Six Kings and the Making of the English State, with Caroline Burt and Richard Partington
54:52 Share

Make your next move with American Express Business Platinum. Enjoy complimentary access to the American Express Global Lounge Collection and with a welcome offer of 150,000 points after you spend $20,000 on purchases on the card within your first three months of membership, your business can soar to new heights. Terms apply. Learn more at americanexpress.com slash business dash platinum. Amex Business Platinum. Built for business by American Express.

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.

I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political bloodletting, including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords, as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crises and the first major peasant uprising in English history.

In today's episode, historians Caroline Burt and Richard Partington discuss the six kings who ruled during these two centuries and significance of these monarchs to England's emergent statehood. Burt and Partington are joined in conversation by medieval historian and author Helen Carr. Let's join Helen now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Helen Carr. Our guests today are Caroline Burt and Richard Partington.

Caroline Burt is a medieval historian and college lecturer at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on the reigns of Edward I, 1272-1307, and Edward II, 1307-1327.

and on English governance during that period. Richard Partington is Senior Tutor at St John's College, Cambridge. He is an historian of late medieval British politics, war, law and crime, with a particular interest in the 14th century and especially the rule of Edward III, 1327-1377.

Today we'll be discussing their new book, Arise England, Six Kings and the Making of the English State.

Between 1199 and 1399, England witnessed savage political bloodletting, including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords, as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history.

In Arise England, Burt and Partington look at the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries to explore England's emergent statehood. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Caroline and Richard. Thank you for having us. Thanks, Helen. Nice to be here. Good. So this book covers the reigns of six very different kings.

all who had an immense role to play in developing how England as a state came to be, beginning with King John and Magna Carta and ending with Richard II. So in many ways, it's sort of a biography of a nation and how it developed rather than these individual kings. So before we look to 1199, I wanted to ask what happened before this period. So I want to go back before 1066 and ask...

How much did the conquest change the English state as it was before that point? And did it establish more of a sort of Franco-centric rule from something that was previously more Anglo-centric? I mean, James Campbell, of course, has talked about there being an Anglo-Saxon nation state, and I think that's pushing it too far. But there was certainly a proto-state in the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries.

And key dimensions of centralisation that we would recognise as part of statehood, I think, today were there in single coinage, which brought with it a degree of economic management, increasingly a single legal system. Though, of course, there were different legal systems for different groups, a different legal system for the Dane law system.

than from Mercia, for example. And increasing recognition of Anglo-Saxon kingship. And with that was writ-driven government, the growth of boroughs, so fortified towns. So there was physical space that helped deliver government as well. So if you like, the underpinnings of a state were certainly there before 1066.

And it's always seemed to me that the Normans came very intelligently recognised that what was there was extremely useful. And they obviously layered then on top of that for their own purposes. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that William the Conqueror did was build castles on quite a scale. What had made, well, one of the particular things that had made England quite difficult to defend was the absence of very significant numbers of castles. And William recognised that. So...

This was one of the first things he did. So some of the things that you would call governmental infrastructure were improved and enhanced under the Normans. And of course, the nobility over time was largely changed.

William brought with him a number of nobles from Normandy and there were immediate changes, but actually a series of rebellions by the lords in England meant that he ended up replacing even more of them as time went on. So that would have felt like a very distinct shift. And you talked about how kind of French this will have felt, certainly at the top level, I think very significantly so. And linguistically, that was a very significant change. Yeah.

So, I think the conquest brought some shifts, but the structures already existed and that's what in many ways made England so attractive to conquer because it was this brilliant infrastructure that gave you access to so much money, so many resources that William looked at and thought, "Well, actually, I could really do with that and I can see a way of leveraging that easily when I become king if I manage to do that."

What I think you then have under somebody like Henry I is some quite significant innovations and developments, particularly in the judicial sphere and the financial spheres. So that's when things really start to kind of ratchet up, if you like. And then again, with a hiatus in Stephen's reign where everything goes a little bit wrong, then again it ratchets up under Henry II for all sorts of different reasons to do with Henry's own priorities as king. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and it's interesting that you start the book, you kind of skip Henry and you begin with John because Henry sort of creates the foundation for a lot of the existing structures that go on past 1199. But I think it's interesting that a lot of people begin with John. And sometimes I think about this particular period of history and the end of John's reign in some ways feels like the start of a new era, right?

