Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of Crécy

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

The English won a decisive battlefield victory over the French in the first decade of the Hundred Years' War. At the Battle of Crécy, an outnumbered English army went up against thousands of French mounted knights, the finest cavalry in Western Europe at that time. Relying on their famed longbowmen, The English under Edward III weathered French cavalry charges until the forces of King Philip VI were forced to retreat. The victory paved the way for the capture of Calais, which gave the English a foothold in France for over two centuries.In this very special episode Dan teams up with Tim Harford, host of the 'Cautionary Tales' podcast. Tim and Dan delve into the details of this crucial battle to learn about the catastrophic mistakes that were made, and why.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to a very special episode indeed of Dan Snow's History, because we've teamed up with one of my favourite podcasts, Cautionary Tales, presented by the legend Tim Harford. Good to get in the studio with you, man. It's fantastic. I've never been called a legend before, Dan, but yeah. Well, get used to it. Thank you. I am very excited to be here. Very excited indeed. You're going to have to run the numbers on whether you are in fact a legend. I'd like to see a piece on that, one of your other brilliant broadcast properties. We are packed together in a very tiny studio. We're playing footsie in here, but we're going to play intellectual footsie as well, because everyone listening to this will know about Cautionary Tales, but it's all about catastrophe. It's all about human error through history, of which there is plenty.

There is plenty of history. And I'm not a historian. I'm something of a wrong-ologist, actually, because I've been so fascinated by human error. So cautionary tales is stories of things going wrong, and in particular, what we can learn about them. So we tell a historical story. Sometimes it's fairly recent, plane crashes. Sometimes we're reaching back through the centuries. But in each case, somebody made a decision,

somebody made a mistake. And at a certain point, I put my nerdy behavioral economist, social scientist hat on and try to figure out why they got things wrong and what we can all learn from them. And listening to your podcast, I'm so struck by the story of our race is one of, we like to think about innovation and farssighted bravery and philosophers, but actually all too often it's the story of absolutely cataclysmic miscalculations and poor decision-making. It is. And the fact is that the poor decision-making is often very predictable because we tend to get things wrong in predictable ways. And you can see the disaster coming and then you can say, well, hang on a minute, I've made that mistake, not with the same consequences, not with the same tragic implications, but I've made that kind of mistake myself. And that's what we're trying to get people to reflect on.

Yes. There, by the grace of God, go all of us. When we're looking at the fall of the Ming dynasty or the collapse of civilizations, it could have been any of us if we'd been in that position. For this episode, we're going to talk about something, well, probably quite familiar to lots of people. We're going to talk about a story that features lots of mistakes, lots of errors, and how decisions are made that have absolutely ruinous consequences. And the story we've chosen is the Battle of Crecy. Yes, we're going to go back to northern France, 1346,

where a motley band of English invaders is about to go toe-to-toe with King Philip of France's unparalleled killing machine. So string your bows and strap into your armour, folks. It's going to be a good one.

Let's go. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

We're in the 14th century, and the Capetian miracle has petered out. Tim, do you know about the Capetian miracle? I feel I'm about to be told about the Capetian miracle, Dan. Brilliant! Yes, you are. The Capetian dynasty are the ruling family of France, and they are kind of almost unique in European history by successfully going father to son, producing a faintly competent male heir in every generation.

Which is obviously the only way you could possibly choose a new leader, right? Obviously, no one doubts that. Prime geniture, of course. Any other systems are madness. But in that period, it was reasonably important. And it goes from the very late 10th century, so the kind of 980s, all the way down to the early 14th century, father to son.

