Gone Medieval - Tournaments & Rebellion in Historical Fiction

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

The Second Baron’s War was a time of great unrest and upheaval in 13th century England. Fought just decades after the signing of Magna Carta, it marked the unwelcome return of tumult between the nobility and the crown and pitted the hitherto peaceful King Henry III against his old friend Simon de Montfort, the Earl of Leicester.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis is joined by Ian Ross who has set his latest historical fiction novel Battle Song right in the heart of this febrile conflict. Beginning with the continental tournament circuit and climaxing in the Battle of Lewes, it is a story that brings the tension and mistrust of this unstable period to life.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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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. The second Baron's War was a period of huge instability and upheaval in England in the second half of the 13th century. The first baron's war had led to Magna Carta and almost seen England conquered by France. And England was still finding its way through a new relationship with the Crown. Ian Ross has set his latest historical fiction novel, Battlesong,

right in the heart of this febrile atmosphere of rebellion and mistrust, but also in the excitement of the tournament circuit on the continent. Ian's research is clear in the story that he writes, so I wanted to chat to him about the book and about the events it's set against. So thank you very much for joining us, Ian. Hello, Matt. I guess to start off with, can you tell us why you chose to set Battlesong, why you chose to set a novel on the eve of the Second Baron's War?

Well, I think probably like a lot of your listeners, I've always been greatly fascinated in the medieval world. In fact, it's kind of surprising that it took me so long to get to writing stories about it. My previous books were set in the late Roman world, the era of the Emperor Constantine. And I've been really working on that for about 10 years now. But I've had this growing desire to write a story about the Middle Ages. But it was only really when I started looking into the history of the period and looking into the history of the 13th century in particular. And I came across the Second Baron's War and everything that involved that I realized that I'd found the proper setting for the stories that I wanted to tell.

So this was, as you said, in your introduction, an extraordinary explosion of really quite unexpected violence and political turmoil in the 1260s. It featured two of the biggest battles in 13th century England. It also featured the greatest siege in English history, and behind it all these extraordinary personalities. You've got Henry III and his son, Lord Edward, nicknamed the leopard. And then you've got, most importantly, perhaps Simon Demontfort, the Earl of Lester, who was the leader of the Barronial rebellion against King Henry. And one of the possibly most controversial figures in the history of medieval England, on the one hand, very charismatic, power.

powerful, courageous leader, but on the other hand, driven, stubborn, ambitious, something of a religious bigot, perhaps, and also very opposed to the Jews. So with these great personalities kind of driving the events of the story forward, I thought I'd found the right kind of setting, a setting that would allow me to portray this era of the 13th century, really the kind of highest point of the high Middle Ages in all of its colour and drama and danger and darkness as well. Yes, I mean, without trying to plug my own book, I wrote a biography of Henry III. So Simon DeMontfort is a character I came across in that process. And I guess I probably looked at him from Henry III's point of view.

So I found him quite hard to like. You know, he's often portrayed as this kind of heroic figure. But as you said then, there's really this other side to everything that Simon does that is a little bit darker than that notion of him as the father of democracy. So what was it about the political situation in England and in Europe at the time that kind of made this ripe for historical fiction? Well, I think to start with it, it's a civil war. And civil wars always provide a tremendously powerful sort of motivating factor for all the kind of stories of adventure and that kind of thing, because you've got characters who have to choose which side they're on, essentially. You've got a

conflict which split society down the middle. There isn't an obvious kind of us and them perhaps. And particularly in this period of the Barron's War, we see, as you look through the historical sources for the period, there were people who were very conflicted about which side they were going to fight on. They were people who changed sides in one case several times, flipping from the king to De Montfort and back again. There was a moment of decision for everyone that was involved in this. And sometimes their motives were mixed. I mean, it's interesting what you just said about Simon DeMontfort. I mean, it's certain that his reputations changed over time. I mean, there was this period, I think, sort of back in the 19th century, a kind of early 20th century

where he was, as you say, regarded as the founder of the House of Commons, one of the founders of democracy, a great liberating figure. But more recently, his reputation has really suffered, I think. It's, I don't know, perhaps because of the times we live in, we tend to be a lot less accepting of the great men of history. We tend to see their bad sides and to regard them as a lot more dangerous and disruptive than as heroic. And this is something that I wanted to bring out in the story because I have this central character in the story who is on the margins of political events, really, on the margins of what's going on. And he's drawn into this great political and social upheaval and finds himself having to decide what he thinks of Simon de Montfort, what he makes of

