Gone Medieval - Essex Dogs and the Crécy Campaign with Dan Jones

Episode Date: September 17, 2022

Dan Jones is world-famous for writing swashbuckling factual history. But now he’s turned his hand to historical fiction with a debut novel Essex Dogs. It’s the first of a trilogy set in the Hundred Years War, in particular during the Crécy Campaign when England conducted large-scale raids throughout northern France.In today’s episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Dan about his journey into writing fiction, how he combined historical accuracy with his imagination to dream up an unforgettable cast of characters, caught up in historical events beyond their control.**WARNING! This episode contains a few colourful words!**The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Anisha Deva and produced by Rob Weinberg.Watch Dan Jones’ Essex Dogs: In the Footsteps of the Crecy Campaign at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. There are hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks to discover!For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter 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. In 1337, France and England fell out fairly spectacularly, or rather their respective kings did, dragging both kingdoms into what would become known as the 100 years war, despite being both off and on and lasting more than 100 years. It's a complex period of high politics and huge personalities, but today we're going to take a look at what part of that conflict might have looked like for people on the ground. So the Battle of Cressie is one of the famous engagements of the Hundred Years' War alongside Poitiers and Agincourt. But what was it like for the man at arms and the

archer on the front line of a medieval campaign? Well, who better to tease out that story for us than the mighty juggernaut of medieval history, the man I'm contractually obliged to describe as the second best Dan working in history today. Essex Dogs is Dan Jones's debut historical fiction novel and it's set during the Cressy campaign. It's also set to blow your hose off with grit, realism and Dan's knack for telling a fantastic story. So thank you very much for joining us, Dan. Thank you for that kind introduction, Matt. It's a pleasure and it's a great pleasure to have you on God Medieval. So I guess my first question is, what lured you from the glamorous world of writing historical nonfiction into writing a fictional novel? A few things, really. So I sort of base

superstition as much as anything else. I'd written 10 nonfiction books and I turned 40. And the sort of round numbers got to me a little bit. My 10th nonfiction book was Powers and Thrones, which was a big history of Middle Ages. And I sort of felt like I'd kind of worked up to that and the first 10 books, well, like a block. And I just wanted a little pallet cleanser. For quite a long time, people had been asking me if and when I was going to do some historical fiction. I think that's not an unfair question because the narrative nonfiction style I'd be working on draws a lot on what feels like fiction. It's actually drawn mostly from screenwriting, but it's sort of how has a kind of fictional flavor to it and kind of toyed with the idea. And I'd been working up

some kind of character sketches for a few years. In 2019 in the summer, I did a job with George R.R. Martin, where I interviewed George and then we had dinner afterwards. And that probably tipped me because George is such a brilliant historian and such an avid consumer of history. And he's think seriously about history. He reads a lot of history. And yet he's turned it into these epic fictional cycles, the most famous of which obviously Song of Ice and Fire, aka Game of Thrones. And so that sort of gave me the confidence that it was okay to sort of really love history, particularly medieval history, and bring it to market, bring it to readers in other forms than just the narrative nonfiction I've done for a while. So a little bit of sort of superstition

about numbers, a little bit of just kind of creative inquisitiveness in a way. And I felt like doing something different. Here it is. And how did you find the difference between nonfiction and fiction. So as you said, your nonfiction is very narrative, it's story-driven, it's quite often character-led as well. So was there a big difference for you in writing fiction, or was it not too much of a leap? There's a massive difference, actually, and the difference that I didn't anticipate. As a non-fiction writer, I'm very structural architectural, and I do a lot of kind of pretty deep work on the structure that underpins all the books. That's drawn from screenwriting techniques largely. But it's there, and the way that I work is I'd spent ages and ages mapping out and

plotting these history books, and then the writing is sort of building to a plan, if you like, the sort of architectural project followed by the construction. And I attempted to begin with a similar thing with historical fiction and found that it just didn't work at all, that actually it's a much looser, freer process, and you've got to be prepared to just sort of relax and see what happens. Now, the step into fiction with Essex Dogs, which is, as you've hinted, a story set in the Hundred Years' War, it follows the Cressy campaign, was kind of a good bridge because the sort of historical spying is a campaign that starts in one place, it ends up in another. And so, you know, I've got the kind of basic superstructure or the background, big story going on already.

