Gone Medieval - The Hundred Years War

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

For the last several decades, Jonathan, Lord Sumption - former senior judge and medieval historian - has been crafting a monumental, five-volume history of the Hundred Years War, widely considered to be the definitive account of the conflict.The final volume, titled Triumph and Illusion, has recently been published. It tells the story of the collapse of the English dream of conquest and features such protagonists as Henry VI, Charles VII of France and the extraordinary Joan of Arc.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Jonathan Sumption about the events that led to the end of four centuries of the English dynasty's presence in France.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight 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. Jonathan Sumption has been an immensely successful and high-profile barrister, a justice of the Supreme Court. But for the last several decades, he's also been crafting a five-volume history of the Hundred Years' War, considered by most to be the definitive account of the conflict. It's incisive, it's thoughtful, and it's as rich in context as it is in characters.

Volume 5 is available now and it completes the cycle. It's with great pleasure that I welcome Jonathan to Gone Medieval to discuss the Hundred Years' War that defines so many of the lives and politics around that period. Thank you very much for joining us. It's a pleasure. I guess to start off with Volume 5, it's subtitled Triumph and Illusion.

It's the final piece of the jigsaw of your Hundred Years' War series. What drove you to first write about that conflict? And did you envisage it becoming such an epic project? I originally envisaged that it would take three volumes, but I very quickly realized that if one was going to do this job properly, one needed a degree of detail and background which was going to fill five. So it's been five from quite an early stage. How much has your view of the conflict and its causes and its effects changed over the course of writing those volumes? Well, not a great deal. The reason is that for the first five years of my career, I was, an academic historian teaching at Oxford. And this was very much at the heart of the subject that I taught. So I had spent quite a long time reflecting about the 100 years more and about

Anglo-French relations in the Middle Ages more generally. And I already had certain views. Of course, I've modified them in some respects. But the basic architecture, I think, was always fairly clear to me. Fascinating. And I guess to start us off then, as we think about, this whole period of roughly 100 years, what would you describe as the main causes of the hundred years war? Was it just a bit of a spat between Edward III and Philip the 6th, or was there more to it than that? The traditional view, which of course is reflected in the works of Shakespeare, the Duke of Morbara once described Shakespeare as the only history of England he'd ever read. and the fact is that many people get their ideas about this period from Shakespeare.

They're not entirely wrong, but they're not entirely right either. Anyway, what was the real cause? I think that the real cause was that for 200 years before the 100 years were started, the Kings of England had held huge holdings in France. They held basically at one point in the middle of the 12th century. They controlled the whole of the Atlantic. provinces of France from the Pyrenees to Flanders and had a great deal of influence in Flanders as well. They lost some of that in the early 13th century, but at the beginning of the 14th century,

they were still major princes within France, and the two countries' histories had been very closely intertwined. I think that the main reason was that the English kings saw their powers of over their own territories in France being gradually eroded by the growing centralisation of the French monarchy, and they wanted to defend what they had there. They didn't want to become mere subjects of the kings of France like so many other princes had become. So that's how it started. The claim to the throne of France was not exactly an afterthought, because after all, Edward III had claimed the throne of France when the succession problem of France was not exactly an afterthought, because after all, Edward arose in 1328 about a decade before the war started. But he gave up that idea and he only

revived it really as a device for taking advantage of conflicts within France. He wanted to give the Fleming's in particular who were in revolt against the French king some legal cover for supporting him. And so by claiming to be king of France, he basically sought to turn what was originally international war into a French civil war. And in a sense, a French civil war is what it remained throughout the 120 years that it lasted. The English only ever succeeded militarily in France in alliance with powerful interests in revolt against the King of France. Yeah, it's a really interesting way to view it. And I guess the long-standing problem for Kings of England with their territories in France had always been that French kings wanted them to do homage. No king wants

to give homage to another king and appear subservient to him. So there was always that tension for hundreds of years and this was perhaps a way to resolve that tension. Yes, it's absolutely true that the ceremony of homage was personally humiliating and the English kings didn't like doing it, although they often had done before the wars broke out. I think a more important factor was that The whole constitution of the French monarchy was transformed in the course of the 13th century, and their lawyers and their courts attached to the notion of sovereignty, all sorts of onerous obligations and rights of intervention, which made it extremely difficult for the English kings effectively to govern their own territories.

They were constantly being appealed to the French king's courts, who were politically not at all sensitive to the position of the English kings, as some of the French kings had previously been. So really it was this move for centralisation and for a new legal concept of sovereignty, which made the French king vastly more powerful over his vassals than their predecessors had been. And that was something that the English kings found extremely unwelcome.