what's going on in his country as he becomes aware of it, because of course, to start off with, very few people would have been quite that aware of what was going on. This is a age, of course, before newspapers, before any kind of real dissemination of news. Many people would have been possibly deeply confused about what was happening around them, confused about why these people rebelling against the king, why the king was raising his banner and declaring war against them. So there would have been a lot of very difficult discussion, a lot of very difficult debate, and a lot of hard choices that people had to make at that time. And because of the kind of novels that I write, which are really their stories of action

and adventure, you know, and they're based on characters doing things and making choices. And that's how all characters are developed and that's how I portray them. And so situations where they have to make choices and where there's a lot of jeopardy depending on the choices that they make are always going to make for more powerful narratives. And so that's why I tend to be drawn, I think, to these great periods of upheaval and civil war. It's interesting what you say about Simon and the troubles that came, because I guess most people in England would see quite often Henry III and Simon DeMontfort are good friends.

Their brothers-in-law, Simon marries Henry's sister. And they seem close a lot of the time. and then there'll be this moment where they flip and they're not friends anymore, but then they go back to being. So I guess, you know, like you said, the whole country might be quite surprised that they're all of a sudden and meshed in a civil war that nobody had really seen coming if you weren't inside the centres of power. And you mentioned your hero, the central character of your book there. So what can you tell us about him? Who is he? Well, the central hero of the book is a young, or he begins as a young squire called Adam de Norton. He's 18 years old at the beginning of the story. And he is the squire in the household of the Earl of Hereford, who is one of these great magnates of the land who are kind of in the background of the political debates of the time.

So initially, I wanted to start off with a character who wasn't a central player. I've never really been that interested in the great men of history, if you like. I wouldn't have wanted to write a novel about Simon Demontfort himself, about Henry, about Edward. what I wanted was to use that great turmoil and conflict as a background, as a sort of dark panorama against which I could set the stories of individuals. So I deliberately chose somebody who is a fictional character, but who represents a lot of relatively unknown people who are around at the time. You look through the historical records and you will find these great lists of names sometimes of people about whom we know nothing. Sometimes we might know where they're from.

maybe they're a knight or a squire, and they do things and they live and they die, and that's really all that we get to hear about them. So I wanted to represent one of those people. So this squire, Adam de Norton, is a man or a young man without power, without wealth, who, because of an unforeseen accident at the beginning of the novel, is thrown into the company of a different kind of character altogether, a landless knight called Robert Dunstanville, who takes him away from the life that he's known, and they embarked together on quite a different course altogether, which will take them ultimately into the heart of the Barron's War and onto the battlefield of Lewis, which was the culmination of the first stage of the conflict, the climax of the novel.

I was going to ask whether Adam is based on any aspects of historical figures, but it sounds more like he's based on the idea of several anonymous people who were drawn together to create the story of an entirely fictional person. Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. His name is actually, borrowed from a real family who lived in Hampshire in the right period. There was a knight called James D'Norton, who was around in the 1250s, who had a son, I think called William D'Norton, who turns up a few decades later. But again, like a lot of these people, we don't really know who they were or what they did, whether they were involved in the Baron's War or not.

But I liked the name, and I liked their heraldic arms. They have this very distinctive shield, which has recorded a few decades later, a few generations possibly later. It's green with a rampant golden line. It just looks very eye-catching, so I liked it. so I use the name, really. Adam D'Norton himself is not a real person. I, at one point was thinking of using a real character who's mentioned in passing. There's a verse history of the period written by a guy called Robert of Gloucester. And in his description of the Battle of Lewis, he talks about an incident towards the end of the battle where King Edward's brother, Richard of Cornwall, is captured in a windmill. And he's captured by a young man who, Robert of Gloucester,

calls John DeBef or Jean LeBef. I was at one point thinking this sounds like an tremendously exciting story. Why don't I have this guy, John LeBef, as the hero? But I looked into it a bit further and discovered that this person probably was a real identifiable historical figure. I think, anyway, that he was a guy called John Leboeuf Giffard, who was the nephew of a more famous knight called John Giffard, who also featured in the battle. And I think this is why Robert of Gloucester refers to him by his nickname. name rather than by his full name. John LeBufgifford was a household knight or squire in the household of the Earl of Gloucester, really. So I've taken that kind of figure and changed his name,

changed his background, and given him a new story. But yeah, as you say, I wanted it to be the people who were in the background of the story all the time, you know, the great mass of history, the people that we don't hear about, the people whose stories are lost to time. So that was the kind of figure that I wanted to represent. And the novel begins on the continent, getting involved in the tournament circuit that is kind of really flourishing in the 13th century in Europe. And you paint an incredibly powerful and visceral picture of that tournament circuit and what it's like to be a tournament night and part of a team.