So in a way, then I was a little bit freer to create the smaller story without worrying about the big picture. So Essex was quite a good way to start doing historical fiction. But yeah, very different processes, very different. And did you find it tricky writing what is believable dialogue? You know, it's great pulling out quotes from chronicles that are really punchy. But is it a different thing to write conversations that people are having and try and make it feel real? Yeah, it is a difficult thing. And I think it's probably one of the things that I reckon historical fiction writers struggle with or struggle to set a bunch of rules for themselves.

And there are lots of different ways you can approach it. One of the ways to approach it. So here I'm thinking of books like maybe The Wake by Paul Kings North or To Calais in Ordinary Time by James Meek. And if you've read either of those, the wake is set in 1066 and Tercallé. ordinary time set in 1348, I think, is to create a sort of hybrid language. Both of those writers do is take a lot of medieval vocabulary and plug it into sentences that are largely modern in construction. So you create this hybrid tongue. Neither of them is sort of quote unquote real in terms of how people would have spoken in the 11th and 14th centuries, but they

aim at a certain sort of verisimilitude. There's another approach which is often deployed on television, which is you take this sort of slightly manored, poised, type of, dialogue that's very plain in one sense, but kind of ornate in its sentence structures. I think not my liege. People don't talk like that now. They never spoke like that in the past, but it is this sort of Hollywood fantasy of othered tongue. I myself don't like that very much, or I don't like writing it very much. And so what I decided to do with Essex Dogs was really, by and large, to use modern syntax in the dialogue, not to overburden it with period length. language, and then to sort of fuse a kind of hard-boiled, really, actually, it's drawn from

American hard-boiled style of dialogue that seems appropriate to a military adventure to keep the word choice quite plain and to pepper it with ridiculous medieval blasphemy, because it's a sort of profane group of people talking to one another. And there is some brilliant medieval blasphemy out there as well. There's some great medieval blasphemy. You can have fun. I became almost a sort of medieval blasphemy bot while I was writing the book and just dial it up to 11. My point which I'm laboring to express cogently is that you make a rule, so long as you stick by the rule, you're probably okay. You're kidding yourself if you're ever going to pretend you're writing like authentic dialogue, because that would be probably impossible to write, definitely unintelligible to almost every reader. And so it's a case of saying, okay, what are my rules here?

As long as I stick to them, I believe that readers will go along with it. The title of the book is Essex Dogs. So who are the Essex Dogs? Can you introduce us to them? So the Essex Dogs, for one of a better term, a little sort of platoon of 10 guys who we meet coming ashore at some Valog, which is just to the north of Utah Beach. It's one of those long sandy beaches on the Contantan Peninsula of Normandy, most famous for the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944, but also the site of the Cressy landings of

the 12th of July 1346. So we meet these 10 guys coming ashore, rowing ashore in what's really a medieval D-Day, and we follow their adventures thereafter. They're led by a sort of slightly over-the-hill 40-something guy called Love Day, who's a veteran of lots of wars going back all the way almost to Edward I. They are sometimes soldiers. They're sometimes freebooters, they're sometimes mercenaries. They're sort of like somewhat dodgy guys. He's assisted by some quite experienced veterans. There's Millstone, who is a former stone mason, who's effectively an outlaw for having killed his foreman on the floor of Rochester Cathedral. You've got Pissmire, who's a vicious little bastard, who really, really likes the work. You've got a dissolute,

drunken, not quite defrocked, but should have been priest, just known as father. You have a gigantic Scotsman only ever addressed as Scotsman, who's physically extremely strong, gruff, foul-mouthed, but deep down a decent person, if roughly expressed. You have a pair of archers called Teb and Thorpe, who are sort of inseparable and brilliant with a bow. You have another pair of Welsh-mounted archers called Linton and Daris, who've just been chucked into the mix before the invasion departed.

