Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 419 - The Battle of Castillon

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

BUY JOE'S BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Highlands-Burn-Foundling-Brigade-Saga-ebook/dp/B0GSG5CNXX/ Don't want to use amazon? Get the Ebook and Audiobook directly from us: https://www.llbdpodcast.com/products/the-highlands-burn-epub Get Nate's band's debut album here! https://secondhomesband.com/ During the closing of the Hundred Years' War the English decide to launch a cavalry charge against in an entrenched French army, directly into the barrels of hundreds of cannons. It does not end well. SOURCES: Welsh, William. Castilion: The Last Battle of the Hundred Years' War. Military Heritage. April 2008. Vol. 9, No. 5. Curry, Anne. (1993). The Hundred Years War. New York. St. Martin's Press. Grummitt, David (2010). "Castillon, Siege and Battle of". In Rogers, Clifford J. (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press. Nolan, Cathal J., ed. (2006). "Castillon, Battle of (July 17, 1453)". The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000–1650: An Encyclopedia of Global Warfare and Civilization. Vol. 1. Greenwood Press. https://web.archive.org/web/20051028021944/http://www.xenophongroup.com/montjoie/castilon.htm

Hello and welcome to the Lions of Vidonkees podcast, the only military history podcast in the entire known world. I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate in London. What's up fellas? Oie mate. I'm doing good. I am experiencing a carbohydrate crash after having another sideways wrap for lunch. I had one and some fries, but I checked my step count and I've already walked 12,000 steps today and it's for the American heads out there, it's like 85. degrees here. It's like 28, 29 right now. So it's hot as balls. That's actually like a meteorological standard being hot as balls. So I'm not worried about the huge wrap and fries and stuff that I ate or the salad that was just raw cabbage and mayonnaise. Yeah, it was a choice. Yeah, it was good though. I don't care. I love mayonnaise. I'm secretly Dutch. I've had that wrap every day for the last three

days and they've been cutting it in half in stranger and stranger ways. Well, yeah, but also you've got to realize something, dude. Like, I fully have naturalized as a European. Joe's been calling it his London residency, and it's been increasingly becoming more grading every episode. That's right. It's the last time we got to hear it. Yeah, Joe is a residentially stinking out my studio.

That is unsure. We all stink thanks to the insulated box that we're in. Yes. I don't know. I've showered and put on numerous lotions and cream. and perfumes. Perfumes. No, I have a, it's a joke actually.

My luggage got lost when I was 20 when I was flying to France and it took two days to get it back and Air France gave me a little like, sorry we fucked your shit up package. And Air France took care of you back in those days because sorry we lost your luggage package was like a zip bag, nice zip bag and it had a new clean t-shirt, a new pair of guys underwear because like it was from, those were the men's version, a condom, a pen, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a comb and a little bottle of OxyTon-Provants, green tea, gender neutral cologne. Or as a friend of mine who smelled it for the first time, said,

Ode B, B, sexuality. And I got that stuff. And you know what two spurtses of that? Anyone who's been on the realness, you ever try that? It's a te verre is what is in French. Green tea, Oxyana, Provence. It's, uh, it is, it is the real shit. So I smell great, but you're going to rub off on me and I'm going to smell bad.

Yeah, it's true. Because I'm in the same room, and also because you're just going to pile me because we, we do fraudage at the start of every episode. It's, it's a pre-show, uh, warm up. Well, that's why we're not. person together actually that often it's not because we don't want to be it's because we'll simply build up too much friction

yeah exactly then there's a static discharge like it's like fucks up the British power grid trains all stop at once I did not agree to be involved in this at all I am not frauding anyone I am you know your employment contract exactly what contract don't worry about it well I mean I mean okay maybe you're not comfortable with fraudage

but I mean because of the common travel agreement in the treaty between the United Kingdom and Ireland you basically are being docked by the king right now So it's all good. So fellas, I've gathered you here because we're going to talk about some nights. And now for the discharge of context. Now for the static discharge of context. A hundred years war.

We have kind of sort of talked about it for years in piecemeal fashions and one battle at a time. Specifically, the battle of Agincourt, something I absolutely nailed in pronunciation back in the day. There were some guests last night at our live show who were from Switzerland who brought up Agencourt in your pronunciation thereof from eight years ago. Yeah, how good it was. Yeah, it was incredible. Also, we talked about the combat of the 30, which is still one of my favorite bonus episodes

we've ever done. The origin of Sir Christopher of Benoit. Yeah, correct, yeah. So if you're interested in that, maybe support the show on Patreon and go check out the time that Nate and I talked about all the CTE that Knights probably have.

For the listeners reference, we did our live performance at Rich Mix in London last night, and so we are on stage madness still. So even though that this is a recording free episode, it's going to come out later, you have no context. We are still in the RIF zone. We are still in the make fun of each other's clothes zone.

We are still in the, after this gets done, I'm going to run you for your shoes in the green room zone. To be sure, it's easier to make fun of each other's clothes when we're in the same room. It's a lot easier, yeah, although you can look it on the webcam. You don't know if I'm wearing pants or not. I assume that when it's hot in the Netherlands, that you are absolutely on like FKK,

you are just fully like, you go German. You go German below the waist, you let it hang and you have a big fan underneath it. Yeah, I'm full Donald Duck mode. There's actually a cut out in the chair so your dick and balls can dangle free. It's like the Pope chair. It's like a birthing chair, but specifically so that the, you know, the fan can get to the crucial parts. I would say... Airflow is important, Nate.

Talking about, talking being gross as fuck and exhausted and talking about stealing each other's clothes, I think actually puts this in the right frame of mind to discuss the 100 years war. It actually does. But the 100 years war was not just one thing. It wasn't one war or reason for war over the decades that it covered. It involves a dozen other smaller sub wars, a few Dom wars,

and maybe a switch war or two. Fuck you. You're welcome. I wrote that for you too. I thought it was going to be a thing about, you know, people were like, oh, the Holy Roman Empire wasn't holy or Roman or an empire.

The 100 years were wasn't 100 or years or war. But you got better. You decided to do what. I guess there's a side war, isn't there. There's top, bottom, Dom, sub, side war. The Black Death was also involved

at one point. The power bottom war. War. Due to its length and complexity, it's often split into three main phases, with the third and final one being known as the Lancasterian War, which is the era we're going to be talking about today, the Battle of Castellion, the final boss battle of the war. This final stage of the war involves a lot of the stuff everyone's probably at least a little bit familiar with. Obviously, there's Agencour, there's Joan of Arc as well. Someone will definitely talk about at length at some point in the future, because I can't think of another history podcast that's ever done

that. But for the sake of this episode, it's important to know that England was backsliding terribly by 1428, something that thankfully has not continued to this day. Every single one of us went for that joke right before you said. I saw Nate lean in. I had to do it. I was thinking more on the lines of just imagining people using the Vaz caricatures to envision 1420s where at one point the Kingdom of England had possessions in Calais, around Calais, and also in Bordeaux. So that's what we're talking about today, baby. There were some decent chunks of France that were just England.