Can you describe that to us a little bit? I mean, how dangerous was this? It was tremendously dangerous, but it was also tremendously influential. I mean, I think this is one of the things that I first discovered when I started looking at this period was how pivotal the tournament scene was to the life of the knightly class of this era, because battles at this time were comparatively rare. I mean, full-scale pitched battles because they were dangerous and they were uncertain. But tournaments were where people would train for battle,

and they were very common. There was this great circuit of tournaments by the mid-13th century. throughout Europe. And knights would go off and they'd go from one tournament to the next, traveling around a bit like a kind of rock band on tour or something. It would stretch all the way from the Baltic to Spain and to Italy, even into Greece by the 14th century. So this was a big deal. And these knights would often spend years just touring around on this tournament circuit. So this is what happens at the beginning of the novel when my hero, Adam Norton, is taken away by his mentor, the knight, Robert Dunstanville, who is one of these landless knights who wants to make his

fortune on the tournament circuit. And once I started looking into this, I realized how important it was and what an extraordinary, vivid world these tournaments created, because they were a kind of moving circus. These knights would go from one tournament to the next with their retinues, with all of their squires and their grooms and their sergeants and their servants, and this great body of people that would follow along with them, all of the tradesmen, the armourers, the saddlers, the merchants of one sort or another, who would go from one tournament town to the next, like this huge cavalcade. And the tournaments themselves were quite different to the way that we might imagine them. We tend to think today, I think, of tournaments as being jousts. You get these two knights and they're riding

towards each other with a barrier down the middle and they clash with their lances and that's it. Whereas, particularly in the 12th century, and into the 13th century, the main event of the tournament, the melee, which was a huge mock battle, sometimes fought by hundreds or even thousands of mounted knights, divided up into two teams. And they'd start off by charging towards each other. This was called the Estor. And they'd crash into each other with lances. Half of them would fall off their horses or be captured. The others would then turn around, which is where we get the word tournament from, and grab another lance and go at each other again. And they would do this sometimes three or four times before eventually they'd all merge together.

into this great mass of men fighting hand to hand. This was the melee, and it would go on sometimes last for days, and it would spread over miles and miles of countryside, particularly in the 12th century when this style of mock battle first started. It was in the northwestern region of Europe along the frontiers of France, mainly. This is where it had its roots. And initially it was the knights themselves who were arranging this.

They would agree between themselves, they were all going to meet up in some particular place, and they'd go along there, and they just fight this massive mock battle, trying to capture each other, because the idea wasn't that you would kill your opponents, the idea that you would capture them, usually by de-horsing them, and they would pay you a ransom, which was usually the value of their horse and armor. So you could become quite wealthy by doing this, but it was also tremendously dangerous. Supposedly the weapons were blunted, although quite often they weren't.

And supposedly in these meleys, these big swirling mounted battles, it seems from the descriptions that we have, that it was incredibly brutal, but basically kind of hand-to-hand fighting on horseback, something almost like wrestling. They were pressed so tight together. There wasn't any space for sort of dueling or skillful sword-flighting. They were fighting with their fists, grappling each other, punching each other with the pommels of their swords. And there's a tremendous relish in this kind of violence that comes through in the sources that we have, because there are descriptions of these big melee tournament battles, often written by heralds or sometimes even by participants. And they really seem to glory in the violence and the brutality of what's going on.

