Gone Medieval - 1217: The year that forged England

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Two years after King John had agreed to the terms of Magna Carta, he reneged on his word, plunging England into war. The rebellious barons offered the throne to the French prince Louis and set off the chain of events that almost changed the course of English history.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets Catherine Hanley, author of 1217: The Battles that Saved England which charts the three key battles that would determine England's destiny. It's an epic story of medieval siege warfare, royal politics, and fighting at sea.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Ella Blaxill. The producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.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 MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. When Catherine Hanley writes a new book, I sit up and pay attention. You can be sure it's well worth reading with fresh insights that you just don't get elsewhere. To Cass's new book is no exception. It tells the story of the year 1217. There's trouble with government. There's rebellious barons. There's a French invasion. There's sieges and battles with some of the most famous and infamous names of the medieval period in England,

from King John to William Marshall. Maybe we'll even squeeze in a little bit of Robin Hood. And I'm delighted that Kath is joining us to explore this complex and critical moments in English history in more depth. Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Kath. Hello, gosh, with an introduction like that, you know, did I even write that? Absolutely. I have nowhere near done the book Justice. I've had the opportunity to read it and I absolutely loved it, and particularly the way that you pick out, I won't spoil it for anyone, but, you know,

elements of a siege that you don't see thought about and considered in other books are given lots of attention here, and I found that absolutely fascinating. But as we mentioned, the book, I mean, the title is 1217, kind of gives away where we are in history. Where should we lay the blame for the crisis that emerges in 1217? Because I guess the temptation is to lay it all at the feet of Bad King John. Yes, well, there's a very short answer to that. question, which is yes, we should lay it all at the feet of bad King John. So there were several ways in which you could be an effective medieval king, right? You didn't necessarily need to inspire love in your people, you know, you could, but it wasn't necessary. You could inspire loyalty or

devotion or respect or even fear and authority. And John's problem was that he was spectacularly bad at all of those things. People didn't love him. They didn't respect him. They might have been afraid of him, but one of his other problems was that he was very erratic. He was unpredictable. There's nothing to say that being violent and cruel necessarily made you an ineffective medieval king. Some medieval kings were violent and cruel, but when you're erratic and unpredictable as well, It means that your people and particularly your barons, they don't know where they stand. You know, these people were, they were in danger of losing their estates on a whim or, you know, lands being confiscated, relatives being taken hostage, that kind of thing.

They just wanted to start with to make John follow the accepted rules, if you like, to abide by the law. And for a while in 1215, they thought they'd. done this because they forced John to agree to Magna Carta. But of course, almost the first thing he did predictably or unpredictably after that was immediately renege on it. And honestly, these barons honestly felt they had no choice that if they couldn't control John, if they couldn't make him obey the laws and see that he was subject to the law rather than sitting outside it, they honestly thought they had no choice but to overthrow him. And this is where this whole situation begins.

It's interesting that you pick up on John's erraticness as the real problem, because I guess you can take the example of people like Henry I first, who was an incredibly hard man. But I think people probably felt like he was a good ruler in the sense that they knew where they stood with him. If you put a foot out of line, he's likely to cut that foot off. But you know what you're getting. With John, you just don't have a clue what he's going to do from one day to the next. Yeah. Whereas with John, you could follow all his rules, you know, and I'm putting rules in inverted commas here, and still end up on the wrong end of it for reasons you. you didn't understand.

That was the problem. So this is why we can lay the blame at his feet. You know, if he hadn't been so rubbish and so devious, you know, agreeing to Magda Carter and then immediately reneging on it, I don't think any of this would have happened. It's no small thing for these barons to consider overthrowing their king. This is an age where the institution of monarchy is held in great respect, even if the present incumbent might not necessarily be the great,

So it's important to remember that what these rebels were objecting to was John's personal behaviour. So they weren't radical anti-monicists. They weren't trying to overthrow the concept of monarch as a whole. They just wanted a better king than John. And part of the reason why it started off being a civil war and ended up being a war of foreign invasion, which we'll come to later, is the identity of the person they picked to succeed him on the throne. Yeah, and I guess the fact that these weren't radical anti-monicists is perfectly well demonstrated in the fact that what they do is go and choose themselves another king. They don't want another form of government. They go and invite Louis the heir to the King of France to come over and effectively they ask him to be the new King of England. So how do we end up in a situation where the heir to the French throne arrives in England invited by some of the barons to replace the king? It sounds almost ridiculous, doesn't it?

If you were writing this in a novel, somebody would probably go, don't be silly. That's far too outrageous, you know, make it sound more realistic. So, I mean, as we're saying, that barons, they're not trying to get rid of monarchy. They're not trying to institute, you know, democracy or anything like that. They need a new king. So realistically, they've got three choices, right?

They can either go for one of John's children. And John has two sons and three daughters, but they're all very, very young. at this point in just after Magna Carta, even the eldest is only about seven. And if they put one of those on the throne, they're basically just going to be John's puppet. Nobody's going to get anywhere.