And do you think that is because of the immensely important Magna Carta? You talk about Magna Carta in the book and the role the charter had in the development of

Do you think that's something that is often underestimated as to how important that was going forward into, well, really into the early modern and into the modern day? I think it has been, absolutely. And I think, I mean, just going back to your point about Henry II, you know, one of the things you could say about the book is, well, why didn't you start in 1154 or why didn't you start in 1066? And we really debated when to choose as our starting point for this. You know,

In many ways, the common law that's created by Henry II is the big shift because that's the thing that creates this sense that it's really unfair if the king can do things in relation to your property that no one else can do in relation to your property. And one of the things that John was doing to raise money, the big thing John was doing to raise money, was threatening people's property if they didn't give him money.

And so all of a sudden, that sense of fairness that had come from Henry II's common law was being kind of amplified by John's behaviour that was completely arbitrary and unfair. So it was a difficult call as to where to start. And I think one of the things that we acknowledge is that

You know, what we're not saying is things just started in 1199. It's a continuum. It has to be a continuum. If you're going to write a book, as you know, you've kind of just got to pick almost, not quite arbitrarily, but you've got to pick a date that makes some sense and work with it. So I agree, it's always difficult. And I think Henry can get a bit overlooked in that whole discussion. Yeah, I think...

The impact of Magna Carta, one of the reasons why we decided to kick off with John was because the big things we wanted to talk about were things like the development of parliament, the development of a system of taxation, the shift from being dynastic kingship to a crown of England that...

attached to a national identity. And lots of those shifts really had their biggest period of development in the 13th and 14th centuries. And so, yes, absolutely, Magna Carta is critical to that because that's the thing that says the king has to behave exactly the same as the rest of us.

And in theory, the king can just go, well, I'm not listening to that. God appoints me. I can do what I like. And in theory, he can. But in practice, when you've had a civil war as serious as the one in the 1210s, that's not going to be possible without political crisis. So that gives rise to a situation where the king has to talk to people when he wants money. He has to actually have a dialogue and get consent to that. And that's the backdrop to parliament.

But then that means people get incorporated into thinking about what matters to them, what should be important. Something I know is that Magna Carta is also so often referred to, whether it's a slightly veiled threat, it's this sort of spectre that looms above kings going forward, isn't it?

I think, I mean, in a way, you know, I have a phrase, politics will always find a solution. And I think it will. And one of the reasons that we started in 1199 is because if you're thinking about the causation of this extraordinary period of change, where we have the emergence of national taxation and parliament and the co-option of foreign policy by the political community and then military revolution, I mean, so many shifts, right?

One of the drivers is the common law, created in 1966 by Henry II, as you know. And the common law, in a way, has its own momentum all the way through our period and beyond. But the other great driver is war, and in particular, war that's not going brilliantly.

And that's one of the reasons why the reign of John is such an important starting point for so much of this, because it's the fact that the war goes badly and that John needs to make a recovery that drives so much change. And you could say the same about Henry III in a way. It's the fact that

It's not until the reign of Edward I that anyone manages to get properly on the front foot in terms of foreign policy. And you might argue that it's only really in the reign of Edward III that that fully happens. And that really does create a dynamic of change that it's easy to overlook. So we look at structural questions, of course, and we look at the role of the individual. But too often, I think we don't think about circumstances, which is often the biggest single driver of change.

And it's the circumstance of a war going badly that makes such a big difference. Now, on Magna Carta and the threat, I mean, it's an interesting question. But I think a lot of this is about the theatre of politics, Helen. And you get it later, of course. You know, you see it with the confirmation of the charters and the articles upon the charters. You see reference to Magna Carta at virtually every political crisis.

The fact that it's talked about doesn't necessarily mean that it's an active threat. It's part of the warp and weft of the political fabric. And that perhaps is the most important and the most interesting thing, that it's there as this extraordinary fixed point, this assumption, which given how contested it was in the first couple of decades is perhaps remarkable. But having been so contested and having become established, it then becomes unquestionable.

you know, central to every consideration. That said, it doesn't stop the kings who want to behave really badly from behaving really badly. And again, politics finds the solution in the form of deposition.

for Edward II and Richard II. I like Helen's idea of it as a spectre, though, as well. I always use a slightly different word, but I think we're coming back to the same thing, Helen. My word is talismanic. So it's a kind of talisman. It sort of gets brought up at any critical moment. And it's almost like a shorthand. If we say Magna Carta and we refer to confirmation in Magna Carta, everyone knows what that means. We don't have to define it.