Remarkable. And that sees this kind of slightly random royal house ruling over a scrap of what we today would call France, inevitably kind of gaining power, because as competitor dynasties and regions end up having complete disasters, and God forbid, lots of daughters or sons who are unable to die prematurely or unable to suffer from some sort of difficulties that mean they can't rule effectively. The House of Capet goes from strength to strength. And you could contrast that, if you like,

with Edward Confessor, 1066, dying without heirs. Henry I doesn't have any sons. There's a civil war that follows. You know, so there is a problem with sonlessness in these kind of medieval dynasties. And the Capetian miracle peters out as three hail and hearty sons of King Philip IV die, one after the other, bang, bang, bang,

and one of their sons as well. So you just get this complete exterminating event in the royal house of France. And guess who, on paper, is the closest male heir to that last king? King of England. Oh, shockingly, the King of England. It's Edward III, and it's this extraordinary thing that English and French,

we like to say we're the sort of greatest enemies, but also our histories, our stories, our lineages, are sort of totally intertwined with each other. I think it's a great example. Edward III's mother, famous from the film Braveheart, was a... Famous documentary. You wouldn't expect that.

Listeners, Tim was not expecting that one. Anyway, famously portrayed inaccurately in the film Braveheart was a famous documentary. You wouldn't expect that. Listeners, Tim was not expecting that one. Anyway, famously portrayed inaccurately in the film Braveheart, married to Edward II. She's a princess of France. So Edward III inherits royal blood via his French mother. And he forms the opinion that he, in fact, is the rightful heir to the French throne. Which, as a feminist, you and I would both agree,

because he argues that the French royal line can continue through the female. He would argue that the crown can pass through the female, very progressive. And it was the opinion of his cousins in France that it could not, and they went back a bit further to trace their link to the throne. So you get the two houses of Plantagenet and Valois

are both fighting now for the French crown. It becomes known as the Hundred Years' War. Yes, because it goes on for, well, I mean, it's not quite a hundred years, is it? It's a bit more. It's longer than a hundred years. It's a more or less question there. So it's much longer than a hundred years. And it's intermittent fighting.

And we're going to talk really about this first great sort of burst of fighting. Is there something in the culture that you've identified here about the arrogance? Well, about men and possessions like what do you think's going on here that these two families about to thrust their respective nations into generations of warfare well it doesn't go well i have to say that's probably not a good idea but i think the problem is uh there's uncertainty it's unclear who is the leader and one the moment you have uncertainty, you have something to fight over. As long as it's clear who is the boss, who is the king, then there's no argument to be had. There's no reason to go to war. So the whole thing is just caused by a lack of succession planning,

as we might say in the 21st century. But because of that, Edward III brings his force over to France and starts rampaging around, causing trouble, and basically trying to prove that Philip of Valois is incapable of being the king of France because he can't protect his own subjects. Yes, it's very interesting, isn't it, that there's a sort of lineage that's important. You've got to have the right blood. It's like William the Conqueror landing in Britain and laying waste to parts of Sussex very deliberately. It's about delegitimizing the king. You're saying, A, he shouldn't be on the throne, he's not legitimate. And B, by the way, he's also useless. And it strikes me that that is a kind of twin track approach, isn't it? Yeah, it is. Now, one thing I was curious about

is why it took the French so long to respond. And I have a theory, which is presumably this is to do with the way that armies were organised. And this is going theory, which is presumably this is to do with the way that armies were organized. And this is going to come to be important on the day of the battle. But Edward and his fairly small army is just rampaging around, laying waste to French cities, raping and pillaging. And the French don't respond for a while. And so my guess is that this is, it just takes time to mobilize an army. You've got to put the word out. You've got all these individual feudal barons and princes, and they have to gather their knights.

And it's not possible to respond overnight. But maybe I misunderstood what's going on there. Tim, this is one of my favorite facts about sort of military history. And you can look at it from the English point of view. The only invasion in English history that is opposed on the beach, so to say in Private Ryan style, people land on the beach, everyone's waiting, they have a massive fight in the shallows, and they're kind of pushing up across the beach, is Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain. So ironically, it's the first, well actually, it's the first recorded historical event we really know about in British history. Subsequent to that, you can think about Henry Tudor, or