So we discount that. Their second option is to elevate one of themselves. But they don't want to do that because they're not royal. They have respect for the institution of monarchy. They realize you can't just go, oh, hey, I'll be king. You have to have some royal blood.

And I suppose that option also introduces the question of who's going to fight it out for the ultimate honour of being raised to the crown anyway. I'm sure almost every Baron would fancy that. Yeah, they'd all find some great uncle somewhere that was related to a previous king. And that would have just caused even more trouble. So their third option and the one that they eventually went for is to find somebody else who's already of royal blood and who's got some semblance of acclaim to the English throne. and they fix on Louis.

Louis is the eldest son and heir of King Philip Augustus of France, one of France's great medieval kings. Incidentally, he's not the Dofan. Yeah, this is a mistake I made when we were talking about this episode earlier, wasn't it? I was like, why did they invite the Dofan over? I wasn't going to embarrass you there, Matt.

I wasn't going to embarrass you by saying that. No, no, I'm happy. I make stupid mistakes. You know, I called him the Dofan of France and you very rightly corrected me on that. He isn't the dauphan, is he? No, the heir to the French throne only began to be referred to as the dauphin in the middle of the 14th century. And that was when the French crown got hold of a territory called the dauphinet of Vienne, which was in 1350. So back in the early 13th century, Louis just refers to himself as the eldest son of the king of France.

Kind of does what it says on the tin. Now, interestingly, Louis is himself or was himself a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. But nobody mentioned this at the time because, you know, that was a long time ago. Why they're interested in him is, firstly, he's royal. He's a member of the Capatian dynasty who rule France. And they've been ruling France in a very, very stable manner for a couple of hundred years by this point. And they also have a custom of consulting with their nobles rather than being very autocratic. so this is all to the good.

He's in his late 20s, so he's in the prime of life. He's that a bit of a loose end because his father Philip Augustus is still in very robust health and is not inclined to let any of his own power drop from his hands. But the other thing that really makes Lou's claim plausible is he's married to King John's niece. So their children, they have two sons at this point and they have a third one while he's in England.

So their sons are dissentive. from Henry the 2nd. So all of this makes Louis a very plausible candidate, you know, plus there's the likelihood that he's going to win. You know, this is quite a practical thing. There's no point inviting somebody over to be your king if he's eight years old or 90 or if he hasn't got military backing. So all of this means that Louis is just really suitable. So a delegation of barons sail over to France, they ride to Paris, they go, Louis, would you like to be King. He says, yes, please. We won't talk about Philip Augustus, because whether or not Philip Augustus supports his son in this is a whole other story that we could do a whole other podcast on.

And he sails to England where he meets no resistance whatsoever when he lands, because King John sees him coming and bravely runs in the other direction. And he rides to London where he is proclaimed king by a cheering throng in the streets. The son of the King of France, being proclaimed king in London. It's never happened before. It's never happened since. It was an amazing occurrence. And only slightly later in the medieval period in England would be absolutely unthinkable to invite a member of the French royal family over to become King of England. But I guess it still speaks to a degree of connectivity between England and the continent that they still felt like they were, especially at the higher echelons of English society, they were still fairly French at this point.

Yes, it's only just over 10 years since John has lost Normandy. So a lot of these barons have grown up in very much an Anglo-Norman realm, where popping over the channel and popping back again is a thing that people do, and they might have estates in both countries. So capacians weren't necessarily the implacable enemies that the two realms would find themselves later on. Yeah. Do you think there's an element as well of people thinking, if they want their continental lands back in Normandy,

the best way to get it is to have a French king on the throne of England because then there's the opportunity to regain everything that's been lost on the continent. Yes, that might well have been at the back of their minds because these barons, as well as wanting a better king, of course, they're all out for what they can get themselves. You know, self-interest is very much there. And, you know, Louis is going to be the king of France one day, dead set. So if he's the king of England as well, yeah,

then that obviously sets up a very different. sort of relationship between the two kingdoms than there is at the moment. I think one of the striking things that comes across in the book is a sort of bewilderment that Louis doesn't have himself crowned. When he's proclaimed king of England, everyone seems to accept him, he just waltzes into London with no opposition, and then, so jumping ahead a little bit, even when John dies, the one thing that Louis doesn't seem to do is have himself crowned. Is there any reason why he doesn't take that step,

which would surely have made him much more secure in England? It would, and at this distance, it's very difficult to try and work out why he didn't do that. I can come up with several relatively plausible reasons. First of all, its coronation is a church right, as well as a secular one, and he's currently excommunicated because it's complicated, but there's a papal legate who doesn't like the fact that he's trying to take the English throne, who has excommunicated him.

