Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 242 - Combat Of The 30

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Joe is once again joined by the show's producer Nate to talk about how in the middle of a stagnated war, two teams of knights got together to kill each other out of boredom as a crowd of spectators watched on. support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: Barbara Tuchman. A Distant Mirror https://web.archive.org/web/20121105020628/http://www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/muhlberger/chroniqu/texts/AINSWORT.HTM Steven Muhlberger. The Combat of the Thirty, Deeds of Arms Series, vol. 2

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hello and welcome to Lines Up by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me again is Nate. How's it going, Nate? It's going very well. We're on a video chat for this call. And I'm backlit and kind of glowing in this bizarre haze on my camera because my camera isn't used to the sun being out in Britain and I'm sitting near a window. So that perhaps gives you some indication of like, it's just an uncommonly nice

day. It's been insanely windy though. And apparently the whole polar vortex bomb cyclone thing that has been freezing the hell out of America is going to head right for us through the jet stream. So we're like fully breaking records on the amount of wind power on the grid right now, but it's probably going to get back to insanely cold by British standards soon. But we were hilariously, as stupid as this country is, there were times of day when we were like 90% renewable energy because of all the wind and then imports of nuclear power and nuclear power from the British grid. If you count nuclear power as green energy, which I know our Discord does, but some people don't like hearing. So stupid. But the funny thing is, is we call it the British

paradox. When the wind is blowing that strongly to generate that much green energy with all of our wind turbines, it's also sucking all of the heat out of our non-insulated homes and thus creating a vicious cycle of us burning more fossil fuels with our gas heaters. So you simply can't win with Britain. But yeah, I'm good. I like that I have recorded so many things. We just recorded when I was in the UK. And then Tom and I have a series coming out where I had yet to go to the UK.

And now I'm recording again, and I'm back in Armenia. And I really want people to attempt to piece together the timeline of like my travel. Like when the fuck did he record these things? It's all over the place. It's like where in the world is Job recording at this moment? Yeah. Where in the world is Joseph Kasabian? Sounds like a game you absolutely would have played, but it would have been banned in Turkey.

Yeah. It's confiscated upon arrival in Baku. Yeah, exactly. I just say simply that they don't want to see an Armenian thriving. Got to keep the king down. I just got back to Armenia yesterday after what has to be one of, well, I have to caveat that. Not the worst series of air travel I've ever had because I had some hellish charter planes when I was in the army. But the worst travel experience that I've had since I've been a civilian because I flew out of Gatwick in the UK, which everybody in the UK told me, like you, another couple of friends of mine, like, oh, your plane's going to be delayed.

Like, they're all just delayed. This is flying out of the UK. Correct. My plane was delayed by two hours. Weirdly enough, my friend flying out of the UK and also coming to Armenia out of a different airport also had his flight delayed. Then I got to Milan, and I had to run like a record 40 time getting through the milan airport pretty sure i took a couple people out along the way oh like it's a and it's whiz air so it's at like the furthest away part of the airport because it's a budget airline you could go to like gate b90

or whatever uh only to find they call him the mal Malpensa Armenian. He just stalks the corridors of the terminal in Milan, knocking fucking Italians over, breaking their fragile little bird bones. I went through them faster than the world cup hopes. And, uh, I only to get to the gate and find out that plane was also delayed. Uh,

so I did this like dead sprint, sweating my fucking ass off for no reason. Got, that was delayed like another hour and a half. Got to Moldova, uh, where my plane was also delayed. And I did see a guy attempt to fight the cops and I don't speak Russian or Moldovan. The only thing that I could understand from the limited amount of Russian that I know is he just kept calling the cops fucking bitches. So you heard a lot of suka bill yet who he's like yeah and

like he i actually have a picture of it but like he gets he gets paid he's like a little guy he gets picked up on both arms and he is like taking down some unlit corridor and you hear his curses at the cops getting further and further away until they go quiet and then i got on my flight to armenia which is somehow the best flight um despite it being like fly one which is not a great airline uh and upon arrival so armenians have this thing where as soon as the plane hits the ground like the second a wheel touches the ground they will stand up and start getting their suitcases out of like the plane is still shaking and shit and they will attempt they'll start getting their suitcases out and like the plane is still shaking and shit. And they will attempt,

they'll start getting their suitcases out and like the flight attendants have to yell at them. And normally they'll sit back down. But this time a guy just kept, it's like he pulled, he pulled his suitcase off and we're just standing in the middle of the aisle and got, kept getting yelled at,

kept getting yelled at, kept getting yelled at. And then we pull up and cops come on board, which is interesting because it's the first time i've ever seen armenian cops work um and they like took him away and i did not see him when i went through customs but that's that's wild man i mean i guess it's one of those things where i thought you're gonna say that as soon as it touches ground they start clapping oh they also do that yeah they're in the dominican republic they absolutely do that on every flight i've ever

been onto the dr the minute it, even if it was the softest, gentlest landing, there was no doubt that this was going to happen. The minute it touches back down in the DR, Dominicans start clapping. And I mean, I respect it because I don't clap when I go back to America. I just say, oh, fuck, I'm going to have to go wait two hours for customs like always. Yeah, yeah.

I was telling a friend of mine who was going to the US for the first time and she's like, does customs take a long time? I was like, Oh yeah. And, uh, she's like, Oh, you mean, because like, I'm a foreigner. I'm like, no, just always, uh, but you know, I've been back, uh, in Armenia for one whole day now. And, uh, I saw the sun for the first time because when I was in the UK, it was just gray the whole time. You came to the UK at the absolute grimmest time of year, to be honest with you.

January is grim, but it's not that bad because the days are starting to get longer. So by the time that you get past the holidays, you're already either right on the cusp or past the point where the sun is setting after four o'clock, which still sounds awful, but it sets before four o'clock for most of December. So remember this when we talk about medieval anything, that if it has anything to do with the English or people from the British Isles, they had permanent seasonal affective disorder. Because this is just abnormal. This is just inhuman. In the same way that you can look at the Nordic countries and those people are not normal. They may have insulated homes, unlike the British, and a social safety net, the british and but they they got that way through like you know weird lutheran crusades and plagues and famines and stuff like that and then just the decision that they'd rather you know cut their

losses minimize their losses rather than have it be this feast and famine shit whereas britain was just like no we love famine we love being. We hate having our houses be warm. Don't like it. There's the door. And you have experienced this in person, but also digging through history, you can only imagine how much less moderated it must have been. Yeah. And in the Nordic countries, everybody's just too shy to look at you directly in the face. And in the UK, they'll just try to steal your cell phone. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Joe and I have both been victims of attempted muggings and the muggers were not successful. But that's a thing in the UK that I've heard about for years. It's not uncommon.

It wasn't unknown before. But as we go through this incredible cost of living crisis and people really can't afford to even keep their their the heat on in their homes also joe you may not know this but in the uk uh if you're deemed to not have good enough credit they put a pay-as-you-go meter for your utilities and you have to go down to the corner shop and like refill it on a usb stick to then keep your heat running what you have to pay and they'll absolutely cut it like it won't cut off completely, but it'll cut to a very, very low minimum. Keep it above freezing temperature. Or at least I think.

It may actually cut off entirely. I don't know because I've never had one. But they used to be coin operated. You used to have to put in the coins in your own fucking thing. Now you have to go down and you pay like a 2% surcharge. So on top of getting fully ripped off by utility companies because the government refuses to intervene in the commodities markets in any way, yeah, you actually have to pay a surcharge for being poor on your corn-operated electric and gas meter. That's fucking insane. I'm not making this up. And sometimes when I tell people this, in conjunction with other stories

about what is normal in Britain, people sometimes look at me and just kind of, you're fucking with me, right? This is an elaborate con. You've just been making this up. This is you doing a bit. And I'm like, no. That's Britain. Speaking of an elaborate con, I have no good segue here. No, that was a good one. Let's see

what happens with this. So, once upon a time, I think we've all probably made this joke especially being soldiers that war would be a whole lot better if everybody in charge just met up in the middle specifically the officers sorry nate and just shot one another and don't don't like involve me in this bullshit right fair like let's just all meet in a predetermined place uh like 10 on 10 like you're playing pickup basketball and just figure it out. Kind of like how you hear mythological stories

like champions and stuff, like meeting outside the walls and deciding entire wars. Yeah. Beats of masculine strength, picking up huge rocks and throwing them, ripping out trees from their roots, things of that nature.

Yeah. I like this idea of predetermined mortal combat rather than war for it to be determined. But that actually happened once, kind of. It didn't determine the war, but it was mostly out of boredom, where 60 men, 30 aside, were chosen, included referees, to line up in a field and kill the living shit of each other in order to settle the War of Breton Succession. Now, this didn't settle anything, but it ended up being absorbed by the larger Hundred Years War at one point. But it is very funny. And that's why we're talking about the combat of the 30 today, even though it should be the combat of the 60.