William III, or William the Conqueror, or Harold Hardrada. You're landing, you're getting set up in land, you're kind of establishing yourself, and then there's a kind of critical battle that takes place sometime after that. And yes, you're right. You can't, in this medieval period, you can't really afford to keep men in the field. You certainly can't afford to have them in a sort of Atlantic wall like Hitler in 1944. And so you have English have control of the channel because, of course, Britannia rules the waves. But most importantly, Edward III had won a crushing naval victory at the start of the Hundred Years' War. And so you've got a huge amount of option where and when to land, the

flexibility conferred by having naval superiority. So you can land in Normandy, you can land in the Pas-de-Calais, you can land in Brittany. And so it doesn't make sense to try and sort of gather up a huge army and keep them all in one place. A, they're going to get sick, they're going to eat up supplies. That's just not how armies work. It's a more persuasive,

you have to get aristocrats from around the country to bring levies with them. It's got a slow process, not one that lends itself to, all right, mate, you sit there on the beach for the next two years and wait for Edward Plantagenet. And so there is a sense, it is very weird in this case,

because Edward is allowed to run roughshod, and it's shocking, his descriptions of, you know, as he marches up the Valley of the Seine and things like that, as you say, the abuses and the criminality that goes on, really. But the French, I think also what they're doing is, a bit like Xerxes against Alexander the Great, you wait until you build up an almost overwhelming force. Yes, they certainly think it's overwhelming.

Yeah, they think, well, there you go. And it certainly vastly outnumbers the English. And there is a moment, before we get to the battle, there is a moment where the armies meet, and the French don't fancy it because the English longbowmen, the famous English longbowmen, are on the wrong side of an estuary. And the French, they've got thousands and thousands of knights. They don't really wrong side of an estuary. And the French, they've got thousands and thousands of knights. They don't really fancy riding over an estuary. So they decide not to try

it. But there is a famous confrontation, which I think is revealing. We can talk later about what it's revealing of, where a single French knight wearing the favor of his lady, like some character from the Arthurian romances, rides out alone in front of the thousands upon thousands of English soldiers and asks if there is any English knight willing to fight in single combat. There's this pause, you can imagine the pennant snapping in the wind like a Kurosawa movie. And then an English knight roars out his acceptance of the challenge. And they joust once, they joust a second time. At the second moment, the English knight's shield is shattered. And that means he's at a terrible disadvantage.

But he's not going to give up. He turns to fight a third time. But the French knight decides not to fight on, not to press his advantage. He dismounts they embrace become firm friends for life and it's this wonderful demonstration of chivalry which runs absolutely contrary to everything that's about to happen at this battle yeah where there's going to be a much sort of more brutal and industrial almost slaughter isn't there it's so interesting that night that chivalric thing i I mean, Robert the Bruce does that before the Battle of Bannockburn in 1315.

He actually smashes the head with his battle axe of an English aristocrat that's gone out to meet him in single combat. So, you know, you do get these examples. And you wonder what those meant, really. Because it's hard to imagine. You can't imagine at the beaches of Normandy, some English soldier showing up and saying, 12 rounds, Queensbury rules,

against Germany's strongest boxer, and just everybody watching while they put on their boxing gloves and duke it out. I mean, it's inconceivable from a modern perspective that something like that would happen. But it did happen back in the day. It did, and I suspect if I was a longbowman, I'd watch it going, here they go, here the lads go.

But remember, both French-speaking, probably shared, lots of shared cultural and religious possibly even family and social connection yeah they sort of don't kill each other become great mates exchange gifts you know like i'll tell you what as a longbowman i will not be receiving the same treatment at the hands of my enemy you know it's a fascinating uh there was a two-tier system operation i think yes eventually tim what happens because this is something you're so strong on it's an encounter battle isn't't it, military historians say? Often people at home think of battles like,

let's meet here next Tuesday and we'll all get lined up on either side of a valley and we'll go and fight in the middle. Actually, a lot of battles are a lot messier in their gestation. And in this battle, it seems the Battle of Crecy, it seems like the French are sort of at the end of a long day's march. They didn't need to fight a battle at all. It's quite extraordinary. So the English choose the battlefield.