Secondly, the sole right at this stage to Crown, Kings of England, is invested in the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is out of the country. Or it may well be that, you know, he just wanted to dive straight into a military campaign. From what we know of Louis and his character and his personality, is very, very keen on military pursuits, a very able warrior, a very able military strategist.

but not as politically astute as his dad. It was a big political and tactical mistake because coronation at this time is what makes you a king. You're not a king until you've been crowned. But once you are crowned, you are the king, regardless of who you were before. So Louis's failure to have himself crowned means that it prolongs the war, if you like, because it means that John is still the only crowned.

an anointed monarch in England, whereas Louis is still merely a claimant. If he had a crown on his head and he could say, well, I've been crowned king of England as well, that might have tipped the scales a bit more than it did. So I don't know why he made that mistake, but it was definitely a mistake. Yeah, and I wonder whether, you know, in the full flush of his military campaign and his youth, he thought, I'll make sure I'm without rival, you know, I don't want any complication, I don't want any question over what's valid. Is it valid to be crowned in a kingdom where there is already a crowned king?

Do I need to defeat John before I can take that step? But, you know, it almost would have been better to take the step and then deal with the problems than it was for him not to take the step because that itself caused even more problems. That's exactly right. You know, kind of half a coronation would have been better than none. And he could have worried about the implications afterwards. But in choosing not to do it at that point,

he did put himself very much at a political disadvantage. Yeah. And I suppose, you know, opened up a fatal flaw in his campaign that he always struggled to overcome. One of the long moments that you focus on in the book is the siege of Dover Castle between 1216 and 1217. How significant for the story of England is that siege? It's difficult to, you know, overestimate. It really was the key to the whole thing. I mean, one of the 13th century writers called Dover the key to England and he wasn't wrong.

When you're on a campaign, a military campaign, you can't just bypass your enemy's castles and leave them behind you, okay, because a castle is not just defensive. It serves an offensive purpose. And of course, as soon as you've gone past that castle, the men in it are going to ride out and harass your army and, you know, cut you off from your supply bases and all kinds of things. So as you're going on campaign, you have to subdue every castle. in your path so that you have control of that because a castle doesn't just control the area of the castle. It controls an area of sort of 10, 15 miles radius around it as well. So you've got to take those. And Dover was, I mean, it was the biggest nut to crack for the French and the rebels if they wanted control of the southeast. And they couldn't say that they had control of South East England until they had Dover in their power. But Dover and the men within it were not about to give up without a fight. Yeah, I mean, it's an incredible story that you tell incredibly well in the book. And I just wondered whether you think the castle deserves some credit here. In terms of

its design, you can go to Dover Castle today and marvel at what an incredible building it is. Does the castle deserve the credit or does Hubert de Berr, who leads the defence of the castle deserve credit, or is it a bit of both? It's a bit of both, definitely. So, I mean, Dover was an immense what still is, but it was an immense fortification. Henry II had spent an enormous amount of money on it, and Richard and his sons, Richard and John had done the same. So just, I won't give you the full details, but we're talking about, there's a keep

in the middle, the nucleus of it, it's got walls 20 feet thick. It's also got a very good freshwater system, which is one of the most. most important things. The keep sits within an inner bailey, which is surrounded by an inner stone wall, punctuated by towers all the way around. That in itself sits inside an outer bailey with a stone outer wall, massive, well-defended gatehouse in that outer wall. And that gatehouse has additionally got a temporary wooden barbican, like an extra fortification built out round it. So you can't get anywhere near it, really. But to defend something like that, it's all very well having such great thick walls and things like that,

but your defence is only really as good as the people that are in it. And Hubert de Berg, I mean, he had form in this area. When John was busy losing Normandy 10 years earlier, Hubert had defended Chinon Castle for over a year and he'd held out there in John's name before it eventually fell. So, you know, he knows what he's doing, defending a castle. he knew that the French were coming, so he'd taken adequate preparations. Everybody who was inside the castle was there to defend it.

There weren't any of these historians sometimes termed useless mouths, you know, people who eat the food but aren't fit enough to defend it. They were all defenders. They had food, they had water, they had weapons, and they had determination. They knew everything was relying on them. If they fell, England would fall, and they would determine that that was not going to happen. Yeah, so the walls of Dover and the resolution of the men inside, led by Hubert DeBur, played a massive part in protecting England from what was going on.

And I mean, Louis and the French and the rebels, they threw the kitchen sink at Dover during 1216 and 1217. So it was kind of two sieges. It was the 1216 one went on. from June through to October in 1216. The French, they managed to, at one point, I want to give you too many spoilers here, but they managed to get through the wooden barbican so they could attack the gatehouse directly.

And they did at one point succeed in collapsing one of the towers of the gatehouse. And that was the crucial moment. If they got right through there and into the inner ward and right up to the inner walls, it might have all been different. But Hubert and his defenders were so well prepared. They already had, I think, an eyewitness tells us, you know, great beams and trunks of trees and to fill the hole up and push them back out.