Yep. Which is, that is what we're talking about. Love brie, love chardonnay, ate me misses. If you don't like it, there's the door, there's the channel. You don't like it, there's the Sen. The English kings once held

large holdings in France, but at this point only two remained. Normandy in the north and Gascany in the south. Then in 1449, English holdings in Normandy were obliterated in record time within the context of this war. I mean, think about it like this.

The French have been fighting on and off, trying to kick the English out of France for over a hundred years at this point. And then Normandy falls in a year, leaving Gascany, the last English stronghold in France. The reason for the rapid turnaround is largely thanks to French military reform, and in essence,

the slow creation of an actual centralized state in order to support it. It was an era of factionalization, squabbling petty lords and fiefdoms, the army that came out of that system reflected it. Lords raised armies independent from the king while serving him. Bands of mercenaries were hired, and this mess went to war in a disjointed, chaotic manner

funded by temporary taxes that would rise and fall with each group being mustered out and hired. There was a huge problem with all of this. Namely, during one of the many treaties that would pop up during the course of this very long war, these dudes didn't just go home. when the treaty kicked in. They turned into bandits,

raiding their own countryside sometimes, killing and stealing, because suddenly nobody was paying them. This became so common that mercenary bands were nicknamed Skinners. All right. All right. Yeah, they were called,

they had a term for them as well. I know that they typically would go on these campaigns to just plunder what they could. At one point, they tried to invade Switzerland and they got fully stomped to the curb doing this. by what was called the Googler War because the weird pointy hats

that basically the Swiss were in the Middle Ages that made them look like the people on Tatouin the Googler War Googler is how'd you say it in German but G-U-U-U-U-L-L-E-R is the Googler war

ridiculous the Google War now is when it's like am I Googling the correct slur for Google to show me the funny image? Yeah, no, these guys actually have a long history of descendants in the UK

and now one of the most famous ones, eats, you know, a chicken curry and a beef pie at 6 a.m. and says, bosh. Yeah, same guy. Yeah. If there was a hundred years war, that guy would just be getting dysentery.

Yes. Send Tom Skinner back to the 100 years war. That's why they call them Skinner. It's just interesting because it's not necessarily a great history, but it's a pretty good starting point to learn about some of the major players. Barbara Tuckman's A Distant Mirror talks about the 13th and

14th century and specifically about some of this with the level of sort of like either we're on the campaign and we just turn into chaos agents doing plunder and this France sucked it sucked being French it was horrible you were constantly getting marauded rated etc hate to be marauded by English and by mercenaries and by whomever yeah during the previous treaty the French took full advantage of the lull in fighting to reform their army French king Charles the seventh implemented a permanent land tax for the constant funding source for a standing army and dragged the feudal armies in all their little bits and pieces, kicking and screaming into France's first permanent standing army sworn only to the crown of France.

Mercenaries were brought into the fold as well, but they could only accept a contract from the king. And refusing this or trying to negotiate the contract would lead to them being branded as outlaws and murdered. Volunteers for the army would have their taxes forgiven. Men would be paid. on time regularly, even when there wasn't fighting going on. And that pay would come directly from the crown, which would, of course, earn the king loyalty and stop everybody from turning into roving gangs of psychos during any downtime. This also gave the king another power. It allowed him to appoint those who were in command and under them, and this would centralize a tool of political favor, military promotions and positions.

But arguably, the most important reform for the context of this episode today, and one that was only possible, thanks to all of that work, was the reorganization of French artillery, specifically under the guidance of the Bureau Brothers, Jean and Gispar. Gunpowder artillery had been around since the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, but those early cannons were mostly unreliable at best and dangerous to everyone around them at worst. But Gasparred had a master stroke. Logistics. Hit the big old logistics siren. I thought he was going to, he designed a new type of cannon, applying the, you know, the incredible French science of, you know, treating it and designing it with the sensuality of the approach of a woman. It's like, you're canon. It must be a white button, but narrow on top, narrowing the shoulder, big ass.

Putting a cigarette at the barrel of the cannon trying to light it. 15th century French guy who's also Al Pacino and he I was going to say that How do you say she had a great ass in French? I mean, there's colloquially, I'm not 100% sure, but I would probably say, they say,

All the artilleries taking notes as he's slapping the cannon in the back. Cannons were in general, a random assortment of boomsticks at the time, from handguns to bombards with whatever armies could get being brought to the field for battle.

There's no standardized make or model either. Meaning armies oftentimes were forced to make their own cannonballs in the field with like a forge that they would have to make. With each cannon being a slightly different size. So that meant like

the crew of a cannon couldn't use the cannon balls from the cannon next door because they're a little bit different. It's like there's always a little bit of imprecision in things but if it's that imprecise then like a cannonball might get stuck and blow up or the canad might be too loose and it's just like it just plops out like a like a disappointing poop like all kinds of things can happen. I'm also thinking to myself on this like you keep talking about the guy named Gaspar

and this is a side note but my daughter loves this French cartoon called Simons Super Rappan, Simon Super Rabbit and Simon's little brother's name is Gaspar and so I'm just laughing. I'm like this little the little four-year-old boy rabbit is out she's like yeah but he's got the ingrained memory of a canon master who's deeply horny as well and so it's just like maybe anyone named Gaspar just has that. So it means the guy from justice is also able to build huge ass cannons. Both huge ass can defeat the enemy and cannons with huge asses. Yeah. And Gaspar changed all of that.

He standardized everything. There could only be so many kinds of guns. And each gun had in multiple different categories. But they all corresponded to regulated size, to better streamline supplying them with ammo, which now meant ammo could be sent with the armed. armies rather than being slap forged in the field, which is never a good idea. Like, oh, we have to put all of our conscripts who don't want to be here back in the forge, making the French 1400s equivalent of pig iron in the backyard.

Yeah, creating, ending the age of, you know, the bespoke canon by, you know, just standardizing everything is kind of the same as how, you know, the founders of Huawei gives, uh, Steve Jobs turbo counselor. Yeah, except the French didn't try to figure this out by just pouring fruit juice down the barrel of the can. I mean, I guess to me it's one of those things where, yeah, like, I feel as though the way that cannons

work by, you know, the amount of explosive power and compression, propulsion, and whatnot. Like, this is the thing where precision is going to be a good idea because, like, I feel as though if every, every fifth time the cannon explodes or gets like a really fucked up goiter just bulging out of it and ruins the cannon. Like, that doesn't make being a canon

near fun. No. Whereas being able to like rain, rain shit on people, you know it must rule. Like, it must be awesome because like, I don't know.

I just in my mind, the cannons had shorter range that means they were closer. That meant that like you saw the cannonball land and like you watched the whole thing. It was this cartoonish. Like stuff exploded. People sounded like,

you know, like you were playing fucking, what is it, angry birds and the pigs are getting fucked up. Like, you know, everything you did was more visceral. If you were accidentally liquefying every fifth artillery crew as well, like, artillery crews requires some skill.