And we often view the Hundred Years' War over its span as a series of military engagements. we think about things like Cressy and Poitiers and Agincourt in particular, how important were the strengths, the weaknesses, and the various characters of some of the key people in the conflict, you know, started by Edward III, who succeeded by his grandson, Richard the 2nd, for example. You get people like Charles the 6th facing off against Henry the 5th. And then people like John Duke of Bedford, who is a character I find fascinating, coming up against Charles the 7th and things like that. How important are the personalities

in the ongoing conflict? Well, the personalities of the kings were inevitably important because of the psychological significance of monarchy in the minds of all late medieval communities outside Italy, which was used to republics. So inevitably, the personalities of the rulers of the kings mattered a great deal. It mattered a great deal, for example, that Charles V of France was one of the most intelligent and thoughtful political strategists of the late Middle Ages. It mattered a great deal that Henry V was a man of very powerful force of personality and that he impressed an enormous number of people, including many of the French, which was at least part of the reason for his success. And of course, on the other side, it mattered a great deal that Richard the second and

Henry the 6th were very poor rumours, Richard II, because he overplayed his hand and offended people whose support he needed. Henry the 6th, mentally defective for much of his life and mentally inadequate for the rest of it. But these things made a great deal of difference. And to some extent as well, we see England reach a real high point under Henry V at the same time that France is suffering with the mental illnesses of Charles the 6th. So you've got that kind of weakness on the French side and a strength on the English side coinciding with each other that really see an English high point? Yes, that's absolutely right. Charles V. 6th was the French equivalent of Henry the 6th. He was mentally, completely incapable. He had interludes of relative

lucidity, just as Henry the 6th did, but they were really only relative lucidity. He was never really in command of affairs. But it's fair to say that France was much better governed, during the madness of Charles the Sixth and England was under Henry the Sixth. This is partly because the reverence for monarchy was very much stronger in France, and it was partly because Charles the Sixth had a brother and uncles who were very formidable figures, formidable politicians in their own right. They fell out and the civil war, of course, was opened the gates through which the English then invaded France. but there's no doubt that the calibre of the people who really ran France in the time of Charles

the Sixth Madness was much higher than the sort of people who were running England during the defective period of Henry the Sixth reign. And particularly during Henry the Sixth's childhood, what did you make of his uncle John Duke of Bedford who was kind of regent of France for Henry during his minority? And he's always struck me as an incredibly impressive figure. Yes, I agree with that. he is one of the very rare examples in medieval history of a good uncle, and he genuinely devoted the whole of the rest of his life from the death of his brother to conserving Henry V's legacy

and preserving it for the benefit of his nephew, the young Henry the 6th. It's a great misfortune that Henry the 6th was actually incapable of taking up the baton even when he was of age. but Bedford was an enormously impressive figure. He was an extremely skillful politician. He was very good at dealing with the mandarinate of the French state at a time when the main institutions of the French state in Paris were under English control. He spoke excellent French.

He married two French princesses in succession. He knew how to cultivate support among people and to conceal from them the fact that they were under an alien occupation. The pretense wasn't total, it wasn't completely effective, but it was a great deal better than nothing, and certainly a great deal better than the much more crude and brutal individuals who succeeded him. I think one of the most interesting or impressive character references that I've seen for John Duke of Bedford was when I think it was Louis XI 11th begins to take back areas of France and they take Ruan and his men want to destroy John Duke of Bedford's tomb and Louis

kind of prevents them from doing it and says, you know, you couldn't drive this man back in life, you know, you let him rest where he was. Yes. Well, that was actually in the 1360s sometime after Ruehont had been recaptured. It's too picturesque a story to leave out and there's probably some truth in it. But the only authority for it is the English chronicler Edward Hall who wrote in the middle of the 16th century, a hundred years later. My reason for feeling that it was a story that I could use was that Paul was a fairly scrupulous user of older sources. He was a publisher, but he was also something of a scholar, and he used sources which we didn't rediscover, and we modern historians until really quite recently. We do not know what his source for this was.

knowing the man, I would suspect that he did have one. And as you say, it's too good a story to leave out, really. How often do you think attacks on France were a good and effective way to paper over political cracks at home? I think particularly under Henry V, with his troubles that his father had faced with the Lancasterian claim, was it a good way, A, to unite the country and take everyone over to France to fight somebody, but also a way to place that disputed Lancastrian claim, before God for judgment in battle.