And despite their best efforts and the first appearance of a trebueche on English soil, sent as a present to Louis from his dad, they couldn't get through it. And in, oh, for the second week of October, Louis decided he'd had enough. One of the other things about being on a military campaign is you don't want to get stuck in one place for too long. And Louis was actually commanding his forces at Dover personally. So he's actually been there right through till October and he decided he just couldn't waste any more time being there. So in about the second week of October, they packed up, disassembled the siege machinery, packed up and he went back to London. But he didn't realize that something else very important was going to happen.

in October in that same month. So in this moment that Louis was unaware of, a big EastEnders duff, duff, cliffhanger moment that changes everything is that John goes and dies, which people quite often say cruelly that the best thing John ever did was just die at the right moment. But what effect does John's death have on the crisis that is evolving around him?

Well, it actually had precisely the opposite effect from the one you might have thought. you might think that with John dead, this would be Louis's great moment of triumph, you know, because he's here and his opponent is out of the way and he's already got half the country under his control. But actually, everything starts to go wrong for Louis at this point. And this is because, as we said earlier, the rebellious barons were not trying to get rid of monarchy as a whole. They just wanted rid of John. And the thing is, now John is gone.

And the royalists, that's the barons who had still been supporting John, immediately. declared his eldest son Henry to be the new king, Henry the third. Now Henry at this point has just turned nine and this gives the royalists exactly what they need. They've got a figurehead, a royal figurehead now who is of surpassing innocence, can't possibly be blamed for any of the things

that have gone wrong under John's rule and it's like a clean slate and a new start. So they're able to turn round to the rebels and say, well, you know, you want to really, of John and now he's gone. So, you know, what are you still arguing about? And crucially, the first thing they did was have little Henry crowned. We were speaking earlier about how Louis made a big mistake in not having himself crowned. The royalists, and in particular their new military leader, William Marshall, who I'm sure you're familiar with, who takes over the campaign, if you like,

and they have little Henry crowned. And so now they say, right, well, we've got a new king. What are you fighting about. You know, we can reissue Magna Carta. That's fine. Henry all agree to abide by it. And so basically what happens is that the rebels have had the rug pulled out from under their feet. But also, this isn't a catalyst for mass defections because the very practical aspect of what's going on is that Louis still looks like he's very likely to win the war. And so there's lots and lots of barons in England now who are mainly concerned about ending up on the winning side, whichever side that might be. And so this is where we have a sort of stalemate

right at the end of 1216. So John's dead, there's this whole new situation and this is where it really, really sets us up for the start of 1217, which is one of the most pivotal years in English history. And so much happens in a very short space of time. And John's death is kind of the catalyst

for all of this happening. And obviously we don't want to let John off the hook too lightly. So a little bit of detail about how he meets his sticky end. I think famously, there's the story about him losing the crown jewels in the wash in a hurry. And then we get a little bit of controversy, I think, about exactly how he died, some suggestion that monks might have been poisoning him with toads and all kinds. Is this just people saying, you know what, John was such an idiot. He needs a weirdly horrific death. Yeah, most of the more outrageous of those stories, especially the ones about monks poisoning him,

didn't come up until quite a while after he was already dead, several years or even decades afterwards, by which time the legend of Bad King John is fully established and they're just kind of heaping loads more stuff on it is very unlikely that he was poisoned. He did die of a sort of a stomach complaint, but it seems extremely likely that it was dysentery, which was, you know, very unpleasant, but also not uncommon for soldiers on campaign because of the sanitary conditions, you know, when they were travelling and eating. What is a nice death? I don't know. It wasn't a very nice death, but he probably wasn't poisoned or murdered. Yeah, I think we'll give him that then, that maybe nobody deliberately finished him off, even though most of the people in the

country seem to want him gone by this point. As we move then into 1217, as you've said, and as the book makes the case for, one of the most important and pivotal moments in English medieval history, one of the key moments there is the Battle of Lincoln. And this always feels to me like a really daring kind of roll of the dice by William Marshall and the Royalists. It's a very much feels like an all or nothing. We win this or we lose everything. Why did they want to take that risk at that point? Well, battle avoidance is normally the best tactic at this stage.

Because if you have the whole roll of the dice, you gamble everything on a battle, you can actually lose months or years worth of gains in one. day just from bad luck. But in this particular case, battle was, I wouldn't say the best option, it was the least worst option for William Marshall. So we were speaking earlier about the importance of castles. You can't just leave castles behind you if you're on a campaign. So the French and rebels under Louis at this point control more or less half of England. If you divide England kind of line vertically down the middle, Louis controls the eastern half and the royalists, the western half. But there are two places still holding out for the Royalists in that eastern half. One is Dover, as we know, and the other one

is Lincoln Castle. Now, a force of French rebels had fallen on Lincoln, and they had taken the city of Lincoln, but the castle of Lincoln is inside the city and had its own separate defences. So the situation at the start of 1217 is that the French and rebels are inside the city trying to get into the castle. And if that castle falls, that castle controls a huge area around it for miles around. It will then give them a sort of a beachhead, if you like, to thrust even further north and start going north and west from there. So if Lincoln Castle falls to the French and the rebels,

it's almost all over for the royalists. And they really need to do something about it. What they can't do is just do nothing. Because the castle has been bombarded. It was being defended, incidentally, by a woman, Nicola de la Hay, who was in her 60s at this time. So don't mess with little old ladies. The French thought this was going to be easy

because their opponent was a little old lady and they were so wrong. So she's commanding Lincoln, but they've been stuck in there for months by then. You know, the food's running out, some of them are injured, some of them are dead, the walls are under constant bombardment, they're going to fall eventually.