There are descriptions of knights smashing each other in the face and breaking their teeth with their fists. There's a person called Henri de Leon, and he was possibly a knight or possibly a herald, and he wrote this description really of the tournament. And he describes a knight fighting in the tornums taking his helmet off and this swill of sweat and blood pouring out of his helmet and showering over him and he says this is the high bath of honour. This is something that they've really enjoyed, which seems extraordinary to us. And we tend to think of tournaments and knights and chivalry as being kind of rather decorous, rather sort of to do with pageantry and showing off. But these original sources just show us how much of a different picture we should really be seeing here. This is just

really tough, hard fighting by men who seem to love violence. Even in the stories of the day, the Chances de Gest, which are becoming so popular during this period, they're tremendously bloodthirsty. The early stories of the Arthurian Knights, there's stories of Proz Lancelot from the 13th century, all about people getting horrific injuries and being hacked to pieces and horses being killed under men and people being bathed in blood. It's really quite dreadful stuff. But they seem to have loved it. There wasn't any sense that this was bad or that they had to avoid grievously injuring each other. It was all part of it. It was all part of this early expression of chivalry, this expression of prowess and doing great deeds of arms,

overcoming your enemies in as showy and as spectacular a way as possible against all the odds. It sounds absolutely horrific and terrifying and being covered in someone else's sweat and blood is definitely not my idea of fun. So I guess it's the glamour and the chance to get rich that outweighs the danger of it all and is part of the appeal. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you could become tremendously famous through doing this. I mean, fame in the chivalric sense, that people would speak about you and you'd become well-known and you would turn up at one of these tournaments and everybody would say, oh, it's so-and-so.

But we know about some of these people mainly because of the stories that were told about them. The most famous one, of course, to us is probably William Marshall because of the history of William Marshall that was written about him, a biography written shortly after his death, I'm not entirely sure, but it describes a lot of his activities on the tournament circuit. At the end of the 12th century, when this melee style of combat was really at its height, you could become rich, you could become famous, but I should think a lot of the people involved in this didn't really get rich or famous. But what they did get was the opportunity to train themselves in combat, which would have been important if they ever were in combat, but also to show great loyalty and service to their lords

who they followed, because if you had a great lord who was going into the tournament, he would have his household knights with him and his squires with him, and they would act as his bodyguards. There are actually descriptions from the mid-13th century of great lords and kings riding onto the tournament field surrounded by so many of their own knights and squires that they're literally invulnerable. It's almost as if they're riding on a procession or something. And the best any of their opponents can do is to try and pick off some of their followers. So this was a great way of demonstrating your loyalty and your service in what was close to a conflict situation, about as close as anyone was likely to get to a full-scale battle. And of course, you would be

rewarded for that. Your feudal commander would pay you. They'd give you prizes. They would share the wealth that they took and that their team and that their household took. So you could benefit, it, even if you weren't becoming one of these great tournament champions like William Marshall or something yourself, there were benefits to be had. And of course, you could travel and you could see a great deal of the world and you could have amazing adventures, which you could then tell your friends about back home, and you could sit by the fire in your hall and have your herald compose extraordinary exaggerated tales, all the things that you've done and all these fantastic exotic places on the tournament circuit. Almost like you're doing for Adam De Norton here.

And that's an interesting part of the tournament that you mentioned there. So I think I have always equated it with that idea of getting wealthy, but also of the practice battle. So these are knights who they train all of the time to fight, but very rarely are they involved in pitched battles. As you said, they're considered too dangerous, too unpredictable. They just don't happen very often. So a tournament and a melee was a chance to actually put that into practice in a pressurized situation that is difficult to recreate. But I think it's really interesting you talk about the political side of it, that this was a way to get yourself noticed and get a promotion at work by doing well at a tournament and to get the notice of your lord. Yeah, absolutely.

As you say, it was a political thing to be doing. There were a lot of knights who didn't have land, who didn't hold land. I mean, there were probably in the mid-13th century only around 2,000 knights in England. I think somebody figured this out by adding up the numbers that were mentioned in sources. So it's only about 2,000 knights. Being a knight was expensive. It was difficult. You had a lot of outlay in equipment and armour and horses. I mean, the cost of horse. was extraordinary at this time. If you wanted to buy a decent warhorse, a destria, it would cost you sometimes several times the annual income of an average manner. Well, a minimum was about 20 pounds a year. That would qualify you for knighthood. You're looking to pay something like 80 pounds for a

decent warhorse. So this was an expensive business. You needed money and you needed support. So going on the tournament circuit, if you were a younger son, for example, so you weren't going to inherit the family land. If you weren't already a household knight who had a kind of family connection with somebody else, you could join yourself with one of these touring companies of knights and you could go on the tournament circuit and you could get money, you could get support, you could get all the equipment that you needed to uphold the dignity of knighthood and enable you to go on to potentially win sort of further riches and renown in the future. And actually, if you look at the story of William Marshall, he entirely prospers on the tournament

Circuit, he manages to win virtually everything he gets just by showing prowess and courage in these tournament melee situations, which then later on leads him onto a political career. Yeah, I think if we believe the biography that's written of him by his own family just after his death, he's very much like the messy of the tournament circuit, isn't he? The absolute goate wins everything in sight. How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships? Well, you can expect all of this and more from The Ancients on History Hit.