The victories of Henry V were a source of very great prestige, and that undoubtedly built support for the Lancastrian kings. After all, the Lancastrian kings had originally been usurpers. Henry VIII had no title to the English throne other than force, and there were serious doubts and some resistance to the Lancasterians, really until the Battle of Agincourt. And Agincourt did therefore transform the view which the English took of their own king. That was partly because God had seemed to smile on him,

but it was also because people admire a highly effective king, and Henry V was certainly that. And the other side of the coin, of course, is that defeat produces the reverse effect, and Henry the 6th lost both his territories in France and ultimately his own throne in England, precisely because he was incapable of doing the things that Henry V had been so good at. Because Agincourt always seems like it's held up as one of those glorious victories, but really it didn't achieve all that much in the long term or really in the short term, did it? It didn't achieve much strategically.

It had an immense psychological. impact on the French. A very high proportion of the French nobility died, Egincourt, and those who survived were largely discredited by the outcome. So in that sense, it paved the way for the much more significant invasion of France, which Henry VIII mounted two years later in 1417. This is actually one of the problems about the whole war. The Egincourt campaign was the last of the great chavoshi, i.e. the huge, armed and mounted raids that the English launched in France. This was a way of waging war that they had devised in the 14th century, and it was one reason why the English never really got anywhere in the 14th century. They won their battles,

but then what? They went scooting off back home again. They left behind them there for a trail of destruction, but no actual political achievements. Their calculation, which was always hopeless, was that sufficiently battered, the French would just give in and surrender to what they wanted. And in a sense, I suppose that could be said to be what had happened with the Treaty of Brittany and 1360, the combination of the reign of Edward III. But the key to Henry V's success was that for the first time, the English set about occupying territory. And that is actually the only effective way of defeating another country is to occupy them. And Henry V succeeded in occupying together with his Burgundian allies, the home of northern France,

just about everywhere north of the River Noir. That completely transformed the situation, but at the same time it made the war very much more expensive to fight. It meant that you have to maintain permanent garrisons several thousand strong in France at the expense of the English exchequer. And ultimately, when their defences were tested, England proved just not to have the resources to be able to sustain this effort. It was one thing to pay an army for three months to raid through France smashing things up. But to maintain 6,000 people permanently stationed in garrisons to repair hundreds of fortresses to conduct the government of a significant country from Paris.

All of this was extraordinarily expensive and faced with a much larger, populace and richer country, even when one just looks at the area that the Dofer ruled in the southern half of France, this was something that they were never going to be able to succeed in doing in the long term. Was the Hundred Years' War then always a hopeless folly for the English? Because if Chevrochets were never going to achieve very much and the act of occupation was beyond the reach of English monarchs, was it something that they could never really win? That's broadly true with one possible reservation. There was a moment in 1419 and 1420 when it looked as if the dauphin was so discredited by his complicity in the murder of the Duke of

Burgundy and the English king seemed so powerful both militarily and by virtue of his alliance with the son of the murdered Duke of Burgundy that the French. might possibly just have given up. After all, a significant part of France did accept the Treaty of Trois, which transferred the Crown of France to the Lancasterian dynasty. They didn't accept it for that long, but they did initially accept it. What made the difference was the extraordinary skill with which a generation of French civil servants recreated in southern France, mainly in Toulouse, and Puci, all the institutions that had previously been based in Paris and created an alternative government with firm control over France south of the Bois. And once they had done that, it would have

taken a degree of wealth and manpower to dislodge them that was beyond the resources of England. And in fact, there are hints that Henry V himself came to realise that in the last months of his life. The problem that his successors had is that they were trustees. They were trustees for an infant king. Henry V could have made concessions and the signs are that he would probably have traded sovereignty over just Normandy for the crime of France. But his successors couldn't do that because they were afraid that they would be accused of betraying the young Henry the 6th when he became an adult. And that was something which the historical precedents, suggests was an extremely dangerous position, or even the highest nobleman to be in.