But it's called the combat of the 30. I don't know. Maybe they couldn't count. Their eyes were riddled with lice or something. Yeah. I mean, weather sucks in Brittany. I actually lived in Brittany when I was in high school. I did a study program there.

So weather really sucks there. I always wondered, it didn't clock until very recently, which is embarrassing, that the word for Britain, for the United, well, not the United Kingdom, but Great Britain in the French language

is just big Brittany. And then it all made sense that like that part of France, in terms of weather at least, is just little Britain. Awful, windy, cold. Everywhere in France could be sunny. Brest, that whole area of the Breton Peninsula

will just be fucking rain, wind. Worse than Seattle. They're contractually obligated to keep the weather in line. Yeah. So, I mean, what you're saying is this was a war... I would say two things. Number one, a war to settle who gets to rule Little Britain, rainy, cold peninsula in France

where they speak a Celtic language. And point number two, the Hundred Years' War was like the high point of knights just doing shit because they were bored. Yeah, 100%. There's so much detail in there about that, yes. It's incredible how a whole bunch of... I mean, it's somehow dumber and there's a lot of... I'll say there's a couple of theories as to why this happened

because historians historians especially people who focus on uh medieval knight stuff really don't want to just boil down to like well maybe they were bored but we'll get to that um i mean i read barbara tuchman's a distant mirror which not like an academic history and i'm sure there's lots of like academic historians can poke holes in the problems with it oh sure but like one thing i'll say is following the life and times of Edgar-Andre Cousy is that there were a lot of sort of campaigns that just was like, eh, bored. My men are bored. I need to keep them busy.

We got to do some shit. Let's invade Switzerland. Yeah. You know, stuff like that. In that time, Switzerland wasn't independent. It was ruled by the Habsburgs, I believe. But like that kind of a thing. Just like there's been a lull in the campaigning.

And as such, like we got to do something because the only way I feed and pay my men is spoils and booty. So it's like, all right, let's go fucking just spoil some shit. Soldiers do love being paid in booty. They do indeed. Yeah. I said that and I was like, he's going to jump on that. He's going to, he would not resist that layup. That was a layup. Exactly. Exactly. It was an assist, actually, I said that and I was like, he's going to jump on that. He's going to, he would not resist that.

That was a layup. That was a layup. Exactly. Exactly. It was an assist, actually, I would say. Now, in order to tell the story of what became known as the combat of the 30, we have to jump back to the 1300s when men were men, warriors were warriors, and they're all dead by the age of 35 and fuck their cousins.

Very true. Actually, cousins might be spotting them a little bit too much. Uh, but whatever the war of Britain succession was based on exactly what you think. The Duchy of Brittany was a fee for the kingdom of France at the time. And the Dukes of Britain were very interwoven into a mess that made up British nobility who were in turn sometimes also married into various lines

and made up French nobility. And they're also all married into each other's families. Hence why they all looked like freaks. As always, inbred people beefing over turf is a common through line on our show. Have you ever seen the Breton flag? I don't think I have. So if you look it up, the Breton flag kind of looks like an early version of the American flag in some ways.

Huh. That is really weird. Here's the thing that's really interesting about it. So, you know, you have the stripes, you have all the stuff, the black and white stripes. So, it looks like the subdued flag. I'm pretty sure that flag predates... No, it actually doesn't predate the American flag. It's from the 20th century.

But that symbol on the top left believe it or not is very very old and basically what it comes from is uh this legend that some famous person in breton history uh saw an ermine that refused to cross like a muddy pond because it wouldn't despoil itself and get its fur all fucked up so they put like their like white cloth coat down so the ermine could cross and it left this little fucking rat claw tracks all over it and that's what those represent. Wait, hold up. What the fuck is an ermine? It's like a mink.

Oh, weird. So like a French ferret. European weasel. Yeah, some kind of weasel family. Greater red wall creatures. Taxonomy. Yeah, something like that. They got a lot of weasels and ground creatures in Europe that we don't have in america that you have to learn about like uh stoats for example basically big ferrets that love just murdering rabbits that are like four times their size

rabbits only defense against them is just to scream and hope a bigger predator comes and and kicks their ass like i'm dead serious uh so i'm gonna go ahead and imagine everybody involved this is now various different degrees of ferret uh the red wall it's a red wall story this is such a red wall story this is red wall now um the ruler of the duchy was john the third sometimes known as john the good something i have to say at minimum is arguable uh say not nominative determinism here but probably a little bit exaggerated yeah for instance john was married several times and each wife has died early uh i'm not accusing him of anything because the 1300s of people just drop dead from i don't know like dropsy yeah they got ghosts in the

blood and they die i was gonna say yeah the the scratch the itch something like that yeah they have a terminal case of uh throat itis and their their their back is blown out felled by the cough we don't know anything more about it the great bleeding um i guess he maybe he murdered them i don't know uh not a single time did he manage to have a child but for a guy who was forcefully married at the age of 11 to a fucking five-year-old girl he probably wasn't going to have very normal relationships with anybody throughout his entire life and he probably wasn't much of a good person

and John the good by our standards and our standards alone John the good because he doesn't hit me with a pipe he only whips me with a rope he's a good duke. Woke 13th century guys

use soft fucking torture implements to beat his spouse. Yeah, it's... Back in my day, I murdered my wife when they didn't give me an heir. Nowadays, I just have to keep remarrying. It's bullshit.

Oh, Jesus. Goddamn woke moralists. Just imagining 13... Middle Ages, like 100 years war, Jordan Peterson. Nowhere. Unbelievable. Can you imagine like what kind of weird like witchcraft concoctions they would have to do to get him on like a benzo binge in the 13th century? That's actually how benzos were discovered was by 1300s George Peterson.

George Peterson. I mean, the all meat diet wouldn't necessarily have been as exotic as it is now. But yeah, like exactly,

like the rare niche pharmaceuticals they have to find, like, you know, go find people who are dancing around toadstools and figure out

if they can give, you know, give up their secrets. And he would die so fast. He would eat nothing but meat and like immediately get murdered by an internal parasite. Yeah was gonna say can you even imagine i

understood why the afghans loved pressure cookers so much once i once once i realized like yeah when when you can't have constant refrigeration freezing supply chain stuff it's like yep put that shit in a pot under pressure and boil the fuck out of it or you're gonna die yep in 1329 he was getting older and sicker uh and his stepmother uh yolande of drew insisted that since he had no heir he should probably name one specifically john of monfort to take over when he died there's a lot of johns here unfortunately there's actually a lot almost everybody has the same fucking name in this in in this script um now john the third hated the other John, and the other John also hated him for really no good reason other than they're half-brothers. And John III hated John of Montfort's mother, his stepmom.

So John III said, fuck it, I'll give the duchy to the French king, which the nobles absolutely refused. So he named his niece Joan as his heir. Her name is also sometimes written as like Janine, but there's also like two more Janines coming up. So I'm going to go with Joan. It could be Joan or it could be Jeanne, like J-E-A-N-N-E. So it was just like female John, girl John. Yeah.

In the 1300s, you could pick from five names. Yeah. Which is funny because like Breton people have the wildest Celtic names. But I guess if you were royalty, you weren't allowed to or whatever. Back in those days, I have no idea. Maybe like when you picked your titles or something like that, or they named you like officially, you know, your name couldn't be like Briuk or something like that.

The nobles had yet to invent a sixth name. A second John has just hit the podcast. Exactly. Internecine John warfare. It is very funny because this is notionally a Christian kingdom and everyone's named John, a very Christian name, but this much fighting between your mom and stepmom and hatred and giving things away to piss off your stepmom, this is a very, very Jewish coded story. I got to be honest with you. However, power would not have gone to Joan to joan it would have gone to joan's husband charles of beloi uh a nephew of the french king philip the sixth but as he was dying john the third penned a will that then named john of monfort his heir after already telling charles that he was going to be heir so he had named two heirs

and then died uh whoops real alexander the great moment um hate it when this happens they simply don't want you to do this uh when he was when he was asked like hey you already like you already named someone else heir to your to the to the duchy like who is your heir this is getting quite confusing and his last words of the subject were a quote for god's sake leave me alone and do not trouble my spirit with such things and then died without clarifying anything to anyone meaning this might be the first time in the show's history where a single guy created his own succession crisis uh this genuinely is like you you have no choice but to click through the dialogue in a

castlevania cut scene like you want to intervene but like the game is forcing you to have this problem the war of succession so you just can't do anything to change it the the duchy of britney's version of final fantasy 7 now most of the upper nobility supported charles of beloi uh so john of monfort would have to move quickly to secure his claim if he was going to succeed in taking it. So he wrangled together a whole bunch of mercenaries and began to take over regional capitals. Now, this is mostly bloodless at this point because Charles hadn't really organized a defense yet. But most importantly, during this point, he secured the duchy's entire treasury while he was at it.