You know, it has its own political currency that at points of serious political crisis, it makes people sit up and kind of, you know, address what they're doing. It sits alongside the coronation oath in that sense, doesn't it, in a way? Yeah. Yeah. And also it serves as like a springboard for other political tools. I'm thinking specifically of the ordinances.

that Thomas of Lancaster was dogmatic about and was trying to spearhead in the reign of Edward II, trying to use this series of this legislation to bring a king to heel. And that wasn't as successful, but it's using the same principle of Magna Carta, isn't it, to try and cap authority to an extent.

Or at least cap arbitrary authority, I suppose, you know, that that sense that that the king can do anything and it's the anything that gets really scary under the wrong person. But it's but it's I mean, it feels terribly current to us, doesn't it? Because of Trump.

Because you've got that sense that somebody is just pushing the margins in a way that other people weren't. What I think is really interesting about the ordinances is that in the end, the ordinances were never, ever going to work. The only thing that would find a solution was politics. And we see the value of the ordinances in the ease with which Edward II dismisses them in 1322 with the Statute of York. And no one can really argue the opposite. I mean, is it illegal to constrain the king? Well, yes, it is.

So it has to be, in the end, the solutions are always about political actors recognising that the way forward involves pragmatism and compromise.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You mentioned common law. What did this look like in the 12th century and how widely did people take advantage of it? Well, first of all, it was quite cheap. Secondly, it was iterative. It was evolving all the time. So you kick off with, let's say, for example, the writ of novel deceasing, which translates as literally new dispossession.

So if I come along and I grab Richard's manor, he can sue me, he can take out a writ of novel deceasing. We can go and have our case heard by a jury and they can decide whether in fact I was in possession of the land and whether he's come along and grabbed it. Now, at the same time, you're getting all sorts of other writs developing and people are literally going to the government, going to the king and saying, that's great. Now can we have one for this? And can we have one for this other thing as well? And I've got a problem with this, but there's not a writ. So can we have one? And it's,

The common law has always been, right from that moment of its inception, something that responds to and adapts to the needs of the time. It was pretty cheap to buy a writ. Certainly not saying every peasant in England was going and buying one, because I think that would be a bit of a stretch too far, but it was accessible, very accessible.

And you can see that from, if you look at the records produced by the King's Law Courts, because we're really lucky, we have these central law court records in the National Archives, which most other countries couldn't have anything similar from this sort of period. They go from quite small to documents that you struggle to lift up for, let's say, one term, one legal term in one year.

which is only a matter of a few months in a year. So that gives you a sense of quite how many people were going to law very, very quickly. And so, you know, it would depend. Sometimes it was in your locality and a jury would hear this. Sometimes you would actually go into the king's courts later in the 13th century, for example, you might go to something called King's Bench.

So let's say Richard's taken my manor. I can also... I can sue him for novel deceasing, but if I really want to ratchet up the pressure on him, I'm going to accuse him, whether he's done it or not, of beating me up and beating up my servants and possibly even killing one of my servants, breaching the king's peace. And so I'm going to get...

a king's bench rid and that's doubly annoying for him because he actually has to turn up in king's bench and that's often either at Westminster or somewhere the king is but not usually in your local area so

So it's all about legal pressure. It's very similar in lots of ways to what we see now. People often think that the law is something that you go to for verdicts. Yeah, sometimes, of course, it is. But quite a lot of the time, the threat of legal action and the first stages of legal action are a way of leveraging sort of pressure on your opponent for them to settle in the way that you want to, because what you're looking for is that settlement in your favour.

And so it quite quickly became that sort of system in terms of disputes between people. The other thing to emphasise too, Caroline said she and I might have a dispute over my manor, but actually 90% of the time it's not a manor, it's a small parcel of land. The vast majority of the cases are brought by ordinary people against ordinary people, townspeople, peasants.

And as Caroline says, very accessible. And of course, if we're dealing with the common law that is not associated with property and property disputes, but if we're dealing with the law in relation to things like assault and homicide and arson, that's free at point of access.

You don't have to purchase a writ, you just have to turn up before the sheriff's turn in the 100 court in your locality, which takes place four times a year. You need to persuade a jury of local people that your accusation, your concern is a legitimate concern.

And the case is then taken forward that way. So it's no surprise that there was this vast from below hunger for the common law to grow because it's just so useful. Enforced by the king's officials, more distant and therefore in a way more impartial. It involves record evidence.

