Gone Medieval - How the Plantagenets Built England

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

Six Plantagenet kings ruled between 1199 and 1399 - two centuries that witnessed civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords. There was also international warfare, a devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in our history. Yet those two centuries and six kings were the blocks upon which the English nation was built.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Dr. Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, about the period as recounted in their acclaimed new book, Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State.This episode was edited by Ella Blaxill and produced by Rob Weinberg.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. Arise, England. Six Kings and the Making of the English State is the fabulous new book from Caroline Burt and Richard Partington that tells the story of the long labour that brought forth the English state. Between the reigns of King John and Richard II, with a Henry and a few Edwards thrown in between. Dr Caroline Burt is a historian and lecturer at Pembroke College, Cambridge,

and Richard Partington is senior tutor at St John's College, Cambridge. So I'm sitting up straight and I'm hoping I won't ask too many stupid questions. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Caroline, Richard. Nice to meet you, thanks for having us. Great to be here. I guess my first question, and I'll aim this one at you, Caroline. Really broad question. The book covers the years 1199 to 1399.

Why is the development of the common law in England such an important part of that period? The common law itself originated under Henry II really, so back in the 1170s. It predates our period. But it really sets up a dynamic in which people in England got used to a situation where they could go to the King's Courts and obtain redress.

So if, for example, they were in a dispute with their neighbour or something like that, they could get a writ and they could go and sue them. That generates a lot of demand. really wanted to access that common law. It was cheap, it was easy, it offered very clear solutions. And it also was a way of forcing your opponent into a settlement, just as the law is often used today. What that did, though, was it got people used to the idea of regularised justice in which people couldn't just do whatever they wanted to each other. There was a very clear system by which

it could be dealt with if they tried to. When the king, then fast forward now to King, to King, John's reign from 1199 onwards, when the king then attempted to do things like fund war, simply by saying, right, I'm going to take your property to do this, essentially in the form of money, without your consent. People started to say, well, no, hang on a minute. If somebody else wants to do that to me, I can sue them because I've got the law and I can have redress through that against the king, what the hell am I going to do? Because he's the king and it's the king's law. But it created this sort of tension in which people began to feel very acutely that this was very unfair. And that the king should not be above the law when everybody else had to actually obey it. So that's the

start of the period in terms of how the development of common law was important. Once you go forward beyond that, it's exponential really in terms of people's appetite to access this. So there's a great case in the 1290s where this guy turns up in the royal courts with a writ of conspiracy and it's a new writ. And the judge says, well, what are you doing here? Your case has nothing to do with conspiracy. And the guy's kind of like, yeah, but it's the new writ. And you can just imagine the judge head in hands thinking, oh, how do I unpick this one? But that gives you a sense of quite how much appetite there was for this legal system

that offered, as I say, very clear rules for everyone. I wondered whether we could, for listeners, and for me, whether we could just define some of the legal terms that we hear quite a lot during the medieval period, but perhaps we don't all understand them as well as we'd like to. So some of the ones I've picked out is the Ayers. So the E-Y-R-E-S, the Ayers. What would that mean? And everyone debates how on earth to pronounce that, but it is Ayers.

They are basically royal justices going out county by county to hear legal cases, to collect coroner's reports, basically to do a general sweep-up, both in terms of disputes between people and disorder in a locality. It's quite slow because they go, as I say, from county to county, and they are literally hearing everything. So they're not kind of sharply focused on one particular thing that's happened. And of course, that, as I say, is what makes them slow. They were also used up until really the reign of Edward I, to increasingly by kings to try and collect money in. So where kings were struggling to get taxation because suddenly people were saying, well, you can't just take our property as you like.

because it shouldn't be possible. There's the law and it should apply to you as well. When they couldn't get that tax, they would use the heirs to extract money from localities in terms of fines and stuff like that. But really, under Ed with the first, it was much more judicial in its focus than it had become in the last couple of decades. It's worth focusing as well on just the sheer practicality. So the word er is a contraction of the French word itinerer it itinerant. All it means is courts moving around exactly as Caroline described. But because there was such a demand for the law among ordinary people, from very early on in the air's history, key aspects of its function were separated out into ad hoc judicial

commissions, particularly the commissions of jail delivery and the commissions of Assize. Now, Assizes straightforward. Assizes were overwhelmingly the assize of novel deceiving, new dispossession, and that was the mechanism that you used if you were in a property dispute to try and get your property back landed property in most cases. Jail delivery, it's delivery as in emptying, like the highwayman's stand and deliver. And the judges who were appointed to commissions of jail delivery went around the country more frequently than the air, and they tried all of the people who'd been arrested on suspicion and who were being held in the county jail. The county jail, by the way, was full of people who'd been arrested by the sheriff's posse, the posse comitatus.