And it doesn't matter how brave they are if their walls get knocked down. They can't stand out against the French rebel army. So the only way that the royalists can solve this problem is by relieving the castle. So they muster an army under William Marshall, which moves towards Lincoln. They do something very clever. Instead of approaching Lincoln from the south, which is the direction they were coming from, they go round Lincoln to the north of it so they can come down to the north and west.

And this is because Lincoln was, well, still is, on a very steep hill. If you're going to fight a battle, one of the best ones, to swing everything in your favour, is to make sure you've got the favourable terrain or the favourable, you know, anything that you can put in your own favour. You want to. So this army is coming towards Lincoln from the north and the French and the rebels are now going to get stuck in one of the worst military positions that you can be in, in that they're stuck between two opposing forces. They can't get into the castle and they can't get out of Lincoln because there's an army outside of it. Uncomfortable rebel sandwich imminent. Yeah. How does the battle play out? I mean,

William Marshall and the other royalists having made this gamble, does it pay off for them? Yes, it does. Now, I won't give you a blow-by-blower account because we'll be here all day. What happens is that the French and rebels, what they should have done in hindsight, and incidentally, Louis himself is not at Lincoln. He's in London at this point. So it's his deputies. So they're being led by committee, which is never really. really a good thing and they all sort of argue amongst themselves about whether they should come out of the city and fight this oncoming army on the open ground or whether they should stay inside the walls. And so they elect wrongly, in my opinion, to stay inside the walls. Now,

the Royalist army led by William Marshall, they managed to get some crossbowmen on foot by a posturn, like a small back door, into Lincoln Castle to strengthen what's going on in there. and then they themselves attack the North Gate and the West Gate of Matt can see that I'm waving my hands around in the air here pointing to North and West, which isn't going to, you know, work very well on a podcast. I'm getting a lovely air map of Lincoln going on, so I'm very clear about what's happening. Yeah, yeah. So they attack, they break through the gates, there's lots and lots of fighting in the streets,

and crucially the Royalists are fighting forwards and downhill, while the French and the rebels are trying to defend themselves while being forced backwards downhill, which if you imagine fighting on horseback or even on foot in a crowded street, is not, you know, if you've ever tried to walk up steep hill in Lincoln, you'll know what I'm talking about here. And it all goes well for the royalists.

The most high-ranking Frenchman who is in the count of Perth was killed and all of the other French and rebel leaders were captured. So there's not a massacre because we don't do that. in the early 30th century, mainly because a lot of the knights and lords on either side were quite closely related to each other. And it almost seems like, because obviously they're not big on killing nobility either. It's fine to kill the peasants.

That's what they're there for. Oh, yeah. But you don't want to be killing nobility. And it seems almost like the death of the counterperch kind of makes everyone stop and go, oh, hang on. We're not having this anymore. Better stop. Yes, everyone's very sad about the counterperse.

He was 21, possibly 22, you know, brave young lad. he'd already, he fought at the Battle of Bovine years ago when he was still in his teens and he was considered, you know, the next big thing. Interestingly, he actually had a claim to the English throne himself. Don't get me to draw a family tree. I tried to draw a family tree of the Count of Persh and I ended up needing some kind of four-dimensional paper, but he actually has a claim to the throne and he's a relative of William Marshall. So it's all very sad. Everyone's upset. Even the people on the opposite side are upset when he dies. And the rest are captured, which is partly because there's some sort of nebulous concept of the Brotherhood of Knights,

which in my opinion is not quite all it's cracked up to be, but mainly because you can hold them for ransom and, you know, get loads of money from them, which fits in with the Baron's self-interest. So they're all captured, but they're still, regardless of whether the French and rebels are captured or killed, this still has the same net effect, which is that it's deprived Louis of more than half of his army. So in winning that battle of Lincoln, they've saved Lincoln, they've stopped the French and rebels getting any further north or west from where they were. And they've also made sure that Louis now does not have a force that is big enough to push for the final win. So it's incredibly decisive.

And this all happened in three hours on one day in May 1217. Yeah, it kind of changes the face of the conflict altogether. as you say, it was looking a lot like Louis was still the favourite and still going to win, but this seems to have really moved the dial, maybe given everyone a little bit of pause for thought about who they should be backing now. One character I wanted to get to before we get towards the end of the crisis is a guy called William of Cassingham, so otherwise known as Willikin of the Weald. I mean, he just seems amazing.