So the English are outnumbered and they're far from home, whereas the French have superior forces and they're on home territory. The English do have this one advantage, which is they choose the battlefield. It is a gently sloping hill with a windmill at the top, and Edward III takes up position in the windmill so he can look over the battlefield. In the English, and they have thousands and thousands of longbowmen as well as knights, the English longbowmen have plenty of time to dig in. So they dig little pits, they have spikes, they reinforce their position, and they just sit there, I don't know, eating their pork pie or

whatever it is and waiting for the French to show up. And the French army, which is, it's unclear exactly how much bigger, but probably three times bigger, many more knights, shows up as the sun is setting behind the windmill. And one of King Philip's advisors says, let's not attack now. No hurry. We will be charging into the setting sun. We haven't prepared. Let's all pray and feast, and with God's blessing, we will attack in the morning, which would have been very good advice to take. And Philip tries to take it. This is the thing. Philip tries to take it. He orders his army to stop, and they don't stop. And that was the first phenomenon that I wanted to explore in Cautionary Tales, because why didn't they stop?

And it wasn't so much that they directly disobeyed him. It was an emergent phenomenon. So I brought out the social science at this point. Basically what was happening, and it was very well described by a chronicler at the time, is that the men at the back didn't want to stop until they had reached the front. They didn't want to be accused of cowardice. They didn't want to be accused of hanging back. And the men at the front didn't want the men at the back to catch up with them. They didn't want to be accused of dawdling themselves. And so there's this sort of pressure where nobody wants to disobey Philip, but at the same time, they're not stopping until they're in the front rank. And if the whole army isn't stopping until everyone's in the front rank, the whole army isn't stopping. And what happens is, as the sun is setting, the advanced ranks of the French forces arrive at the bottom of this hill,

milling around in full view of the slightly bemused English archers who are standing there going, what are they doing? At which point, King Philip decides, look, we're kind of committed now, we're here. We have to attack. And that's really where the French troubles begin. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more to attack. And that's really where the French troubles begin. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's so interesting when you read sort of 18th and 19th century military manuals, they use this word discipline all the time. And that to us might mean sort of beating people up for stealing beer and things like that. But what they think it means is doing what you're told.

And you see time and again, whether it's Sparta, whether it's Oliver Cromwell's roundheads, whether it's Genghis Khan's Mongols, they're a bunch of lusty, praise-hungry, wealth-hungry, egotistical, insecure young men. They know the easiest thing to be thing to do is charge at the enemy because then no one can doubt their manliness, their courage, and they want to win glory. And actually, what great commanders are able to do, great systems, great cultures,

are able to get them to subordinate that urge and do exactly what they're told. And it might not make sense to them on the ground. The enemy's right ahead of me and they're running away. Come on, what's going on? But you have to assume the general's got a better intelligence picture of the battlefield or even the theatre of war. And it's getting those units. have to assume the general's got a better intelligence picture of the battlefield or in the theater of war and it's getting those units and this is the problem

with medieval armies is there just isn't that culture because they're raised there's a loosely called feudalism you get these dukes and these barons they raise men locally they regard themselves almost as autonomous they're happy to support they listen to the king as a general picture but when they're on the battlefield come on it, it's the glory of the house of whatever. And I think that there's an economic side to this, which is that your heavy artillery or your shock troops, the most important weapon in a medieval battle is your fully armored knights. And they're also the richest people on the battlefield. They're the richest people in your country.

knights, and they're also the richest people on the battlefield. They're the richest people in your country. So how do you get the richest people in your country to put themselves absolutely on the front line? It's a bit of a problem. You need them because no one else can afford the armor. And critically, you can't afford it. So you can't have a big central state like the Roman Empire or the British Empire going, right, everyone, you're all going to be armed with the same kit, do the same job and do what you're told. Yeah. So they have autonomy and you need to give them an incentive to take risks. That incentive comes from culture, which is a culture where these men, they would rather die than be accused of cowardice. Which is great if you want people to fight bravely, but not necessarily great if you want people to just hang back and wait till tomorrow. Because they are chronically incapable of doing that and they don't. And I suppose if you're a young, hungry aristocrat, your grandfather,

great-grandfather stretching back might have fought the Crusades. They might have fought alongside the great warrior kings of France. They might have invaded England in the early 13th century. Your primary objective probably is not that of the king of France. Your objective is, probably is not that of the king of France. Your objective is, I want to win honour and fame and be the subject of praise poetry. That's not a great way to organise an army. It works for the individual, doesn't it?