So it all starts sounding terribly wild west. And of course, that's because the The judicial system that operated in America in the 19th century was a straight lift from medieval England. And as demand grew, more and more of these ad hoc mechanisms were created so that by the time you get to the middle part of the 14th century, you've got a much more comprehensive suite of mechanisms to allow ordinary people to access justice in every county four times a year. And if you look at the records of the legal cases, Matt, which there are literally hundreds of thousands of case records from, say, the 14th century that survive. And somewhere in the

region of 95% of them are brought by peasants on other peasants. So it really was a universal system accessible by ordinary people and heavily used by ordinary people. Government was just very, very useful for ordinary people because of the law. Asizes was one of the words I was going to pick up, so you've already beat me to that one, Richard. Thank you. Justices of the Peace, who were they and what did they do? The Justice of the Peace, who were they? And what did they do? The Justice of the Peace were essentially another set of judges. The original justices, the justices in there, and then the justices of jail delivery and Assize, were mostly professional judges based at the political centre, which was usually Westminster. Not always Westminster.

Sometimes government was based in York or other major cities, but it was usually in Westminster. What happened in the very late 13th century and during the first half of the 14th century is that government, in the face of an expanding demand for the law, started enlisting trained lawyers who were based in the localities and employing them as judges. So to use a modern analogy, it would be a bit like saying, well, instead of just using the judges of the senior courts in England of Wales, we're going to start employing the senior partners in regional law firms to start hearing cases to deal with a backlog. So that's effectively what they did. And the justices of the peace were people who had usually trained in the law in London, had quite often practiced as attorneys,

as lawyers at Westminster for a few years, and then moved back to the region where they'd come from to practice as a local attorney, and they were embraced in the 14th century into the legal system, so that the number of judges, and therefore the capacity of the system was significantly increased. Fascinating. Just a couple more, I promise. The Court of Common Pleas, what is that and what would I do there? So the Court of Common Pleas would be where you would bring all sorts of legal disputes, but didn't particularly affect the king himself. So let's say that I came to the Assizes and I sued you, Matt, for taking my manor and castle. I bring a writ of novel decease in against you, which literally means I had possession, you've taken possession.

If I want to settle a more fundamental question of right, so if, for example, I want to know whether I have the greater right to that, not just whether I had possession or not, then that's what I might take to common pleas. So it's one of the royal courts that hears those sorts of legal cases. There are lots of others as well, but that just gives you an example of the sort of thing. Business tends to be slower. You tend to get fewer verdicts in there than you do in the assizes. And I've always got the sense, actually, that common pleas, a bit like the Court of King's bench, which I know we'll talk about, was a very useful mechanism for pressure on. your opponent, not necessarily for getting a definitive settlement.

I think that's really important. I mean, Kingsbencher is used in the same way because they were based at the centre of government, usually Westminster, and because you had to appear there, and because a jury had to be drawn from your locality and sent there to hear the gaze, because it's trial by jury in the Middle Ages under the common law. It was very, very slow. So Common Pleas and Kingsencher are brilliant places to go if you wanted to kick the case into the long grass and generally create a headache for your opponent. And as Caroline said earlier,

Matt, this is all part of, just as today, the business of trying to get people to settle out of court. And quite often it worked. And one of the reasons why there are so few verdicts in King's Bench, for example, is because we think almost all of the cases were privately settled before they actually reached a conclusion. In my period, in the mid-14th century, Commonplace deals with an awful lot of cases of debt, actually. The criminal stuff is in Kings Bench, but the really important, live and active stuff is in the local courts, i.e. the royal courts that are locally based, so that's a combination of jail delivery a size, the justices of the piece. And then from the mid-40th century onwards, under an innovation of Edward III and his chief justice William Scherzell, the King's

Bench starts being sent into their localities to hear cases as that court of first instance. And you see some really extraordinary stuff there as well. Under Edward the first, on whom Caroline is an expert, there was also a great expansion of ad hoc judicial commissions, particularly the commissions of trailbustum, which is probably another word that people don't know, sometimes called commissions of General Oya and Terminate to hear and to determine. So to hear the charge and then to determine the outcome. And these were grand catch-all commissions that would be sent into a particular locality if the king was really worried about disorder having got out of hand. So, as a suppose, again, if you were looking for a modern analogy, it would be a bit like a special

government task force being sent into a locality to run a local authority where the local authority had collapsed, that kind of thing. Well, I'm not too far away from Birmingham, so familiar with that. What did it mean for the balance of power between a monarch and their people that people seem to have such good, open access to the King's Justice? It's an interesting question. I mean, I think in the first instance, it made the king increasingly important and stable government increasingly important in people's lives, because obviously what people were using more and more was the king's law. Now, to some extent, even if the king wasn't very good, mechanisms within that could continue and they did. However, if the king was not settling the most important disputes,

say, between nobles, what could happen then and did happen was that that that was that, that was, would then result in violence. That would involve people who are connected with them. It would drag in all sorts of other people. You'd end up with all sorts of knock on disputes, probably resulting in violence and probably therefore wider disorder. So the king became much more important to people as an active presence in their lives, and his law was really crucial. So at one level, you might say that gave quite a lot more power to the king in the system. It made him much more indispensable to the system. But as I said earlier, the other side of that is, of course, that you can't dispute that power at all. It was also power that came with responsibility. And what the law taught people

was this idea that you could have a system that would be fair and that would apply in the same ways to everyone. And of course, that then made the king sitting outside that system feel much more problematic and anomalous to people when he behaved very badly. So you could say at some level, it drove accountability of the king as well. Other things that is really important to recognize is that because the legal system got so big and because so many people used it, it drew in an even larger group of people. Because remember, everything was dealt with by jewellries. And the jury wasn't always 12 men. It was quite often 18 or sometimes 24. And if you add into the mix, entered the first statute of Winchester, which was a kind of policing statute in the 1280s,

by the time you get to the mid-14th century, the historian Chris Dyer has estimated that maybe as many as 40% of male householders were involved in government in some way, as jurors, as constables, as royal officials at a local level. So government was much more community-based, perhaps, than we might imagine, and maybe even more community-based than our government today. I suppose a comparison in terms of community-based governance today would be things like governing bodies of schools and trusts of hospitals and that sort of thing. But it was very much a structure of government embedded in the social fabric. And because there was no organised police force, because the state couldn't really afford it, no medieval state could, there was a heavy drawing upon local manpower social networks, generalised goodwill and willingness to help with enforcement. and that meant that there was a kind of melding of social networks, the social fabric, with government structures.

I think where things got really difficult in the localities was where either the king was completely idle. Somebody like Edward II who was just not dealing with stuff and slowly, I mean the system had momentum, as Caroline suggested, but that momentum slowly unwound and things started to collapse. So if you have an idle king or if you had a king who was even worse than that, as Edward II became during his tyranny, a king who was trying to manipulate the legal system, that was really problematic. And even under some of the kings who were really effective rulers, and a good example would be Edward III, there were moments when the king was using the law quite aggressively as a heavy weapon within a political context. And localities could get quite uncomfortable and nervous about that. In the same way,

perhaps, that today we would start to get quite concerned if government puts speed cameras on every single road with absolutely no margin for error, we would start to say, hang on a minute, this is a bit too much. This can't be right. It's not fair. And there were times when the medieval community felt that government was burdening it too much, in inverted commas, interests of the common good. And I guess we talk today about the argument between small state and large states. And I think most people thinking about the medieval period would think it's small state. It's a small elite running the country. But it sounds like actually the state was becoming much bigger than we might have thought it was. And as you say, it was really netted into communities. Yeah. And that's the

thing that I think people just don't realize. You think about the medieval period, you don't think that you've got a king who can order the arrest of somebody one day, somewhere distant from Westminster. That person is then brought to him a couple of days later. The king is interviewing that person, interrogating that person perhaps. People just don't think that. the state infrastructure could be that well developed in this period and that communication as well could be that quick in a pre-technological age, but it was. Just moving on a little bit, Richard, the book deals with some significant developments in England's military capabilities and the structures that were used to going to war during

that period. How significant was the introduction of things like indentures compared to the previous feudal military arrangements and how different were things in England then on the rest of the continent? Really excellent question. So I think the first thing that we need to recognise is that the English kings who were very effective as military commanders, Edward I and Edward I and Edward I third in our period, learnt from their neighbours.

Edward I learnt from the example of the Irish and he learnt during war in Wales about different ways of fighting different sorts of troops, like cavalry or hobolars from Ireland. And of course, the use of Longbow, archery en masse, which was something that really came out of Wales in the first instance. And then Edward III and his immediate tutors, people like Henry Beaumont, undoubtedly learned about a new way of fighting from Robert Bruce. And Robert Bruce fighting on foot, without heavy cavalry,

in prepared positions, dug in, very well-organised, infantry-based. By necessity, he was very much part of a wider European pattern, which we also see in the low countries and in Switzerland, in which very well-organized societies faced by effectively imperial threat, found ways of dealing with traditional heavy cavalry in a way that no one had before. And what's remarkable about Edward III in particular is that he took some of the organizational changes of Edward I, including professionalisation, the indenture, the contract for service instead of the old feudal service. He combined that with Robert Bruce's new way of fighting and produced something that we sometimes now termed the Edwardian military revolution in which the army went from being very large,

poorly equipped, poorly organised to being very strongly, regionally recruited, from professionals, very well equipped, very well supplied, very well organised, the regional recruitment based around regional professional commanders meant that everybody could understand everybody else because remember this is a period in which dialect was very strong. If you had a great mess of troops raised from all over the country and they were standing next to one another, some of them literally wouldn't have been able to understand one another. If the Earl of Arundel is at the heart of a retinue of 400 men all raised in the March of Wales, then they are going to understand one another. They come from the same bit of the country. So you combine all of this together

and the English armies became much more mobile, much easier to fund actually in a way, and much more effective in the field. So it was the case that the French could only really win in the Hundred Years' War, once they'd fully recognise what was going on, by employing what we call Fabian tactics, refusing to fight pitch battles, retreating in the face of the English, and trying to pick off stragglers, attack them in the camp at night, guerrilla tactics would be another way of putting it.

And that was the only way of handling what was an absolutely irisorisorisorice. resistible military machine. I think sometimes we're guilty of still clinging to this kind of whigish view of history that the English kind of invented this unstoppable military machine that rolled across Europe and we forget that what they effectively did was steal some Scottish tactics and put them to good use. Correct. Edward III was a military genius. There's no question. Edward I was also an extremely good military commander. But if I think of the medieval commanders who really leave me almost speechless with all, I mean one of them would be Thomas Randolph Earl of Moray, who was Robert Bruce's great right-hand man, and of course Bruce himself. I mean, these

were absolute masters. And they learned, you know, Bruce learned the hard way. Bruce lost initially. He learnt to fight in a different way. And Edward III learned many of his tactics from Bruce. But the organisation came from Edward I originally. And why throughout the 14th century then, and particularly thinking in France with the beginnings of the Hundred Years' War with Cressie and Poitiers, why were English military tactics so devastatingly effective against the French in particular? Well, it's really important that we recognise when they worked, they worked irresistibly, but there was one great drawback.

The way that the English fought was that they travelled on horseback, so they're incredibly mobile. And that was very, very helpful on campaign. They found it relatively easy to outmaneuver their enemies because they could outrun them pretty much whatever they needed to. In fact, if you look at English armies in Brittany in, say, the 1340s, and you look at the pace of their advance. It's as fast as the Veermacht moving into Poland in 1939.

It's mechanised speed. They could advance 30 miles in a day, you know, when they needed to put on a bit of a spur. So very fast. They fought dismounted, though. And they fought dismounted because there was a recognition by Edward III, partly on the basis of experience against the Scots, that if you had very strongly held, well-dugged positions

and you fought on the defensive, it was very difficult for cavalry to deal with you, especially if you had the right sort of anti-horse weapons like very long battle axes and, of course, mass long bow archery. And it's worth remembering that, for example, at the Battle of Cressee, the 6,000 English archers were probably putting somewhere in the region of 90,000 arrows into each French charge. It's almost machine gun level. So the French just could not cope with that. But the weakness is that the English fought on the defensive. And of course, there were extended periods in the hundred years. war when the French recognised how strong the English position was, recognised the risk and did not

fight, and relied upon a combination of financial exhaustion, disease, bad weather, etc, to do their work for them. So the English were in an immensely strong position whenever the French felt obliged to fight, which periodically they did for internal political reasons, because of loss of face, because of chivalric expectation, but they always had at least theoretically the option of not fighting, and most of the time that was the option that they took. Where the English way of fighting was especially useful was not so much on the field of battle, where it could be negated by the French refusal to attack, but, for example, in siege warfare, the ability of Longbowmen to clear the top of a town or castle wall of defenders so that ladders could be got up and people could get over the wall and open the gate was really important.

Bowman was the Swiss army knife of even soldiers. Could do everything. How did England's developments in terms of the military compare to other kingdoms? Because again, I think there's this view that England was this great innovator, which we've already sort of put to bed because what they were doing was building on Edward the first work, stealing some Scottish tactics. And then once they set on that, and it seems to work, they don't actually change very much for a very long time.

But the French don't also seem to change very much to counter it or find a way. to effectively deal with it. So how were England's military progresses, I guess, comparing in other nations? In an excellent question. To my mind, the real poser, and I don't know what the answer is, is why no one else developed longbow archery in the same way. One of the theories is that the French kings didn't like the idea of their peasants being armed with such a dangerous weapon and training from childhood all the way through, because you couldn't just pick up a bow and fire it. I mean, well, you can, but it took years of training to be really proficient and to be able to fire more than a handful of rounds before you're exhausted. So we don't really know why no one else created armies that were 50% Longbow.

In terms of innovation, the main innovation that you see with the English as time goes on is that the armies become more and more and more dominated by Bowman. Until by the time you get towards the end of the 15th century, the English armies are 80 or 90% longbowmen and only perhaps 10% of. or 15% men at arms or knights, whereas in the 14th century it was more like 50-50. And of course, the other change that occurred in the 15th century was the development of gunpowder artillery, which began to negate the advantage of the longbow. And by the time you get to the Tudor period, if you look at the bow staffs that survive, for example, in the wreck of the Mary Rose, it's clear that the only thing that the English could really do at that stage was to have bigger and bigger bows in an attempt to fire further and harder. And obviously, that was only ever going

to be a bit of a sticking plaster solution. It sounds a little bit like they found something that worked and just kept doing more of it and more of it and more of it and more of it and more of it and it didn't really work anymore. I think that's pretty much the size of it. I think the other thing that changed, of course, was political leadership. And this is the thing that's really easy to forget. The reason why the French won the 100 years war in the end in 1453 was because the English were hamstrung by having no political leader because poor Henry the 6 was disabled and

mentally ill. And it was lack of political leadership that was critical there, whereas the French had really struggled under Henry V, because they at that point had a mad and sick king. And it's easy to forget that a large part of success and failure in war is not about the technicalities. It's not about the longbow. It's about who your commanders are. It's about the way that they're able to galvanise the country, choose the right strategy, employ tactics at the right time in the right way. And in the end, In my view, almost all military victories are really political victories. One of the other big institutions, parts of the English state that emerges during the period that the book covers, is Parliament. And I think there we start to see a more consultative relationship emerging between the king, his lords, then the commons. What did the emergence of Parliament mean for England? And again, it's not something we particularly see happening in other countries, is it? Not in the same way at all, actually. It's very striking what happens in England. If we think about what happened in Parliament, it was striking in the sense that England was actually quite distinctive relative to other countries in Europe at this point. And what that enabled it to do was really punch above its weight in the 100 years war, for example. So some of those absolutely glittering victories were really a result of the way in which England was so centralised and war finance was so well organised.

and the mechanism for achieving that war finance, in other words, with the consent of parliament, was just so well developed. So for England, it punched above its weight without a doubt. Within England, I think also what this meant was that the fact that people had to have these conversations, that the king had to have these conversations with his subjects, if he wanted to fight any war at all, if he wanted to get hold of the sort of money that would enable him to do that after Magna Carta, he had to have a... dialogue with them and explain to them why it was that they should support this war. Now, initially, of course, these are the king's dynastic lands in France in particular.

I think that what grows over time, to some extent simultaneously, but to some extent connected with all of this, is this idea that actually there is this entity that is the crown and that lands belong to the crown, not just the king and his family. And so the king has to defend those lands. And so when he comes to the Commons and says this is for the common good, the Commons will debate whether in fact they agree with that policy and whether they think it is for the common good. And if they think it is, then they will support warfare in France, even though historically those have been the King's dynastic lands. So it reinforces this sense of a kind of public identity of a crown of England and a community of the realm that is partnered with the King in the defence of all of those interests, whether they be within. the British Isles or beyond the British Isles. And again, that makes England quite striking and to some

extent unique in the way that its political system developed in this period. I think Parliament, when it starts off, is very deliberately and consciously focused on England and not particularly interested in what's happening overseas. So how does it become more interested in foreign territory and foreign policy? Is it a conscious effort by the Crown to create this, as you said, the public identity of the Crown in order to get Parliament's buy-in for foreign wars? Yeah, so it's a really, really good question. Parliament comes about in the 1230s, essentially, it's got lots of antecedents, so it doesn't come from nowhere, but in the 1230s, what's going on is that the King's Government need to fund foreign warfare, and that's where

Parliament comes from. They're basically saying, right, we need to ask for consent for this. And initially, it's actually quite a small group of people that make up this thing called Parliament. So in fact, right from the start, its raison d'etre is taxation, particularly connected with foreign policy at that time. So that wasn't actually the new thing. You could say that that was absolutely a core of what Parliament was doing right from the start. The King needed tax at this particular point in time. It was mostly for policy outside of the British Isles. And so Parliament was right from the outset concerned with those things.

And we do see the notion of the community of the realm. coming into really sharp focus in England too. Is that something that we see in other nations? Does it exist? Is it expressed differently? Or is it just something unique to England? It exists everywhere in the sense of a wider concept of a community of people with sort of common traditions and perhaps a legal system, etc. The difference in England, of course, is we're going back to kind of previous points in a way, which is that it's more centralised than most of the European countries. And so there is something much clearer for that community to identify with. There is that common legal system, for example, that I just mentioned. So that the concept itself isn't particularly unique. The way it was

realised in England was, I think, much more intense and expansive than in most other countries for the reasons that we've talked about. One sense that I have very strongly from looking at Scotland is a powerful sense of Scottish national identity and community in the face of the perceived threat. from the English, perceived an actual, actually, certainly for some of the time. And so what was happening in England, as Caroline said, wasn't unique. But I think in a way, England's sustained foreign policy demands and the effect that that has on Parliament, because Parliament was summoned so regularly, and because it's important, I think, that we recognise this, because the community of the realm agreed with the King in the 1290s, the 1330s, the 1330s, and it's important, and it's important,

They agreed that England was under terrible and unfair pressure and that something needed to be done. And it was Edward III's instinct to seek political consensus and to embrace all of the structures of the realm that I think, not in a cynical way, almost in a kind of organic way, began absolutely to embed in the consciousness of representatives that this thing that they were funding was part of their affair. And remember that the king all the time, and kings like Edward I, Edward I was third all the time, talked about their peace, which meant the peace of their people, that somebody who offended the king offended the king because they offended the people. They saw the whole thing as being absolutely enmeshed. And they felt a kind of personal responsibility to the people as well as to the realm's rights. So it's kind of unsurprising that all of that became kind of melded together. It's just a kind of natural shared enterprise. And it was inevitably the case that the Parliament was the place in which other issues of great importance to people began to be discussed because they were all there together. Normally they were scattered to the four winds. You held a parliament. Everybody was together. They could all swap notes.

It was the physical meeting at the end of the COVID crisis for the first time when everyone saw everyone else. And actually, it's unsurprising that within that setting, then other things would start to be raised. Yes, the king needs the money. We all recognise that. enormous amount of money, and we need to make sure that it isn't taken in a way that does damage. So let's discuss the precise structures that are going to be used to raise the money. And since there is a connection between the King's financial rights and the processes of justice, let's talk about how taxation and justice will interface with one another so the realm is not

unduly burden. It's that organic development. Kings embracing the political community, partly because they have to post-Magnacarta, it quickly becomes a two-way street in which the community of the realm starts to embrace the king's own concerns and they become the realm's concerns. So you end up in this extraordinary moment in 1359 after the second Treaty of London

where the King goes to Parliament within the context of the Hundred Years' War and says, look, here is the Second Treaty of London, what should I do? Do I settle at this point? And Parliament says, no, you need to go back and fight for more. And that seems amazing if you think back to 1199 in King John. I mean, what a transformation.

Yeah, they've almost gone from saying, please don't, to please go and do some more. What we've explored so far gives us this idea, the common law created this almost direct connection between the king and his people. We've got military development, creating a more professionalised industry. We've got government reaching into every corner of the realm and the community. and we've got Parliament there as this almost consultative body with a bit of a quid pro quo going on. You know, if the king wants something,

he has to be willing to give something in return. Do you think there's any single factor that stands out as the most significant in terms of the development of England during the period that the book covers? Or do you think it's more of a coincidence and a convergence of lots of different factors coming together? I think fundamentally,

and Richard will probably want to say a bit more about this in a couple of minutes, but war is the kind of drive. force. And that is, obviously, at some level, that's coincidence in that we have the inheritance, particularly by the Angervyn Kings, the Pontaginus. I think what's also going on at this time, though, and this is across Europe, is ideas are developing about what authority means and what sovereignty means, and that those ideas are really driving people to take positions, particularly in respect of foreign policy, where they butt up against other nations or indeed against the Pope, to take positions that are different and novel in order to emphasise the primacy of their

own authority in a particular area. And so everyone is kind of swept along in Europe by this incredibly strong current of ideas. You can't just ignore it because all your land will get taken for a start. And that's something that is a clear driver. Obviously, then you plug into that, the behaviour, the agency of individuals, the competence or incompetence, the tyranny or or otherwise of a particular king. And that has a driving effect. And I think all of this brings us to some extent as well to war because of some of what I've just been saying there.

I'm sure Richard will want to pick that up as well. War was very important. War is always important as a driver of state change. If I think of the war on terror, if I think of the Falklands War in my own lifetime, these usher did really significant political shifts. But there are other really important forces at play to. The Black Death, of course.

The Peasants Revolt. are moments that create a real sense of urgency about response. So it's not just war that does that. And the other thing I think that is really important for state growth is kingly incompetence and tyranny. Of course, when a king is incompetent and inattentive, the state doesn't grow. The state can't grow because nobody's hand is on the tiller of the ship of state. But because everything collapses in due course when you've got really faulty kingship like that of Edward of the second, You then have political space afterwards. You have a kind of extended honeymoon period for the successor.

And you often have a kind of dispersal of or dismantling of structures that means that there is more of a blank sheet of paper on which a new structure can be drawn. So you see that, I think, particularly with Edward III. You see it with Edward I actually to a significant degree. You see it later with Henry V, that there is a crisis, failure has produced an opportunity for growth. And that's an internal dynamic around politics. So it's not always the big exogenous factors like warfare or pandemic or rebellion that produce these shifts. I think it's striking what role war played in the sense that we're probably not that different today, are we? Lots of nations, when they move onto a war footing, suddenly things get done in a hurry.

things can be achieved much more quickly. Everyone is much more focused. And it sounds like that was still going on during this period too. Absolutely right. Of course, if the realm is put on a war footing in the wrong way, that can be counterproductive. And that arguably happened in the late 1330s with the so-called Walton ordinances, which kind of misfired. But once they recognise that some of that had been got wrong, there's a real shift. The legal system, the internal legal system, there's no doubt that that was supercharged by the realm being on a war footing. Because from the King's perspective, people buggering about at home and creating difficulties internally was just another way of helping the French. And so there was a real drive against that sort of thing. And great lords

who at one stage might have got away with something close to murder, maybe even murder, found themselves being held to account in time of warfare in a way that perhaps they wouldn't have been otherwise. And do you think the development of all of these structures, legal and governmental, were they meant to support a good king and compensate for or restrain a bad one? Or did the system have enough flex that it could accommodate the personality and the capability of kings? And I guess the obvious comparison is Edward I was a man who was interested in both war and law. And he's followed by Edward II who is really not interested in either. Did the system build ways to deal with that?

So it did and it didn't. There were things that operated regardless of how good or bad the king was and that was usually, for example, the legal system. The problems come when actually the king is giving no leadership or he's tyrannical, for example, where as Richard said, there's a kind of trickle down and things just start to unravel.