And then you have a real row, a kid called Romford, who's basically a street kid from London, who's runaway, joined up with the army at Portsmouth and had just been sort of seconded to Essex dogs. He's about 16 years old. He's the same age as the Black Prince on this campaign. And he provides a sort of great counterpoint to the Black Prince. And eventually their stories will become intertwined. So Loveday and Romford are the viewpoint characters, if you like, but around them is this cast of sort of likely lads, some of whom are very happy to be at war and some of whom are increasingly

ambivalent or reluctant about the whole experience. Do you have a favourite? I found all of them great fun to write. I had fantastic time with Father, the very bad priest, because that's kind of a medieval staple. He's like the opposite of Freyatuck, isn't he? He's not the jolly drinking... He's not jolly.

No. He's not jolly at all. He's like the landlord of a thousand pubs I've drunk in over the years. You know, he's really just gnarly and miserable and quite vicious. But you can tell used to be something different. And I've deliberately only given sort of fairly opaque snatches of their hinterlands throughout the story because I felt like you were just dropping into their world. And so there's not tons and tons of exposition about who they've been,

but you dropped hints about what's gone on before you've met them, and it's not necessarily fantastic stuff. Anyway, Father was a very fun character to write. Love Day is the lead character who takes us through it. He's got a sort of deep nagging worry that everything he's done in his life. life hitherto might not have been the right thing. And I think that that's an interesting thing to play. He's sort of experiencing an awakening perhaps a little bit too late. Ultimately, he's sort of one campaign too many. And he's the sort of product of the early 14th century,

really. And as you know very well, and as your listeners know very well, the early 14th century is a rough time, man. You know, it's war, it's famine, it's repeated failed harvest, it's terror sort of climate adjustment. The characters in the book don't know, but coming down the road is the worst global pandemic in recorded history. And so he's a sort of product of those times. He's not totally shocked and traumatized by them, because my feeling is that the human experiences that we tend to be quite robust and we don't bear the trauma in our every movement all the time. But it's definitely hard baked inside him. So Loveday is the product of the early 14th century. And he's starting to realize that this is some pretty bad stuff.

he still retains within him a hopefulness, a sort of desperate optimism and a deep care for the men around him. So he's an interesting sort of military figure, a reluctant leader. He's also been cast into leadership. The Essex Dogs have lost their leader. That's the sort of deep backstory. He's a deputy who's in charge of his men. If or probably when, this is a film or a TV series and you were offered a part, who would you like to be? Who could you imagine yourself being when you were writing this book? Ah, now, the experience of running fiction, as I've learned, and I'm sure lots of you are listening. listeners know this already, so forgive my naivety. It's that you compartmentalise yourself,

but different bits of yourself into different characters. Maybe my favourite of all the characters is the Earl of Northampton, who's the constable of the English army, who swoops in about halfway through the book, and there's a commanding presence through the second half. And I love, love, love, love, love, writing Northampton. There are chunks of him that were inspired by the football manager,

Neil Warnock, specialist in managing lower table team and escaping relegation and famous for his foul-mouth rant, but his ability to galvanise the people who are sort of working for him, his troops for one of a better term. And that was the sort of genesis for Northampton. And for many years I used to write a sports column, so I was quite familiar with this particular type

and I've always been really fascinated by this type of leader. Anyway, I put a special amount of effort into Northampton. And so if you're offering me a role in the screen adaptation of this book, I think I'd jump at the chance to portray him. Ah, interesting. I'm a Wals fan. So if anyone's still listening after I've admitted that, my abiding memory of Neil Warnock is when Nuno Espirososanto forgot to shake his hand at the end of the match because he was too excited. And then tried to shake Warnock's hand and was met with a tirade of F words that you could very clearly see with easy lip reading on the TV screen. So that's my abiding memory of Neil Warnock. I'm sure lots of your listeners who are expecting just pure medieval chat will be surprised we've veered off into Premier League football. But I tried to sort of smuggle a lot of these things