They require a lot. more skill than like having pointing a guy in the right direction that has a spear. Well yeah and also like you have to be strong to two artillery stuff especially back then and it's like you know how long it takes how many peas you have to go to create peas to feed someone to be strong enough to be artillery. You don't want to just waste that. All the artillery teams just looked like asterix and obelisk. It's like there's the big one that moves the cannon and there's a small nimble one that pulls out the protractor and you know figures out the angle. Well and then there's the fruit juice guy to pour fruit juice on the barrel. That's the druid or whatever.

The Canon Druid comes by. The Canon Druid basically, it was like he had a vision of what a pomegranate is, and he's coming, he's found. He's going to, like, you know, grow it in Brittany and feed his people. The Conant Druid is wearing like a chain mailed turtleneck. Yeah, he's got in the vision that he's seen when he's tripping off missiles, so he saw the palm wonderful logo. And now he knows the future. And everyone knew the conquest of Gascany would be much, much harder than the conquest of Normandy had been. For example, the English had controlled Normandy for only about 30 years, whereas Gascany had been

English control since the 12th century. I find it funny sometimes because this is a thing that obviously repletes during the Crusades that, you know, you have the Frankish kingdom and, you know, what's now Palestine. But it's very funny that they basically had created sort of like the analog of the Frankish kingdom and or the state of history if you want to go that far. But like it's Britain colonizing France. Like there's something extremely funny about like they listening to shitty side trance, but 14th century version.

And the last thing that Charles wanted to do was invade and get bogged down by a series of drawn out sieges. So he decided he would rely on the same tactics that had worked during the previous invasion of Normandy. Rather than sending in one large army, he would send in three smaller ones trying to bait the English into picking one to meet in the field in open battle and then crush them. The ultimate goal was for all three if open battle failed to simply converge on Bordeaux, the seat of English government in Gascany. And, uh, this all happened in like a month in July of 1450. Bordeaux had fallen and it seemed like the French conquest and therefore the war was over. But it wasn't. As I alluded to earlier, Gascany was pretty much just English in both

culture, customs, and norms. Nobody there had any living memory of being ruled by the French throne. So before long, English nobles in Gascany and commoners began to resist French rule. But more importantly than that, a lot of Gascon nobles had run away to England after the French came. So they began to petition the king, Henry the 6th, to invade and liberate their land. King Henry was,

let's say a complicated character. He was notoriously weak, having been crowned as both king of France and England, and was the only king to technically be crowned in both places. He had been crowned as a child, but had been ruling on his own since he was 16.

Kind of. He pretty much let his court of scheming nobles run wild over him. His rule was racked with problems. England was pretty much bankrupt. And what's interesting here is they were bankrupt from both winning and losing the war over in France. When they were winning, it took a lot of money to maintain their holdings across the channel. And when they were losing, it took away the rich lands and a large tax base. Not to mention resulted in a lot of unpaid soldiers returning to England and then going on looting sprees throughout the south. Well, you know, as the saying goes, heavy is the head that wears the crown,

especially so if you're wearing two crowns. Heavy as the heavy as the head of the lazy crown, especially if it's a child. Well, I suppose coming back to Nate's analogy earlier on was like, maybe they should have figured out the got their own wizard who had the vision of the pomegranate instead is like, why don't we get guys from Kent and put them on paragliders

and get them to sail over the English channel into France? I mean, I feel as though there are so many other visions you could possibly have when fucked up on mistletoe and if you imagined what if you could burn

juice from the ancients in a machine to make heat that could propel a motor that could then put a sail in the air and you could fly across the channel like I don't know

I would be terrified by that vision and obviously the French work gonna do it they're using all their juices for the cannon well yeah exactly yeah they're both

yeah making the cannon bigger and also like they're getting it because they you know use that fire and heat and propulsion to ferment more alcohol to celebrate the cannon to get the cannon drunk so it's tipsy you know

yeah but see it's the often forgotten part of Sun Tzu's Art of War is the chapter that's on juice management where you allocate your juice depends we'll decide how your war effort goes yeah and when it goes bad oh no all my juice is gone yeah the enemy is taking

all of my slurp juices so it is no surprise that people get into yell at the king, saying like, look, if we retook our holdings in France, everything would be cool again. And before long, the king agreed. So he tabbed Lord John Talbot, a 65-year-old man who'd been fighting the French for 30 years to put together an invasion force. Talbot had been the head of armies had smashed the French before. And, you know, in the middle of all these late stage reversals. And thanks to his utter ruthlessness, he had earned the next. name the terror of the French.

And he's as close to a blood-drinking Lord of War that could exist outside of Warhammer. And I do not mean this as a compliment. He'd been fighting wars and rebellion since he was 16 years old, murdering his way through Wales and Ireland before turning on the French countryside and making it look like something out of Cantaro Murah's wet dream. I actually went looking for French

berserk recently, but it's been taken off YouTube, which means I can't hear. Grifit. Grifit. What's interesting here is one of the titles that Talbot got was like the Duke of Waterford in Ireland. And that immediately tickled the back of my head because another thing that America does, of course,

is named towns after places in Europe. And Waterford is where several members of my family live in Michigan. I was just like, you know what? And thinking of him as the Lord of Waterford, but in like brackets Michigan is a very funny idea. See, I'm still stuck on the idea.

of British Cantaro Mura and now I can't get the image out of my head of Big John in the berserk armor. He's obviously going to be Bazuzu. Was it, was it, Pizzuzzi was his name? Yeah. The weird round-headed, kind of looks like Magneto Knight,

the 16-year-old guts, cuts in half. Yep. Yeah, that's fictional, I think. And I know this isn't how things are named, but in one of the most on-brand things of all time, one of Talbot's holdings was a town called Painswick. It's two on the nose. This is going to be nomin of determinism.

Painswick, but I'm sure it's pronounced like Pissick or something like that. That's how those town names are. I hate coming from Pistick. Yeah. This is the Pissick bound Northern Line service. Stopping at Cockfosters. Going to Painswick ruled by the terror of the French and just instead of streetlights, there's candles and human skulls.

I mean, look, man, we all want at some point in our lives we thought living in Castlevania would be cool. You just like hit a random pot and a fully steaming chicken comes out. I know, that's the thing is he's so annoying about when you live in the sort of dystopian, like medieval vampire hundred-D kind of environment of Castlevania. It's just that, yeah, you can't just have a flaming whip and hit candles to have hearts come out that heal you or chickens. I keep trying. It hasn't worked. I'm not very good with a whip either. I mean, I've said the story before and I love telling him, I'm going to do it one more fucking time with seeing the sort of draftsman idea for a channel tunnel in like the 1700s.

It would have horse carriages and it would be lit, have candles every like hundred meters. and it just, it was drawn in such a way to be like horizontal scrolling, basically do this architectural elevation and it just looked like Castlevania. There was a carriages and candles and shit. You just need the room with the upside down furniture and stuff like that.