John III died in April, and by May, John of Montfort had managed to secure enough power and money that an assembly of townspeople and minor nobles recognized him as the rightful duke. Though the upper nobility mostly still supported Charles. And while this was happening, Charles was attempting to secure the military strength of France in order to help him invade Western Brittany. In a tale as old as time, when this started happening, John of Montfort turned to, who else but the English for help. And since this is the 1300s, neither the French or the English really cared why, if there was a war going on, they were getting involved. There's also one thing to bear in mind too here, which is a lot of people may not be

aware of this if they're not schooled up on this particular era of European history, which is that at this point, the English crown had a large possession of its own territory in Calais on the European mainland. So technically speaking, there were some other holdings, I think in Burgundy as well, but there were areas of France at that time, small fiefdoms that were actually controlled by the English crown. So the English involvement meddling constant warfare in France at that time, the low countries at that time, was also due to the fact that technically speaking, we conceive of England

ending at the English Channel and at the the border between scotland and the border between wales but like in those days the english crown controlled shit on the the the european continent and similarly like it's not like that ended in the middle ages you know at one point france like algeria was just part of france you know new caledonia was just part of france it's it's literally like it's closer to fucking australia than it is to to anything else and now you go to any beach in spain or portugal it's part of france it's it's literally like it's closer to fucking australia than it is to to anything else and now you go to any beach in spain or portugal it's part of england yes it sure is it sure is un bureau e chipos senora uh yeah you got a language for that you got a license for that language chippies oh my oh english do you speak it yeah i was also gonna say joe you're gonna laugh because i normally don't do this but i thought you

might find it funny is that i looked it up just make sure i understood the word that you were using and it would actually be charles of blois but saying the word blois sounds like you're trying to create a slur for french people so i am gonna just let you do blois well then i'm gonna say blois because they deserve because the french'm going to say Blois. Because the French deserve a... Charles de Blois. Charles de Blois sounds like the sex version of Charles de Gaulle. That sounds like his porn name. Just a tall, skinny Charles de Gaulle snaking into the sheets.

Smelling like cigarettes. Just absolutely cooking with Benson and Hedges. Oh, Jesus. Can you only imagine horny Charles de Gaulle? You know it happened because he's French. I mean, what kind of Frenchman wouldn't be horny? That is the thing they do. Yeah.

They cheat on their wives and then chain smoke. I don't know. That's French. I don't know. A clown falls off a unicycle. That's French culture to me. The prime minister presumes or the president presumes no one's going to notice notice him the president riding his scooter around paris to go have sex with his mistress he just thinks this is this happened this happened francois alon did this in like the 2010s

i'm not making it incredible i know they're amazing they're such an amazing country. How does it work? I don't know. So there's a possibility that the English would have sat this one out. But France and England had recently signed a truce during the larger Hundred Years War, which centered on competing claims over the Duchy of Aquitaine and the French throne itself when the king keeled over and died without a male heir. However, this new succession crisis gave the English a chance to kick the whole thing off once again, with the added bonus of the English crown getting a little bit more of Western France if they managed to win and put their guy on the throne, right? The French king himself was kind of fenced sitting the entire thing as the

Hundred Years' War had been one hell of a drain on finances and resources. But when he heard John of Montfort had the ear of the king of England, he immediately recognized Charles and Joan's claim to the Duchy. The King of England promised military aid, but it was way too late. And the French military aid to Charles was immediate and decisive, ending in John of Montfort being kicked in the teeth and eventually imprisoned after losing a couple battles. However, John still had supporters. And this is actually kind of interesting to me they just threw john of monfort in prison i kind of assume like this is the 1300s you you you defeat your opponent who is also claiming is like you cut off his head

right like you do something terrible hang drunk quarter them whatever whatever the french do to to execute people which is i assume having sex until your pelvis breaks. Yeah. Jamming a funnel down your throat and filling it with fucking grain until your liver explodes and they make it into a delicacy. The weird thing is, Joe, is that just from having read a little bit about this, is that you're not wrong except for the fact that the execution and that kind of stuff you're describing is more sort of the last resort if they don't get concessions or ransoms. But because there was so much trading back and forth between people of captured nobles, if they were just

captured soldiers, they could very easily just be executed on the spot. But when it's captured nobles, captured aristocrats, there's always going to be the opportunity to trade. Whereas if I believe there were things, for example, when they tried to take over Malta and they did not successfully trade for hostages and they just fucking broke a bunch of dudes on the wheel because they're like you know it's sort of like well uh i guess i gotta pour these bottles of wine down the drain kind of thing they're like well fuck it we're gonna kill all you guys that does in these stories happen but like there tends to be a sort of like ah this will be useful i'll throw him in like you know the cum smelling dungeon or whatever i'm sure they have it segregated no No, no, not the cum dungeon.

Not the cum dungeon. Not the one with the trees that smell really weird that bloom in May. I can't even remember what those trees are called, but they have them all over Indiana. Cum trees, yeah, exactly.

You've heard of a gum tree. Have you heard of the second worst thing? It's that time of year again. Fuck. It's the season of cum exactly now uh with montfort being thrown in prison uh he still had supporters within the duchy called montfortist um who are now being led by his wife janine uh yes both guys vying over the throne had french wives with the

same name with the same name which is why this is great yes it's like john versus john john versus john like yeah it's it's it is kind of a parody of frenchness in its own right like i said they'll eventually invent a sixth name they just haven't gotten there yet exactly um and sometimes this war is called the the war of the twoannines or Jeannines. The Montfortists weren't doing great. They kept getting stomped pretty badly by the French military and they eventually lost most of their holdings outside of the town of Brest, which allowed them to hang

on long enough to finally get English military aid, which arrived right on time, and by right on time, I mean a year late in 1342. It is very funny to look up the commanders and leaders on the wikipedia page for the war of britain succession and it's a john a joanna a john and on the other side a charles and a john and then there's one british guy sir thomas dagworth you're just like just fucking can you make it any more obvious please sir thomas dagworth of upper Dicker. Yeah, exactly.

God, I'm just imagining the insane place names that have been forgotten to history. You thought the Dicker at Upper Dicker or Shittington or Dis or any of these weird fucking places. Is Shittington a real place? No, Shittington's not. I don't think it's a real place. I'm going to choose to believe that it is. But I know there is a place that is... There are definitely weird enough place names in the United Kingdom to satiate anyone's curiosity. I wish I could be like a font of wisdom

and just fully remember them on the fly, but I don't. I try to forget this place. I'm a Shittington truther now. You're hiding it from me. Exactly. Shittington's actually a real place. Now, the english military force numbered a little over a thousand was under the command of william the earl of northampton um and uh this officially turned the entire thing into

little more than a proxy war between france and england which was diplomatically sketchy as one had just ended and this this turn of events brought the pope into it as the Catholic Church, when it wasn't starting its own wars back in the day, was kind of sort of trying to act as a go-between between Christian realms who started killing one another. The Pope needed them to go kill Muslims in the Middle East. They didn't want to waste their strength on one another. The Pope eventually did secure a temporary truce between the French and the English,

but not the actual combatants in the Breton War of Secession. Because the Pope wanted to find a way to end it for good. However, each truce was immediately torpedoed by the loyalists of the House of Law and the Montfortists, who refused to have the war end in any way that did not end with them in power. Gotcha. So basically, this was sort of like an impasse where all the diplomatic solutions seem to be getting exhausted. And it's just like, at some point, we're just going to start to have to hit each other with halberds. It's just going to happen. Well, it's like the British and the French got involved.

They're like, this kind of sucks. We want it to end. But then they kind of forgot what the whole point of the war was. They're like, we don't care if you want it to end. We're still trying to take over the duchy you fucking assholes like and i the the pope probably would have had in something of a status quo where the duchy ends up being kind of subsumed by the french and the british with no clear victory so i mean it would have been a war again at some point now eventually john of monfort died and charles of blois was captured two years after that after which he'd be held in a British prison for

nearly a fucking decade something that was almost virtually a death sentence I was gonna say can you imagine the meals he was served that's just how fucking this how gruesome they would have been it has to be some kind of like pudding made out of wheat yeah exactly it's like it was like the stuff

that they look back when they have modern day bread sauce and they're like at least this shit is good kind of like pudding made out of wheat yeah exactly it's like it was like the stuff that they look back when they have modern day bread sauce and they're like oh at least this shit is good compared to that old stuff yeah it's like just yeah exactly like like mushy bread bread and rainwater bread and drippings if you're lucky uh just what you don't want to know you don't even want to know exactly you know they're brown they have flavor the flavor is also bad exactly it's the origins of brown sauce that was this before they cleaned they church it up and made it made it presentable brown sauce is legitimate i mean like okay what they're actually talking about is houses of parliament sauce or hp sauce but they do just call it brown sauce

fuck is there a sauce named after the house of parliament that's like hey no i let me put some let me put some fucking congress on this burger it's i mean it's it's just the brand it's like a it's like a kind of a tamarind sauce it tastes it's like a tamarind vinegar sauce it's kind of like not too far off from worcester sauce but just like it's it's the consistency of ketchup and they love putting it on stuff so like on meat on like a full english like when you're in a cafe or as the Brits call it a calf and you get a full English, like the big breakfast. Budget cuts have eliminated the E in cafe. Yeah. It's like, I don't want to sound too posh.