into the greater medieval framework because I find quite often, and maybe this is a frustration you share as well, Matt, that the middle ages are kind of easily parodied and they're often just imagined to be sort of this alien time where absolutely everything was different and people operated according to completely different rules and mores. It struck me throughout my writing career that there are some sort of basic templates of people and they are probably eternal and you're just as likely to find a Neil Warnock, you know, running a part of the army for Edward the third as you are managing a Premier League football club today. So it seems an interesting experiment to me to try and bolt these things together. I think my version of the Earl of Northampton

is probably not quite similar to the real Earl of Northampton, but he seemed like as good a vehicle as any to carry out this experiment. And I hope the character is memorable. to everyone who reads the book. I'm sure everyone will read him imagining you in his place now. To Essex Dogs is set against this historical backdrop of Edward III's Cressy campaign. Why did you choose that particular moment to begin the book? What is important about the Cressy campaign? To answer that question in two parts,

I chose that particular moment because on the 1st of January 2019, I was on Omaha Beach in Normandy, had a house out in Normandy for the new year that year. And I was with some friends. We were talking about D-Day in 44, and then I said, you know, but actually this stretch of coastline is the place that you land.

And that's why, Edda, the third landed here with this quested campaign. And that sort of sparked something in my mind. Wow, imagine a sort of medieval landing here. It's band of brothers. It's saving Private Ryan, but it's in 14th century costume.

I percolated that in my mind for quite some time. You know, a good six to eight months. I was thinking about that scene. How would you do it? Is it a sort of viable way to write that? What would have been like? or with the differences and similarities being between 1346 and 1944.

Putting that aside, or rather what grew out of that thought and what made this more than just a compelling scene, but I thought a good place to start a novel, which is the Kressi campaign is the first great sort of land campaign of the Hundred Years' War. And in many ways, it's the reason the Hundred Years' War lasts so bloody long because it's an against-the-odds success for Edward. Edward lands on the Normandy beaches,

and launches a chevalche, you know, basically a sort of terror campaign, not wildly different in its conception to Putin's marauding through Ukraine at the beginning of the invasion of the last year or so. It's burn, it's destroy, it's rape, it's kill, it's pillage, it's cause as much terror as possible, with the aim of proving to the inhabitants of Normandy and the same valley that Philip the Sixth King of France is incapable of defending them. And if it had just been a chevorset, then I don't think we'd be talking about it now. But because Edward transforms it from a chevotche into something much bigger, it has a very long legacy. So Edward marauds down the southern bank, the left bank of the seine, but manages then to get across it. And then it ends up in a foot race with Philip to the banks of the Somme, manages to cross the Somme. And then they meet famously in this battle at Cressey on the 26th of August 1346 when Edward wins. And at no point is he supposed to win. He shouldn't have been able to cross the sin.

He shouldn't have been able to cross the Somme. He shouldn't have won the Battle of Cressey. And subsequently, he then goes on to take Calais in 1347 after an 11-month siege. He shouldn't really have taken Calais either. But this run of successes means that the English end up with two things. Firstly, they end up with a foothold in northern France near Flanders in the form of Calais, which wouldn't have been possible without the victory at Cressey. But secondly, they end up with this sense that the French are there to be beaten.

and that then extends, certainly extends the war in the short term. You mentioned Poitiers at the top of the show, extends the war for 10 years, and the psychological effects of Cressy are clearly visible at Poitiers. Jean II does not want to go down the way that his father, Philip the 6th has gone down, and he makes the insane decision to get well stuck into the fighting at Pwatea and ends up captured. That then extends the war even further. But this sense that this is somehow a God-ordained mission for the English, and that Wright really is on their side is set in stone at Cressy.

And for that reason, I think, the Hundred Years' War just won't go away. It doesn't go away until the English are finally battered Castion in 1453. And even then, you know, Henry VIII is still not that sure it's in the past, right? You know, there's still this fantasy that the Hundred Years were, maybe, maybe. And I think so much of that can be traced back to the extraordinary success of this Crescent campaign. You know, had it failed at any of the points that we were. which it might, perhaps should have failed, we probably wouldn't be talking about it now.