The man had actually been captured twice while fighting France and only been released a few months before his new assignment to once again invade France. I will say also that for nobles and people of rank and stuff getting captured didn't necessarily mean it was always for ransom back then. He just got ransom back on.

Whereas if you were a soldier, they just killed your ass. Yeah, if you weren't worth any money, you got God. Yeah, if you were a soldier, you weren't like being put in a sale and getting your feet tickled. No, they just didn't. That would be horrible. I would hate if someone did that to me. They'd have to get a real big feather for your fucking thing. This fucking ostrich feather.

Yeah, exactly. You're going to need a bigger obliad. We can't put them through it. Oh, my God. Unlike France, England hadn't undergone any kind of military reforms. Under Henry, England was about as factionalized as it could be without it being an active civil war. So when Talbot gathered his invading force of about 3,000 men, they had all been mustered from his lands with the commanders he chose personally

and were loyal to him more than anyone else, which included his son, also named John Talbot, who was in his mid-20s. So yeah, we have the Painswick Battalion commanded by the Talbot slaughterers. All right. All right. I mean, this is getting more and more just Anglo vibes, like unintentionally. Yeah, this is one for the real Wexford heads. This is how the hotel ended up being called the Tall.

Yeah. England was factionalized. Everyone hated each other. The leadership sucked. Things were not forward looking and had in advance in centuries. They were bankrupt. The French were stomping on their ass. I mean, action movie intro, in a world where England

is factionalized, aka my dream. His invasion goes incredibly well, at least for a little while. The French were expecting the English to try for Normandy first, and virtually everyone in Gascany welcomed the English with open arms. throwing open the gates to Bordeaux and letting them all in. Afterwards, the French garrisons

found the population turning against them, and English troops were chasing them down one at a time. By 1452, GASME was, mostly, once again, under control of the English. Furious, King Charles put together an army over the winter to prepare for a 1453 campaign. He put the Lord Clermont in command, but then tasked Jean-Burot with commanding his artillery, which would grow into a force of over 300 pieces of artillery, and then they decided, fuck it will give you an army to go along with it of several thousand men. The tactics were the same as the first invasion, three different armies marching separately, trying to trick the English into committing to battle. And before long, Lord Clermont's army was heading for Bordeaux. Meanwhile, Jean-Burro's army, artillery included,

was marching for the town of Castellion, about 30 miles away. Talbot knew that the entire French force outnumbered him easily by several thousand men. So he took the bait that the French were setting for him. He believed rather than taking the whole French army in open battle, he should launch himself at one of the smaller ones, heading it off and destroying it before the three columns could join at Bordeaux's doorstep, which is exactly what the French wanted him to do. Bureau and his army got to Castellion, camping at the east of the city on July 13th. He then went to work, ordering the construction of what is known as an artillery park, which sounds like a theme park that is built specifically for me. But in reality, this is more of a base. It's like a fortified position for cannons and men. It's a

logistics hub. It's an anchor point for the future siege of Castellion. From the park, French troops could then build trenches and move cannons and men up closer and closer to the city. And then it acts as a fortified fallback point if shit turns sideways. Sort of like a fortified motor pool for cannons. Yeah. Yeah. The park was butted up. against a river and some walls, and ditches were dug on the other three sides with firing ports allowed intersecting fields of fire for the cannons that were stationed on the other side of it. Inside of the walls were between 6,000 and 7,000 men, with a reserve force of another of 1,000 stationed two miles away on the other side of the river.

This is also known as the place you don't attack. Talbot sat in Bordeaux as Bureau's army dug in with his plans of targeting a smaller army in mind. Like he heard about Jean Biro's army and decided, this one ain't for us. But soon Gascon nobles were begging him to relieve Castellian. Talbot shot them down, saying that this is not the battle for me. Like, they are in a good position. They already outnumber us.

This is not the place we want to be attacking. He wanted to wait for a realistic target. Yeah, he really knew that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Yeah, exactly. And the squeeze, in this case, being like his own bones. creating like a fine juice with pulp out of hundreds of French people. This all goes back to the tactical juice supply. Yes.

He explained this to the Gaskins, who then turned to each other, broke out into a meeting, came back, and then just called him a coward. So he caved. He's like, oh, you said the one thing I cannot possibly put up with. You called me names. This man has personally slaughtered thousands of human beings, but he gets called a coward. he's like, I'll show you who's a fucking coward. But this is like extremely congruent with all of the people that I've ever met that I would describe as mental cons. Yeah, he definitely falls in the category.

He did what you never do. He listened to the trolls. Despite him knowing that this is not the battle he wanted, he was soon marching out after Bureau on July 16th with about 8,000 men. But that many men move slowly, and that's not something that Talbot wanted to deal with. So he selected a 500-man vanguard and rode them hard through the summer heat to get to Castellion that same night. He surprised the picketing force of 1,000 French archers who were still like asleep in a camp in their beds. And he chased them off. A few of them are murdered, but most of this turns into like the French going, oh shit and running back towards their artillery bar.

It would be really, really funny to see a bunch, like a thousand guys with bows running off. Like, just weird angles, just like jostling. You know what I mean? Like, fuck shit. turn around and stretch your arm really far, but you can't, you know what I mean? It's just hopping away in my sleeping bag. Yeah, it's sort of like, like you opened up a garden shed at a thousand crickets throughout. Protect the juice!

But Talbot doesn't go after them as they run back towards the artillery park. And Talbot's surprised because he sees that Bureau makes no attempt to retake the position, which is on the high ground overlooking the artillery camp. That's because Bureau didn't need to. The entire purpose of that position was to alert him of, of their approach so he could get the artillery park ready to fight. So it did its job. I mean, it's classic picket position. As Talbot and his vanguard sat in the picket, eating food taken from the dead and drinking a whole cask of wine, he sent scouts forward to check out the French's

position. The men quickly reported back exactly what he saw. The French had built a strong position with tough walls and no real good approach to attack it from. But then a few nobles from Castellion, seeing the English had arrived rode over to meet them. They told told Talbot that they swore to God they saw dust clouds rising in the east, which could only mean one thing. The French were in the process of withdrawing. Should be noted here though, Talbot scouts did not say that at all. Talbot decided right then and there that he needed to go on the attack before the rest of his infantry managed to walk the 30 miles to where he was camp. When he was reminded of this like, hey, there's only 500 of us here, he just ignored that.

He decided that his own handpicked scouts must have been wrong and these local randos must really be under something. And if he attacked with his mounted vanguard, he could hit the French while they're withdrawing, negating their numerical advantage. Which is just insane, right? Like, there's about 7 to 8,000 French dudes down there. I don't know how big this surprise has to be when you only have 500 guys to win that battle in anybody's mind. Maybe if you could do the like alt-history thing of going back in time and giving the English. machine guns. But even then, though, it's just sort of like as a full force multiplier thing, it's like plenty of machine gun positions have been overrun by people who are not particularly

well armed against it. There's a lot of them, you know? So it's like those numbers, you really have to count on panic and nothing else. And route and hopefully like, because it's, you know, it's something we've talked about like countless times and something we'll talk about on the show before is like, you don't have to make a whole army route. You smash one part of it. They take off running. Some people will just like, book this and they'll try to run to keep up with them or think that they miss some order of a treat and that it's a cascading failure. People who are drowning don't behave the way that you think people who are drowning would like their heads bob up and down in the water. Their arms kind of flail up and down, but they don't scream. They don't make noise and it's like

people, even though they're trained. Yeah, just like me dancing. Well, yeah, exactly. The thing about it is is that, you know, in your case, when you're dancing, when people are drowning, there isn't a guarantee that D12's Purple Pills is playing in the background. Not a five anything to do with that. That is interesting to think that there's basically non-diagetic music that follows anywhere on human history that anytime someone drowns, it plays purple pills. Like, that's just always been there. We didn't actually know what the song was until sort of Druid Eminem was able to like see

the vision and put the song together. Yeah, I think that's what the heroin did for him. What I'm trying to say though is that like despite all the military training and numerical advantage, like when people are freak out and panic, it causes a lot of people just do things you wouldn't expect, like, freak out and panic and just fucking go. So it can work, but it's, uh, it's a bold one. It's like all the times that you see, heard of here of like crushes and things like that. Like the dynamics of human minds in large groups is completely uncontrollable.

Once something is broken and everybody realizes they're an immediate life-threatening danger, uh, you've lost control of them. Uh, there, they're, they're going to scatter. And training can only go so far. Yep. Yeah. Funnier still, though, his men hadn't even finished eating dinner, but they have put down a lot of wine. So some of them were solidly drunk. So that begs the question, what was this dust cloud that the nobles said they saw?

Well, Bureau had ordered horses in the camp to be moved out to make room for those archers that had just run away. So the artillery park hadn't gotten weaker. They had actually gotten stronger because they just evicted all the horses. and now there's that like 900 extra archers inside. And there's a bunch of horses they're just gonna stop the shit out of anyway. These faces like the archers are being protected by a sort of orbiting ring of horse.

Yeah. I was because Talba, you know, he whispered in like one horse's ears like, they're gonna try and eat you eventually. All the horses running off. Yeah, he hadn't easy out because Tesco hadn't been invented yet. They've had apples this whole time.

Their camp is full of sugar cubes. There's children you can stop. Now, things are already pretty dumb, but they're about to get even dumber. You see, when Talbot was released from French captivity, he was made to swear an oath, never to take up arms or wear armor against a French ever again. So despite the fact that he accepted this assignment, he was going to stick to his oath. And as he let his men forward, he took off his armor and left his sword behind. mind you, all of the other men

had dismounted from their horses to fight on foot due to the marshy uneven ground. But Talbot didn't. Meaning there was now one lone unarmed unarmored man riding forward on a bright white horse towards the enemy. He also had

like a known look. Like he had long white hair and wore a red cape. It's like a single like, hey look, it's that cunt that keeps slaughtering. I mean, genuinely this feels like a Diablo mission. where it's like, this is the guy you have to kill in order to pass the mission. He looks a

kind of way that immediately jumped out to me. He's like, if you're playing an RPG and you're looking around for a quest giving like NPC because they always look noticeably different. Like, that's a recruitable character right there. British Al-Qard is out there. He doesn't have any weapons. Fuck. He's just covered in a thin sheen

of blood and carrying human skulls from Waterford. You would be so scared though if you were like on watch and you just see this guy like riding towards you because you, this is the type of vision that the Palm of Granite Wizard would have. Yeah, 100%. Like this is signs, portents,

omens. He's riding towards the enemy and he can't have a sword. This is you can ever take a sword up against the enemy, against the French ever again, right? But they never said anything against putting on Hulk hands. Well, also, it's like if he's bollock naked, is he

riding the horse without a saddle as well? Because that would hurt. No, he's wearing clothes. He's just not wearing armor. Yeah, he's just not allowed to wear armor. Though I do like it, your way better because how intimidating would that be? Like you're being face down by dude screaming and charging and carrying weapons. There's just some dude

full hog out, Hulk hands up, riding forward his like white hair billowing behind him in the cape and everything. I think there's like an epigenetic trauma in all of Western Europe that when you see a butt naked English guy and England hasn't won a football match, then you know that like something very very dangerous is coming away. It's still dangerous

when they've won, but if they haven't won and the man is naked, then it's like, it's sort of like the haunting vision of the crow magnin you know, like, when uncanny valley freaks you out more because it reminds you of the sort of the Paleolithic ancestors. He's running towards them, bollock naked, with Hulk hands

on, dick, rock hard, another smaller Hulk hand on the tip. Once Talbot and his men got closer, this starts to sound like sexual cantorum, you're a question frankly, like sort of weird making it sound like there's a difference, or maybe I'm just reading Berserk rock. Weird, grotesque

pervert shit, but like most of Berserk isn't sexual so much as like... Don't speak for yourself. I mean, okay. Guts is, this is jacked as shit. But you know what I mean? Like,

like the stuff is more about body horror and like, you know, like, eternal punishment and like spout like demon shit and stuff in like other worlds beyond our own. But like there is a sexual element in some of the storytelling. But I'd say like the level of weird grotesque art that he loved doing like the human bugs and the human lesions and stuff. But like you what you just described of like dick wearing Hulk hands, that feels like Mura's vision but horny.

No, but see, it's because he wrote a book unknowns to anybody with Miracami once. Yep. Oh, okay. So now Talbot's also a 12 year old girl.

Yeah, yeah. Talbot's 14 and there's stairs everywhere and cats. Yeah, cats and weird, weird flashbacks to lesbian sex for some reason. Once Talbot and his men got closer, he saw clear his day that the French had not been withdrawing at all.

And they haven't committed to battle yet. Like, they could call this thing off. And that's what all of his subordinate commanders said they should do. Like, we, we, we still have the chance to just wait for the rest of our army. And, but there's a reason they're subordinates, and he's

not. Yeah, he's the fancy boy. He's the blood lord of Painswick. You're also wrong. It's not Kintyramur. That is the whole hands on the dick. This is 100% Iraqi who created Jojo's. Like, that is a Jojo's ass character. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Iraqi also loves absurd proportions, like, buildings with windows that are 40 feet tall and shit like that. And so I think like what you're describing in my mind, like there's something about the mismatch proportions of tiny band versus like just infinite like exponentially increasing numbers of archers and other other launchers of projectiles that like it's starting to seem. It's yeah,

somewhere between Jojo's and like Captain Planet villain shit. It bears mentioning once again, he only has about 500 men and they're staring down an intranced position that has as many. cannons as he has soldiers as well as almost 10,000 soldiers at this point. And the 10,000 soldiers are all saying

and I would fight 500 men. Instead, Talbot once again ignored his officers, insisting that the violence and fury of his attack would break the French anyway. This is one of those things where you really need to stop reading the evil epic poems about like the chivalric hero