And in a precedent-driven society, that's immensely helpful. And we think quite a lot of the property cases had probably been settled out of court, but they take them to court, they buy a writ just to get a formal verdict, which the jury have almost certainly been co-opted into so that there is a formal record kept somewhere to help guarantee the peace in future generations.

So the most remarkable thing, but also driven from the top, because very quickly the common law became the primary means by which the royal government was carried out in the localities. If you're thinking about how government was represented to you, you saw it primarily through the king's courts. So an amazing shift.

I think as well, the rhetoric and the language that's used in some of these documents is so interesting. I work on petitions and I think that even though it's slightly different to the writs and the King's Bench records, you do really see a sense of people learning a way of how to make their case and the language that they use and the demonstrations of

you know, of their grievances. I think it's really interesting. And some of them are so obviously so prosaic, but then others are just fascinating insights into the way that people were trying to get access justice during this period.

When you think about super successful businesses that are selling through the roof, like Heinz or Mattel, you think about a great product, a cool brand and brilliant marketing. But there's a secret. The business behind the business making selling simple for them and buying simple for their customers. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify.

Upgrade your business and get the same checkout as Heinz and Mattel. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash promo, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash promo to upgrade your selling today. shopify.com slash promo.

Hi, this is Javon, your Blinds.com design consultant. Oh, wow. A real person. Yep. I'm here to help with everything from selecting the perfect window treatments to... Well, I've got a complicated project. No problem. I can even help schedule a professional measure and install. We can also send you samples fast and free. Hmm, I just might have to do more. Whatever you need. So the first room we're looking at is for... Shop Blinds.com now and get up to 40% off with minimum purchase. Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. Okay.

The world is facing urgent, monumental issues, and you may be considering a career where you can take your service to the next level and make a global impact.

In the heart of Washington, D.C., gain world-renowned expert knowledge and a global network as you pursue a master's degree and turn your passion into practice. Thousands of the world's leaders got their start at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Are you next? GW is a proud Yellow Ribbon Program participant.

I mean, Parliament as well was another thing, aside from common law, that became hugely important to the development of England. And how did this develop after 1216 from something that was relatively basic and defence and justice based to more of a political machine? And why was this particularly unique to England? So it's a good question. Well, of course, the word Parliament shares the French parlement, and it's really about discussion.

So, you know, we should always remember that there is that very close connection in lots of ways. And where does it come from? It comes from a long history of dialogues between the king and his subjects about X, Y and Z. So it's a bit like with Magna Carta and Parliament.

all parliaments it's not like somebody sort of came along in the 12th 13th month right i need to design a whole new edifice so i'll do it all from scratch and do this amazing innovative thing they just went we need to have a dialogue about this we need a forum in which it can operate what have we done before quick grab that and that's all they did with magna carta they just went how shall we do this oh charters of liberties that'll do we'll use the template so um

And Parliament's a bit like that. So, again, it evolves. It starts out as kind of, you know, a dialogue between quite a small number of elite people and the king about taxation, in which people also will bring some grievances and there'll be some wider chit-chat and discussion about matters of import.

And over time, of course, what happens is that more people are asked to contribute to this taxation. And funnily enough, as people start to have to contribute, they start to want to have a say. There's nothing like turning 18 and then paying tax for the first time, you know, and realising that you can vote and you can pay tax. And suddenly you might have an opinion on things that you never previously had an opinion on. It's kind of like this, you know, people are paying tax. They want to have input.

And over time, as tension arises between the king and his subjects over what they'll pay for, that forum has to be broadened and broadened. But also kings have to recognise that in that broad forum, I'm not just going to come all the way to wherever you're holding a parliament to discuss your tax. I actually might want to bring some grievances and have those discussed first.

I've got things to say as well. And so under Edward I in particular, after a big crisis in Henry III's reign, the king starts saying, OK, we need to call knights, we need to call representatives of the towns. This isn't just about the nobility. So the forum gets bigger in which that discussion happens. And of course, then Parliament starts to deal with much, much more. So the king might say, well, I'm going to create a piece of legislation. It's not like now. He doesn't need permission for that.

But he will often use Parliament as the place where that's read out for the first time, for example. And in the 14th century, as Richard has shown with his stuff, particularly on Edward III, Parliament becomes quite mouthy, really, about what it wants. Probably hand over to Richard at that point, given that intro. Well, I mean, I think in a way, it's why kings don't call parliaments. The reason kings don't call parliaments is they don't want people to get together.

Because when people get together, they swap notes. And that's the easy thing for us to forget, that actually the nobility and the gentry of medieval England are scattered across the entire country. They're not physically together. They can't swap notes easily. And when they are all together, they can start to form collective views on the way that things ought to be.