Join us twice a week, every week, as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to the Ancients, wherever you get your podcasts. Do we know what the kind of attitudes were to the tournament circuit? Did some people approve of it and disapprove? I mean, I know some Kings of England banned tournaments in England, which is why it happens more often on the continent. But you sense that local merchants might well have benefited from things like this.

Oh, yeah. I mean, certainly a lot of people benefited from tournaments. It wasn't just the knights that were competing in them. There was a whole kind of service industry, if you like, that grew up around them. Because these people were touring all around the continent, they were going from one place to the other. and every time they turned up in a town, you had a small army suddenly appearing, which caused a lot of trouble, of course, which many people were not keen on,

but it also caused a greater opportunity for the people who lived in the town and for the merchants who would follow these tournament bands around. But yeah, I mean, they were very unpopular in certain circles. First of all, the church never really liked tournaments. I mean, as much as you could talk of the church as being a single institution, there is churchmen and bishops and so forth made many pronouncements. against tournaments, which they regarded as a distraction from the true duty of knighthood, which was, of course, to go on crusade or armed pilgrimage, as they would call it, to go and

liberate the Holy Land from the infidel. And rather than doing that, these knights were spending all of their time and all of their money, having these grotesque, secular mock battles and all of the vulgar pageantry and so on. And the tremendous wastage as well. I mean, the amount of horses that were slain, the amount of armour that was ruined, the amount of money changing hands, and all of it basically in the service of competition and showing off. I mean, this wasn't really very popular with the church. And they made repeated attempts to try and persuade people not to do this. Supposedly anyone who died in the course of a tournament was supposed to die excommunicate.

They weren't supposed to be buried in consecrated ground. Obviously, some people found ways around that, but that just shows how unfavorably the church authorities regarded it. But as you say, kings also disliked tournaments. Sometimes strangely you would imagine because you would think that a king would like the opportunity to have all of his knights trained in conflict. But in fact, tournaments, at least the large scale melee tournaments, were often too much trouble. You get a very large body of men armed and equipped for war, gathering in one place. This is potentially going to lead to difficulties. I mean, it can look very much like a rebellion.

Sometimes tournament musters were used as pretext to gather a rebel. army. This happened in England. And Henry III was very opposed to tournaments, both for religious and for political reasons. And as you say, I mean, throughout most of his rule, he issued repeated prohibitions against them. And we get these in our sources. You get sort of royal letters going out saying that the tournament is such and such a place has been prohibited and anyone who attends it will forfeit their lands and be banished from the kingdom or something. They were really sort of laying down all of the prohibitions they could against them. So Henry was against them. His son, Edward initially was very keen on tournaments and went to France several times,

competed at first quite poorly, apparently. He lost several tournament bouts. He had a lot of his horses killed, lost a great deal of money, and was very badly injured at one point in probably 1262. This is an incident that I dramatize in the novel. But he, you would have thought, would have been quite into tournaments. But as soon as he became king, as Edward I, he very rapidly saw that having these tournaments going on was not a good thing, and he too, in fact, prohibited them, as did the King of France,

Louis the 9th, for a very brief period, at least, around the time that I'm writing about. So, yeah, they were unpopular with the church, they were unpopular with monarchs at various points, and yet at the same time, nobody could stop these things from happening. A bit like raves, I guess. Maybe they're medieval raves. And the book builds up then, so you move from the tournament circuit, and it builds towards the Battle of Lewis, which, as you mentioned earlier, is kind of the climax of the novel. Can you tell us what the background to that confrontation was? Why do Henry III and Simon De Montfort end up at odds with each other?