who can cleave 500 men in Twain because when you start designing your order of battle based on the idea like, oh, the chanson of Roland emphatically a French thing is mine. That's us. Actually, every one of us is going to fucking, you know, chop the Saracen and then literal half like down the long way. And then you actually just realize that no,

like someone's going to slip and like, you know, throw out their back and then a horse is going to trample them and like the whole thing's going to fall apart. Like, hold that thought. Oh. Talbot ordered his men to be broken up into two groups, one to target the west and one to target

the east. And at first, arrows began to rain down on their advance. but obviously kind of like we talked to before, cannons have quite a limited range so the true killing wouldn't start until they got there. I also want to say this show isn't a fault of yours, this is funny but the way you just phrased that

sounded like it could be a quote from like Sun Sioux for even dumber guys they broke into two groups, one in the east and one in the west. It's just sort of like, yeah you kind of do that sometimes. There's a north at play as well. Oh, is there? You might not

know this. This is actually a a bold theory that I'll put in my sons who are right. There is four carnal directions. Yeah, you've east, west, and a secret third one. And then a secret, even secret or fourth one. The finest minds in England are trying to figure out

what the fourth one could be. Well, it's because no one in England pays attention to the north. Actually, yeah, but they don't call it that. So, yeah, there's not actually north and south. It's gods up and gods down. And once the cannons open fire, they absolutely

obliterate the English ranks. The men who didn't rapidly have their insides turned into outsides via cannonball, dove into the ditch for cover and began to climb up the other side of it to fight the French. As the English began to crawl, though, the French had a special gift for

them. They had smaller guns called culverins. Now, the term colverin is sometimes used for guns of various sizes, but the ones in this case were what were effectively handguns. It was like a handgun blunderbunders. situation because they just fired

like shrapnel out the barrel. Doing like John Wu, Goncata moves but with a blunderboss. They get hit with the equilibrium over the top of the trench. And they just started firing these culverins right down into the English as they tried to

crawl up the other side. It sounds like it sucks. It sounds like it really fucking sucks ass. I mean, I'm sorry to be like so just matter of fact about it. It sucks until it suddenly doesn't because now you're dead. Thank God. This is one of the things where it's like everything about this all I could think of as when you're describing the larger and larger buildup and the level of preparation the French had done. And then these guys be like, no, we can do it. It's like, this is one of those

things where the game can't necessarily force you to not go a certain way at a certain point, but like everything about it is set up so that you cannot advance. Yeah, it's when you go into an area and it's like level gated. Like you have the English you're about to learn a valuable lesson called there's levels to this. Once they got to the top of the ditch, the English who survived found themselves in hand-to-hand combat. This is where the man that was acting as Talbot's standard bearer, the guy holding his flag with his house sigil on it,

ran forward, planting his Lord's flag at the top of one of the dirt walls, showing everyone around that the English had taken that section. And then he got clapped at point blank range via hand cannon. The French kicked over the flag. Some of the accounts says, like his chest

was literally just blown out. This wouldn't have happened if he had gotten all, you know, the, the, the, the, current cunts from Romford who love flags in this country is like get them they would not let that actually no they would let the flag touch the ground if like all the french would have to do is like wave like half a gram of coke from a mile away i mean i will say that it's interesting too because like this is emphatically in the the high middle ages i believe actually maybe i'm a fucking idiot i don't think this counts as early modern yet really because we're in the 14th century

the 15th century and what i guess i'm trying to say is we think of horses and armor and swords and axes and heavy shit. But then we don't necessarily envision dude getting fully airhold, like novelty oversized like Arnold Schwarzenegger shotgun style. Yeah. But it did happen. Yep. So it feels kind of like an anachronism in a way. And it's a gun that like kicks so hard. Whoever shot it like got blown straight off their own feet. It's straight up. It's like the arm gun that Guts uses in the first episode of the 1997 version of Berserf. Somehow we keep going back to Berserk when he blows up the fucked up snake guy. Like seriously, it's that, but the French have it for real. By this point, reinforcements had arrived and saw, oh shit, oh God, the commander

is in another battle. Like, they had just walked 30 miles for hours. They're tired. They're disorganized and they're unprepared. There's no mass deployment of men because all of their commanders are now in this battle without them. I would fucking desert so quickly if I got hit with the like ending of Super Mario's like your commander is in another battle. The tried and true law of war is this battle doesn't have to take place. You could just hit the bricks. Yeah, you can leave any time you want. So they deployed into the battle on their own.

But because they weren't arrayed and deployed in any organized fashion, they just kind of trickled into the general area and then started to humping it over to the battle. But before they got there, they had to walk across the same open field directly into the same. canons, which changed target to them and began eviscerating them. According to one chronicle of the battle, each cannon shot easily vaporized six minutes a time. Jesus Christ. This is starting to be like the, yeah, like force-un-forced sort of, yeah, confrontation version of the story.

I remember when I told you about the envisioning the rats on Mauritius eating the dodo eggs, but, you think they make this illegal? It's so fucking good. These guys, you think they'd be smarter that this is you're just like, fucking like hands, arms akimbo, fucking shit's flying everywhere, like human pinball machine, basically sending limbs into the sky. The French is sitting there very calmly smoking cigarettes. Like, you think they're going to run away anytime soon? This is getting kind of boring.

Yeah. Before East London, Gascone had the Jews. Can we please not finish these guys off? I haven't committed adultery in about eight hours. Wait, at this point, was tobacco in Europe? I'm not sure. I don't think so. so I'm not 100% sure.

The French just incestrily always have. Yeah, it's like with cigarettes. We just have to come up with new stereotypes of like what the French soldier is not going to have to take a smoke break and cheat on his wife. Although it's not necessarily cheating because they have an understanding. Yeah, yeah. They both agree on it. It's fine.

It's not weird. I'm willing to be wrong. But I believe the tobacco is a new world crop and the Colombian exchange has not yet happened at this point. Just like Armenians and 1980s Mercedes, they've always just have. them. Yeah. Even before they were invented. They have autotinous, Galois, cigarettes. They just grow on a fucked

up tree. Exactly. Pre-rolled and everything. Young Gascan, we must go harvest the cigarette crop. You just have a big scythe and you're like cutting all the cigarettes done. There goes the baker cheating on his wife. What do you think about it? The same old Galois sigs to sell. The French

are like, we're the first ever like anti-polyamorous people on the planet because it's like, no, we have understand that you can fuck other people, but having emotions is completely like, you know, off the table. Yeah, what are you my father? There could have been some chance that the thousands of dudes showing up a little late could have swung the battle and Talbot's favor, but he was missing something. His own artillery. As was custom for most armies of the day, his artillery was limbered and marching at the back of his army. So while it took about 90 minutes since I started the battle for

these guys to show up, it might take hours for his cannons to arrive. And Talbot, such a rush in believing the only way he could succeed was through the ferociousness of his attack, also failed to do something so elementary, it's kind of shocking that a guy as experienced as him didn't do it. Though I suppose when the majority of your career is just

spent slaughtering Irish and French peasants, you kind of forget what happens when they fight back. He didn't post a single soldier to protect his flag. Honk. Okay. So that's when Bureau saw this and then ordered his reserves,

a thousand cavalrymen from across the river to simply walk on over and fuck his shit up. And in no real rush, they forward the river and begin to advance towards Talbot's right flank. Talbot panicking at the sudden realization that he'd forgotten something so simple, I figured it out when I was nine years old and playing my first total war game, screamed at someone to fill that hole. But it was far too little and way too late. Yeah, you get Zergorosch to play the fringe. Yeah, exactly. He did not construct additional pylons. Fucked up. Launa Zergrasé.

The few guys who ran over to meet the French charge were immediately trampled within seconds and the armored cavalry crashed directly into the English flank. The English began to retreat and now they had the cavalry on their ass who were quickly joined by a counter charge of the men inside the artillery park. While that was happening, French archers began to walk through the fields of the English wounded, sussing out who was worth ransom money and stabbing anybody who wasn't under their arm or armpits because there's a like a gap there. I love it just going at it like you were fucking dispatching crabs or something like that.

Like this is fucked up. Like when you go and pick like mudbugs for like a crab boil or something like oh, not a good one. Shank him in the armpit. I feel like that was a unique experience for you, John. Oh, is that how that feels? Yeah. Maybe I should have brought up some band.

You're talking about crayfish. Yeah. Okay. We didn't call mug the mud bugs in Indiana. So that's what I was looking at you for some like, y'all eat cockroaches up in there? Yes. Yeah. Michigan really is beyond the pale.

Got a belly full of mud bugs. The French were driving the English south towards the banks of the river, a river too deep to cross. And also don't forget, they're still getting slapped with artillery. One of those cannonballs splatted right into the side of Talbot's horse,

throwing him off, and then the shattered horse corpse landed on top of him, pinning him to the ground. Oh, he's about to get William of Orange. Now, what's interesting here is I've kind of laid out why everyone in the French ranks

knew who he was immediately, he stuck out quite a bit. And they all fucking hated him. Like, we talked about ransoming nobles. This was something that was standard practice for people, unless they really fucking hated you. Because when they saw him go down, every Frenchman dropped what he was doing and ran in his direction, wanting to make sure he was finally dead. Getting shanked on site with hundreds of baguettes, you like are lying on the ground and you're just like looking like St. Sebastian with baguettes sticking. end of your ribs. That's almost a better way to go than what happened.

Oh, no. Because what French soldiers sprinted over and just beat Talbot to death with the blunt side of his battle axe? He took the whole hand off his dick and hit him in the head with it. He's basically getting Charles the Bull did. I'm way to heat death, heat stroke to remember if Charles the Bull died before or after this. I can't remember.

But, you know, fell off his horse, bad things happened. And then just got basically stomped with every blunt oblong object and or blaze. object. Meanwhile, the surviving Englishmen were now leaderless and totally broken. Some men tried jumping into the river to swim across only to die while being carried away by the current. Others were

cut down by the French. One of those was Talbot's son, who was killed while trying to find a shallow part of the river. The few survivors of Talbot's cluster fuck managed to get to the town of Castellion, which surrendered the very next day at Bureau's demand, with the option of like you could surrender

now, or, well, sack and loot your town to shit. Like, what's your choice? If you surrender, we'll leave you alone. And they surrendered. Over half of Talbot's army arrived on the battlefield afterwards too late. And John Bureau allowed them to search the battlefield

for Talbot's corpse so it could be returned home. His face was so smashed in that it was entirely unrecognizable. But thankfully, he was known for having such bad teeth. They identified it via his dental records by just like, damn, look at that grill.

That's got to be John. They managed to get his body off the battlefield before the French deployed their ultimate weapon, a guy called Pierre the corpse deviler. From here, the French besieged Bordeaux, which held out until October before surrendering. This time, in order to be safe, French King Charles was so over this shit,

he banished the Gaskin nobles and installed Jean Birore as the region's governor for life, uprooting any hint of English loyalty in the area once and for all. The only continental holding the English would hold on to after this was Calais. And while this is the end of the Hundred Years' War, nobody knew it at the time. And in fact, the war would continue, at least officially on paper, for another 20 years. But the English had no ability nor will to continue fighting it.

Instead, what happened was Henry, King of England, lost his goddamn mind in the immediate aftermath of the battle with some chroniclers insisting that the news of the defeat caused his mental breakdown. The king retreated into his chambers and became completely unresponsive for a year. Speaking of like doing the Shinji sitting in the chair pose. I was going to say like this is such a distant world from ours and we don't have any points of reference and this is the most relatable thing you said so far. This handed the control of his government over to anyone else that would take it with the majority of the power falling into the hands of the Duke of York who became acting regent. King Henry snapped out of it all, like I said, a year later and without... talking to anybody, and walked out into a bickering throne room full of nobles who wanted power,

or those who hated the ones who had gained it from his absence, and most people who hated him personally. The country is full of landholders who were broke thanks to years of war, disaffected soldiers and a society largely ruined by the mismanagement of the conflict. And all of this eventually broke out into open war that would eventually become known as the War of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster. Henry weak, insane, and outmaneuvered by pretty much every single person around him would lose, be arrested, a throne into the Tower of London, and probably be murdered, though it's mostly just said that he died, but nobody's really sure how he died. So murdered is probably where we're at. The son of the Duke of York, Edward VIII, took the throne in 1471, and he is the one that finally brought the 100 years war to an official end.

though there was a small little side quest here where he very nearly restarted it before it finally ended. The end. Grand old Duke of York, he had 10,000 men. That is the battle of Castellion and how the English got turned into a strange meat pie via French artillery. I mean, it is the combination of the two great national loves of both England and France of fucked up pies and fucked up meats. Yeah, fucked up teeth, getting your head smashed in with an axe. know that they love that shit. Yeah.

I was thinking about this that's, uh, yeah, they didn't have potatoes yet. So they couldn't be making comparisons to how everyone got turned into a shepherd's pie or a parmentia if you want to go French shepherd's pie. Mm. Shepherds pie wasn't said it's just made with mashed turnip. I mean,

I like turnips. I love gravy on it. It'd probably be okay. I mean, but that's what so like in Ireland, like say with, um, Halloween,

like the Halloween pumpkin is actually an American thing. Yeah, because we used to carve turkeys. Turnips. Do you put candles inside too? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

I know what I'm doing this year for Halloween. I'm going to confuse all my fucking neighbors. I mean, Joe's going to walk around eating a turnip like an apple. Just like pure horse mouth, your lips are going to like peel back. Yeah. I just have to make sure to feed myself with a flat hand or I'll bite my fingers off. Joe, you should, you should just do this. You could find new confounding things to eat like ambulatory snacks.