I mean, I always think Henry the Eighth's kind of Battle of the Spurs was very much his attempt at an Agincourt that never went very well. I've suggested before that you could almost characterize the Battle of Bosworth as one of the last battles of the Hundred Years' War. This is French-sponsored invasion of England. Just because they're invading England, rather than England invading France, it's the French enacting regime change in England for their own purposes, you know.

So it potentially drags on and has this huge impact on the English psyche, the English medieval psyche is driven by this idea that God wants us to be kings of France. I couldn't agree with you more. In a sense, that's the calculus of the end game of the Wars of the Rose, isn't it? It's this push and pull with the French sort of threatening, well, you can have the 100 years war again if you really want. You know, and it's the interrelation between the dynastic politics in England and the international politics of, can we really, really reopen the 100 years war? And if we do, are we reopening the dynastic wars at home? You know, they are totally bound together. So, yeah, I'm with you on that.

And even the Wars of the Roses, you know, do we have for Wars of the Roses without the Hundred Years' War because it's so much about the failures in France coming back home to Roost? Absolutely. Couldn't agree with you more. The only question is, how far back do you trace it? And do we say, okay, it's Henry V,

who's predominantly to blame for that? Or do we go back and say, well, Henry VIII wouldn't have been over there campaigning, you know, Achencore, Ruon, Treaty of Quar, the rest of it, without Edward before him. So all roads can, if you want, lead back to Cressy. At the moment, I would prefer they do lead back to Cresi for obvious reasons. Well, I think they can. I've said before, I think Agincour is all about Henry V, putting the

Lancasterian claim to the throne before God for judgment. You know, his father's reigns been dogged by problems about the legitimacy of their claim. Well, an answer to that is to go to France. It unites the nation behind you. But it's also a chance for Henry to put his crown on on the battle of Agincourt and say, look, God is still on our side. The Lancastrians are the rightful kings, and God will prove it in battle. So it's kind of harnessing that energy from Cressy that is still lingering there to kind of reinforce the Lancasterian regime a bit. I think it plays into all sorts of elements of the English psyche for 100, 150, 200 years after Cressy. Absolutely. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit.

Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday.

So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Did your research and your writing for this novel change your view of the Cressy campaign. I mean, it's obviously something you know well enough from writing and studying medieval period in the past, but did you get a different view of it? Did you get a different take on it in writing this book? Yeah, a massively different take. I'd written about Edward III and 100 Years' War before, probably at greatest length in the Plantagenet published 10 years ago. And in that, what does Cressie get? I can't get more than a couple of pages. This is a deep dive into the campaign.

And it also makes you ask completely different questions than writing. a political narrative forces you to ask. Political narrative, you're just sort of interested in outcomes and the diplomatic game, if you like, as changes the shapes of diplomacy. When you're writing a novel like Essex Dogs, it's all about the granular experience of war, some of which I think, given the subject matter of Essex Dogs, which is ordinary people in the Hundred Years' War, fiction is a much better vehicle to treat this than nonfiction, because had I tried tried to write nonfiction about the Cressy campaign. Most of the stuff I'm investigating and thinking about and writing about in Essex Dogs would be inaccessible because the record

is simply not good enough for the type of people that I wanted to write about in Essex Dogs. You know, the questions of what are people eating day by day? How are they camping? Where are they shitting? How many times are they getting bitten by mosquitoes? How does they deal with the heat? How do they deal with the exhaustion? What are the cyclicals? psychological effects of being sent into a city to rape, burn and kill everyone if you're not really that keen on doing it, or if you are really that keen on doing it, there were lots of points in writing Essex dogs. And in fact, every chapter of the book starts with a quote from Hua'sar or, you know, one of the chronicles of the day who tend to be interested in the

deeds of kings and nobles and the code of chivalry. There were lots of points where, you know, I'd come across a line from Quassar that might say, oh, they came to, I don't know, sound low and they took the town right there's not that's it you know it's so laconic they took the time we all know what that means well let's play out what that means quite hard to do in nonfiction without just endless must have looked like this probably smelled like that you can do it at a much sort of deeper level in fiction where you put yourself into a responsible imagination of the reality of the sack of a town and a responsible imagination of the psychology of the ordinary soldier asked to do that. So the research process is totally different because of that.