Essentially, as you said originally, Simon DeMontfort and Henry III were initially friends. It's a really strange story. Simon DeMontfort came to England as a French nobleman, essentially a kind of adventurer picking up an ancestral claim to the Eldham of Lester that his family had had for some time. By this point, England and France had become very sundae. Back in the days of King John, the English crown had lost its claims to Normandy and a lot of its French lands.

And this had created a new mood of national identity, certainly in England, probably in France as well. And there was a great deal of what we might now call xenophobia towards the people who are called aliens. These could be French, Flemish, anyone from any other country, even the Welsh, particularly the Jews as well, were also labelled in this way. So Simon de Montfort, as a French nobleman, Ariviest, if you like, should have been very unpopular. But he managed to inveigle himself initially with Henry III.

He took up his earldom of Leicester, and soon after that he married the king's widowed sister. A very controversial marriage, because she had taken a vow of celibacy after the death of her last husband. But this kind of brought Simon Demoithel into Henry's inner circle and made him a very powerful figure in the land. a powerful supporter of the king. And the story of how he turned against Henry and how this great discord grew between them is too long to explain here. But needless to say, by the 1260s,

Simon de Montfort had become the figurehead of the baronial opposition to Henry. This group of magnates and powerful men who believed that Henry was ruling unjustly. They believed that he was ruling against the terms of Magna Carta, which had been originally drafted back at the beginning of the century under Henry's father, King John. And Magna Carta, as I'm sure most of your listeners will know, was really an attempt to create a balance of power between the king and the great magnates of the land and really to provide some constraint on royal authority. It was an attempt to answer a question which is really still very pertinent today, which is, are those who rule us subject to the same rules as we are. Does the king or the government have to follow the law or are they

above the law? And what Magna Carta did at the risk of a gross simplification is provide an answer to that question and to say, no, the king is not above the law. Yes, the king must follow the rules. He must be bound by the concord of what was coming to be known as Parliament at that time. So this was the foundation for the struggle between Henry and the barons led by Simon de Montfort. They believed that even though Henry had agreed to follow the terms of Magna Carta, he'd failed to do so. He was ruling unjustly. He was raising strange taxes for peculiar foreign adventures, which they didn't approve. He was bringing foreigners into the kingdom who were related either to him or to his wife and putting them into positions of power, granting them great wealth and great lands, which was really breaking up the network of power relations.

which had grown up in England for about 200 years since the Norman conquest. So this was the roots of this turmoil that was going on. It was really the old established families of England who were protesting at the way that King Henry appeared to be ruling England as his own private domain, doing things in the way that he wanted to do them, not respecting the will of Parliament, not respecting the conventions that had been laid down in Magna Carta. So yeah, Simon De Montfort was a unlikely leader for these people. But by the 1260s, we have him in the leading position amongst these baronial rebels. And there was a period between about 1262, 1263, where England was really heading towards open warfare. There was a great deal of skirmishing going on. There were attacks on

people's manners. People's castles were being burned here and there. But it was only in early 1264. It was actually April the third, I believe, 1264, that King Henry decided that he'd had enough of this, and he raised the royal banner at Oxford, summoned his loyal barons, and declared war on Simon DeMontford and the Barronial rebels. And in fact, he not only raised the royal banner at this point, but he also raised a flag that was called the Dragon, which was a particular insignia, a red flag, probably with a jeweled dragon on it. And this was, as our sources tell us, the sentence of death upon the rebels, the sign that no quarter would be given in this coming conflict. So it was a real declaration of intent by King Henry, because we tend to think that Henry was a rather

mild king. He has this reputation as being a sort of very mild, very Christian, not very warlike monarch, certainly in comparison to his father and to his son. And yet at this point, when he raises his banner at Oxford, when he declares war, we see a totally different kind of king suddenly appearing. And it must have been a great shock to everyone around him at the time. Because of course, medieval kings, no matter how Pacific and Christian they were in times of peace, in times of war, they were expected to be ferocious. They were expected to be angry and to show no quarter to their enemies. And sure enough, this is what Henry set out to do. There's an incident. It happened about a month after the beginning of the conflict where Henry was marching his army south from Rochester through

the wheeled of Kent, down towards the south coast and the conflict that was going to happen at Lewis. And at one point, as his army was marching along, a group of Kentish archers attacked the vanguard of his army, and they apparently killed the king's cook, which outraged the king. He thought this was a terrible thing to be doing. And he ordered, well, the sources, tell us that it was, I think, 312 local archers, although these, of course, would just be local men, not necessarily anything to do with whoever had attacked the king's army. He ordered them to round it up and executed.