You should eat a plantain like a banana, a raw plantain. He's walking around with a handful of spaghetti. Yeah. Just walking down the street eating like the kind of thing that Diplodocus would eat. Well, fellas, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. And if you would like to ask us a question on the show, you can support the show on Patreon. You'll have access to the Discord, which has a whole channel for stuff like this. You can ask us on Patreon itself.

Or you can hollow out a turn-up, carve it up real nice and give it to Tom for Halloween and put your message inside. and we will answer it on the show. And today's question is, what historical cult are you most likely to have joined? Oh, actually, before we came in, I wanted to talk to you. I sprung into my head in that

there was a cult in Duny Gall, I think it was, in the 70s called The Screamers. They were like a new age, weird cult. It was all women and they all dressed up like Victorian ladies. They were all lesbians. and they also like coded computer games.

Well, it sounds like I couldn't join that one unfortunately. But like everyone in the area like from around that time has stories about like they got called the screamers because all you could hear was screaming from this house. Okay. All right. That's a bit odd. I mean, screaming ecstatically or screaming demonically. Why not both? A bit of both.

And it's like Ireland had like a weird, not necessarily like that kind of like late 60s, early 70s like new age Christianity thing. but it was just like when the kind of New Age paganism thing kicked off a lot of hippies across Europe moved to Ireland and like set up weird communes weird hippies in the US do that with like Hawaii there was that person who moved there and swear that she was like the mother of the volcano

and like Hawaiians got really mad and like threw shit in her mailbox. The one that I would like actually join and it's because I'm kind of fascinated by it I might join OTO like the Order Templars it's like it's the

Alasar Crowley thing that's like still around like David David Tibet is on the board of the international OTO talking about like though like we're talking historical so like this is like when it's at its peak like back in the day I'm going to say it's probably an obvious one from the jokes

that I made on this episode and other times that I would be willing to go along with whatever the fucking Celtic Druid thing was because I think jurors are inherently funny and I'm not trying to be disrespectful back to disrespectful. You'd be the canon druid. To cult a Celtic culture,

but I think there's something about druids that's funny. I think something about sort of like, you know, burying a scythe and making potions that make you trip and, you know, reading entrails and whatnot

and all the various druidry things. Yeah. I find it, so I would absolutely be on board with that. I mean, genetically speaking, I'm probably descended from people who were,

let's be real. So, you know, maybe that, maybe some one of the weird Italian heresies in the Middle Ages, you know,

on some, like, some freak Catholic, Catholicism where they're just like completely, like, there is no such thing as the Eucharist, you know, we just all have to take naked baths together or something like that. I think that we just to cuddle like friends joining the Rosicrucians in like the 18th century. I mean, yeah, just whatever, you know, I feel like, I feel like in a way like our treatment of history and specifically military history is heretical in its own right. So maybe we have a cult, maybe we've started a cult

without knowing it. Yeah, it's the Church of Eastern Horsodoxy. Exactly. Exactly. I will say, Joe, because, you know, we raise up our boroughs together. I am touched that my stupid as fuck joke got made into a t-shirt. That's actually really funny. Because I remember when it just kind of occurred to me to say Eastern Horsodoxy and you lost your shit. The most I've ever heard you lot lose your shit other than spur of the moment, Bob Seeker lyrics.

So like, you know, I'm glad we can make that happen. I think the cult that I would be in, I'm going to make this really easy. I would definitely fall for Hong Christ. Yeah. Yeah, well Tom, you might be genetically related to some who did fight for Hong Christ. It's true. I was also thinking another option to be Heaven's gay

just because they got those sick-ass uniforms and shoes. Yeah. I mean, I didn't like the, the castration part of it. Yeah. That one is real downer.

I mean, it's kind of annoying to pick a random-ass comment and be like, we're all going to die and a big thing's going to happen. Like, no one cares because like that comment is like, at least Hallie's comment's going to come back, you know, in sometime this century.

But like, Hail Bob isn't going to come back for like 10,000 years. So like, well, it's hard to prove them wrong then, isn't it? Well, yeah, it's also hard to prove by the time we get bad. Like, basically the world will be, will be either, you know,

fantasy future meme or vampire hunter D. so like, one of the two, no one's going to care about guys who wore Nike's in 1997. I mean, like, Jonestown is also a good example. Like, in the very beginning. Jonestown's really problematic. Yes, I know. But in the very beginning, it wasn't. This is why it's interesting. Like, before he went completely bad shit, cuckoo insane,

Jim Jones had a lot of really good points. And then he didn't. To make a long story short. But in the beginning, it was like a very, like, it was, there was nothing else like it in the, United States is very much like in the spirit of new wave like togetherness type stuff. But in the very, very beginning, he was like a Christian church who let white and black people come and worship together when nobody else allowed and fought for black people's equality. And then he discovered,

you know, amphetamines and went insane and started seeing himself as a prophet. Like that, that's why it's like, which one would you have fallen for? Like most people who fall for them, fall for them when they make sense. Like, you know, a good, a good example is Hong Christ. which at the time, when it was coming up, he was doing all the, I'm Jesus Christ's demon fighting little brother who God gave me a sword. No, you can't see it.

Don't ask. But in the beginning, he's making a lot of very good points about how illegitimate the government was because nobody's taking care of you. I'm kind of laughing about somebody in 1965 being like, it's okay. I think we can save this one for posterity.

Jim Jones will forever be the proud son of Indianapolis and everyone would hear Jim Jones with like, wow, what a great job Indianapolis. listed creating a man like that. Certainly this will not go wrong. Anyway, that is a podcast. Fellas, you host other podcasts. Plug those podcasts.

First of all, I want to say so many of you came out to our show last night. Thank you so much. We had an absolutely wonderful time. We're still kind of buzzing from it, and we're still kind of sweating out the post drinks, post-event drinks. I only had two. I only had two also, but it's hot as dog shit right now,

so I just feel bad. I am the co-host and producer of Trash Shooter. a podcast about the technology industry being bad. I'm also the producer of Kill James Bond and the executive producer of No Gods, No Mayors. I'm in a band called Second Home, so we have an album called Find a Way to Hate It. It's available on band camp, and that's it for me.

Beneath's a show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. I also am the producer of Bloodwork, show about the economy of violence. If you're hearing this episode, you have heard Greg from Bloodwork on this show. Twice, twice. I also have a

studio here in London, which you are hearing us in right now. So if you want to produce anything or just a place to record, let me know. Thank you for listening to the show. Consider supporting us on Patreon. You make absolutely everything we do possible. We're an independent podcast. We do no ads. We do no marketing. So tell your friends. Put it on a billboard. How old a gourd, put a message inside, throw it at someone. And leave us a review and wherever it is you listen to podcasts because it helps us immensely, especially when it comes to securing venues for live shows, because they

look at that kind of thing. And my book, The Highlands Burn, is out. It is out in paperback, e-book, audiobook, a cuneiform tablet. All of them are yours. You can find the links in the show notes below. And until next time, you see

a man trapped under a horse, beat him to death with a hammer. Keep that thang on you, and by thang, I mean, hold cans. I don't know I'm gonna do.