of either cliche or just like gratuitously unpleasant battle scenes, was just a lock focus, super super tight

with one character and you follow mainly two characters. You follow the group of characters, but you're locked with a couple of viewpoints love Day and Romford through most of Essex Dogs, and not as much as you. But I have worked in TV as well as in writing, and one of the directors I worked with on a show a few years ago gave me a very good piece of advice, which is, if you're having trouble writing your way through a scene, just lock that camera on one

person's shoulder. I found that the more I did that in Essex Dogs, the more the battles sort of gained very similitude. And there's one which is the one I suppose it's really is a crescy where for part of it where with Romford and he's just on the floor, just on the floor, and we could see his feet

have been kicking it. But then it's really but he can't get a real can't get up, and you don't see anything out like flashes, you see other stuff that also I found, like, firstly, it freed me from having to write endless, endlessly long boring battle scene, so you've just got this like confused chaotic vision through one person's eyes.

But I found also enabled me to make jokes because anyone who knows is invested in the history of the Crescent Campaign will come to us themselves and we'll be able to see where there are there's little easter eggs for the homeboys, right, like if you know that the Black Prince, if you if you heard about the Black Princes, go, well, it wasn't actually true that the Black Prince wore black armor.

That's a Victorian myth. Right, let's st get this. Then there's a there's a joke for you about why how he gets that name and the way he acts when someone offers to give him some black armor is like it's but if you don't know. It doesn't marry says in character, but the picking viewpoints that are attached closely to one character, you know, usually a lonely part of

the of the social hierarchy. I just found I had much been a ways of having jokes and subverting history and messing around with it, and and I enjoyed myself doing that a great deal. But then look, i'd have written a novel before. It was all new to me, and now you're doing another. There's a sequel coming out. I believe it's part of a trilogy. It's number two of a trilogy. Yeah, and I've gotta I gotta really

finished writing that thing. Yeah, get on it so that I can have you back on and we can talk about it again. Siege craft is different. Siege craft is very, very different. Narrative challenge. I'm finally writing a the story of a siege to the story of a campaign, a military campaign. Is it's pretty easy? Like, oh, of course, yeah, famously easy. All of us are thinking that. But what you do, what you have built into it is narrative imperative.

It goes forward because the army is moving and all you've got to well not all you've got to do. But that the thing you've got to actually a thing you've got to do with the battle campaign that's difficult is not make it inevitable the way they go in, and you've got to throw red herring after red herring in and give them different diversion so that it's not just that, well, they're on a train and the trains

go into the station. Stop them here. Yeah, the difference of the siege is, man, this train isn't going anywhere the Strangers station. It's going to be at the station and delivering gets off. So it's very, very rich in textural opportunity. Unless it a very teenage girl and a horse who thinks she talks to God. It shows up. That's good for your siege. You know that you said

about the trol with Calli's trouble with Keli. The trouble is it's not or Lane no true what you do have just in the same way, Elier, you've got Joan of Arc and the White Horse and every you know instantly when you say that, everyone knows what you're thinking if they listen to this podcast. Anyway, I haven't done a Joan of Arc episode, but I will. Well, you gotta get Helen Caster to come and do it. She

is brilliant. Yeah, she's she's she's the best. Put that aside. Cali, you have a very very very very very fam us end to the siege. So if you've been to Calais, there's a row down sculpture in Calais of the six Burghers of Calais, and they're coming out with the nooses around the next to offer their lives to Edward to buy the freedom of everyone who's left in the city, who's survived baiting, rats and horse leather and whatever, whatever, whatever.

And it's a really famous, really famous scene. And then you have cause Edward says, no, you hang you all, and his wife Siliver, oh please through that? Okay that I won't. It's a bit more dramatic than that, more paces in it than that impression suggested. But there are things in Cali to write towards that. They're there from the history, and so I've that's helpful. I love this. I don't know anything about this. There's so much history, Dan,

That's the lesson of history, isn't it. There's there's tons of it. Every time I think you've you've got to handle on it there's some more comes along. I've been reading nonstub history for a few years, doing this podcast constantly, and I've never heard about these burgers coming out with nooses or on their necks. The Rodance. Just doing google the Rodan sculpture, because the Rodand sculpture, there's two of them. There's another one, I think in London. Maybe I've not

long to make somewhere else. I made a couple of films that like the Real History of Essence Dogs and made them in the summer last year, and we went to Calais and I said and looked at that Rodand sculpture, and it's just I mean, obviously it's it's not fourteenth century, it's Rodin, it's modern, but it's a sensational piece of sculpture which each of these six Burgers has a different form of grief conveyed by their mannerisms in their face, and they are what's amazing about it is that he

has given them individual character. And when we think about so many of these set pieces from medieval history, if it's not the king or someone like near the level of the King, or Joan of Arc or whatever, they're just sort of generic noble or generic knight or generic peasant or generic archer or whatever. And what road Down does so brilliantly in that sculpture is say, these were real people, each one individual at each with a different reaction to this what we now see as a sort

of a fixed historical tableau. And row Down is in a measurably greater artist than I will ever be, obviously, but the I don't know, he never owned as sex dogs. Well, but the aim is to capture some of that, is to say, like an army of fifteen thousand is fifteen individuals, and each one of them with their own take on the thing that they're experiencing. And when we think of

medieval archer, yeah, okay, that's like that's a type. That's somebody who shoots a pretty similar bow with a similar arrow out of a similar bow and a similar place. But each one of those people was an individual, and and in the realm of fiction at least, that gives you such rich opportunity to do things with the past that nonfiction doesn't always allowed to do. So that's for me why I've enjoyed my little gap here. Fiction brilliantly said, A six dogs comes out in America February fourteen. I

believe makes a great balance and take the week before. Yeah, it's it's a pregame to immortality. Are I'm I'm twenty eight, two weeks before. It's okay, but plenty of time to read it and get ready for immortality. Your February could be sensationally good fiction wise, couldn't right? Get a good Valentine's Day gift for the medieval history lover in your life. Yeah, and then get a get book after that. Yeah, thank you so much for joining me. Uh, clearly when you're

ready to go to bed. This is this is what I planned. Fire sell roll from straight into vice slumber. And next time I'm in London, will you take me on another tour? Can we go do something? Yeah? What you want to say? I'm coming this summer, are you? Yeah, I'm leading at tore to Cornwall, but I'm going to be in London for a bit. Okay. So we went to Westminster Abbey last time, didn't we? Yeah? I got a personal tour from Dan Jones in Westminster Abbey. Not

to brag, but it was. It was wonderful. We had to queue up. I've never done that before. It was. I know. He was like, he's like, you're on TV. You don't have to wait line. Well, what don't we go to the Tower of London. Done, I'm there, let's do it. Tower of London is good. Yeah, we'll do that. Great. I'll see you this summer, and I'll see you even sooner because we're talking about your book again for your launch. Oh and then I'm coming to l a al, I'm

coming to see Iggy Pop. You're going to get so tired. I'll see you so much. This is good. I know, this is fantastic. Great, order Dan's book. Dan, I'll see you so soon. Noble Blood is a production of Art Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron