Gone Medieval - How to Survive the 14th Century

Episode Date: May 30, 2025

Matt Lewis dives into the dramatic and transformative 14th century with historian Helen Carr, from the drama of the Peasants' Revolt, where commoners breached the mighty Tower of London and terrified a young King Richard II to the chaos of the Black Death and its surprising aftermath—an age of opportunity and change. From Edward II's controversial reign to Richard II's downfall, Matt and Helen uncover the gripping stories and seismic shifts of the 14th century to discover how resilience and upheaval forged modern Britain.MOREPeasants' Revolthttps://open.spotify.com/episode/793WPDhg8myDcHJLk2jw2tThe Black Deathhttps://open.spotify.com/episode/0rfU8b4CEDUQZ9YOpH8X4oGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK 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. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Travel back with me to the 14th century, a time when England was anything but the blessed plot Shakespeare described. More like a place of drama, disaster, upheaval and resilience. Take, for example, June 1381 when London was gripped by chaos, thousands of rebels, peasants, artisans and labourers, stormed the city, furious over crippling taxes and broken promises. In a dramatic twist, the unthinkable happened. The mighty Tower of London, long considered impregnable, was breached, not by an army, but by commoners. Inside, the terrified 14-year-old King Richard II and his household hid, as the rebels seized control,

executed top officials and demanded justice. Yet, even as their hopes were dashed and their leaders slain, the rebels' courage and resilience echoed through history, challenging the foundations of medieval power and sparking demands for change. So what was it really like to live through famine, civil war and plague? The century's crises shaped not just monarchs, but the lives of ordinary people, especially women whose voices we can find in rarely used petitions and court records.

One particularly gripping story we'll explore is the mysterious case of Maud de Burr, who claimed to be pregnant for nearly three years after her husband's death. Was this a calculated bid for power or the tragic result of trauma and a misunderstood medical condition? From the death of Edward I to the turbulent one, to the turbulent, rise of Henry IV, Helen Carr's new book, Septed Isle, explores the reigns of three pivotal kings, the devastation of the black death and the seismic peasants revolt. I'm delighted that Helen, a good friend of God Medieval, joins me today and I want to ask her how we reconstruct the truth from biased chronicles and dry parliamentary roles, and find out about the detective work needed

to read between the lines, question assumptions and give agency. to those too long overlooked. So today we're going to immerse you in the sights, sounds and struggles of a century that's shaped modern Britain. Expect intrigue, heartbreak and humanity. As we ask, was the 14th century truly the worst time to be alive? Or was it a crucible for resilience and change? Welcome back to gone medieval, Helen.

It's fantastic to have you join us again. No, it's really great to be here. see you, Matt. And back to talk about your brilliant, shiny new book, Settard Isle. I wonder if you could start off just by telling us what Septid Isle is about? So Septed Isle is a new history of the 14th century. So it starts with the death of Edward I, the accession of Edward II, and it ends with the deposition of Richard II in 1399, say 1307 all the way through to 1399 and covering some of of the, hopefully most of the major events of the 14th century. So you have these three major kings, Edward II, Edward II, the third, Richard the second, but then within that space of rulership,

he've also got the Great Famine, the Civil War in England with Edward II and Thomas Earl of Lancaster. You have the Black Death famously right in the middle 1348, the Hundred Years War, big famous battles like the Battle of Cresi. And then you also have the Peasants Revolt, And it's jam-packed full of drama. As you're where you're already getting a sense of. And then right to the end, you have the deposition of Richard and the rise of the first Lancasterian king, Henry IV. It certainly is a jam-packed century of not always very good stuff going on.

Was there a particular reason that you wanted to try and tackle this whole century? Is it important for us to view what happens in context of what's happening around it? Yeah, I think. So I've always been very interested in characters and personalities in human beings. My first book was the biography of John of Gaunt, The Red Prince. And when I was telling that story and the story of Gaunt's life, I sort of felt so constrained as you are when you're writing biography. And I couldn't sort of go on these tangents into everything else that was going on around him.

And I was fascinated with the first part of the century, you know, the 50 years before he was born. And I was also fascinated with some of the things that were going on. during his lifetime, but that he had no real interaction with. So what was so interesting to me was how he was shaped as a person by the events that were going on around him and as a magnate. But that applies also to the leaders and the kings and the people who were existing around him at that time as well. And as I said it before, I wanted to tell that first part of the century.

I felt like kings like Edward II hadn't really been given a huge amount of attention. and there hadn't really been much of an in-depth analysis as to his character and his famous queen, Isabella of France, notoriously called a she-wolf. It felt like an important story to tell. And of course, right in the middle with the Black Death, that was the most appalling circumstance that reshaped humanity going forward into the rest of the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. So I felt like it was incredibly important to cover that too.

Yeah. And it's great, I think, to put all of the things, in sequence, in context, you could get a book just about the black death, but this allows you to place all of those things in the context of the politics and the economics that's happening around all of the characters as well and the people. So it's a really great way to approach what are seismic events in the 14th century. I wonder before we get into some of the detail of the story as well, if you could tell us a little bit about the sources that are available for you to construct the 14th century, it's sort of, we're still in the medieval period, sources aren't always

Is that good? Yeah. So it's a lovely question. I love talking about sources. I get to really nerd out when I get asked this question, because obviously you have the brilliant chronicle accounts period, and you have these wonderful characters. You have the Vita, the life of Evdward II,

and then in the Kings After, and you have brilliant French chroniclers like Jean de Vienne, you have John Fossar famously, and then you have the brilliant scathing, Thomas Walsingham, who just has crossed with everyone, and he likes to be rude about all of the leading magnates at the time. But obviously, chronicle accounts are inevitably flawed. They are always taken from a personal reading.

They're often written to appease their patron. They want to give a version of events that is going to be biased towards one side, as everything in history is written by those terms. But also, they're often from secondhand accounts. They're often written from confines of a monastery. So it's very difficult for these authors, these historians of their time, to really deliver a very accurate account. And often with these accounts read

multiply, so when you have one account corroborating another, so for example, with the Peasance Revolt, we know a lot of what went on because you have multiple accounts corroborating what the other one's saying. So the Anonymous Chronicle, who might have been there, was also saying the same thing as Thomas Walsingham, who was getting an eyewitness version of what had been going on. So they can be incredibly useful in those terms and you do get a sense of truth and reality through that. You have to layer this with what is available in the records and you go into the archive where a lot of things are actually brilliantly, have been digitised and are available online through all sorts of different projects and things, which are such a great source.

I mean, there's so many of them if you actually might as to delve into what's available. But I love going into the archives and most of the things I need are in the National Archives, which is incredibly helpful. And you're looking at, you're looking at things like Kings Bench Records, so core records. You're looking at Parliament roles. Everything is like minutes, right? So it's documented as to what is happening and being said during the course of Parliament, which all being well takes place twice a year.

And so you'll get a really good detail of what's going on with all of these different accounts. And I really love working on petitions, which are a source that's not really used all that often, but I use them for my academic work. And petitions are a wonderful way to access. what is going on for the people who are at the front line. You know, they are experiencing the world as they are seeing it. And they're writing to the king, to government, and saying, I need help with X. So-and-so has taken illegally this portion of land.

I need help through this. And you can sort of track the way these petitions make their way through the governmental systems. But what is also wonderful about them is it one of the few sources available that we get a sense of direct voice from women. So these petitions, they're not being written personally by women, they're being errated to clerks. And you get this wonderful sense when you're reading them of almost performative action. So you can almost see the way that women are moving their bodies, the way that they're expressing themselves. And it's just such a valuable source to me. And I tried to incorporate these within the book, particularly in relation to the ongoing war with Scotland and the women living in those borderlands.

Yeah, because I guess the issue is you've got that section of the Chronicles, which, as you say, you know, they're quite often biased. They're quite often a bit snarky. They've got a message that they're trying to convey. And then against that, you've got the slightly drier governmental paperwork, which gives you numbers and dates and who was going where, but doesn't necessarily why, it doesn't give you much motivation for why things are happening. So I guess it's trying to feed those together to shuffle the deck and come up with a fuller picture. But it sounds like petitions are kind of a good, halfway house, you've got some court paperwork, but it's actually coming from an ordinary person who's explaining their issue with the world that they're living in. Yeah, yeah. And I think that something I do a lot as well is I spend ages just sort of, even with Parliament roles, like reading the detail very carefully and going back and reading it again. And as historians, like one of the major things we do is we ask questions of the source. And you can draw out more from these records then you might necessarily just, then you might think that's what's available to you on the page. So for example, it totally depends on the way you are reading it.

I'm reading it from the perspective of a woman. I'm looking at it through, you know, a young woman, a woman who's a mother. I've had children, so I'm going to empathize and feel differently when these sorts of cases about women and childbirth and children come up in the record. And you see things through a different lens. And often, particularly in relation to talking about women or more marginal, people, the court records are phenomenally biased because they're written from the perspective of the privileged. And so you have to use that brilliant tool of reading against the grain. So you're

reading against what it's saying. And you're questioning, is this truth? Why is this person being spoken to by these terms? Why are they being referred to by these terms? What is that actually telling us? So it's kind of like reading this very small source. You might have three lines and you're looking at it again and again and saying, this doesn't, hang on, if they're talking about this person by these terms, does that not mean X? Or could that mean Y? An example of this, which I found in the course of researching this book, was the case of Maud de Berg, who we might go into looking at the Declare Sisters later on in the podcast, but M. D'Urude D'Berg was the wife of the recently deceased M. Earl of Gloucester, who was killed at the Battle of Bannockburn. And after the

death of her of her husband Gilbert, she claimed she was with child, she was pregnant. And what's so fascinating about this case is it's quite a famous one that Hugh Dispenser the younger couldn't get her lands. The Claire sisters couldn't claim their right for inheritance because there was this potential air coming, right? So Gilbert's sisters, who would have been the next in line to inherit the property or had to wait. Everyone was waiting. Is this baby? What is it what's going on? She claimed to be pregnant for almost three years. And we know that as biologically impossible. And previously, this has always been assumed that she was lying. And when I was reading through the case, and I was looking at the record and what was

said about her, there was an instance that inspectors had gone to look at her. And importantly as well, people within her vicinity had seen her to be with child. The meaning of this was she looked like she was pregnant. She appeared to be pregnant. She was investigated for pregnancy. So with all of this in mind, that seems like a very elaborate lie. And when you think about the experience that she'd been having, the trauma of losing her husband, the stress of the expectation, the knowledge that a widow without a child without a son to protect her is in a more vulnerable position, it seemed rational to me that Maud might be experiencing

what is not an uncommon condition, which is pseudosaesis, which is a false pregnancy. So in fact, contrary to what has previously been assumed from a very male historical gaze that she was lying, I actually don't think she was. I think she was unwell. Yeah, yeah. And I guess, you know, between the stress and the desire to be pregnant, all of that is feeding into creating the situation in which, yes, it's easy for us to look back and say she was just lying to drag things out. But as you say, thinking about it from a slightly different angle, there's potentially so much more to that story than just a fib to try and get an inheritance. Yeah, exactly. It seems like quite an elaborate one. I think she was actually probably deeply vulnerable, probably incredibly confused and was really appallingly victimized and treated thereafter.

Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned at the start, the book deals with three kings. And even that's not. simple for you, is it? Because we've got two that are deposed, one that rules for kind of half the century, two that are considered amongst the worst medieval kings of England, one that's considered potentially the best medieval king of England. So you've got kind of all kinds of extremes going on in there. How did you find that Edward the second, Edward the third and Richard the second approached kingship? What were the differences in the ways that they got it right and got it wrong? Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. And I think these three kings are fantastic example of medieval kingship in the sense that they do it so different. You know,

they are example of how to do it right and how to do it wrong and the mistakes that they make, what they value, what's deemed important as a leader and as a king and what people around you value. And also what historians in the future have valued and people in the future have valued. You know, do we value a king who doesn't really have as much interest in war and just wants to focus on your realm and his image, you know, how he's represented? Or do we value a king? who wants to take armies into France and conquer and be victorious. But in the process of that, also ending the lives of a lot of innocent people. So it also begs the question as how do we think about kingship?

And these kings do do it very differently. I think a lot of this comes down to power and how they use it. And with Edward II, he is an interesting case study of kingship in that he is actually going into his rule as an incredibly vulnerable man. His father was a bully. I mean, it's no doubt that Edward Hammer of the Scots, Edward I'm first, Edward Longshanks was a fearsome man. He was scary.

He was intimidating. And he made no secret of the fact that he would punish his son when he didn't stand up to what he valued as his heir. He was treated quite aggressively in his youth. And so when he comes to the throne, he needs the support of people around him. He's not coming to it feeling buoyed up by a sense of his own importance. and a duty to do right by the realm and come on, let's get going, let's go to war with the Scots and sort them out just that my father was. He was somebody who didn't really know what to do

and what he looked for was strong-minded, strong-willed individuals to tell him, don't worry, Edward, I've got your hand, let's do this together. And what he did by doing that was he destabilised the traditional hierarchy of power in the Middle Ages. You have the king, think of your GCSE feudal pyramid. You've got the king right at the top, then you have the nobility, the immediate nobility with that royal blood pulsing through their veins beneath them. And then you have resurfs all the way down at the bottom. And what Edward did by prioritising favourites like Pearce Gaveston is he took somebody who was just your average squire, who wasn't even English.

He was from Gaskinie. He was a Gaskin knight. He brought him up, elevated him, created him Earl of Cornwall, which is putting him power-wise and land ownership on the same level as people like the Earl of Lancaster, who was Edward's cousin. This is a grandson of Henry III. He's putting him on that pedestal, and that's going to really irk the nobility. It's going to make them cross.

They're saying, hang on a minute. This is really confusing. We're supposed to be supporting you. We're supposed to be, you know, never questioning your judgment and your kingship, but you're sharing your power and you're relying on guidance and the power and the support of this person who we consider beneath us. And so Edward continued to keep making that mistake. He kept pushing his face.

He kept destabilising that very accepted structure of authority that worked that had been proven to work. And that was his greatest mistake. It sounds like what Edward II is doing then is he's taking that feudal pyramid that we all know so well, whether it's real or not. But the point of the feudal pyramid is it has that broad base that provides support to the top. And what he's doing is narrowing it at the top. He's almost putting a spire on top of it, which makes it, you know, precarious, a spire can blow over in the wind. So he's making that stable structure much less stable,

which means that he has to be so much better to keep it all together, which he doesn't quite seem to manage to do. No, he doesn't manage to do it, and it doesn't help that he is not a military strategist. He's unable to win battles. I mean, the Battle of Banachburn was the worst military disaster of the Middle Ages. It's been compared to the Battle of Courtaireu in France, which was a Battle of the Golden War.

Spurs, which has claimed that it was the entire destruction of the flower of French mobility. And the same happened with the Battle of Bannockburn. It completely rendered the northern frontier, the northern borderlands vulnerable to attack. And Robert Bruce, after that, was able to completely take over the north of England, demanding tribute payments. He made an extraordinary amount of money from people on those northern borderlands just by demanding tribute payment from them, at millions by today's standards, by people. people just saying, look, I'll pay you, just don't raid me. And that's how he was so successful because Edward was completely unable to defend the Northern border because he had lost at the Battle

of Banachburn so many of those important northern lords who were supposed to be using their power and their strength, their money to protect those lands. And they were just, they were wiped out. Yeah. And I think I was struck by, if you deal with those three kings, Edward the second, Edward the third, Richard the second. There's not much of an element of. of any of the three of them being particularly nurtured to be good kings, and yet you get two bad ones and one good one. None of them really have that training. He said Edward I first, not a great dad, big old bully. Edward the third is following Edward II who is deposed for being an awful king. Richard the second comes to the throne as a child and his education as a king is largely ignored.

So it suggests that there's a strong element of nature about being a good or bad king rather than nurture. I totally agree. And I think this is the thing. When we think about kings, it's always this idea of, oh, they're a king, therefore they must behave and act in this way and be this sort of person. And actually, they're not, they're individuals, they're human beings. And they will come to the role with very different prerogatives. It's interesting that you say the idea that Edward III, going on from Edward II, he wasn't really trained. I think to an extent he was, but not by his father, but by his mother. Some of the major characteristics that you see in the reign of Edward the third, I think are taken from his mother, Isabella of France. For example, his desire to emulate

and recast himself in the image of King Arthur, which was very clever political device in order to get the masses on board and really get his nobility behind him, creating this sort of fraternity of noble lords. It was absolutely genius. But I think he got that from his mother, who was known to enjoy the Itherian legends. She and Roger Mortimer used to dress up as Arthur and Guinevere and have their sort of courtly romances played out in their evenings together. And I think that Edward, he saw all of this. And I think he used that side of his mother's very skillful way of presenting herself

through legend, through dress. So, for example, when she went over to France and refused to come back, she started to wear black because she claimed that she was a widow because of this Pharisee who had come between her and her husband, her marriage was effectively ended. And so she treated as if she was in mourning for her marriage. It was very, very clever. And I think that Edward, he took all of that on board.

But I think also he was bright and he watched everything that went wrong in his father's reign. And he saw how important it was to keep your nobles on side. And he knew that the nobility made the country the realm strong. The nobility supported the king. And so what he did is he created the Order of the Garter, which was initially called the Order of the Round Table. And he had all of his nobles, his friends around him, the people that he wanted also to give him money to fund his wars in France. And he made them part of something. And there's something very clever in that.

That's a very human instinct to want to be part of something and feel like you're important. And he knew that. And he did that very successfully. In regards to Richard, I think what's fascinating about Richard is he absolutely had no trade. for kingship. He was never supposed to be king. Supposed to be his father or his brother, but with both of them dead, it fell to him. But Richard was so coddled and cosseted.

It's like he's wrapped in cotton wool. He was told from a very early age how important he was, how godly he was. He was born on the Feast of Epiphany at the 6th of January. This is a sign. This is a portent symbol. You are divine. And so it's no surprise, really, that he sort of carried that on to him into his reign. And where he came up against conflict was because he was there trying to be like, I want to rule.

I want to show that I can rule. But he had no idea how to rule. He was tyrannical. And he was petulant. It was like having this sort of gung-ho teenager who wants to take your car out for a spin without a driving license. And that's what it was like trying to contain Richard and his late teens. So it's no wonder really that this young man who has such a buffed-up sense of ego and importance turns out to be how the tyrant that he's, did. Yeah, I mean, I always think with Richard

the second that most teenagers think they know better than everybody else and that they're special and the world revolves around them. But you add to that the fact that he's actually been told that for the whole of his life by everybody and that he has the at least theoretically, he has the power and authority of a king, even if he's not always

allowed to wield it. And it's kind of a recipe for disaster, isn't it? It's reinforcing every bad thought that he has and then launching him onto the political stage as the most powerful figure in the country and wondering why it goes wrong. Totally. And you can imagine that moment in the Peasants Revolt where he rides up to the rebels and he's like, I'm your king. And they're all like, oh, yeah, amazing Richard. You can imagine all the no, up in Scotland being like, fuck. Because it's just not helping, you know, this idea that like, oh, no, but my realm, my people love me. Yeah, he's a funny one. He's a fascinating character, Richard. I find of all the kings, actually, for me, Edward and Richard are sort of psychologically the more interesting figures. And I do, you know, I say quite often I think we're still trapped in a slightly 19th century Whigish view of what makes a good and a bad medieval king in that, you know, if you go to war with France and you're successful, you're a great king. If you start to build the institutions of government that Victorian England, you love to revel in. You're a good king. If you don't contribute anything to that, you're naturally bad without too much exploration of any alternative around them. So it's good, I think, to see Edward II and Richard the second place kind of either side of Edward the third.

and their lives considered more fully than just being the bad king that came before and after the great Edward III. You touched on Isabella of France a bit there. I did want to talk about the queens that are alongside these kings because they're fascinating characters in themselves as well. And I guess the one thing I'm struck by when we're talking about, particularly Edward II and Richard the second, two kings that end up getting deposed, is that the real moments of crises come for them when their wives are gone for differing reasons. But it's Isabella abandoning Edward II that really causes him the final catastrophe. And Richard II seems to change, I think, after the death of Anne of Bohemia as well, almost like she was a calming influence on him.

So I wondered what you felt about the influence that the queens had throughout that century too. Yeah, I think it's in Isabella and Edward's relationship is very interesting, because through the popular lens it's this idea that it was a terrible marriage. They never got on. he was always kind of with his men and she was having affairs left right and centre and it really didn't look like that. Early on when they were first married she was a child she was very young she's years away from being able to conceive children but they still spent time together they still you know they seemed to get on he gave her lots of nice gifts and he you know he acted

on her behalf he asked her advice and also I think he seemed to respect her he respected her as a princess of France. He revered her position. And Isabella also had a very strong sense of her own regality and who she was and her own importance as well. It all sort of seemed to go very well for a long period of time. I mean, they had children. There's this famous example of when they were at her father's court in Paris, their room or the room they were sharing one night in the pavilion actually was set alight and there was this fire and Edward naked carried Isabella out of the fire. They were both completely naked because they'd been having night passion together and she had burns on her arm and this is corroborated in her wardrobe accounts.

You see her paying for an apothecary to go and sort of get the materials to heal her arm wound. And that's all something that you might find that in a romantic fiction novel and this is a bit extreme, you know, the heir to the realm or the king carrying his wife out naked from a pavilion that's on fire. It is a strikingly romantic moment in their relationship. Totally. And you know, there's a in the same, on the same trip, Edward was late for a meeting with her father because he's overslept with Isabella because they'd been sort of, you know, having a great night the night before. It all really went wrong much later on and quite quickly.

Even in the time of Pierce Gaveston, Isabella and Gaveston spent time together. She seemed to quite like Gaveston. She didn't really have much of a problem with him. The real issue came with Hugh Dispenser. Hugh Dispenser the younger. So before Dispenser and in the early years of Dispenser, Isabella was on Edward's counsel. She was aware. She acted as a queen with a plumb. She did all the right things. She had interceding for people was a major part of queenship where she would go to her husband and say this person has requested X from me. Please would you consider this as my personal plea on behalf of X. And she also, there was that amazing moment with the siege of Leeds Castle. Isabella was in on this plot to try and capture the battlesmirs as traitors and really managed to sort of pin the Earl of Lancaster. Dan as a traitor, which all, you know, climates were the Battle of Boroughbridge.

Isabella was a major part of that. So she was very eager to step in as Edward's queen and act with authority, with leadership, even military skill. Like, she was fascinating, but it all went wrong after the Battle of Boroughbridge. Edward started to get very paranoid. Hugh Dispenser was, he really was a character with dripping poison in the ear of the king. And dispenser was also incredibly greedy. He targeted the widows of the Battle of Boroughbridge for their lambs. These are women who were left, their husbands who were major landowners in England killed as traitors. And he went after their lands. He's like, I want their lands. I want to be richer and richer and richer. And the opportunity arose for dispenser to start targeting Isabella when her husband, when Edward had a fallout with her brother, the King of France.

And I won't go into that too much because it gets very dull. And again, it's just all over homage and Gascany and yada. but she, in a nutshell, Edward, starts to punish Isabella basically for being French. So he removes all of the French members of her court, her household. He has many of them arrested. And then he also strips Isabella of her lands and the alderm of Cornwall, which is the lands she had in Cornwall, which were incredibly valuable to her, not because they necessarily generated a huge amount of money. Edward gave her an allowance. I don't think it was so much about the money.

It was about her agency and her individuality and her ability to, to rule by her own terms, to manage land. It's freedom, effectively. It's a woman's freedom. And he took them away. And so she went off to France on behalf of Edward on a diplomatic mission. And I think something shifted there. But really, it was that moment where he's stricter of her lands.

And she saw, Hugh Despencer is more important to my husband than I am. And he's a dangerous man. And he's not on my side. And she writes from France when the Pope is intervening. And also the treasurer, Walter Stapleton. She writes from France that she is too scared to return for fear of what would happen to her. She fears that Dispenser is so vile that he would kill her. He would do something awful to her.

And I think that's real. I don't think that's her being dramatic as it might have been depicted in the past. I think this is a woman genuinely afraid of the avarice and the rapaciousness and the true villainy of a very dangerous man. And I think she was aware of it. For me, Isabella seems a really good, she gets cast as this She-Wolf of France later on. But for me, she's a really, really good example of how a queen can leverage her power. She's saying, I'm too scared to come home.

What she's saying is my husband can't protect me. That's casting shade at Edward in a big way. Wearing black that you mentioned earlier and portraying herself as having been widowed because her husband. These are all kind of challenges to Edward in a way that people recognize her, almost challenging his authority in an acceptable way, which is a hard thing for a queen to do. Yeah, and I think her relationship with Rodden Mortimer is interesting on these terms as well. She never made it secret that they were in cahoots. And I believe there's some questioning whether they were in a sexual relationship.

I mean, I think they were. But, because Edward, in effect, say so later on. But what is interesting is she's not hiding it. And she's actually showing that Mortimer is with her. They are now 18, whatever that looks like. That is some sort of adultery. But by medieval terms, by her making this an obvious thing, she's shaming Edward. Because traditionally, by medieval standards, it was often a man that was punished for the adultery of his wife because he couldn't care for his wife. He couldn't be in charge of her enough that she wouldn't go off and be adulterous. And I think that she's using that kind of, um, de-masculinating rhetoric against Edward. She's making him look weaker by exposing her and Mortimer as something that is a more powerful, cohesive unit. Yeah. And I guess with Edward III, you see Philippa of Hainautz acting as kind of

almost an ideal queen. She's beside him working as a team throughout his reign. They seem like a really successful couple. Yeah, the Victorians love Philippa of Hainaut because she basically just did as she was told and had lots of babies. Stay quiet, didn't she was told you. No, she was great. And she's a wonderful example of intercession as well at the Siege of Calais in 1346. So you have that incredible vignette of the Burgers of Calais coming out with the ropes around their neck. And famously, it's the heavily pregnant Philippa who begs her husband to spare the lives of these men. And so intercession is a really important part of queenship. And you see Anna Fahemia doing that later with Richard

the second as well. But Philippa was a very, a good. deeply loved queen. She was loved by her people. She took the role of queenship very seriously. She invested very much in trade and sort of helping things like the wool trade, develop and helping factories grow and emerge so people to that people in England could start creating their own cloth. She was very invested in that sort of economic development and also academic development in the founding of colleges. And so I think she was a much beloved queen. And I think Edward the third really did, I think he really caved in actually when she died. You know, you saw a different side to Edward after the death of Philippa.

It was like he'd always given up a bit. He had this very successful martial king that was so strong, just sort of reduced to the slightly decaying older man, really, who's just sort of staring from his throne, isolated with his mistress sort of being the only pointed interest for him by that point. And Richard, after the death of Anne of Bohemia is also interesting. I think Anne was a very levelling presence in Richard's life. I think they got on very well. They were close.

I think they were very good friends. I think she was gentle with him. And I think she listened to him. And I think that she didn't push him. I think she had a very similar space for him as his mother had, Joan of Kent. And I think that Joan of Kent was, again, a very, very good mediating figure. she was calming. You know, these medieval queens, if only the world was run by them, right?

Wouldn't have been a much better space? I think I'm with you on that because I do think, you know, when Anna of Bohemia dies, you do see a switch. I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned it's when Isabella abandons Edward II that things really changed for him. Edward III, you know, almost becomes an old man overnight when he loses Philippa. and Richard's vindictiveness reaches its pinnacle when Anne is no longer there to kind of restrain him, whether that's with soft restraints, you know, that she understands him a little bit.

It is soft power. These queens are brilliant at exercising soft power, and it's very effective. Yeah, yeah. We talked a little bit about it early with the petitions, but I wondered how easy it is to get at some of the stories of more ordinary people, kind of outside of royalty and the nobility, and why it's important to try and do so, as well. Yeah, I think that was the danger with SEPTed Isle that I didn't want it to end up being a series of potted biographies. I wanted it to feel as if my reader is getting a sense of what

the world looked like as well. And I think that I did this through covering some of the more social events of the time, the major sort of social upheaval. So the right at the beginning, you have the Great Famine, and then you have obviously the Black Death in the middle, and then increasing sort of episodes of war, etc. coming through in the second part of the 14th century. So for the first part, so just covering the famine and the Black Death, there are some great examples in the record. I mean, on more dull terms and frankly, I mean, I'm sure that I will get some economic historians kind of, you know, getting cross any saying this. But I did look at the menorial accounts and minorial records and so dull. But it does give you a sense as to sort of what the lame.

is experiencing in terms of very basic means of sustenance and existence for people in the first part of the 14th century was living off the land. And when you have a famine or you have a moraine of cattle, which is, for basically, first it was just years of rain. It just didn't stop raining. People were unable to bring in the harvest. And so you can look at what the impact of that was. And then that was followed by a moraine of cattle. So a lot of cattle and livestock died from like effectively a plague on livestock. And so what that caused was famine. And you do read more apocalyptic accounts from the chronicles about people eating, like, you know, unclean things, as they call it.

But I can imagine it pushed the point of starvation. People did do some strange things. And I think looking at the impact of these major environmental disasters, how do people respond to that? It's very difficult always to get to the individual. But what you can do is take a more macro look on what these sorts of disasters and how they impact societies as a whole and communities as a whole. So you can look at the way that villages might be abandoned,

people moving to more urban areas. What does that mean? You see that a lot after the Black Death. The Black Death, fortunately, as a historian writing now, has been very well documented. There are wonderful collections of primary source material that have been collaborated in order to make my life a lot easier. So I can't say that I was there sort of scanning the archive myself

for finding all these wonderful little new bits of information about the black death. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants when it comes to that. You know, Rosemary Horrocks, the famous collection of her edited volume of all of the black death material. I have about two copies, I think, on my bookshelf. It's just a fantastic source. I also found it was very interesting for me in relation to the black death to look at it on a more global perspective. So I was reading accounts from Syria to see how it spread. I was looking at more of the epidemiological account.

So historians like Monica Green writes a lot about it. You know, we write as historians now and it's like, it's not all. We do our own research as well from primary material, but a lot of it is, as I say, standing on the shoulders of giants and reading the work of fantastic historians that have been working over the last 50 years and sometimes even beyond. So in regard to understanding more social histories, it's a real case of, yeah, trawling through the reference.

and finding these little nuggets of information that just stand out. They jump out that you don't, they sort of off the page. And I remember when I was working on the Black Death, one of the sources that I like to look at just completely between me and the original source was Wills. So I did look at a lot of Wills and how people responded. I tended to look at mostly from 1349 onwards because we may as well not bother with 1348. That's not enough time has been spent really. in the 1350s you start to see a kind of pattern of behavior, what people are doing, how people

are giving away their things that they value the things they treasure, the material culture of the period. And there were wonderful examples of humanity actually, and love and care and a real consideration for one's community in parish in which these spaces was so important to people in this period. And then later on, after that to access the voice of more of the masses, I was very interested in the culture. So looking at artistic movements as we kind of move not quite to the Renaissance but closer, so the way that people were depicting death and grief and how they considered their immortality, I found very interesting. And it does, you know, art gives a sense as to what

society is experiencing. It's a mirror image of lots of different things, of politics, of societal norms of the time, of what's going on in the world. around us. And so, yeah, I think as a historian of the Middle Ages, you have to look at multiple different sources to get a sense of what people were experiencing. And as a historian of emotions, I do work on emotions. One of the ways that we access emotions is treating it as like a mirror image. So you look at a source, but you have to treat the source like a mirror. What's that source sort of reflecting back? And I think that when you're thinking about you layman and the average person, that's a very helpful way of looking at things.

So yeah, I think, you know, altarpieces, wall paintings, you can still go and see some amazing medieval wall paintings that were painted around this time and does give you a sense of what the world that people were existing in and what they felt about it. Yeah, fascinating. Do you have a favourite person from the century from the book who sticks out for you?

Yeah, so I have a favourite king, and I have a favourite person. I think I'm really interested in Elizabeth DeBerg. I think she's fascinating. She wrote this brilliant, scathing a protest against the dispensers, which I went to see and read. And she's just, there's this wonderful self-defense against her who she is. They have treated her so badly where she's been so maligned by her uncle the king. And I think she was very strong and just an incredible woman.

I mean, this is a woman who was expected to go to bed with a man who is not the father of the baby she had birthed for six weeks earlier because her uncle told her to. And I just think that there's a lot more to look into as to the role of noble women. in that respect. And I know that's done on more academic spheres, but as a more public historian, I think they often are quite marginalised these women. So I love Elizabeth DeBurne. She's fascinating. I love over the second. I just think he's really interesting. I think actually he's got this terrible reputation thanks to Mel Gibson and Braveheart, but he was just this sort of fop that he was, you know, only, there's this wonderful scene, isn't there, a Braveheart? He's carrying a mirror, or a mirror is being carried around Westminster Palace and he's there sort of being a

carry on and, you know, draped and furs and ermine. And for me, that's not the Edward that actually is, was. He was a man who, he really loved his people. He was fascinated because he loved going and watching people like dig ditches. He loved rowing. He was very active. He was incredibly generous. He was sporty.

He was good looking. He was fun. He was really funny. Like, he and Pierce Gaveston, you could imagine them just laughing and really just taking the fist out of the nobility. Gaveston had all these wonderful nicknames for the nobility. He called, you know, the Earl of Warwick, burst belly.

He called Lancaster a churl, which is effectively like calling him a peasant. And he just, I found actually another nickname. When I was looking at the accounts in the record, I found that he called one of his ballots. He called him Richard Whiteflesh. That's effectively the same as calling him pasty face. So he was just, they were just quite funny.

They would laugh together. And I think there's a side to Edward that's been definitely misunderstood. I think he's a very complex and nuanced man. So, yeah, I think of the two characters of the book, amongst many, I think those two initially are the funds that's jump out to me when you asked me that question. Yeah, and anyone who's a history hit subscriber can find out a little bit more about Edward I second from you

in a brand new film that's out the same day as this podcast. So hopefully they can tune into this and then tune into that. I'm doing like a history hit takeover. Yeah. I'm a 29th of. On the 29th of May, clearly. Helen Carday. Yeah.

Do you have a favorite kind of moment in the 14th century, an event or something that was happening that really stood out and you thought, that was great, I'd love to have been there for that? Oh, my gosh. I don't know if I'd have wanted to be. I mean, amidst a terrible century, there's so many things you wouldn't want to be there for. Yeah. Do you know what? There is, I think, to be in the court of Edw with the Third, in the third. in the 1350s, 1360s, would have been pretty cool.

Like, you know, this is him throwing parties where he's dressed as a pheasants. This is these incredible jousts and tournaments. You know, they were a spectacle. He knew how to throw a party. And one of the brilliant sources that I looked at in regard to Edward's hedonism and his wife's hedonism and Philip's hedonism as well was called these jousting letters. which you can, they're not really, they're up in Edinburgh.

They're hard to access to get and see, but they're just amazing. And they are these wonderful make-believe scenes of queens basically telling all of the men who are entering the joust and sponsoring them and being like, I'm going to enter this man and I'm going to enter that man. And they're sort of quite flotatious. They're quite, there's a lot of sexually innuendo. But it gives a sense of all of. the opulence and how women were very much involved in this pageantry and this court mythology. There was this fine line between reality and make believe.

And it was just such a wonderful, I think, fascinating a space to exist in. So yeah, if I was going to be there, I'd be at one of these jazz. They seem like the medieval equivalent of, you know, going to a massive rock concert where it's, you know, what's the light show going to be like? What's the pyrotechnics going to be like? Yeah. It's that kind of, you know, how far is Edward going to go in trying to one up his last tournaments? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think actually everyone always talks about it. And I always, I always bring this up because I think it's just, I think A, because it's been given such a bad rap. But I think in Night's Tale, everyone talks about how anachronistic it is and how incorrect and everything. And it's like, yeah, of course. But what I think it completely nails is the vibe of the period. And I think it totally nails the mood, the idea of, you know, this is just total everything. is going well. We have a great king. Chivalry. Yay for chivalry. Yay for jousting. It's just this wonderful time of just fun with the backdrop of appalling war, of course. But yeah, it was just a lot

of fun, I think. Yeah. You will never hear criticism of a knight's tale on Gone Medieval. Definitely not from Eleanor and I at least. One of the greatest films ever, ever made. Absolutely. Amidst all of the terrible moments, is there a worst moment if there was one that you really, really would want to avoid, what would that be? I would want to avoid encountering the Black Death, obviously, but I think I'd want to avoid Hugh De Spencer, the younger, because I think what he did was shocking, even by today's standards was so appalling. His treatment of women, I do think I'd ever encountered that before. And these are women who had nothing to do with him. They weren't family within his family, but he had women physically abused.

used to try and coerce them to hand over their land. It's one woman in the record, and this could be exaggerated, but he was either threatened or had, had her arms and legs broken. He was a deeply, deeply vicious individual, and I would have wanted to avoid him as much as I'd want to avoid the plague. Yeah, avoid him like the plague. Yeah, he always strikes me as someone who, it's almost universal, with the exception of Edward II, everyone absolutely despises him, and almost to the point where,

I feel like I would quite like maybe 10 minutes in a room with him just to get a sense of the man. And I feel like maybe after two minutes you'd be like, oh yeah, I get it. I'm off now. You are just a vile, vile person. But it's rare to find someone that is so universally despised by absolutely everybody that he was just clearly,

you know, we always try, I think as historians, to look at for balancing people that there aren't necessarily just good and bad people out there. You don't divide people that way. But it's hard to find a redeeming feature for Hugh Dispire. Spencer the younger. Totally. And I think that's the difference. He's often sort of placed in the same kind of bucket as Gaviston. I think they're very, very different beasts. Gaveston was a bit feckless and he was a bit arrogant and, you know, he rub people up the wrong way and he's a bit rude.

But dispenser was an absolute opportunist. He was cutthroat. He would be sort of, you know, heading up something like, you know, one of the big investment companies in, he's like Wolf of Wall Street sort of vibe. He was like, I don't care. I'm going to walk all over you. I'm going to do what I want to do. He was just not. He was not a, there was no decent bone in Hugh Dispence's body. But Matt, he did get his comeuppance, didn't he? Let's say, I don't want to ruin the book.

But he probably died one of the worst debts that somebody could in the middle ages. Yeah, it's a pretty gruesome episode. Yeah, it's forever. And it's hard to say you didn't deserve it. So if you had to give us a kind of a sales. pitch for the 14th century. How critical was the 14th century in the evolution of England? It's a century full of catastrophes and setbacks and problems, but do they actually move England forward in a way? Absolutely. I mean, what the Black Death necessitated was a period

of, it's been called by some historians as a Golden Age after Black Death. Other historians are saying that, obviously, it wasn't a golden age, but I think your evidence suggests is there as an element of Golden Age about it, in that what it necessitated was human innovation, the ability to advance technology, to better oneself. There was no longer this sort of fatalistic sentiment that you were born as a surf, you lived as a surf, and you died as a surf. People were moving into apprenticeships. People were generating more money. There was more trade. Everything was things were becoming more global. There was certainly a huge advancement following the Black death. And then later on into the period, of course, you have the development of the vernacular.

So the court language moved from being French to being English. And you start to get some of the English texts being created, Jeffrey Chaucer, obviously, the most famous. I think that this century really is accountable for that. And to blame for that. So you have this huge movement in development of technology and industry, but you also have a huge cultural boom, which really ties into what was happening on the continent as well with the Renaissance, which was starting to appear in the 1380s, 90s over in Italy. Yeah, yeah. I think the book does an incredible job of bringing all of that together and explaining

the impact that all of those things had on each other that the great famine leads to social and economic developments and problems. The black death is horrific but creates opportunity in a weird way. And you get the government's difficult reaction to all of that opportunity. for people as well. And I think what I took away from the book was this kind of resilience of the institution of the crown. Two kings are deposed, but the crown keeps going and you've got this increasing self-confidence of Parliament is being viewed as the place where you have to go to depose a king. And by the end of the century with Henry IV to create a new king, that has to be done

in Parliament. And Parliament is still such a core part of the nation today. You see that really beginning to grow in the 14th century. And I think in a more feudal sense, you see the nobles desperately trying to reinforce that pyramid that we talked about, that the load has to be shared beneath the king for a strong foundation to exist to support the king and to be supported by what's below it. So, you know, I took away that this is a kind of a critical century in the development of what will become England and the United Kingdom, even though it's a fairly horrendous time to live. I think it's a really, really good point about Parliament. And actually, I'm really glad that you took that away because

the themes within the book are human beings and power and the way power moves and also humanity and how we can understand people as humans, not just caricatures. But one of the early sort of pictures of the book and one of the aims that I was going for was this a development of nationhood. And that was a theme I hoped had carried through. So I'm really glad that you picked up on that because you're so right. It's a really good point about Parliament. I mean, it was Edward III that created the Lords and the Commons.

You know, that's something that happened in the 14th century that has pervaded into the modern day. There's lots of ideas of nationality and nationalism, but have, where kind of the seed was planted in the 14th century and have come through to the modern day, the order of the garter. St. George, you know, you still see football fans walking around with the flags of St. George. So, so ill. Same naive to the fact that St. George is actually not English. No, but the point is, there are so many wonderful. things and good and bad from this period. And yeah, you're completely right that it's a development of nationalism. I think you see that a lot with Richard as well. Like he had no interest

in war. It very much became Anglo-centric. And it's just, yeah, I mean, I'm always going to be saying the praises of the 14th century, not so much. And it was such a wonderful time to be alive. It was quite an extraordinary time to be alive if you made it through. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Well, you've heard the podcast. You can now go and watch the documentary on Edward II and then you can go and read the book and learn all about the 14th century from the wonderful, wonderful Helen Carr. Thank you so much for joining us, Helen. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you again. Oh, thanks so much, Matt. It's always a pleasure to chat to you. Thank you. Helen's new book, Sceptered Isle. A new history of the 14th century is out now

if you'd like to get an even better grip on this fascinating period and the people who endured it. Helen's brand new documentary about Edith II is also available on History Hit right now if you're a subscriber too. And if you're not, what better reason to give it a go? You can listen to Helen's previous visit to Gone Medieval to talk about her biography of John of Gaunt, the Red Prince, in our back catalogue. If you haven't already had your fill of the 14th century, then you can also find several past episodes covering the Hundred Years' War, the Black Death, Helen Castor's visit to talk about Richard II and Henry IV, and a special series that we did recently on the crises of Edward II's reign. There are new instalments.

have gone medieval every Tuesday and Friday. So please do come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hits podcasts add free. head to historyhit.com forward slash subscribe right now. And if you're still here, I'd like to take just another moment of your time. Some of you may be aware that my wife recently passed away.

This is the first episode of Gone Medieval to go out since I began recording again. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the incredible team behind Gone Medieval, Anne-Marie, Rob, Joseph, Amy and Eleanor, who have offered a huge amount of support, as have the rest at the audio team and everybody at History Hit. I consider myself blessed to work with such fine people. I'd like to say thank you to you, the listeners have gone medieval. It's an immense pleasure to work on this podcast. The feedback I get from you is always encouraging and positive. Seeing the audience grow and hearing that long-time listeners continue to enjoy the episode is hugely rewarding. Finally,

I'd like to thank my wife. I'll keep it brief, but this could last for hours and still barely do her justice. I'm only here because of the love and support and encouragement that she always gave me to pursue my passions. I know because she told me that she was very proud of what I've achieved. I told her in turn that none of my achievements are mine. Every single one of them is ours. My world has changed beyond my comprehension and I'm struggling to work out how I fit into it but I remain grateful for gone medieval to each and every one of you who listens

to the team that makes it happen and for all that it meant to my wife. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.