And it's inevitable within the context of very large amounts of money being increasingly regularly extracted to support foreign policy, that people will be interested in the nature of that foreign policy. And because people are naturally curious, and most of them are reasonably intelligent, their interest will develop a kind of, again, a kind of momentum of its own. And it's this process, I think, across generations that leads us from a situation in

1199, which foreign policy is basically King John's domain, to one by the late 1350s when Edward III says to Parliament, okay, here is the peace treaty that I've been able to negotiate. Is it sufficient? What do you think? And Parliament says, no, it's not. I'm afraid you need to go and fight against Sire.

And it's such an extraordinary shift, but it's that iterative process of discussion. And of course, when they're together, they take the opportunity handing over large amounts of money to say to the Crown, actually, there's another thing that we'd really like amendment over.

And I think where we've misunderstood this in the modern age, as we've looked back, is we've tended to assume that that process was transactional when actually it wasn't. It was a process of negotiation, discussion and consultation. And it's really important that we recognise that the king retains the whip hand in those negotiations all the time.

Again, he can't act in defiance of good sense and he can't act in a way that is going to strip the realm and diminish his people. But technically, the levers are in his hands so long as he manipulates those levers cannily. And where it goes wrong is where kings aren't satisfied to work pragmatically within the possible realm.

where they insist, as Richard II does, upon working outside the possible. Or in the case of Edward II, they're just not doing anything at all. And that's where things then start going badly wrong.

I think there's another story here also, which is the way that parliamentary process, and it's something that I'm not an expert on by any means, but it would be really interesting to study this properly, I think. The extent to which parliamentary process structure starts to shape politics simply because of the human instinct to do things according to a formula. And that's something I think we could look at more.

I wonder as well, you talk about the 1350s and how much of this rising middle class in this period, particularly in the parliamentary sphere, how much that threatened royal authority and also the authority of the nobility. Do you think that that became a real problem leading to things such as the so-called imperialists?

peasants revolt which is really misleading in its own way because of course as you know it wasn't just led by quote unquote peasants. To be honest with you Helen I think that in a way the rise of the Commons in Parliament doesn't really pose a threat to order at all because kingship is working co-optively with the nobility and the gentry and the wider political community. It's the work of Chris Dyer who

that pointed out what probably, you know, a couple of decades ago, that in terms of male householders, something like 40% of them have some sort of government job, if you include working as a juror or being a constable in a vill, being somehow involved as one of the king's officials. I mean, we know from, again, the records of the royal courts in the early 1340s that in a county like Essex, there were 2,500 royal officials.

So there are huge numbers of people in every county who are heavily engaged in government. And as government expands, the expansion involves an extension to wider and wider groups of the social and political community. And I just don't really see it as a

as a challenge so long as people are pulling in the same direction. I think it becomes a challenge when groups, and this Peasants' Revolt is an absolute case in point, when groups feel that they are being let down by other groups within the political community.

And that, of course, happens in times of failure, in times of dearth, in times where there is lack of leadership. That's when things start to tear apart, where people start pointing the finger at other people. But when you've got effective leadership and when things are going rather well, actually people tend not to point the finger at other people. They tend to work together. And that's certainly, I think, the story for most of the 13 leaders.

30s, 40s, 50s and well into the 30s, 60s. Yeah, it's interesting that actually this sort of growing little class was something that was incredibly beneficial to the nobilities and the monarchy is what you're suggesting. And also during the reign of Edward III, how much he relied on that sort of burdening merchant class as well and government relied on them to fund the war effort. Well, again, that's the other thing that we forget, that most taxation was indirect taxation.

That it was the customs on war in particular and indirect taxation more widely that really funded the war. The focus is all upon the 15th and 10th, the debate in Parliament, because, of course, those are the records that have survived. Now, wider questions of taxation are also discussed in Parliament, but perhaps are not quite the same pressure of focus because of...

the perspectives that are represented in Parliament. And the merchant class, of course, also act as the people who facilitate a lot of the practical side of the war, amphibious lift, the provisioning of supply. All wars fundamentally are logistical wars.

And by having such a strong merchant community and being such a strong trading nation, the English are in a secure position to be able to project power overseas in a way that not every nation could. I was going to say that I think one of the things that struck me, I mean, I wrote the Edward the Richard II chapter.