Yeah, we should be fair and say that the French army has been incredibly potent fighting force. It's been highly effective. It's worked fine up until this point. And this battle is the moment where the English find the weak point of the French military tactics and the French military equipment. So speaking of tactics and equipment economics, you are the man to talk about the longbow, because lots of people will know about the longbow. They've probably shot one at a heritage day out. So these bows made of yew, often not peculiar to England and Wales, but really adopted by the English and Welsh in this period. Is that also a reflection of culture and the economy, do you think? Or was it just luck?

Definitely not luck. I think what's fascinating about the longbow is that, so the French don't take the missile weapon seriously. They have crossbowmen, they have Genoese mercenaries with very powerful crossbows who they don't really understand and don't take seriously, we can discuss in a moment. They don't respect the user of a missile weapon. They don't respect the archer. They don't respect the crossbowman. The funny thing is the English felt the same way. So the English used to sing songs about how the archer was a coward who dare not come close to his foe. And Edward III deliberately set out to change the culture. And it took years. It was a patient process. He decided he was going to build his army around this longbow.

This was potentially a very powerful weapon, but you need to be very skilled. So how do you get so many skilled longbowmen? So he forgave the debts of people who made longbows. He made it compulsory to practice archery for two hours after church on Sunday. Banned football for that period? Oh, yes, indeed. So, I mean, if you're really saying, no, archery is more important than football,

you are making a very, very strong statement to the English and the Welsh. And so over the course of years, it becomes clear that the longbow is very important, that the longbow man is to be respected, even though he is not a noble, not a knight, but is a very important part of the army. And so you have a large, respected, and very skilled force of longbowmen who are deployed at Crecy. And these can shoot, well, people talk about sort of 15 arrows every minute. I have not been able to achieve that rate of shooting, but they- Have you practiced for two hours after church every Sunday?

I have not done any of those things and they can punch through certain types of eyes can punch through armor but just as effectively the experts tell me is that they're an area weapon they can just rain down metal and make it just so incredibly unpleasant for horses and men even if they're not actually punching through armor finding chinks going through bits of mail and the horses weren't armored and And indeed, the horses are very, very vulnerable. So you just are under this just bombardment and at quite a long range as well. So this is the setup then. The English longbowmen are uphill, so they've got an extra range advantage. They're dug in. Philip sends the Genoese crossbowmen out to fight. Just take

out those English longbowmen and then we'll charge. But he doesn't really seem to understand them. And in particular, the crossbowmen were supposed to be equipped with this huge shield with a spike in the bottom. They would carry the shield out onto the battlefield and ram the spike into the soft earth and crouch behind the shield while loading the crossbow. Because the crossbow is a very powerful weapon,

very sophisticated weapon, much feared, but slow to reload. And ideally, you reload it with your foot because that gives you the force. You're quite vulnerable, aren't you? You're quite vulnerable, but not if you're behind your big shield. Well, remember, the French army arrived on the battlefield

in some disarray with a bit of a pileup. The shields are back in the baggage train. So these mercenaries who, I mean, Penny, for what was going through their minds, they must have been furious. They've been marching all day next to these French knights who were in the saddle. They're tired, they're hungry.

Now they're sent into battle and they don't even have their shields. So they march uphill to try to take out the English longbowmen. And then there's a bit of luck for the English. It's a sudden rain shower. The English longbow is very easy to unstring, so they quickly unstring it.

They keep the strings under their hats. Keep it under your hat. Keep it under your hat. The more sophisticated, more complex crossbow, you can't do that. So the Genoese crossbowmen, their strings get wet, which makes them looser and reduces the range. They're marching uphill.