It's great. One of the reasons little is known about him is that he was known by so many different names. And I think that, you know, what's happened in future years is that some historians weren't aware that all of these were actually the same guy. There's a really interesting bit in one of the contemporary French chronicles that said the French called him Willikin of the Wheel because they couldn't pronounce the word Cassingham, which I quite like. Cassingham, as it was known then, now Kensham, or Willikin of the Weald, he's from the Weald in Kent, which at this time is quite a lot bigger than it is now. So the wheel at the time was about 120 miles east to west. I'm doing air maps again, 120 miles east to west and about 30 miles north-south, dense forest all through Kent.

And William and his merry band, if I may call them that, were waging a guerrilla warfare in Kent. Now, one of the important things to remember here is to them, to the people of Kent, this is not so much a civil war between two English factions as a war of invasion by the French, because Kent is where all the French have been landing and coming through Kent to get to London and the other places. So as they see it, it's a war of invasion by a foreign power. And they launched this kind of guerrilla warfare.

Now, the dense forest of the wield was not an ideal place for large numbers of heavily armoured French knight to be riding through on their horses. And William and his band took advantage of this. They were people of common origin. They weren't knights or anything. They didn't have horses or lances. They were on foot and they used bows and arrows.

They made ambushes. They destroyed bridges. They destroyed mills so that the French couldn't get food. And they just made life really, really difficult for the French. So any of them that landed in Kent, they couldn't just go straight through to London. They had to go kind of all the way around the coast to get to London. and yeah, William was very effective. He was quite brutal.

He was known, we were just saying, about knights, ransoming other knights. He was, if he captured any prisoners, he executed them. Although possibly, you know, you've got to think, well, he had nowhere to keep them. He had no way to feed them. So it wasn't just a terror thing. There was a sort of practical element there. And, yeah, he's not as well known as he ought to be. He seems absolutely fascinating.

And he seems to genuinely terrify the French. they're seriously worried about what he's doing. He's recognised, even by John, John kind of recognises the effort that this guy is making on his behalf and the trouble that he's causing to the French. So his efforts are recognised by the Royalists. But we've got this guy, a bunch of commoners in the woods, attacking bands of knights as they come through.

Are we getting anywhere close to a kind of prototype Robin Hood story here? Yeah, I mean, who is this reminding you ask? It's ringing some bells. Yeah, and with the bows and the arrow. as well. And yeah, there's a very good case to be made, and this has been made. I mean, I mentioned it in my book, but I'm certainly not the first person to do it. Numerous other historians have written this before. That, yeah, William has got a very good case to be the person on whom the Robin Hood legend is built, not just because of what he was doing, but the fact that he had

this kind of folk hero nickname, Willikin of the Weald. Technically, you could say that he wasn't an outlaw because he was fighting for the royalists, but given that the rest of the Southwest was under the French and rebel control. He is sort of fighting against the powers of authority. I certainly think he's got a better case than pretty much anyone else I can think of to be the origin of that legend. And he did, oh, spoilers, he did survive the war. John even wrote him a thank you letter at one stage, you know, and if you could get a thank you letter from King John, you know, you did quite see on Anteacques Roadshow and everyone be like, no, we have no clue what this is worth. No one's ever had a thank you note from John before. So, so far,

We're only just in the beginnings of 1217, but we've had a French invasion. We've had a siege of a castle, a dead king, a battle in Lincoln. We've got this kind of prototype Robin Hood tearing around in the wield of Kent. And we've got another naval battle to come. I say 1217, it was all happening. So after Lincoln, as we said, Louis has been deprived of quite a lot of his army. And he needs some reinforcements. So he's got a big secret weapon, which is not his father, the King of France, but rather his wife, Blanche of Castile.

Another amazing woman, one of the great figures of the Middle Ages, you know, if I had one piece of advice to anyone going to the 13th century, it would be never mess with Blanche of Castile. She is at this point, she's not just writing letters, she's riding around France, appearing on people's doorsteps, haranguing them and telling them that they've got to, send troops and get over there to help Louis. And by the middle of the summer, she's actually raised quite a large force of reinforcements. And they all muster at Calais and the surrounding ports in a fleet. And she sends them over to England. And Blanche and her fleet leads us in really nicely to the last set piece that I want to talk about that's part of the book. And that is the Battle of Sandwich. So we've had our land battle. We've had castle sieges and everything else.

Now we're going to get a really good naval battle. What happens at the Battle of Sandwich? It's fascinating to me. Oh, this is so exciting. It's one of the first great naval battles. First of all, apologies to any real naval experts out there because I'm sorry, but the actual kind of sailing part of this is not really my forte. So I'm going to talk very much in layman's terms here.