And one of the things that was really, really resonated with me, because I was writing quite a lot of it during Covid and during lockdowns, which was great, obviously, the sense in which this was so similar to what we're experiencing today. You know, obviously, our society is in so many ways different. And we you know, you think all these hundreds of years between us, but you have a pandemic.

No vaccines, so it kills basically 50% of the population. You have a pandemic, you have an economic crash, and you have a lot of suspicion of what you might refer to as elites.

which is that great amorphous term, you know, what does it actually mean? It's not me, is it? I'm not one of them. And that's all stuff that we've experienced in the last few years. Partly the 2008 economic crash has kind of had that long-term backdrop to it, but the pandemic as well and the economic crash that's followed on from that.

It was kind of like not quite history repeating itself, but when I was writing it, I was like, wow, this is so similar to what I'm seeing when I'm writing about the 1370s and 1380s and how angry people are. Yeah, and a question of the structures of society, you know, people starting to come out of this pandemic and particularly in relation to the pandemic

1348, you know, this lack of the sort of idea of the fatalistic existence, not necessarily being so much, so much of a thing anymore. But we were just talking and leading into the changes and shifts around war and patterns in military strategy and developments. What did Parliament have to do with military power?

And this, I think, became particularly important in the reigns of Edward I and Edward III. Am I right in thinking that contracts replaced sort of a very traditional feudal system of you work the Lord's land so you go to war with him?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think the critical thing is the assumption that the king's subjects will provide him with 40 days military service is completely swept aside by the idea that you contract on a regional basis. And there are so many advantages to that. One is that actually you, instead of simply finding yourself faced by

effectively a whole load of conscripts, 50% of whom or more are not really fit for military service, don't want to be there, haven't got the right equipment, are knackered because they've been working the fields or whatever it might be. And will run away at the first opportunity and have to be guarded to stop them from running away. And they're in great amorphous groups who, depending on how they gather together, may not even be able to understand one another because they speak different dialects.

You recruit via contract on a regional basis. You recruit the people who actually want to fight and who are equipped to fight. You get to weed them properly. They're gathered together in groups that can actually understand one another. And then they serve alongside people with a strong sense of local identity. You know, we have accounts of, for example, the Earl of Arundel's troops arriving with him wearing uniforms. So you've actually got divisions who are all wearing the same uniform, which is an extraordinary shift.

And it also makes service overseas much more viable because you're paying people to go. And the wages are quite good. I mean, an archer is paid the wage of a very good skilled labourer, the daily wage, and a man at arms twice that. And in addition to that, of course, there will be the hope of a degree of plunder and maybe ransoms depending on...

whether you get lucky with that, of course. It's easy to forget that for the elites, war is a very expensive business. So we tended to think in the past that nobles went to fight because that was one of the ways that they made money. But actually, most nobles, certainly in the 14th century, lose vast amounts of money through the king's wars. And one of the clever things that contracting armies does is it enables...

the king in a way to access the nobles' money to provide troops in a way that he's not been able to before. Because these noble captains act as regional recruiting agents and use their own resources in the first instance to provide the equipment and pay for the shipping and the food and all of that sort of stuff. And the king pays them back afterwards. Unless, of course, he doesn't have the money, which quite a lot of the time he doesn't.

And that's one of the reasons why so many leading war captains end up with really big debts at the point of their death. And they're not fighting for money. They're fighting because it's a dimension of their identity and it's a matter of public service. Yeah, I'm really interested in that. This idea about particularly Edward III was very good at this.

This idea about national identity and war being a national prerogative and we're trying to protect our beaches and we're trying to secure England by going to war in France. I mean, how successful do you think that was? Do you think people really bought into that pro-war propaganda that Edward so heavily invested into?

It's a really good question, Helen. And I, in a way, I turned it slightly on its head by saying that if you look at quite a lot of what Edward III said, particularly in the 1330s about the reasons why he was going to war, it wasn't really propaganda. It was a description of reality.

And the French were, this is going to sound terribly jingoistic in a way, the French were behaving really badly. You know, Philip VI, the French king, was pushing extremely hard and being unreasonable. And I think the political community recognised that there was only so far that you could be pushed.

I mean, in a way, I think if we were looking to draw a comparison, it's a bit like right now, somebody saying, well, President Zelensky is propagandising the situation of Ukraine. Well, he's not. You know, they were invaded.