And really the writing mindset is totally different. All one's priorities and interest as a writer change in this type of book. I'm super interested in writing process and writing technique. And so I was sort of aware of the difference in what I was doing as I was doing it and fascinated by it all the way through. Were you able to tease out any kind of stories of the real men on the ground that helped to inspire any of Essex dogs or contribute to your understanding of what it was like on the ground or do those stories just not exist in the Chronicle Records? I guess I'm asking whether any of Essex dogs is inspired by real people or real events at all. Yes, it's almost all inspired by real events. A lot of the names I pulled out of databases from the Hundred Years War, you know,

Anne Currie's and work on the medieval soldier provides a beautiful wealth of names. I didn't often take names wholesale, but I might take a forename here and a surname here and put them together. So let's give you a good example of the experience. So there's a scene in about the sort of second third of Essex dogs where one of the characters, Romford, the youngest of the dogs, has ended up falling into the circle of the Black Prince and he attends a banquet and he's tasting all these fine food served at the banquet, almost all of them for the first time. He's never seen, smelled, or tasted food like this before. Okay, so Romford's an invented character. The banquet is, well, we know the army camped there and they ate there, and the cardinals visited the king

there. So I put them at a banquet, so it's reasonable supposition. But the menu itself, because we have the kitchen diaries still extant from the Cressy campaign, we do know what they ate on that particular day. And so the menu that served at the banquets that Romford-Tens is exactly what they ate on the Cressy campaign on that day, or rather what the king and all his retinue ate on that day. So here's the intersection between the invented and the known. And I try and do that as much as possible in the book. There's an example at Saint-Loe earlier in the story, where we know that three-nights sympathetic to the English cause

had been beheaded in Paris some years earlier, and their heads were on display at San Lowe. And all we know from the Chronicles is that their heads were retrieved and buried. That's a line at best. That's a sentence in a non-fiction book if you even decide to include it. But that's the sort of thing where in fiction you go, right, I can really get stuck into this. Because how do you get these? If these heads are on spikes above a gate at San Lowe, reasonable supposition, who gets sent to get them?

How do you get them down? What'd you do with them? Who'd you take it to? All of these questions unanswered and unanswerable from the sources are like a gift for fiction because it allows you to give the characters a sort of, a, fairly amusing and slightly gross task to do. It takes an angle into the source material that's unavailable to the historian. And so I suppose the broader point I'm driving towards here is that often people who write and even read a lot of nonfiction might look down on fiction as a kind of a cop-out version

of history. But if you approach it with the mindset of, I'm I'm going to use this tool we call fiction for its optimal end, which is to get into all the corners history can't go, to shine a torch into all the little things we wish we could imagine. Then you can do really interesting things with it that aren't just sort of copping out of the dirty hard work of real history that are building on that work. And I think that's where people will appreciate and understand where you're coming from because you do have all of that knowledge. You do understand the history, absolutely.

and this is all rooted in your knowledge and your research, but you're able to explore those things that you just can't in historical fiction, but do it with an authority that says, based on everything that I know, this is how I think this might legitimately have played out. So it is kind of almost a halfway house. It's almost, I'm not going to say it's a true account, but this might be as close as we could get to understanding how some of those things might have happened. Well, it's just another way of investigating and looking at things.

It's another sort of tool. one of the maybe slightly crass or silly analogies I've been using. I use this more to myself, I'm sure I'll end up repeating it over the years, is that if history is going up to like a compost heap and like taking it all apart and describing very carefully what you can identify within the compost heap and writing it all down and logging it in a database and then publishing the results, fiction is like taking the same compost heap and chucking some magic beans on and seeing what grows out of this strange midden.

and it's fed by exactly the same thing that you've been rooting around in as the historian. They are related, but they also are completely different. If you take seriously what you're doing, then I think you will produce something credible and interesting. And I've approached writing fiction with the same sort of seriousness and intensity as writing nonfiction, but with a completely different goal. And you've recently been over to France with history hit, so any subscribers can catch the first episode, the same date as your book is released on the 15th of September. And that was an effort to trace the Cressy campaign and to tell the story.