The hill is now a bit soft because of all that sudden downpour. And maybe they're a little shy to get too close to the archers who have that height advantage. They stop, they fire their first volley, and all the quarrels fall slightly short. And there is not a second volley. No, because the English start shooting their longbows. Yeah, slight range advantage. They've got dry strings. Maybe it's a slightly better weapon,

but they've got the hill, the slope of the hill, and they just rain down these arrows. They're able to fire with tremendous rapidity, and the crossbowmen who don't have their shields, they just break and run. They've never seen anything like this. They're running back down the hill, And then some reports claim that King Philip was so contemptuous of the crossbowmen. I mean, he misused them completely. He had a powerful force,

completely misused them. He was so contemptuous of them that he ordered his knights to just charge straight through them, hack them down if they got in the way and attack the English longbows. Well, actually not the English longbows, to charge for the English attack the english uh longbows well actually not the english longbows to charge for the english knights so that longbows are on the flank you're charging towards the english knights um just engage the enemy yeah did not go well it's interesting isn't it through history the sort of lack of respect that existing hierarchies have for kind of new technology new ways of doing things and there's so many examples i'm thinking of the british admiral who who went to an early demonstration of submarines, and he sputtered

that it was underhand, unfair, and damn done English. You know, initially on naval ships, engineer officers weren't allowed to eat in the wardroom with the officers on deck, you know, because they were seen as rather oily and unpleasant and from the bowels of the ship. And you see this with the early days of, I guess, drone warfare as well. And it's strange how blind we can be to engaging with and using this new technology. Yes, which I think is what makes Edward III's decision fascinating, that he did take the long bow seriously. He did regard this as an asset that he could use. But it's interesting, because not only are the French knights contemptuous of their own crossbowmen, and maybe they charge right through them.

That's certainly what some accounts say. But they're also not very interested in the English longbowmen, who are mostly on their flanks. They want to make contact with the English knights because, remember the joust, remember the single combat, the French knight with his lady's favour. There's no honour in cutting down a bunch of peasants. Charge for the English knight. So they just ignore the longbowmen who are raining down these arrows from a defended position from either side and in front. And remember, the ground is soft.

It's uphill. You've got several thousand Genoese crossbowmen trying to get off the battlefield. And the horses are dying under this rain of arrows. So the charge just breaks down. It doesn't quite reach the English lines. It breaks down in disorder. It's not that thousands of French knights are killed, but just they cannot sustain the momentum. The few that reach the English lines are thrown back, and they have to withdraw in disorder and put themselves together and then decide what to do next. It's so interesting you say that

and how people, especially the officers, especially the members of the elite, how they want to go to war. I'm reminded of the, you know, during the Spanish Armada when the British ships developed this idea of cannons staying off Spanish ships

and just blast them with cannon. Not very gentlemanly, really. I remember reading about one Spanish officer who stood in the rigging, branching his sword and shouting at the English, calling them Lutheran hens. Because they didn't come alongside and fight as you should,

hand to hand on each other's quarterdecks. Yeah. Until he caught a cannonball to the face, presumably. Exactly, presumably. So in the same way, early cavalrymen didn't want to go and fight in tanks. Like, no, it's not what I've signed up for. It's not what my dad did.

It's not what my older brothers have done. So your point there is so fascinating. By the way, if people are interested, there is also a cautionary tales about how the British army invented blitzkrieg and then forgot all about it. So Tim, the first charge gets thrown back and then begins this, some people might be familiar with it. They might elide it a bit with the Battle of Agincourt later on the Hundred Years' War, but just an absolute killing field. Longbow arrows raining down, repeated French charges, chaos. Because the French do it again and again and again and again and again.

And the same thing happens every time. It's just getting more and more difficult. The battlefield is getting muddier and muddier. There's stories of French knights drowning in their own helmets. Every time they try to do it, there's more dead men and more dead horses on the battlefield. And they're not really reaching the English. I mean, occasionally there is a bit of a skirmish, but fundamentally, they're thrown back every single time. And every single time, with tremendous skill, they wheel around at the bottom of the battlefield. It's getting darker and darker.