I mean, whatever some people in the globe might think about that, that's the reality. That's pretty much the way that it was, I think, in the 30s, 30s. And Caroline, you know more about this than I do, of course, but the same in the 1290s as well. The French did a really sly number on the English in 1294. And it's no surprise that there was a willingness to fight. Yeah, I mean, Edward, the first brother, Edmund, who had led the negotiations in France and done a deal with the French king in which he thought that they were going to do a very nice kind of

we'll acknowledge your grievances and we'll hand over Gascony but you're going to hand it back and everyone's going to go away having reached a peaceful settlement here.

The French king just, as he said, did a number on him, invaded Gascony and said, right, I'm keeping it. And Edmund Crouchback, I mean, to put the human side of this into it, I don't think he ever got over it. You know, he came back and a whole pile of nobles said, well, what were you doing there then, you idiot? And the poor guy's like, well, what would you have done in this circumstance? You know...

women in the family who were very trusted, who were trying to do the right thing, who were intermarried and related to each other through the French king and the English king, were trying to conduct negotiations and came up with this deal, which everyone thought would hold. And it just didn't. And it didn't because Philip IV showed complete bad faith or whatever reasons, you know, he's probably pushed into it by kind of quite extreme figures in his own government. But yeah, I mean,

Edward I has no choice but to respond. I think the problem is that he...

The way he then goes about stuff is, one, hugely expensive and people start not to be able to afford it. And two, there is great fear once the Scots and the French are like with each other that the minute the king goes to France, the Scots are going to invade or, you know, do serious damage to the English position, which is exactly what they're doing. Which is a very reasonable fear. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's not like they weren't either doing that or were going to start doing it because they did invade multiple times.

Yeah. I mean, that brings me actually, interesting, you do have, there is a section in the book about the Battle of Bannockburn and obviously the massive failure that was the Battle of Bannockburn. But how, speaking about military tactics, how the tactics used at Bannockburn and the efficiency of Robert Bruce, how Edward III later used that to his advantage with battles like Halland and Hill and even arguably at Crecy. Yes.

I mean, the English learnt quickly from the Scots. What I think is remarkable here, Helen, is the extent to which political circumstances, and again, it's circumstances, forced a new way of fighting onto peoples who were really hard pressed. The Swiss, of course, at Morgarten in 1315, the year after Bannockburn,

And before that, in 1302 at Courtres, the Battle of the Gold of Spurns, the Flemings against the French, they could not meet the French with the sort of massed, well-equipped cavalry that was the traditional way of fighting within the Western medieval world. And so foot soldiers had to do the best that they could. Very well-organised, very well-drilled foot soldiers. That was the situation that the Scots were in. They couldn't match the English in respect of cavalry, so they had to fight in a different way. And it was an extremely effective way of fighting.

And it's to the credit of the English that they saw how effective that way of fighting was and co-opted it. But they added to it something else which they'd learned to a degree in the Welsh Wars, which is how effective longbow archery was when used en masse. And it's that combination of the very well-organised foot soldier equipped with the right weapons to deal with horses and

and longbow, mass longbow archery, you know, six, seven, eight thousand archers that produced this effectively irresistible war-winning formula that the English had for the best part of 150 years until a combination of gunpowder and political change shifted the balance again in the middle part of the 15th century.

Something I have never understood is how did the English manage to maintain, and correct me if I'm wrong, and I'm just missing something here, but this sort of martial monopoly over the longbow? Because am I right in thinking that the French continued to use the crossbow and it's obviously less effective? Why didn't they just take it?

So it's a really interesting question, Helen. It's one of the great unanswered questions. So in a way, the longbow is a bit of a... We use the term the longbow to distinguish it from the crossbow, but it's not actually... It's an anachronistic term. They didn't talk about longbows in the Middle Ages. They just talked about bows. So you've got the one that you hold vertically and the one that you hold horizontally and pull with a trigger. That's the crossbow, the latter. The longbow is the vertically held one.

The reason why you'd use a crossbow rather than a longbow is that anyone can fire a crossbow. With a day's training, anyone can fire a crossbow with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Firing a longbow requires years of intense training because of how physically demanding it is. So you had to have your population training on an ongoing basis for wars that were to come. The big question is, why didn't the French...

train their peasantry up in the use of the longboard bow in the way that the English were trained up in the use of the longbow. And we don't really know. One of the theories is that the French were particularly concerned about peasant rebellion, and they didn't want all of their peasants armed with this incredibly dangerous weapon. But that's just a guess. I mean,

I mean, it might just be that actually the very nature of centralised England meant that it was possible to organise this sort of thing in a way that highly decentralised France couldn't really organise. Or there weren't the same imperatives to organise it.