So I just call it a calf. And I sound like I've been hitting the head really hard. But believe me, my beef with Britain, the country that I elected to move to as an adult is unending. But you'll literally be like, oh yeah, brown sauce and red sauce and it's ketchup and fucking hp sauce and it's like uh there's a part of me that's like well that that can't have just been the thing that popped up randomly there's got to be a medieval antecedent of brown sauce and that's what they were serving charles of blois the really fucked up version of it yeah it's like things coming off the wall of the cum dungeon exactly exactly that's why they stacked the cum dungeon exactly exactly that's why they

stacked the cum dungeon on top of the kitchen they needed this stuff to be efficient all right gravity fed a lot of things in the middle ages a bread was it a bread uh pudding or bread sauce that reminded me a lot of something that like i grew up really poor so my family ate some weird shit and like i just thought it was normal and i feel like that's how bread sauce is still around it's like it's something that peasants put together because like well we have water and we have bread we have bread we have water we have like a soup bone or something let's make this savory whatever like milo milo talked about it being like a disgusting sort of curio of british christmas food but like honestly anything that's savory like it's just like wet stuffing like okay fine like i can handle it that makes it sound even

worse i don't know dude i didn't grow up poor but my dad grew up thinking that fucking katusa snack bar versions of ramen were normal and so like my dad when my dad had to cook dinner it would just be like ramen with peas and hot dogs in it i thought it was pronounced ramian my entire life until i realized I'm like, no, that is how it's pronounced if you're Korean. I counter that with

I thought it was pronounced Raymond. Raymond? Yeah, because my mom always said Raymond noodles. Well, there's a place here

that was like a pop-up dark kitchen restaurant. Like it's only on delivery apps. It's not an actual restaurant. It sounds like it was something for human trafficking. Like we've trafficked

all of these cooks. Dark kitchen sounds like fucking like, like you have to cast a spell on someone like, like you get your food, but it's subtracted from your immortal soul. Um, like a kitchen you get locked in and one of the fucking saw movies. Yeah,

exactly. Exactly. And then, uh, then what is it? Liam Neeson comes in and manages to shoot everybody with a gun he's never handled before and doesn't shoot you even though in though in a real hostage situation, he absolutely would have shot you.

That always fucking annoyed me in the Taken movie. I'm like, he's never handled that gun before. There's no way he would take that shot. He just wouldn't know how that pistol was going to fire. He has a set of skills. You wouldn't understand. Exactly. I really hate it when the electrical grid is stable because then i can't fucking electrical shock torture people but no but but the point i was trying to make um

in this really cascading fucking open closed parentheses here is just that okay first of all the cum dungeon um i'm glad i'm glad 30 minutes into this episode we've already just already discovered the cum dungeon, and that is something that's never leaving the show now. It's never leaving the show. It's like the dick-sucking union. It came up organically, and now it's interwoven into the show to the point that you can't...

It's just there. It's there. You know what sucks? They come on the walls. What sucks, dude, is that honestly, I did have a point that I thought I was going to make there, but I'm trying. I'm trying to fucking remember it, and it's completely escaped me.

And I'm sure in the playback, it's going to be really annoying, but there it is. I should stop interrupting you, but we're adding more lore to this show, so sometimes I don't feel bad. That's what we're here for. So now Charles is in prison. John of Montfort is dead, and neither side has its original leader, meaning there's really no reason to carry on, right? Like it, the, the war of secession is over as both the guys who are claiming the throne are gone.

Right. Uh, but carry on. They did. Of course they did. Now. So I'm going to react in one second, but I have to say I did remember the thing I wanted to say, which is there's a British restaurant, the Dark Kitchen restaurant. It's called Slammin' Ramen, which doesn't make any sense why it would seem this kind

of punchy thing to say. And it's like, oh, it's because the Brits would say ramen. So literally they call it Slammin' Ramen, which just sounds like sex. Yeah. Like that sounds like dogging. Would you like some noodles with your dogging? But anyway, to bring it back to the point, because I totally forgot what I wanted to say, but now I... So basically at this point, the cause for the war, everyone's dead.

Or in prison, yeah. Or in prison. But they're going to keep at it. Yep. They just kept on keeping on and in the in the initial opening combat of the war the uh when the appearance of the french and the english the war had devolved into a mostly small-scale raiding between the two sides of loyalists neither side had the the power to end the war and the especially without the the power of the uh the french and the british and they didn't really

care uh they didn't really feel like pouring manpower into the battlefield in order to end it. They're also kind of sort of sticking to the truce they made with the Pope. And they didn't much care about the war anymore, mostly staying out of it directly. The French also were kind of convinced to stay out of it after they got stomped in the battlefield once or twice. Like, all right, we had our initial victories this is actually quite hard let's all get on our scooter and go to our mistress's house

that's exactly like they had the whatever the fucking 14th century equivalent of a scooter was a jaunty little bit of transit maybe it was like a like a pony or a small horse or something like i don't know because like like a cart pulled by a peasant who you could trust to look the other way when you were hitting it like that's just what

they had to go find their mistresses go get my human cart i need to go see my mistress uh this led to a pretty much complete stalemate on both sides of the war each party of the war was just kind of staring at one another from areas of the control without anyone actually being able to conquer anything. And, uh, Pope innocent, the sixth encouraging that this should continue because it's kind of a piece.

Um, enter John D. Oh, man. Yay. Oh, I don't know. Uh,

give me a second here and let's see if I can find the people on you. Oh, man. No, I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Oh, great.

Yeah. You're doing, you're doing amazing. Um, doing great over here. Oh, great. Yeah, you're doing amazing. Hang on one second. Jean de Beaumont. Beaumont. Okay, Jean de Beaumont. We're back. We had to take a slight break so he could teach me how to say a French word.

Now, he was a Boulogne loyalist and captain of a garrison, which was very near the Montfortis garrison, captained by Sir Robert Bamboro. Seemingly out of boredom, and for no other reason that we're aware of, Jean penned a challenge to Robert, which reportedly said, and bear with me, this is like ye olde English, quote, to our best to be thanks to adjust our differences in this way, by mortal combat in the field on some appointed day yeah it rhymes it's weird 30 against 30 and you list together we will fight armed at all points and on our steeds in heaven defend the right willing to bet this is more of something someone wrote later

as i highly doubt this guy wrote him a poem um this translation came out years after the fact so it's probably not probably not a real thing um yeah and i will also say that in a lot of these situations like i found when these documents got translated like particularly in the really kind of bombastic narrative histories that would be published in you know the centuries following before the modern era and then in the early modern era they always tried to make it rhyme and seem more like versified than it might have been. And also, let's just bear in mind too, they were not speaking modern French when this was taking place. No, of course not.

The language they spoke was very, very different. I mean, it's like you can read it in the sense that you can recognize some words. But having studied this period as part of my degree in French literature, everything you read, even for native French speakers, has to be bilingual because a native French reader, unless they had learned the same way that you could learning middle English and that kind of transitional between old English and middle English, you wouldn't recognize that unless you'd been trained and educated to learn it, to understand it.

French people can't just pick up a thing of like like i have books of like poems from the 12 and 1300s in french they're in what is effectively a different language yeah it's just yeah and that dimension this makes them look much more romantic because they're knights and yes i would have to make them look good you got the knights have to have their hype man and i wanted to say one of the thing too which is that like if you look up stuff about the Combat des Tres, like the Combat of 30, you'll find a lot of stuff about it, kind of romanticizing it from the middle 19th century.

Drawings, paintings, kind of like things in stories, kind of legends and things along those lines. And so the one thing that I feel like is worth bearing in mind with this is that you can find stuff you know on wikipedia and articles elsewhere talking about and showing illustrations that are clearly from the medieval period like sort of contemporaneous but then you'll also find a lot of really heavily romanticized stuff in the kind of like french second empire period which if you know the dumbest version of the french empire yeah the the second like the most the most incompetent and weird and

very like like um kind of overly sappy nostalgic kind of romanticized versions of french history oh yeah i mean that whole thing was said napoleon the third no he was going by napoleon the third right it was napoleon the third he took over in the coup in i think 1851 um after the revolution of 1848 and basically ran france into the ground and then got captured at the battle of sedan yeah yeah just at sedan was was run basically completely ate shit uh in the franco-prussian war and that led to the collapse of the regime someday maybe we can do a series we're gonna do in that series in the franco-prussian war i am obsessed with the franco-prussian war and the bellapak and like the weird guys of that era so like if you ever want me on to talk about insane french history dude i'm all about it i'm about to move to a french-speaking country so i'll really

be fucking drowning in this shit now uh regardless of what this thing actually said ben borough immediately agreed probably because he was bored as hell too now there is a second argument here that what was the real cause of this duel to the death as you know boredom is one thing that's often cited and it seems to be what is quite honestly the most realistic excuse another thing is that the two captains personally hated one another like more than just because they're on opposite sides of the war they like hated each other on a personal level one reason is that beaumanoir and his men acted like bandits towards the local population and they appealed to bamboro for help to stop them however that doesn't make a ton of sense as one of the few details that is established without much of a doubt is beaumanoir

challenged bamboro not the other way around another theory is way back in the day bamboro had fucked beaumanoir's wife uh the animating impulse of a lot of medieval conflicts because they're just and remember these guys are both like from the they're nobles from the duchy like they're probably vaguely related um and that's there's a healthy rumor going around that dude had clapped homie's wife that is you know they made eyes at each other at the feast of some saint no one knows about anymore yeah every third day was a feast day for nobles for some saint you know the loot was just rocking the unfiltered wine really got to their heads she made some mistakes you know but he never got over it and of course that is the reason i would like to believe uh

but i i think it truly was just probably boredom i mean these guys are mostly knights of course they have people who aren't knights in their in their units and whatever in their armies uh but they were bored and And knights were soldiers. And even back then, as we've proven time and time again, just like seeing Romans carve dicks on the walls that they're still discovering all over the world, soldiers are always soldiers. Just like we talked about already.

You can't leave soldiers sitting around for too long or they're going to do dumb shit like set up a game of Mortal Kombat out in a field. Yeah, I mean, I think with with knights too you have to bear in mind is that knights have been basically trained in both courtly manners and then also in combat basically from from the age of seven onwards and they'd been basically doing field training more or less constantly always being on their horses always riding always training since about the age of 14 and then since once becoming confirmed as being knighted, which typically would happen around the early 20s, being not on campaign was a very, very uncomfortable place for them to be, both financially and in the sense of... I don't know. It's hard to communicate sensibilities from that far back from such a different culture.

But the best way I could describe it from the things that i've read and understood about this is that not being on campaign not being in combat not being out doing your job as a knight was sort of like i don't know like somewhere between forgetting to put your pants on when you walk outside or fucking being a professional athlete and just like not playing in the season even though you're fit like being on the night version of like the ir like it sucks a healthy scratch from night from knighthood they they genuinely were like a combination of like all these things we can derive in really cliched ways like special operators but also professional athletes like there's so much about them but like the most fundamental thing

is that like until their bodies fully gave out or they died they were just doing campaigns yeah they were off fighting that was their job standing around at a feast for the third time that day exactly yeah exactly just sitting my ass in a castle or like or or or catching the dove that their rival had sent over to their wife with a little piece of fucking neckerchief on it and just ripping its head off. Now, whatever the reason, the two sides would agree on some particulars, namely how many people would be involved. They cut a deal that both sides would bring 30 of their best knights and squires, though the vast majority on both sides would be squires and men-at-arms rather than knights. Not an important distinction in the moment.

There would be no reinforcements no matter what happened on the field and the two sides would have to sit and fuck each other up until the contest came to a decisive conclusion they even agreed on uniforms one side to be wearing tunics with a red cross and the others would be wearing with a black cross also since they are all knights i guess the fight would have to be done under the rules of chivalry. Now, it doesn't say exactly what those rules are, and the codes of chivalry were, kind of depends, they varied somewhat

depending on where you were, who your lord was, when exactly you were claiming to follow the rules as they change with time, and there wasn't really a universal code that we would think of, and for what it's worth, the knight's code of chivalry is described in the song of roland as one to fear god to maintain his church to serve your lord liege in valor and faith to protect the weak and the defenseless to give

sucker to widows and children important word you you gotta suck off the widows and orphans. Jesus Christ. I'm so sorry. To refrain from the wanton giving of offense, to live by honor and for glory, to despise reward, to fight for the welfare of all, to obey those placed in authority, to guard the honor of fellow knights, askew unfairness meanness and deceit to keep faith at all times speak the truth to persevere at the end of any enterprise that has begun to respect the honor of women and never refuse a challenge from an equal and never turn your back on your foe now the song of roland was written possibly 300 years before all this so their rules may have been different i didn't see anything in there about you know wearing the right uniform to your murder game they also could have come up with some god-ordained rule

of shotgun or takesies-backsies at this point i really have no idea it was noted that both sides agreed there'd be no quote deceit or trick. They would simply line up in front of one another and commence the killing. Like, you can't hide the archers in the woods. You can't, I don't know, hide a dude around a tree and sneak him into the battle or something. No extra men. They finally agreed on the location for their organized violence, a specific tree that lay in the midpoint between their two towns that is the Midway Oak. They then picked their weapons. They agreed

upon melee weapons only because obviously bows are for cowards or whatever. Swords, daggers, axes, and spears. The one guy named Thomas Belafort who is known for being looking vaguely like the Hound from Game ofones and armed himself

with a 25 pound goddamn sledgehammer yes i mean i don't want to get hit by that but uh i was getting your like i don't care how much like armor you put on when some dude brains you with a 25 pound warhammer you're you're you're taking the the forever sleep you know that's that's the thing right you said it before i did warhammer but like yeah roger like it's like it's not just a claymore or a huge big sword like a comically oversized sword like you know scimitar like fucking that basically might as well be the buster sword from final fantasy 7 it's it's like no the guy shows up to battle with a hammer like that's that's trending trending towards orc shit that's trending towards like like fucking

you know like like like like the dark lord comes down and plays you know place the forbidden note that makes everyone's head explode like it sounds like something out of fantasy that's what makes it so funny to me is that it's so the premise is over the top to begin with but then you have these details

uh you know it's like meters at the halfway oak and just fucking getting slaughtered with hammers it's nuts it's insane just like everybody's like oh i see everybody brought their swords that's cool oh i see tom brought the fucking warhammer again like this guy has to be a fucking monster like he's described as big for the day but in order to just swing a 25 pound sledgehammer like while wearing armor for a prolonged period of time and running around and chasing men down and murdering them with it like this dude had to be like fucking lebron james of murdering guys with a hammer you know like yeah

i mean it's safe to assume these guys were yoked as hell like knights typically trained with weapons that were in excess of the normal weight so that their actual combat weapons would seem light. They would fatigue more slowly, slower. I can't speak English. And so these guys were hench. These guys were huge. And this guy in particular, exactly, was LeBron Jamesing it with the um, with, you know, the, the, the, the, the John Henry pile driver hammer. We've talked a bit before about how the past is a pretty terrible place to live, especially in the middle of a 1300s war zone. You're bored as hell. You're hungry. You've probably never taken a solid shit in your life and your closest friends are your countless parasites.

I've had more Mountain Dew code red in my entire, in just my life so far than you've ever had it in your entire existence. You know, like just if, if you show them like microwave popcorn, they would absolutely have a stroke. Yeah, exactly.

So in the grand scheme of things, well, I'm going to say popcorn. They'd be like, what is this heathen grain? They've never seen corn before. Corn doesn't exist to them. I can,

I can only eat things that give me ergot poisoning as God intended if you don't like it go back to your own time at the same time the heathen saracen believes we shouldn't all die of rickets but you know what i've read the one true gospel yes my child was born with his legs bending the other way but you know what i prayed to god this is exactly exactly you know what i know for a fact that there's a dude who got a piece of the one true cross he only guy who's got this i know this for a fact too and he's gonna touch my child on its fucked up knees and it'll cure him that's how it works nobody will call call my child ostrich boy anymore exactly so exactly nobody should be that surprised when i tell you that when word got out about this upcoming dual night fight i don't know what to call this uh night fight fight night in brittany

yeah it's exactly this is this is the the this is the ufc of its day this is the octagon of its day you know what i mean in case you didn't know you can watch watch UFC-style guys fighting in full plate armor. Of course, it's Russian on YouTube. I think it's called night fighting. And it is a CTE machine. These guys are taking full-bore sword swings to the fucking head and just getting knocked clean the fuck out. Getting connected to God's Wi-fi with a like a bastard sword wearing full plate armor in like 2022 you know this is why they had to constantly recite you know the

chanson de roland or tristan is uh or like la prise d'orange and like the same stories they all knew is that like if you didn't continually recite the same stories in like ballads and songs that everyone knew like you these guys wouldn't retain any new information because they're just like they are so concussed that like you can count the non concussed moments of their lives as if it was like the special events like it's literally just like

I spend my day getting my bell rung and then I'm also the only liquid I consume is alcoholic everybody's had their brain turned to fucking paste by old tom's giant hammer so when word got out about this night fight it spread quickly people from every nearby town and village emptied out and streamed over to the area where the battle was supposed to take place so they could watch stands opened up people sold food alcohol and they made bets on who would win the beaumanoir

team was favored by the bookies and soon uh remember like there were two to be a death match turned into a festival meshed with a spectator sport they even had like a guy who would call out who the knights were so they effectively had an announcer like they like if you went to like a jousting or like games or something where they had an announcer they did that but in the middle of a war i'm just imagining someone playing jock jams on the harp now on march 26 1351 the two sides of 30 apiece showed up and according to eyewitnesses the two sides met in the middle, exchanged a friendly greeting with pleasantries, before once again separating themselves into opposite sides of the field. Though again, this is up for debate.

There's a specific English and a specific French epic poem that are main sources on this event. The English poem makes both sides seem as nightly and chivalric as possible while the french poem makes the english look like shit talking assholes uh which i think both of those things could probably be true um according to the poem the battle of the 30 english and the 30 bretons bamboro rode up and immediately began snipping at beaumanoir for being late being a coward and not wanting to fight i also assume in what was some cutting old-timey trash talk he said quote where art thou beaumanoir have at thee by default hast thou been here full speedily discomforted thou must been i don't even know

what the fuck that means yeah i mean exactly i was also thinking to myself like in a way your description of this makes me realize that A Knight's Tale is actually a documentary. Them using fucking Bachman Turner Overdrive and David Bowie and ACDC and a thing about medieval jousting or whatever, they're not that far off the mark. In a way, that

makes it more interesting than pretending that it was this staid, very dry, weepy shit. No, this was both entertainment and also insanely violent. pretending that it like like like that this is the stayed you know very like dry kind of like weepy shit like no this was entertained both entertainment and also like insanely violent yeah and it's the world was a horrible violent place i think we've talked about this on the show before we're like death wasn't really that serious nobody cared everyone died left and right so it's like oh yeah i went down to the market to buy some apples i saw there was a death match i saw a huge fucking geezer with a hammer mash a guy into paste and then i came home yeah

and i fucking this boar meat is the only protein we're gonna have for the next 30 days yeah so you guys like tree bark yeah so uh when nobody was looking i cut a piece off the dead guy and now we're having a bibimbap so that's fun so yeah once again bibimbap with like what you've consumed a thousand percent more bibimbap than the average medieval peasant because they didn't have hot peppers and i don't know if they had rice that far north probably not i genuinely i don't think they did yeah yeah. They just slurped up fucking gruel. And if you're a noble or something, you'd slurp up gruel

and then eat horribly diseased meat, which would kill you. Yeah, exactly. And just eat the most disgusting things on earth, like, I don't know, like stargaze pie or something. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, sort of whatever. That at least makes sense.

You know, savory pie with fish sticking out of it. You don't want to waste anything. But when it's like peacock, we roast peacock slathered in apricots. That sounds like shit. Could you please pass the rat asshole stuff with ferrets? Yeah, exactly. It's like, there's an extent to which we have to delineate between what is food you eat to survive versus food that you want to eat. it's just sort of like you know i don't really want to live in the middle ages any more than i want when you look at like roman menus and it's the exact same thing it's like yeah it's like it's like food picked because it's exotic stuff with more exotic things you're like that sounds

like that sounds like you took your grandma's potpourri and stuffed it in roadkill and ate it. It's miserable. Now, to this slight, Beaumanoir responded, quote, we hear you well, me and my company. If it pleases the king of glory and St. Mary and the good St. Eves, Ives, in whom we have great faith, throw the dice, don't hold back. The luck will fall on you and your life will be short. I mean mean this is kind of badass let's be honest it kind of sounds like anime like anime dialogue but also it's kind of badass it's the medieval version of some guy saying all your base are belong to us or saying

that the power of friendship will be able to defeat god um exactly it's medieval care bear stare to be honest with you for the many of your fans listening, All Your Base or Belong to Us might as well be something from the 14th century. That's probably true. I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I forget that I'm in my mid-30s and I am old now. Yeah. I had an All Your Base or Belong to Us t-shirt in high school and I thought it was really cool. It was in the year 2000.

Nate, I am 100% convinced that you are the only person who thought that you were cool in that situation. People wanted to buy them. My brother made them with a screen printer and people wanted to buy them. They asked me where I bought when I was like, you can't buy this. My brother got he made it. My cool brother, not cool at all. Yeah, man, like that was 20, almost 23 years ago.

So, you know, God, ancient history, ancient. It's even worse than ancient history. It's ancient internet history and like we are the like the the generation that kind of grew up with the internet so we've we have the most cursed knowledge of internet history and early early shit yeah no we just you can't find anywhere like at least as regards the romans or medieval knights killing each other in a field like someone carved a dick into the the the oak of midway or whatever the hell the the halfway oak la la chande de mi voix but like but like there isn't any trace of this stuff left like you know the stuff wasn't backed up it wasn't archived the devices have

failed like there is no centralized storage of it it's just like i remember seeing dumb fucking like web comics where they just taken very bad scans of cartoons and done MS Paint over them to create a new story or bad digital photos of action figurines to make a comic book story. I could Google any of the lines I remember from this very stupid story I used to follow on someone's Angel Fire page. Nothing would come up. Literally, in a way, we're like human repositories of information.

No one gives a fuck about. We are the kid from the giver. We are the kid from the giver for ancient memes. Exactly. And you know, they're all gone now. All of those dick jokes gone like tears in the rain. Exactly.

Like leisure town might still be around, but no one can remember. No one will understand how funny it was. You know, no one will remember. I don't even think jerk city is around anymore for it is. Don't go look at jerk city. It sucks.

It's probably age really bad. It's really homophobic. Everything that the internet was. Yeah. Yeah. Now, honestly, I believe the second version of the shit talking more.

These guys have been at war for years. The nights are all seasoned violent psychopaths not to mention the story of them hating each other's guts and possibly fucking one another's wives and i refuse to believe that these guys didn't trash talk with the best of them i mean think about like you're not gonna if you're a knight you're not killing your opponent in one swing it's gonna be virtually impossible unless you're the huge hoss of the fucking hammer but uh like you're gonna be chirping at one another as you take hacks at like your head or whatever like fuck you slap like king oh concussion fuck you i

think i think that you and i having lived in different cultures realize that there's certain things like may seem improbable to us but then you go to another you go to a country like armenia where like people don't really swear unless it's literally a really big deal. I've been to a place like Japan where literally speaking, you don't swear, you just speak gruffly and that's how you communicate that you're swearing and being rude. It's possible that they did speak in this kind of style and register because that's just how people talked back then. I don't know. And I say this trying to be as open-minded and not hateful as possible. We also have to remember that this is

being, in many cases, interpreted to us through the writings of the most closet gay Catholics of the 19th century. And so there is a degree to which we may be getting the overly flowery romanticized version. But then again, that might be just how they talked. I don't know. Yeah, I have no idea. And to make sure that this whole death match went according to plan, they hired referees. The two captains agreed to hire a couple of guys who are not at least outwardly loyal to either side. So they had impartial refs.

The refs were put in charge of when the battle started, when they were going to take breaks, because they had agreed they'd have a refreshment break halfway through. So they had a halftime. And then the refs were also there to make sure everybody followed the rules. I'm not really sure how some refs were going to control nights. Imagine, I don't know, Tom the Orc kicks some guy in the balls or whatever, and that's against the rules.

Are you going to be the guy that's like, yellow card, you can't do that. Or say, red card. While you were allowed to kill that man, you were not allowed to say he had a tiny dick and balls. That's right, yeah. Rules of chivalry. Just imagine a tiny, underfed medieval peasant

throwing a red card at a guy who's smashing another man's head in with a war hammer and sending him off the field yeah exactly he's just managed he's just cloven someone in twain with an axe that was built like it was a novelty oversized prop and the guy comes out and says you made a joke that you weren't going to provide succor to his orphans yellow card get out oh man i had a yellow card during the last death match yeah exactly it's like francois the blade gets a corner kick once everyone was ready the ref signaled for the fighting to start and the two sides went running at one another the death game was officially on now night fighting nights fighting whatever uh was really unlike any other kind of combat uh for most of time they're really

heavily armored. So you just smashed into each other, swords bouncing off one another. You really want to knock someone down and then like shove a dagger into like a slit of their armor or their eye holes. You got to catch a blade in the eye hole.

I'm flashing back to your story or your episode about the Battle of Agincourt. And that's the similar thing is that these guys were so weighed down with armor, like for the style of combat where you rode into battle on horseback and then got off. You either clashed on horseback and knocked each other over, or you got off and you fought on foot. They were so ill-equipped for both the weather, for the mud,

and then for the fact that they were going to have to defend against longbows they just basically a lot of them like you told in your story either crushed and asphyxiated each other climbing over each other or drowned in the mud because their armor weighed them down yeah like as you said this was a this was definitely like a fucking american ninja warrior style combat except it was real and that's in a way like it's hard to not be impressed by the kind of the drama of it but also it's to my eyes in a way like it's hard to not be impressed by the kind of the drama of it but also it's to my eyes it's it's it's hard to not find it really funny yeah of course it's hilarious because like knights could actually move quite well uh you can see videos of people uh on youtube or they're wearing full recreate like authentic recreations of of

knight armor and they're like can run on treadmills and like jump up and down, do pushups or whatever. So like, but it's still really fucking heavy. Um, I mean the way it is distributed, whatever, but like,

you know, kind of like an Asian core, it doesn't really matter if like, Oh no, my army of Knights is defeated by some wet dirt, you know, like, and,

and they're just smashing into each other. It has, I mean, it, it, you can see videos of it, like especially the night fight MMA shit, but it looks hilarious.

Like something that blew my mind as a kid learning about this, because living in Europe as a kid and seeing this stuff in museums and things like that is that, you know, they would wear, typically they would wear either a leather, like leather suit underneath

or leather suit and then a chain mail suit and then individual plates. So every single piece of that armor is a strapped on plate with leather buckles and metal buckles and leather straps. So imagine wearing the bite suit from when they train police dogs and then you put a football uniform on top of it, but it's made out of metal. And then you have to go and kill people with huge swords like it is both an incredible feat of athletic prowess and insanely funny yeah i honestly i'm curious how some of these guys like looked because like like you said they're a mix between soldier and professional

fucking athlete and as much as like the u.s army attempts to say that like our soldiers are athletes like they're really not uh it doesn't really take that much skill to walk in a circle until some rando shoots at you trust me i could tell uh yeah but like you carry a lot of heavy shit on you but also like you know you have you have access to more pizza hot pockets in the first strike ration than any medieval knight in the hundred years war so there's a degree to which like the stakes are different they they they had much more austere conditions yeah and these guys have to be able to do this eating like absolute dog shit diet and drinking mostly booze because water is not clean. Water will kill you.

Yeah. The spicy water will make you shit out your insides until you die. Now this is getting knocked over and stabbed or crushed is normally how nights died. And that is how the Frenchman went down early, described as being taken off his feet and having his head crushed in by our good old friend Tom. Not Tom the producer, though we don't know.

He might be some kind of Highlander. I was going to say, they brought him over from Ireland to swing a hammer. Now, most importantly, it was slow. And I don't mean that because knights couldn't move fast. Of course they could. They can probably move faster than I know i know that i originally thought they could but so my honey no thomas oh my hammer on your fucking head now uh wearing armor like that like the layers of armor

carrying a heavy sword spear or comically oversized hammer that I can't get over. Axe, halberd, hatchet, whatever. Yeah. And the heat of spring for that long, you get tired. So you have to pace yourself so they could go longer, not trip up, get themselves killed. You know, and also they're rapid. Those suits are rapidly filling with sweat, piss and shit because they just let loose on themselves. I was going to say, they just fucking exploded. They just let the on themselves you say they just they just fucking

exploded they just they just let let let the dookie out you know that's all you can do in six hours of combat i mean marathon runners do it now so why wouldn't medieval knights you know and they then medieval medieval jordan peterson hadn't gone on a benzo binge from fucking toe stools and invented medieval gatorade so they didn't understand the concept of electrolytes come at you now uh after several hours the refs finally called for a halftime. The current score, because that's what I'm going to call it, was Beaumanoir had suffered four dead and Benboro two. Though pretty much everyone was wounded in one way or another at this point. There's no word as to what the halftime show was.

I assume burning some religious minority alive in the middle of the field. Iftime no i really don't know if there was a jewish community in britney at that time i mean like there was they probably made sure it wasn't there for very long yeah exactly i mean i was thinking about like my mom my mom's family the jewish side is from norfolk and like william of norwich and the fucking original blood libel is like from there like like britain was world beating pioneers in terms of doing fucking pogroms in the 11th century so yeah it's just how it was now the halftime was quite short lasting just long enough for everybody to bind their wounds the best they could with some bandage that would absolutely give them an infection they also pounded some wine to stave off thirst because

like we said water will kill you and uh you know obviously getting drunk makes lining up and braining the guy across from you a little bit easier to handle something about you know doing blood sport in front of a hooting crowd of spectators might be stressful when they go in for round two after what made me think about this is like if I one time

actually bit into a fork and it was like created this horrible sound painful feeling that like any kind of scraping metal reminds me of but imagine if your entire professional life literally from age seven was clanging metal on metal like you could scrape your nail on a chalkboard if knights knew what the fuck a chalkboard was and none of them would be bothered they'd be like am i amstey supposed to be disturbed by this because like they just must have such a high tolerance for like horrible grating metal on metal noises that's all they ever did i also think that their senses are all

dulled from constantly being mashed in the head it's like exactly it's like hanging out with mike tyson he's not entirely there you know exactly yeah yeah we were led to victory by by our chivalric lord, Christopher of Benoit. Fuck. The name even works. Oh my God. I think I told this story before on the show. It was like a question from the Legion about what is someone that's been canceled or something that shocked you.

And obviously, Chris Benoit was... I guess he got the ultimate canceling in his own hands but yeah i mean it's a horrible story yeah when that happened i was very i was i wasn't very young i was much younger obviously i think i was 16 or something and uh i had stopped watching professional wrestling quite a few years before but one of the things that i did get was a chris benoit and wash shirt fuck and then that happened and i was like oh my god i still like i still have this shirt and uh my brother was like i'm gonna wear it to school and then he was told to go home i mean i like it's a funny joke because of the cte but it's also really sad because it's like that man's brain like that man committed a murder suicide and his brain was mush his brain was

literal like oh yeah fucking he had like all he had effectively at alzheimer's win the golden spurtle for best fucking oatmeal except it's in your brain like it's horrible it's absolutely horrible but like flying head butts and steroids are bad for you kids also taking unprotected chair shots to the head but then i think about this shit i'm like these guys like the the real fucking heavy hitters the real like you know champion warriors in terms of being like knightly lords and whatnot whatever i'm mixing up terms here would have probably been in you know from their late 20s until their early 40s and so those guys will have fucking experienced so much head trauma and like you said just like taking drowning your head trauma and weak wine and alcohol

constantly yeah it's healthy it's fine you you gotta imagine that they they were not doing so good on the fucking like if their brains could survive to be scanned by ct scanners in the modern day they would look horrific. I can imagine they'd have very healthy and normal home lives with their wives and children. Yeah, exactly. After the break, Ben Borossi began winning, killing two more of the

other team and capturing a few others because like we said, taking hostages is a very normal part of war back then and they're still actually trying to capture one another in the middle of a death match. I assume this worked like dodgeball rules rules when like you get taken out and then someone catches a ball and you can come back in but like if you knows if you run over and grab one of them like you get one of your guys back or something i don't know yeah exactly well you have all these guys with these badass sounding names and then you have the peasant referee named

like john testicle or something like that he's the one who has to give you the ruler. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like Alan pre-come. He's the person that my dad built the dungeon. I mean, that is very funny.

They did. They just didn't have surnamed like last names back then. Like people just have my surname, uh, roots like literally just like meant butcher because back in the day, that's how Armenians got their name. Unless were nobility. Your last name was your job. I don't know what what that would be it's it's a french name but they were french protestants um but i really couldn't tell you but i'm sure it was just like a job you did like it was like like like a bta was the guy who like scraped this shit

out of fucking knight suits of armor after after you know cheval combat you need to have your uh suit of armor hosed out from shit just like another good day at the shit hosing factory. Your critical mistake here is you're giving him Baz British English accent, whereas Fred's just like, Monsieur, it is time to glean the shit out of your armor. That's 100% how they talk. That's my ancestors. And then my Jewish ancestors on the British side are like,

Oi, mate, I think it's going to be a progrom again. Oh, shit. God. At least there's no fucking Cossacks. Oh, God. I'm just being honest with you. Benboro was doing so well. He was riding around on horseback, which was allowed, by the way.