Okay. Now, I'm going to try not to wave my arms around in the air too much. to draw maps in the air, but I want you to imagine a map of the southeast of England. Okay, you've got the coast of Kent and you've got the channel, right? Now, the French fleet has come across from Calais. Initially, it's come across to Dover. But they don't want to land at Dover because Dover is still being defended mightily by Hubertberg and friends. And they also don't want to land on the Kent coast,

because in order to get to London, they'd have to go through the wheel, which is still being defended by William of Cassingham. is how it all fits together. So what they've done is they've come over from Calais, they've got almost to Dover, and then they've turned, and the French fleet is now going almost directly north up the Kent coast, and the idea is that they're going to go sort of around the top of Kent and up the Thames all the way to London. The other important thing to remember is while we're looking at this imaginary map, is the wind is blowing from the southeast towards the northwest. Okay, keep that in your mind.

Now, the English fleet, as we're now calling it, by this time in the war, even the contemporaries have stopped talking about royalists and rebels or the King's Party or whatever. They're just calling them the English and the French, which is a really interesting development in terms of national identity. They're at Sandwich. Now, they decide that they're going to actually fight this battle at sea. They don't want the French to get all the way to London and then have to try and sort of fight them. So they're on a fleet and they're coming out. Now, initially, by the time they come out of Sandwich, the French fleet have already passed Sandwich going north. And so the English fleet go behind them and out to sea.

And the French are like, well, hey, we've done this. We've got past them and they start shouting things at the English as they go past. And they think they've got away with it. What happens is that the English fleet go out to sea and then this is where my nautical knowledge sort of fails me slightly with the right terms. They turn round. That's not the technical term, but they turn round. And so now they're heading from the southeast, northwest, towards the French fleet,

and they've got the wind directly behind them. This means they're speeding up. This feels like it would make a perfect movie scene, doesn't it? where, you know, they go whizzing past and the French are like, yeah, cowardly English, you don't even have to fight them. And then it's done, dan, dan, dun. That would be just where they'd put the advert break, isn't it? Just when they're, oh, no, it's all gone horribly wrong.

But they turn round. And so now they're sailing really fast towards the French fleet, the back of the French fleet. Now, interestingly, the command ship of the French fleet, which is called the Greek ship of Bayon, which is being commanded by a very interesting character called Eustace the monk, who, we may or may not find time to talk about, is actually right at the back of the French fleet. This is partly because it's really loaded down, because all of the most high-ranking French nobles who are in this fleet wanted to be on the command ship, not any of the other ones.

So there's so many of them on it with their horses and a trebice and all kinds of things that it's so low in the water, it's basically wallowing. And the French are now going quite slowly. The English are going really fast. They're catching them up. Now, of course, at this stage, there's no cannon, there's no gunpowder. There's nothing like that. This is not Nelson's Navy, right?

The ships don't have any innate fighting capacity. It all depends on the men that are on them. So normally what you would do is as you got near enough, as you closed, you might shoot off a few arrows, a few crossbow bolts. And then the only real way to fight at sea is to get the ships to ram or to board so you can fight by boarding. But the English fleet have done something really clever. As well as arrows and crossbowmen, they start shooting. shooting pots of lime. Now, when I say lime, I mean dust, quick lime. They're not throwing

citrus fruit at each other. Not cordial. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're not chucking. Mix this with your water. Exactly. And this is very caustic. It gets in your eyes. It gets in your lungs. If you breathe it in, you choke. If you get it in your eyes, you can't see. And they're shooting this over with the wind behind them towards the French ships. And so before the ships even closed with each other for hand-to-hand fighting, everyone on the French command ship is blinded and choking. So they're not in the best position to be boarded. And so the English ships literally ram into these French ships and English sailors and English soldiers pour over onto the ships. And there's a massive hand-to-hand fight, which the English win, spoiler alert there. And Robert

de Courtenay, who is a relative of Louis and Philip Augustus and leading the French fleet is captured. Eustace the Monk comes to a sticky end. I won't give you too many spoilers there. I mean, Eustace the Monk is another one of those incredibly fascinating characters who pops up in this period. We could do a whole podcast on Eustace the Monk, Matt. Yeah, I mean, he's basically been terrorising and occupying bits of the Channel Islands and acting as a pirate. He's variously worked for John and against John. And as you say, he leads this French fleet. to attack the English. So alongside the victory at Sandwich,

which must have been important for the English, the death of Eustace must have been a big step as well. It was huge for the people of South East England because Eustace is, I mean, he's a very dangerous character because he's swapped sides several times. He's worked for John and he's worked for Philip Augustus. And he's not really bothered who he attacks. You know, when he worked for Philip, he attacked South East England.

And when he worked for John, he attacked France and Normandy, but he'd still attack South East England as well, even when he was working for John. And he was just incredibly unpopular and feared. He was one of these characters, you know, where parents would tell their children that if they didn't behave, Eustace the monk would come and get them, that kind of thing. So it's huge that he's been killed. But in terms of the actual war, you know, what's happened is that not one single ship makes it through to Louis in London.

The contemporaries get a bit confused about how many ships were sunk and how many were captured and how many might have made it back to Calais. But the main point is that not one single ship got through to Louis. So he hasn't got all his reinforcements. And of course, he's still very much down after losing the Battle of Lincoln. Dover's still holding out. Hubert and his men there are still going. The war is over because there's no way Louis can possibly win it.