They were just beheaded, all of them in a single day, presumably in front of the king and his court, perhaps in a field. It's a really horrific scene, if you imagine that happening. 312 people, not guilty of any particular crime. Some of them had even surrendered to the king, thinking that they might get let off. But all of them beheaded. You used to imagine what that might have looked like

and what it might have sounded like and what the sight of 312 severed heads in a pile might have looked like. And then the king just packs up and marches on again, leaving the local people to go and identify the dead, presumably. But this was Henry on the war map. This was Henry being a savage medieval monarch. And this is the Henry who led his army down to the south coast

and then along to Lewis, where he waited for Simon de Montfort to catch up with him and for the subsequent battle to take place. And how does all of this affect Adam De Norton? So he's been on the continent in the tournament circuit. How does he end up back in England and getting caught up in all of this unraveling trouble? Okay, yeah. So as you say, the story up until that point is that Adam has been on the continent with his knightly mentor, Robert Dunstanville, learning the craft of war, really, in the tournament circuit. and they decide early in 1264 to return to England, having heard that this war is about to break out. And principally the reason for going back there is that Robert Dunstanville has had his lands taken away from him

and believes that the turmoil of the kingdom might provide him with an opportunity to better his situation if he chooses the right side. So this is their initial decision that they have to make, which side they're going to be on in this conflict. And I don't think it's giving too much a way to say that they decide to follow the cause of Simon Demontfort, even though Robert de Dunstanville is himself not terribly convinced by DeMontfort's revolutionary credentials. Adam is a bit more into it. Adam is by far the more earnest of the two. He's younger, he's idealistic, he really believes or comes to believe that this rebellion that's going on, this baronial uprising led by Simon DeMontfort might actually create a better kingdom. it might create a more just government.

But of course, that idealism is pretty immediately challenged by what he sees as he follows De Montfort's army, because one of the first things that happens, and this is shortly after the King's declaration of war, Demontfort's followers returned to London and indulged in bloodshed of their own, directed against the Jewish community in London. I mean, you can't really play down in this conflict the importance. of the Jewish community to what was going on. Because a great deal of Simon de Bonfort's followers were younger knights and barons

who were heavily indebted to Jewish money lenders. And many of them believed, it seems, that Simon de Montfort was going to wipe away their debts. And so we have this wave of violence happening in the spring of 1264, directed against Jewish communities in Worcester and in London, and later on in Nottingham

in Lincoln, people were attacking the Jewish people. They were killing many of them, and they were destroying the records of debts. This was one of the principal things that these rebels were doing. They would take the archa, as they were called, the chests in which the records were kept, and they would destroy them so that nobody would know how much money they owed to these Jewish moneylenders. But there was a terrible episode of this in London in Holy Week of 1264, where some of the sources on this tell us that between three and five hundred people were killed. These were men, women and children, Jews of London who'd been living there for all of their lives, for generations, and a mixture of, we don't really know who the perpetrators were. They were possibly the supporters

of Simon De Montfort. They were possibly members of the London populace who were pretty overwhelmingly in favour of De Montfort. But whoever they were, Simon DeMontford himself doesn't seem to have been actually present, although some of his leading supporters were and were directly. involved in the violence. So Adam gets to see this and gets to see really a much uglier and more brutal side of this revolutionary movement, this supposedly very pure campaign for justice. And that gives him a lot of conflicts, you could say, because one of the things which I haven't mentioned so far is that his mentor, Robert Dunstanville, is very close friends with a Jewish family in London, or rather a Jewish muddellender and his sister. And I wanted to show this relationship

as something close to a genuine friendship, because we hear a lot in the sources about the hostility directed towards the Jewish population during this period in particular, dating back to the early 13th century, but really reaching its peak of violence around this period. There's lots of legislation against the Jewish population. England was the first country to mandate

that Jews had to wear an unidentity. identifying label on their clothing, really setting them out, really forcing them to try and live separately from the Christian communities that surrounded them. So this was a very important thing that was going on at the time that I wanted to write about. And really, you can't think about this era and the Barron's War without going into that. It kind of leads into one of the questions I was going to ask as well about where you stand on writing historical fiction versus the need to maintain historical accuracy, because I think it's clear from the book that you've done in a vast amount of research and you understand this period intimately. But I guess one of the advantages