They think, well, what should we do? Let's do it again. And I bet that also that bit's important. I bet it's not the king going, right, everybody. I bet it's just sort of individual nobles going, on my honor, you know, follow me. And then it's sort of that kind of chaotic, crumbling frontier idea. There's one famous example, which is Blind King John, who can't see. He's lost his sight. He's about 50. He's lost his sight about 10 years previously. And he asks to be led into battle, even though he can't see, which I think is a fantastic illustration of both the courage and the heroism and just the stupid futility of it. Because, of course, blind King John of Bohemia is immediately killed.

And then, of course, everyone sings songs about what a great hero he was. But there we go. That's the French approach all summed up. And you can imagine him going forward with his little bodyguard. And then other people think, oh, there's something else going on. They join. And then everyone's like, oh, we're going up again. I mean, it's just... If blind King John, who cannot even see, is charging, how can I be seen not to charge?

I must join him, of course. I mean, it seems so stupid to us. But this is where I got very interested in cautionary tales about, well, what is going on? What does it even mean to have a culture? This is the French military culture of the time. What does it even mean to have a culture? And of all places, I found an explanation in the Harvard Business Review. This is what we do on cautionary tales. And the Harvard Business Review talked all about corporate culture and how it worked. And one of the things they said in this article, it's full of all this PowerPoint slides and all this nonsense, but fundamentally I thought it was very insightful. One of the things it said about culture is it's collective. Culture is a thing

that you have in common with other people. The second thing is it's pervasive. So it's just everywhere in a way that it means that you don't necessarily see it. And it's not articulated, that you don't necessarily see it. And it's not articulated. It's implicit rather than explicit. And the way I phrased it in this cautionary tale, I said it wasn't that the French knights came up with the wrong answers. It's that they didn't even ask the questions. Why are we doing this? Why don't we just wait till morning? english are completely outnumbered we're in france we're surrounded by friendly territory let's wait till dawn and have another go or maybe even just dismount and walk up there we could walk up there and kill them we've got so we've got such numerical superiority but no we have to ride we have to charge and because of their culture which had served them very well up to that point, they weren't even able to ask those questions, let alone come up with the answers.

The death and destruction, I mean, it reminds me of 1917, you know, General Nivelle's offensive, same thing, just hurling French troops forward on German, pre-prepared German defense on the Western Front. You know, it just seems like, what are you learning here? It's extraordinary. I mean, the interesting thing about the Hundred Years' War is that we remember the English victories. There are also, later in the war, many enormous French victories. But the English are unable to turn this battlefield advantage. So this tactical success they managed to build on the battlefield, they're unable to win. Edward III never becomes king of France.

His son dies, a black prince, just before him. And Richard II is not the man his father and grandfather were. It's funny the stories that we remember, when actually Cressy is almost a bit of an outlier. I mean, he strolls off to Calais, which the English then hold for many, many decades afterwards, but they don't hold much else. I mean, the battle is a catastrophe for France,

even if it's not a particular triumph for the English, because so many French nobles die on this battlefield. And so we began our conversation by talking about this battle for succession in France. Well, it turns out that suddenly you have all of these battles for succession in miniature all across France, because suddenly all of these nobles have died, often without heirs. Families rising and falling, competing in the regions. Well, Hundred Years' War, a small and not particularly rich kingdom, England, taking on France, one of the richest and most populous in Europe. And as a result of these astonishing battlefield successes,

it does go on for a long time. But ultimately, ultimately, the English do lose that war. And the French do adapt. Their culture changes. They adopt gunpowder weapons a lot more. So perhaps crushing defeat is where culture starts to change. Culture can change, and it often changes with learning from your mistakes, but it takes time. Tim, a man who's never made any mistakes, thank you so much for doing it. I would love to do this

again sometime. Well, Dan, this was such fun. I shall remind people that they can listen to The Battle of Crecy in the Cautionary Tales archives. Well, thanks for listening, folks. I hope you enjoyed that. Be sure to check out Cautionary Tales, of course, wherever you get your pods. See you next time. you