And he's pragmatic enough to realise that. So negotiations happen. he agrees, it's quite interesting, everyone's still a little bit scared of him. Because of course, although he hasn't won now, he is still going to be the king of France in a few years' time with all of the resources that that entails. So there's some very polite negotiations that go on between Louis and William Marshall. And Louis agrees to renounce his claim, go back to France, take a massive paycheck on the way. They offer him 10,000 marks.

that's six and a half thousand pounds, which was quite a lot of money in 1217. And he goes back to France. He did end up being the King of France, but he never did invade England again. So the year of 1217 and all those people that William Marshall, Hubert Berg, Nicola de la Hay, William of Cassingham, all of them, between them,

had seen off what could have been the equivalent of another Norman conquest? I was going to say, I find it really, really interesting. I mean, the book is incredible. We've barely scratched the surface here, so please buy it and read it. But I'm really struck that this has so much about it that is similar to 1066, except that the French invasion fails. Yet we, particularly in England, we kind of focus on the invasion where the French did win, and we ignore the one where the English kind of defeated a French invasion,

which seems like an odd way around for the English who are obsessed with how brilliant we are militarily and everything else, that we focus on a defeat and not a victory. But how do you think 1217 compares as a moment in English history to 1066? I mean, the reason it's not better known is for precisely what you've just said. It's because it wasn't successful. I mean, if you imagine if that invasion had been successful and there'd been a new King Louis in England and England had been subject to capation rule after that, the whole Norman conquest, the 150 years of Anglo-Norman rule would have been almost like a little interlude.

Like in the same way we sometimes talk about the Danish rule of England, you know, before the conquest. Oh, you know, there was some Danish kings were king of England and then they weren't. It would be the same while this guy came from Normandy and they were king for a while and then they weren't. It's interesting to think whether we would then have viewed the Norman invasion as a sort of stepping stone towards a wider French conquest, you know, sort of halfway to the 1217 conquest, if you like. Yeah. And so, I mean, the whole history of England would have been. different. Edward the first, second, third. None of them. I find it extremely unlikely that the hundred years war would have happened if the capacians had been ruling England and France. I mean,

when I want to get too much into what if, because there's always loads of variables, but it's difficult to see that that would have happened. No tutors. That wouldn't bother me. Now there's a thought. Let's just linger on that for a moment. I was also struck that the book pitches 1217 or positions the events of 1217 as a real moment in the birth of an English identity and an idea of English nationalism. And as you say, they start talking in terms of the English defeating the French. And there is this real sense that whether it was deliberate or accidental, I'd be interested to know what you think, but that they do craft this separate English identity as a way to fend off this threat. Yeah. So it starts off very much as a civil,

war because we've got the royalists and the rebels in England, the people who support John and the people who don't. And the rebels, to some extent, you know, they were entitled to feel that way. They've got a rubbish king. They want a better king. They want to be governed properly. Fine. But in sailing to France and offering the crown of England to the son of the king of France, they sort of lose the moral high ground there. And to start with, you can still just about be saying, if you look back on how I've been speaking through this, we start off with the rebels and the royalists, and then by the time we were at Lincoln,

I'm talking about the French and rebels, because they're one thing. But then later on, we've just got the French. And by the time this fleet comes from Sandwich, of course, everybody on that fleet is French. There aren't any of the English rebels on there. That is solely a French fleet coming. And by this time, you can see it as a war of conquest, almost.

And William Marshall and others, I mean, he gets the best press, because obviously he had a biography written of him a few years after he died. One of these days I'm going to write a book called William Marshall, Not All He's Cracked Up to Be, but let's leave that for now. He and various others are very clever about this, and they use this kind of sense of nationality to help them fight. So as soon as John dies and Little Henry, who's only nine, is on the throne,

they can start talking about the innocent child who's under the protection of the Pope. But in some of the speeches, and naturally the speeches that contemporaries tell us were given, we can't take word for word, but the sense of it is very much that William Marshall and Hubert Berger and everybody keeps saying things like, the French are here to take our kingdom away from us and to drive us out of our own land. We need to fight against them. And one of the contemporaries even says, you know, that the English force was fighting pro-patria for our country. which is kind of the sort of thing you hear in First World War poetry and other things. So they've really developed this sense of national identity. And, you know, one of the hills I will die on is that a sense of English national identity developed around this time, which is rather earlier than some people think it did.

Yeah, absolutely fascinating. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Kath. It's been brilliant to talk about some of the highlights of 1217. I think by no means we've covered everything, but it's been wonderful to talk through some of these incredible. incredible highlights. So thank you very, very much. Well, thank you. Cass' newest book, 1217, The Battles That Saved England, is out now if you'd like to get further under the skin of this decisive moment in the birth of Englishness. There are a new

episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please do join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, as it really does help new audiences to find us. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.