You mentioned the Treaty of Tuat there, and that always feels like an incredibly significant, almost moment in the Hundred Years' War. How impressive an achievement was it for Henry to get that signed? We know that it would effectively fall apart when he dies just before Charles the Sixth does, and then we get the nine-month-old Henry the Sixth. But how impressive an achievement was it for Henry to reach that point? It was a formidable diplomat. It was a formidable diplomat. attenement. It was built on the back of the victories since 1415 and the successful occupation and political organisation of the home of Normandy, which was one of the richest and largest provinces of France. But it also took considerable diplomatic skill to negotiate that deal with

the Duke of Burmandy. But the critical thing that made the Treaty of Trois possible was the folly of the Dofer in having permitted the murder of the Duke of Burgundy. The Duke of Burgundy was a brute and a bully and had many faults of character, but he stood for a great deal in the eyes of many of the cities of Northern France. The princes of Burgundy were by far the most powerful of the French royal princes. If the Dofer had only been a little more patient, one can imagine what would have happened when Charles XVI eventually died in 1422. The Duke of Burgundy's sole basis of power

was through manipulating the puppet of Charles the 6th who was in his custody. Once Charles the 6th, there would have been no basis on which the Duke of Burgundy could have called upon the loyalty of the French and the whole Burgundian enterprise would have fallen away. There would then have been no treaty of Trois and possibly the whole history of the next 30 years would have been very different.

That didn't happen, and it was all due to the fact that the Dofer, or rather his more persuasive and violent ministers, were too impatient. They were not prepared to let the situation play out. They tried to advance matters by murdering their principal opponent. It's an act of extreme folly. That whole period around 14, 19, 14, 20 seems like a series of errors of judgment or mistimings. The Dofan doesn't wait. Henry manages to get the treaty sign, but then he dies immediately before Charles I 6th dies. And it's such an odd, unlikely series of events that really affected the course of the 100 years war.

But that's what war is like. All wars, the outcome is strongly influenced, not just by the talents of those who fight them, not just by the physical power of those who fight them. All wars, their outcome depends in part on a huge element of luck and misfortune too. And the balance of luck and misfortune has been the story of almost every major war that humanity has ever fought. Suppose that in 1941 Hitler had not been foolish enough to invade the Soviet Union. Suppose that the Japanese had not attacked by the war. Harbour. History might have been very different. The history is essentially a tale of misjudgments

and misfortunes interrupted by occasional strokes of genius. Wonderful. And so in volume five, what drove the hundred years war towards an end? Was it a matter of attrition? You know, it's been going on for a century by this point. Was it the futility of the war or was it the personalities? Henry the 6th didn't want to fight. Charles the 7th was much more resurgent as a French king. What really drove it towards an end? The imbalance of resources and the fact that defending a frontier is a lot more expensive and difficult than attacking.

If you are defending a frontier hundreds of miles long at Frontier of Normandy, for example, your opponents can choose the time and place to attack. and you have to be ready for them at all times. That's a very expensive process. So that this was something that taxed the limited financial and manpower resources of the English more than any other kind of warfare. Defensive warfare is an extremely expensive and exhausting business. So your phrase, a war of attrition, is absolutely right.

Of course, the talents of Charles the 7th by the time he worked out. up to them in the late 1430s and his principal servants were an important factor. Of course, the inadequacy of Henry VI was an important factor. But the ultimate outcome would have been the same, even if Henry the 6th had been brilliant and Charles the 7th had been the Dunderhead, which the English always mistaken in the thought he was. That's really interesting that it would probably have ended up the same way anyway, because I've always viewed it as Henry the 6's lack of interest in the war meant that it just fell away, and Charles I seventh was rebuilding France's military capability, investing in cannon and gunpowder weapons and things like that, and that was where the balance

tipped. But it sounds like that was almost irrelevant. That certainly determined the timing, but I don't think it determined the ultimate outcome. Interesting. We tend to, and by way, I guess I mean the English, we tend to think of the Hundred Years' War in a very Anglo-centric way, that it was some kind of lap of honour of Europe by the English Longbow, and we judiciously managed to forget the end. We forget that France won. We forget that France effectively won. Well, indeed, we do take an Anglo-centric view, and I think if one's going to understand the war, it's essential that one should look at it from both sides. I have spent years working in French provincial and national archives trying to do just that. But yes, obviously, the ultimate outcome was

defeat, although there's a qualification which I'll make in a moment. But Philippe de Comyn, one of the most intelligent observers of the European scene in the late 15th century, once observed that the English were good at winning their battles, but bad at winning their peace. And that's absolutely right. The English, they were never successful diplomats, except at brief moments like the Treaty of Trois, which we've discussed. The English always pitched their demands too high. The first thing that you have to do in any negotiation, and this is a lesson of life generally, not the 100 years war, you have to work out what your opponent can afford to conceive, and the English never did that, really. The French did it. They understood the English a lot