Shit-talking Beaumanoir's team pointing at the pile of dead bodies, and I assume chanting scoreboard over and over again uh but he was he really was laughing and pointing about how many dead other people had which i would argue is a violation of like honoring other knights but you know whatever i'm not john shitshielder the referee exactly and also once again i point to the argument that so much of this stuff while valid and well true in statements and from historical documents is also being interpreted by the world's closet gay catholics from the 19th century so they may have churched up a little bit about like the

oh i'm absolutely sure they did um and beaumanoir had been badly wounded at this point uh he was sidelined for the rest of the fight he was so badly wounded that he had his armor stripped off and he was asking another night for water to which the night responded quote drink your blood beaumanoir your thirst will pass

which has to be a the most incorrect thing on earth but be the most metal fucking thing I've ever heard yeah that's so badass like that's the thing right is it like we remember the

old self suck we remember the courtly the courtly? Is that like, we remember the- Giving himself the old self-suck. We remember the courtly, the courtly love poems about like, you know, the knight protected this fucking songbird as a symbol of the love for his, you know, I can't remember the term

that they would basically use, but like for his maiden or whatever, you know, like who actually was married to King Mark who decided to cut her in half with an ax later because he was jealous.

But like, in truth, the person who was most remembered was not the person professing courtly love and you know the correct way but like a guy who did such a badass job swinging a sword cutting a dude in half down the top like he literally cut his dick perfectly in half they're like that guy is amazing that's who they're gonna remember yeah like you know that's the lebron james of medieval combat is guy who literally cut a dude's dick in half but like with one fell swoop hot dog not hamburger exactly exactly see we all in a way i know that that's actually had the level they were operating on while bamboro was riding around and shit talking uh one of the squires from the other team charged at him and jammed a spear directly through the eye hole of

his helmet and out the back of his head killing him and he was like he died so fast that his body was still like locked onto the saddle so the horse just ran off into the distance carrying his body away with a spear cartoonishly lodged in his head oh man

after that his sides his head closed ranks not wanting to quit which admittedly was part of the rules that they weren't allowed to. And they weren't allowed to withdraw from battle, you know, turning your back on your enemy. Then another squire appeared, jumping on a horse and charged right at Ben Borough's side again, crashing through their line and breaking them apart. And this is something of a breach of the rules because your guys on horseback had to be designated as like, that's their position. They're the horse guy. And he just designated as like, that's their position. They're the horse guy.

And he just jumped on a horse that was hanging out. But nobody seemed to care. His charge floored seven men, trampling them under their horse so badly they're unable to get back up. Now suddenly outnumbered, the rest of them decide that, guys, this might be the dumbest fucking thing we've ever done on earth and surrendered in order to end it all. And Team Beaumanoir officially merged the victors so what did they win absolutely nothing whatsoever um the combat of the 30 had no effect on the greater war and that was never the point in the first place i guess

it could have very well been a death match driven by a bunch of bored fancy lad knights or it could have been a matter of honor or a dude fucking another guy's wife either way it was completely and totally pointless and the only thing that changed at the end of the day was 11 people were dead now um the war went on for more than a decade after this finally ending in 1364 when uh charles of blah blah uh blue ah was released from prison and killed in battle against john the fourth son of john john of montfort and uh then the montfort claim of the duchy was uh was recognized so all this is for nothing and knights are kind of dumb uh but they are very funny um so that is the, the combat of the 30. Um, so Nate, we have a segment on the show called questions from the Legion. If you would like to ask us a question from the Legion,

donate to the show. You can ask me on our discord server or Patreon is normally the two best ways to ask. And then we'll answer it. This is, what is your death row meal? What is my death row meal? Yeah. Oh, man. That's a really good question. You know, to be honest with you, I would say I've got a really soft spot for Korean food in general,

having lived there for a while. And good Korean food is kind of hard to come by outside of... There's some places where you can get really good stuff, but you can't get that sort of... The ubiquity of the ingredients and people who know how to do it, how to prepare it outside of Korea, it's just much harder. I would

say, to be honest with you, my death row meal is probably going to be a just huge blowout of Korean food. I want someone to make samgyeopsal for me, the barbecued pork belly, which I realize is treif. I realize it's fucking not kosher,

but I don't care. Cha-jung-myeon, which is technically Chinese, but like it's really good the way the Koreans make it. It's like the black bean sauce on noodles and bibimbap, like an actual real bibimbap with uh with bulgogi in it like and just like unlike the dude from old boy as many mandu as i can fucking fit in my mouth because mandu are amazing i think that uh i don't even you know

if i'm gonna die then fuck it give me some give me the goddamn the soju chami soil that's the the fucking soju with the little frog on it that gives you the worst hangover of your life like if i'm gonna die i don't care get me on so soju drunk is a great way to be soju hungover is about the worst way to be yeah you're gonna die anyway you might as well like it's that dying isn't gonna feel any worse if you're hungover exactly so i think i think for me it would be that kind of like koreanorgasbord. I just have such a soft spot for it. And it's so hard to get stuff that, unless you're there, that is as good as... And if for some reason my execution fails and I'm hungover, give me naengmyeon, the cold beef noodle soup hangover meal.

Then I'm living a new life. I'm not sure what I would pick, quite honestly. I really don't know. If I'm going to go back and... Like a disgusting meal that just hits me right where it's supposed to, you feel gross afterwards, but you don't really have to worry

about the afterwards because you're about to get fucking executed. I am going to pick something really, really gross, and that is a stuffed crust pizza from I think it was Pizza Hut. Yeah, it was pizza pizza yeah it was pizza it's just like horrible greasy cheese that isn't probably actually cheese and it feels like you just

bagged your heart yeah yeah the cheese tasted like the cheese sticks like the fucking cheese sticks you would pull off and strip so once you get in like school lunches go sticks yeah bosco it was like it was like a it was like a crust full of bosco sticks of that kind of processed cheese yeah they have to spell it with like a z because legally they can't call it cheese or something yeah exactly like like that far down given american food standards um it's so greasy and disgusting like the night and i'm lactose intolerant as well so like the next day when they go to execute me i'm shitting on them i'm shitting everywhere exactly yeah clearly they got to put you in the electric electric chair and it just diarrhea explosion like a baby just

shoots up my back all the way up your back like it's they have they have to hire like me fucking in modern form from my ancestral you know my ancestral guild trade of shit cleaning out of armor uh to go clean the shit out of the cap from the electric chair they put on your head the the pierpont family in england does all the executions yeah i'm glad they've got all the shit i'm glad they've got a bertie here who can fucking do this for us it turns out that's what your your job is being really good at cleaning shit out of things yeah man i mean um yeah i'm also not so great with lactose myself uh not that my my any any any trace ethnicity problems you know from that

um but uh oh that's so i thought you were gonna say something even more midwest like a johnny marzetti or something like that i don't even know what that is i think francis told me about it when like sent me a picture it just looks like some kind of cursed casserole yeah we used to have it in school it was like a it was like a like a hamburger helper pasta casserole thing but it's just called johnny marzetti for some reason i've never heard of it anywhere outside the midwest if there's one thing i will never eat again is a hamburger helper and it's because like you could buy a box of hamburger helper for in feet a family of four for what like six dollars something like that so we ate that for like lunch and dinner

every day for so long and my mom would be like oh i i made it special and by that she's like i put like american slices on top oh god i'll never touch it that's like my my opposite death row meal i'll go to death row before i eat uh that so meanwhile meanwhile there's a dude from the fucking ICP fandom, you know, hardcore juggalo who's canceling their Patreon right now because you said that. He has like the hamburger helper glove, like tattooed on his calf. That glove has seen some shit. Yeah, exactly. Nate, thank you so much for coming on the show and telling one of the dumbest stories of nights that I think we've ever told.

And you can use the spot in case anybody doesn't know where to find your many shows. Well, so many of you who are listening may recognize my voice because I've been producing this show since 2018. But I'm also the co-host of What a Hell of a Way to Die. I am a sometimes co-host of Trash Future, always for live shows, but not always on the show itself, for Trash Future, the podcast about business success and capitalism. And I also produce a show called Kill James Bond with the extremely funny Abigail Thorne, Alice Caldwell Kelly, and Devin. So if you're into a reading of Bond films and now Euro spy films and action films that points out their foibles and makes fun of them on, you know, from some of the funniest trans people you've ever heard in

your life. That's, that's, that's what I do for a living. I produce four shows now. So thank you, Joe, for letting me be on this because this is always a lot of fun too. Yeah, it's always good to have you on. And everybody, thank you so much for listening. If you think what we do here is worth a dollar, you can give us a dollar on Patreon, thank you so much for listening if you think what we do here is worth a dollar you can give us a dollar on patreon patreon.com slash lines led by donkeys uh and you get bonus stuff uh like you get this episode early you get bonus episodes you access to the discord all that good stuff or don't uh it's your money do with it what you want uh but leaving a review is free and it helps us in ways that i don't fully understand but it does uh and again thank you everybody and until next

time uh don't don't go to the cum dungeon