How did you find it doing that, having written it all? Did that, again, impact your understanding? Did having written Essex dogs affect the way you approached telling that story? Yeah, absolutely. No, making the history hit film was like just an incredible added bonus to the experience of writing the book because we actually followed in the footsteps of Edda III's army and the fictional footsteps of the Essex dogs. As always, going to the actual place is always very helpful.

I've been to many of these actual places before, but some of them I hadn't. And it was actually quite pleasing, because if I hadn't been to places, I was using, you know, I was using Google Earth. I was using lots of historical plans and maps and sources to recreate these locations within the book. And in some of the locations, because that part of the world was, so heavily reduced in the First and Second World Wars. They don't look now anything like they would have looked in the Middle Ages.

Nevertheless, there was something really, really thrilling to go on that journey. And to be talking about the real history, because having written this story, it's nice then to go and unpick the reality that lay behind it. So I really enjoyed doing that. And it was also the first time I'd been out and made a film since COVID as well. I made so many films and documentaries pre-COVID and then had basically had two years off, just sitting in my little room, writing my little bullshit. Now I would back out working with other people on the ground again, reembracing yet another way of telling stories.

We've talked about the difference between telling stories in non-fiction books, between telling stories in fictional books. There is another grammar of storytelling and another sort of mode of communication about history, about medieval history. and that is on screen. And I'm endlessly fascinated by the differences and similarities between these ways of communicating. So I actually love making those films, and I'm super excited about all the history hit subscribers watching. I'd thoroughly recommend them to subscribers,

and if you want an excuse to get your free trial of history hit in, then you can use these films as a compliment to Dan's novel, which I'm sure everyone will be reading. Before we finish, if we could just go back to slightly more macro view of all of this, I'm wondering whether your experience and investigations and writing about that micro detail on the ground changed your opinion of the more macro picture as well. Did it affect your opinion of Edward III?

I mean, Edward III is quite often held up as almost an ideal medieval king, perhaps the best medieval king. How close does he come to that ideal if there is an ideal? I suppose what writing this kind of granular fiction made me consider more deeply than perhaps I had before is sort of what you've just said, is there an ideal? Now, yes, Edward III, by most reasonable standards slash metrics, is about as good as you're going to get from a medieval king, particularly given that he does it over a longer period than, say, Henry V, who might be his closest contender, and circumstances are somewhat different for Henry II, who would be the other option. If you're writing the sort of top-down macro history of the Christian campaign

and the Hundred Years' War, Edward does well. it doesn't matter if you think that the Cretti campaign is sort of well-planned, daring, execution of a very audacious strategy, or Edward being a good enough general to get lucky, lucky, lucky three times in a row. He still comes out somewhere near the ideal of what you want out of a king in either of those two situations. But writing the sort of the granular micro-history via fiction forces you to say, well, hang on, that may be the ideal for kings and nobles and knights and historians of military strategy. But what's the ideal for about 14.5,000 of the 15,000 men who are taken on this campaign? What is the ideal there? Well, for a lot of them, the ideal is we just want to make some plunder, make a bit of loot, get home alive.

For some of them, the ideal might just be, I don't know how I got myself here, but I hope one day I see home again. Is Edward matching up to what you really want from your leader? To what degree does he even care about the survival and the lives of the people on the ground? Those are all the questions that became more prominent in my mind writing Essex dogs than they would have been if I was doing a nonfiction book. And then the answers are more difficult to come by. You know, you change your perspective, you change your mind. So yeah, I suppose it just opened my mind a lot. And I guess the other big character of the period is the Black Prince.