better than the English understood them. But the qualification that one has to make is this. Counterfactuals are said to be pointless, but that's not always true. And sometimes you can only decide what the significance of an event is by asking yourself what would have happened otherwise. Now, suppose that Henry V had achieved his object of uniting England and France as two separate kingdoms under his own rule. What would have happened then? Well, I think it's inevitable that the centre of gravity of this dual monarchy would have moved inexorably towards the richest and most popular as part of it, which was France. And so that England would ultimately have become a subordinate part of the dual monarchy. And the Lancastrians would have become progressively

more French and less English until the tensions exploded at some uncertain future time. So in a sense, you can say that the English defeat in the Hundred Years' War was perhaps the most fortunate thing that happened to England at the time. I was going to ask a question about whether the legacy for England was really civil war in the Wars of the Roses and perhaps the increased power of Parliament in England, but it sounds like the sheer existence of England was the legacy of the Hundred Years' War? I don't think it would ever have ceased to exist, but it would have ceased to be independent until at some stage one assumes there would have been some kind of war of independence. This is, of course, all highly speculative. But the legacy is important in both

the census that you mentioned. The legacy in France of the war was a form of absolute government, and the key was taxation. The French kings could not get consent to taxation effectively from representative assemblies, so they basically ignored them or suppressed them, and the result of that was that they, in order to defeat the English, they had to assume far greater powers than any English king enjoyed. The reverse happened in England. In England, Parliament was prepared to fund the war, not as generously as the English kings wanted, but they were prepared to do so in principle. They therefore established their own control over the purse strings in a way that not even the tutors with their absolutist aspirations were able to undo. And that was a

major development, it meant that France maintained a standing army and a large budget for the next three centuries and was one of the most persistently aggressive countries of the European continent. Whereas until 1700 or so, the English were unable, in spite of the aspirations of some of their kings, to mount an aggressive foreign policy because Parliament simply was not prepared to fund it. and the origins of England as a parliamentary state and of France as an absolute state really lie in this crucial period in the last half of the Hundred Years' War. Fascinating. I was going to ask as well whether the story of the Hundred Years' War is really the story of France and how it fell apart and then how it was rebuilt. But it sounds like

there's an equivalent going on in England as well, that it's really the story of how both states were created. Well, that's true. But it is perhaps more the history of France. than it is history of England, simply because the opportunities that the English exploited were created by a civil war in France, by the internal politics in France. And the key to the whole thing is an understanding of the provincial differences and provincial loyalties in France and the weaknesses and strengths of the structure of the French monarchy. All of that tells you a huge amount about why things are. turned out as they did. And when do you put the end of the 100-year's war? Is it the Battle of Castion in

1453? Well, that's where I've brought it to an end, because it seems to me that although people did not, of course, say in 1453, okay, we've had 100 years, in fact, we've had more than 100 years, we've had about 120 time to call it a day. No, they didn't say that. And the French certainly conducted their policy on the footing that a further English invasion could be expected at any time. They maintained large garrisons across Western France, they improved their coastal defences, they maintained in existence a system of coastal defence and reserve armies, which were primarily designed to deal with a revival of English power and another English invasion. Of course, we know that it didn't happen. But it seems to me that 1453, when

the English were booted out of the last of their French possessions except for Calais was a really significant turning point. And there is a certain unity in this period 1337 and 1353, which justifies Jules Michelin's choice of the Hundred Years' War in the middle of the 19th century as the words which described it. This was the period in which the histories of England and France were intertwined because of the English possession of much of Western France, which only really came to an end in 1453. So that was the moment when politically speaking, England really became an island. Previously, it had not been an island except in a crude geographical sense. There was a sea running between England and the rest of the continent. But politically, the English had regarded

themselves as European princes with European ambitions throughout the time that this war was being fought. And it was the decisive defeat of the English and the 100 years war that turned them into an insular polity. And they remained that until the beginning of the 18th century. What of course changed things at the beginning of the 18th century was that the English lack of resources, which had been the principles restraint on what they could do, changed that the emerging commercial empire made England a rich country and a decisive player in European politics. The first time that it was in a position to do that since the 15th century. I mainly ask about 1453 because, I mean, the Wars of the Roses is kind of my history home.