sometimes of historical fiction is that you get to pad out what we know. You can put words and thoughts into people's mouths. So do you feel that you ever have to sacrifice the fiction to maintain the accuracy or the accuracy to build the fiction or is there a balance to be had? Yeah, I don't really see that there's a conflict between them. I mean, I know that a lot of people do. And obviously there's a lot of different ways of writing historical fiction. I know that there are some people who treat the historical background rather lightly. They see it as just a dramatic setting and they can just lightly sketch it in and then have the story going on just in front of it. And there are other people who see it in a much more literary way they would regard

the past as really a literary contrivance. So they can just add their own additional literary contrivance over the top of it. Those are perfectly good ways to write fiction. But I've always preferred to be a scrupulous as I can. I mean, I don't see the research as being difficult. I mean, I enjoy it a lot more than I enjoy writing the novel, to be honest, the bit where I'm leading up to starting writing something and I give myself sometimes two to four months just to research it and to plan it. I mean, that's fantastic. I can spend all of that time chasing down any obscure little bit of information or any weird little facet of the historical background as I like, because I never know what's going to be useful and what isn't. I can research to the very limits of the records. And I enjoy doing that. And to me,

that is an important part of the creative process. I don't see that the historical record is a sort of barrier to creativity. Rather, it's the framework that I use to construct the story. I always try to weave the story that I'm telling around the facts of the historical record rather than trying to push through them. So for me, it's all part of the same process. I see the details of history as being the seedbed for creative imagination and invention, really. It's what leads to the story. It's where the stories grow. I've always felt that the past is important and the past is real and worthy of respect. And whenever I've written about the past, I've tried to make it not as accurate as possible because I don't think you can really talk about

accuracy in that sense. We have no way of measuring how accurate our versions of the past are. All we can do is create a picture of the past that accords as closely as possible to what we currently believe the past to have been, because this is history. History is not an objective science. It's just our way of trying to look at the past and trying to understand it. And that's why history is changing all the time. History is constantly being rewritten. And so the kind of novel that I would write today about the Barron's War would be very different to the kind of novel that people were writing in the 19th century about it, not because the facts have changed necessarily, but because the way that we view the past has changed. Our idea of history

has changed and developed as it necessarily does. So in terms of accuracy, I wouldn't say I would make any great claims to that. What I'm trying to create is a sense of authenticity, I think, a sense that this is a real world that I'm describing, a world that might have existed, people that might be genuinely inhabiting a time in the past with all of the complexity of any life at any period of time. Amazing. So I guess if anyone reads the book then and they get to the end and they have thoroughly enjoyed it,

as I have no doubt they will have done, will there be more from Adam De Norton, what's coming next? Without giving away any spoilers, obviously. So the first book, Battle Song, leads up to, I don't think it's a spoiler to say. It leads up to the Battle of Lewis, which was won by Simon DeMontfort. this is not really a matter of any great mystery. We leave Adam to Norton, victorious on the battlefield of Lewis.

However, this is the first of three books. I've written the second book. I'm in the process of just beginning the third one. And they follow Adam's adventures through the rest of the Barron's War, because of course Lewis was not the culmination of this conflict. There was another battle the following year, and then there was a siege the year after that. And really, events continued even beyond the death of Simon DeMontford himself. So this is what I'm dramatizing over the course of these three books. I think at the moment that the second book might well be out in December of this year or possibly early next year. But certainly over the next couple of years or so, these books will be seeing the light of day. So anyone who's enjoyed reading about the story of Adam De Norton in Battlesong

can continue, hopefully, to follow his story in successive volumes. Wonderful. Sounds very exciting. Something to look forward to for later this year or early next year. year. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Ian, and sharing all of that. It's been great to talk about the tournament circuit and the Second Barron's War and Adam De Norton, so thank you very much. Thanks very much, Matt. It's been an honor to beyond. Ian's novel battle song is out now. So if you're looking for a gripping, exciting and visceral visit to one of England's most tumultuous periods, definitely look this book out. You can join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from, and to

all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you do get a moment, please drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to podcasts. It really does help listeners to find us amidst all the algorithms. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking to go a bit more medieval, then subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletters by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I've better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.