So there's only so much the system can do to compensate for a bad king. In that sense, it's much more reliant on the individual, then you might say we are now. Though, if you think about the COVID crisis and the different approaches of governments across the world to dealing with that crisis, I think that gives us a very real sense of the extent to which individuals retain a huge amount of power, not just in terms of policymaking, but in terms of the impact on us every day, even though lots of things just carry on working

just as they did before. So the middle ages just had a little bit less of the stuff that carried on working. There's no health service, for example. There's no police force or standing army. There was a limit to what the system could do to deal with a bad king in the sense that although there was this idea that the king was below the law, the idea of removing the king from the throne was one that people weren't very happy or comfortable with, and they would do only an extremist because of the sheer problems and evil that that would,

and usually civil war, that that would cause. So if you've got a king who's not being very good at his job, you don't really want to get rid of him because it's probably going to create a worse situation if you do and hey, who's going to get rid of him anyway? So then the system can't really do a great deal. You'll tend to find nobles going, well, you really should do your job

and trying to make the king do his job, but there's only so much of that you can do. And if he just keeps saying no, they cannot substitute the king's authority. There are certain decisions that only the king can take. If a king is absolutely tyrannical, again, it's not really the system that removes him. It's usually an individual, usually a noble, who's got nothing left to lose. Bollingbrook had had his entire inheritance taken away from him and you've been banished from England forever.

I mean, you know, this guy is the quintessential nothing to lose guy. And those are the people who actually physically will remove a king. The system doesn't have built-in protectors of the people, partly because of course if it did, then a good king wouldn't have the freedom of action to do the really effective things that he wanted to do. So it's an interesting dilemma really that you're faced with. The system supports, it has a certain amount of automation you might say in it. But probably like any governmental system, if you've got a totally incompetent government or even a tyrannical government, even in modern world, we find that very difficult to deal with, even in the more developed countries,

if you like, or countries with more developed systems of government. That's absolutely right. There is no system of government for which a complete set of checks and balances exists. In the end, everything depends upon politics. And it depends upon people politically behaving in acceptable ways rather than being constrained by limitless constraints. Because as Caroline said, in the Middle Ages, the king couldn't run the country if the king was constrained. The king couldn't be the impartial, separate, independent person that you need to. head any government. And it's the same now. I mean, we saw this in a way with the crisis under the Johnson Premiership over preroguing Parliament. Suddenly, you had a prime minister who was willing to do things that other prime ministers hadn't been willing to do. And at that point, the law stopped him, but a different set of judgments by the Supreme Court might have led to a different situation. And in the end, the solution would have been a political solution. The solution with Boris Johnson was a political solution.

He was removed by the Conservative Party for political reasons. It's the same in the Middle Ages. In the end, you have to rely on politics for the fix. And the book ends. It brings us up to 1399, the deposition of Richard II. How much do you think of what existed in 1399

is still familiar to us today? I guess, you know, could a medieval lawyer from the mid-14th century land in London today and find his way around? I think they'd be surprisingly comfortable. I mean, I think, obviously, the tube and a few other things would be. be something to navigate. But yeah, I think they'd be surprisingly comfortable. Clearly,

there are lots of things that have changed, but the operation of the common law still has so much that would have been familiar to a medieval lawyer. So it really has given us our legal system. And as Richard said right at the start, if you think about some of the terminology being reminiscent of the Wild West, this was exported to countries across the world with which England had colonial relationships. So I think the legal system is absolutely enduring. Of course, Parliament with its two houses of Lords and Commons, that existed in the medieval period. So, again, the building itself would be different, but the concept and the structure and what it's doing would not be different. Actually, if you look at pictures of Parliament in the 14th century, this idea, I always think, quite antagonistic physical structure of parliament, with, you know, people facing off against each other.

That would be very recognisable to medieval minds as well. And of course, a government that sits beneath the law would be something that in our period people took for granted. And I think the final thing I would talk about would be English identity, which is now, of course, subsumed into and complementary to a wider British identity. If we just focus on the English part for a moment, because of course the Plantagenets were English kings, that element of identity was very, very much developing during that period as well. So again, people would recognise what we see now as a nation, if you like. Well, thank you so very, very much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. I could genuinely have done this for at least three or four times longer had I been allowed. So thank you very, very much for joining us today.

Thanks for having it. It's a massive pleasure. Your questions are fantastic. I have to say, I'm just really grateful that you and your team are producing this sort of material for the wider public. People who love history, it's so important that this sort of opportunity exists for people like Caroline and me to talk to a wider audience beyond our students. Oh, thank you very much. Well, that's the new gone medieval advert sorted. And I'm also conscious that we have barely scratched the surface of what the book covers in the 200 years of the emergence of the English state. So you can grab a copy of a Rise, England, Six Kings and the Making of the English State by Caroline and Richard right now. It offers a fantastic amount of detail and an account of a couple of centuries that really helped to forge the idea and the state of England. And that as you've heard have left enduring legacies to this day. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. And don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts 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. 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. We've been history hit.