That's where I normally live. And I've tried to wonder to what extent, particularly Bosworth, can be seen as an extension of the Hundred Years' War, that it's the culmination of Louis XI11's plan, although he's gone by that point, to kind of reverse the Hundred Years' War and to invade England, because he buys Edward the Fourth off in 1475, but then becomes increasingly more aggressive towards England. And Bosworth in 1485 is effectively a French-sponsored invasion of England that brings about regime change. And I just wondered to what extent you could see that as a shadow of the Hundred Years' War, perhaps. I wouldn't see it that way, because it's perfectly true that French

kings had sponsored not just Henry the 7th invasion in 1485, but also the return of Henry the 6th to power in 1470. I think that their object was to have a friendly or at least a tolerant figure governing England on the other side of the channel. What they were mainly afraid of was a revival of the system by which the English allied themselves with princely rebels against the authority of the French state. And that was something that the English were still trying to do right up to the 1470s. The 1470s marked a big change

because I think that's when the English more or less stopped intervening on the side of the French princes. Edward IV delivered a famous discourse to Parliament in 1472 in which he said, well, the rationale of our policy in France has got to be to stop the French king becoming too powerful. And to do that, we have got to basically prevent the French king from completely dominating the French nobility. We have therefore to support the French nobility in their rebellions. That ceased to work mainly because Louis XI 11th fairly decisively suppressed the various noble rebellions in his time. The last of the effective rebellions was in the

1880s to which England made a minimal contribution. They weren't in a position to do any more than that. But it was the disappearance of the threat of major rebellion in France, which really frustrated any English ambitions to resume their interventions in French politics. By the 16th century, and the French monarchy had achieved a completely dominant role over the French princes, had turned them into obedient vassals and cooperative partners in foreign wars like the invasions of Italy. The last attempt really was the attempt of the Constable de Bourbon in the 1520s to raise a rebellion which was a complete fiasco. Henry VIII tried to intervene in his favour, but the problem was that his rebellion collapsed,

before anything had even really begun to happen. That was the pattern of the future. It is sometimes suggested, and in fact was suggested by one of the scholarly reviewers of my book, that perhaps the French monarchy hadn't entirely triumphed because there were incidents like the frowned in the 17th century and the wars of religion in the late 16th century. I think that those were fundamentally different in many ways, but they were certainly different in that they did not offer an opportunity for English intervention of the kind that had happened 100 years earlier. It's been wonderful to talk about this great span of history with you and some of the issues and some of the people involved. Is it a relief for you to have finished this now,

or will you miss the research and the work? Well, I have mixed feelings about it. I'm contemplating, of course, a huge void in my life, having been engaged for 43 years in this work. I'm glad to have finished it because that was always the object of the exercise. I'm sorry that the companion of four decades has now disappeared. I liked the research. I liked the travelling. One of the great things about archives is that they're always next to good restaurants. It's a good life researching history.

That sounds incredible. You must have come across some really interesting bits and pieces in the archives as well that perhaps weren't entirely relevant to your studies, but it must be fascinating to go through those things that were written down, you know, five, six, seven hundred years ago. Of course it is. And the great temptation is to use material because you're so pleased with yourself for having found it, rather than because it's actually genuinely important.

So you need the self-discipline not to use some interesting anecdotes because ultimately they don't add up to very much. But it's perfectly true that if you can look at the actual documents which the clerks wrote to record war expenditure, if you can hold in your hand the notebook in the public record office, which the captain of Calais or his deputy held in his hand as he did the rounds of the watch at night, it gives you an emotional link with the past, which is totally irrational, and perhaps very difficult to explain, but undoubtedly exists. Yeah, wonderful. I think next time I'm writing something, I'm going to hear Jonathan Sumption's voice in my head saying,

Are you putting this down because you're just very pleased with yourself that you found it, or does it actually mean anything? I'm going to carry that one with me next time I'm writing. I guess just to end on, are you planning to fill that void in your life with anything else? Can we look forward to any other projects from you? I've got various projects, and the trick is to find something that hasn't already been so well written about that there's nothing I can contribute, and something that will sustain one's interest. One possibility is the French Wars of Religion, which I've always been interested in. Another, which would in a sense be the sequel of the Hundred Years' War, is the Wars of the Roses,

but very much viewed as an international, a European crisis, which it was, in a sense, that isn't always realized by English historians. It was a European event. Well, fantastic. I think wherever you turn your attention will be the richer for that attention. And, I mean, in some ways, I selfishly hope it's the Wars of the Roses, so I can read what you think about the Wars of the Roses. I'll do my best. Thank you very much for joining us. and congratulations on finishing a 43-year-long project.

Thank you very much. Volume 5 of Jonathan's series on the Hundred Years' War, triumph and illusion is available now, as are the previous four volumes. 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. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us

wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcast, it really does help new listeners to find us out. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.