You mentioned that he appears later in the book. What do you make of the Black Prince? Well, the Black Prince, to all your listeners who I'm sure know their history of Hundred Years' War. The canonical story of the Black Prince on the Crescy campaign is that at Cressy, he wins his spurs. He proves himself by fighting the thick of the battle. And when he gets into a bit of trouble, his father supposedly says, let him sort himself out and does. Now, the latest scholarly history of the Crescent by the brilliant Michael Livingstone, who's in the history hit films, suggests that the Black Prince was incredibly reckless at Cressy

and very, very lucky to escape being captured. The Black Prince in my book is a little shit, really, because I can't imagine that putting a teenager in nominal charge of the army could be anything but trouble. And so we proceed really from a punchline, which I don't really want to tell you now, because I'll risk giving away the end of the book. So I think we're just going to leave the Black Prince as being a little...

A little shit. One of the advantages that fiction has over nonfiction is you can make jokes that aren't just sort of one-liners and quips, but that are sort of deeply baked in jokes that people who know the history will kind of get. And there are just so many opportunities with the Black Prince, with this particular type of character, where it's like Daddy's boy, on campaign, given charge of the army. Like how many 16-year-olds do you know that are going to be cool in that situation? It just struck me as absurd that we consider that he'd be anything but.

And it also then opens up the possibility when you're thinking in terms of three books, maybe even six books for this cycle, of growth and development and change on the part of the Black Prince. And I managed to fit in my take on his possible personality with real events. And it fits with what we know from the sources, ways that the Black Prince behaves and the way he behaves at Cressy, the way he allows his men to behave before Cressy. And his father, Edward III, really does deal with some of the Black Prince's men very harshly. And of course, then there's the he's known as the Black Prince. Now, that's of course not a contemporaneous nickname. It's bestowed on him much, much later, but I couldn't resist. There's a real Easter egg of a joke right at the end of the book about the

name the Black Prince that history officionados will, I hope, appreciate and forgive and enjoy. I certainly did. That's got to be worth reading the book all the way to the end for everyone listening. I think it's one of the weird juxtapositions about writing nonfiction and fiction, isn't it? With the fiction, you get the luxury of exploring that character and putting it. them in a direction that you think they would have been. But offset against that, you've got the fact that when you're writing them in fiction, you're forced to make that decision. You don't have the luxury of nonfiction saying, well, we don't know whether the Black Prince was thinking this or this. You kind of have to have him behaving in a way and being a certain personality. So you have to kind of

get off the fence and decide who you think the Black Prince is. So you get that freedom to write him, but you also have to give him a character. But you're also freed from, unless you're one of these fiction writers who says, I've really gone with the historical facts, and I think this is a true representation of the story, which is about the most hypocritical thing that you could do as a fiction writer. I think there's a great freedom in saying, look, this is just a story. This is my version, and it's primarily supposed to be entertaining. And if you want to see where I've deviated from known sources, there's a reading list at the back of the novel, so people can go and read up on the real history, and then they'll be able to see, ah, well, that's where I've

stuck with what's known, this is where I've made it up, and this is where I've sort of triangulated between the two, either cleverly or not cleverly. I think it's actually quite freeing in terms of fiction, because in nonfiction, if you can do this and I feel terribly unfree that your judgment is always going to be pulled apart by the next person who writes about the same subject, or even the last person who wrote about the same subject. With fiction, you can just say, look, I'm having some fun. You don't like it. Don't read it. Don't read it. Yeah. So just to end on, you hinted a little bit earlier, talking about three, maybe six books. What's next for the Essex Dogs? Book two, which sort of continuous

from Essex Dogs. It's called Wolf Moon. And it follows directly on from the Battle of Cressy to the siege of Calais in 1347, which lasted for 11 months overwinter and ended. It's not too much of a spoiler with the English taking Calais. But what I think you see in that story is a different side of the 100 years war. You know, you see the economic side of the war and the merchants who had invested interest in this war continuing for 100 years and the politics in England and Flanders and so on. So that's what's coming next year. Fantastic. Well, something else to look forward to thank you so much for joining us on Gone Medieval Dan. It's been absolutely fantastic to talk to you. And Essex Dogs is released on the 15th of September so everybody can grab a copy. And Dan's

series on the Cressy campaign is available on history hit now. So look that out as well. Thank you very much, Dan. Thanks, Matt. Take care.