Maybe because war was being fought mostly in open plain, in good cavalry country. They weren't trying to fight in Ireland or in Wales or in Scotland, in hill country, where the horse was a real disadvantage in a way. So there's a whole pile of things that could have been at play. But the critical thing is that the English had thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of people who could fire a bow really well. And the rate of fire and the range of the longbow and its accuracy were irresistible.

Yeah, yeah. And it took extraordinary fitness, as you've mentioned, and ability because it's so heavy. I remember listening or reading something on Toby by Toby Capwell, and he was talking about how the actual weight of the draw, how heavy it is.

And that being something that we don't really think about today when we think about shooting a longbow. I know, I know. I mean, the only real disadvantage of a longbow, actually, is that the bowmen could only fire so many rounds before they were completely exhausted. So that's something that we don't really, again, we don't talk about that much. But, you know, they could maybe fire 16 or 17 shots and then they'd have to have a really good rest because they were so tired. Right.

There are so many questions I have and I'm conscious that we're going to have to sort of rein it in. So something that interests me particularly when thinking about England in the Middle Ages and particularly the period that you cover within this book, and I'm a 14th century historian, but...

And I think about it very much in terms of the 14th century, but your book has certainly widened my scope with that. And that is how should we consider the term nation in regard to England during the Middle Ages? And, you know, particularly thinking about the waxing and waning interconnectivity with France and wider Europe and the territorial ambitions of the Plantagenet kings before Richard, right?

It's a fascinating question and one of the things we couldn't do more on in the book was talk about that question because we were already running to hundreds and hundreds of pages and we just had to stop. And it's one of my great regrets. There's a brilliant historian called Andrea Ruddick who's written the book on this, which if anyone hasn't seen it, although it's an academic book, it's incredibly accessible for people who aren't trained academic historians. But basically,

I think English identity was there at the start of our period, without a doubt. I think the idea of the development of Parliament, the development of the system of national taxation and the wars, particularly the Hundred Years' Wars, as having quite a significant impact on how people saw what England and the English crown represented.

particularly vis-a-vis their continental neighbours, is an important one. I mean, that's where you see really significant shifts as well. And so I'd love to have been able to do more on it because it's such a fascinating question as well. I don't know if Richard wants to say a little bit from the stuff you wrote. I mean, I think one of the things I've reflected on is the extent to which maybe the Scots also

forged a route forward here in that because of his extraordinary political circumstances within Scotland, Robert Bruce was forced to draw a line dividing the Scottish nobility from the English nobility.

in a way that no one had before. Before then, you had an Anglo-Scottish or Anglo-Franco-Scottish nobility, more realistically, a nobility that, to use Robin Frame's phrase, strode across Europe with aplomb, who had lands in England and in Scotland and in France and family in all of them and moved between all of them. And it was Robert Bruce who really made the shift from 1314 onwards, where he effectively said, well, you're either Scottish or,

or you're not part of Scotland. And being Scottish effectively precludes holding land in England and recognising the English crown in any way at all. And that formed a sense of identity that was also attached to place that perhaps hadn't existed before.

And you then get the English, it seems to me, defining themselves by reference to language, particularly vis-a-vis the French. I mean, going back to propaganda, where there is propaganda, I think, Helen, is over French wider intentions in relation to Englishness, the desire of the French to eliminate the English language, which is something that is propagandised by the government of Edward III.

And that speaks to a real shift, I think, in attitude and perspective. Nonetheless, we're still talking about an international political elite, and you only have to look at the military commanders.

on all sides in the Hundred Years' War and the wars between the English and the Welsh and the English and the Scots, to see the extent to which soldiers of fortune from all over Europe were fighting on all sides. The key critical captain in the defence of Aquitaine against the French in the first phase of the Hundred Years' War was Hugh of Geneva.

I think, yeah, I mean, there's so much about that. And I think your point about Scotland and Robert Bruce and that sort of defining the fealty as becoming part of a nation. So before that, it was something political and all about sort of which power are you supporting? And then it becomes about which identity are you taking on in it?

Yeah, exactly. No, I think that's fascinating. And there's so many questions. I feel I want to talk to you about borders. I want to talk to you about lots of things, but that's going to have to be for another time. Caroline and Richard, thank you so much. That was Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, authors of Arise England, Six Kings and the Making of the English State.

which is available now online or at a bookshop near you. And the paperback will be available to buy from the 10th of April. I've been Helen Carr and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.

Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.

That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details.