Noble Blood - The Crécy Campaign (with Dan Jones)

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

In the summer of 1346, English soldiers landed at Normandy and mounted a campaign that would become one of the most famous in the Hundred Years War. Historian Dan Jones joins the podcast again to talk about Edward III, the Black Prince, and his new novel, ESSEX DOGS. JOIN THE PILGRIMAGE TO CORNWALL! Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Pareon — Merch! — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and pre-order its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. I'm very excited to be joined for this very special episode by my friend, amazing historian Dan Jones, who's joining us via seamless internet technology from across the pond in England. Damn, thank you for joining me. It's absolutely my pleasure. We're like, we're so good at technology that this was set up.

It was the easiest thing. We knew how to do our headphones, our microphones. Both of us just nailed it immediately for a try. I definitely had the microphone thing locked down, did you? And contrary to what people are saying, my microphone was on the entire time. It was fully, fully turned on. That wasn't the mistake I was making. You were brought back on this podcast by popular demand.

The people demanded you, and so we had to bring you back. You were the Charles II of podcast guests. Thank you very much. That's probably my favorite Charles, of all the three. Yeah, of all the three. I was asking you before we started, how is the new king over there? Well, I think that you guys are thinking about it a little bit more than we are. We had quite a lot of it last year

And now we're just, the coronation will be along in a few months' time And I think we'll have another little go at it then But by and large, no one's paying it that much attention, I think I think of the two of us, I am the only one who read Prince Harry's book. Is that true? That is true. Well, assuming you did read it. I did read it.

I have no reason to doubt you. And it's the sort of thing you would do. Yeah, I did. Like professionally or you're actually curious. They sent me a copy. So this is full disclosures. I got a copy for free. I don't know if I would have like shelled out $25 for it.

And then I was just curious as a document. I was just like, so what is this guy really saying? Did you find out by the end of the book? Yes, I think... He's pissed off, isn't he? He's really mad. And I think he had a very sad family life. I felt bad for him by the end of it.

I was like, it must have been really lonely. Your dad never hugging you. Like, that would have been awful. But I do kind of think he's mad about the wrong things a little bit. Like he's holding these family grudges. And I feel sorry for him, but it also feels like, I don't know if he realizes it's not, that's not like the main problem with the monarchy. Yeah, it does seem to be quite, um, he does seem to have misconstrued and misconceived quite a lot of things that you would have thought like by the time you get to around the age of 40, he's a little bit younger than me, but I've, you know, by the age of 40-ish, you're supposed to have just started to work out certain things about your life. situation. And he seems to have got some of them wrong. The ones that he hasn't got wrong,

he's reacted to in a really bad way. It does seem as though he's the only one in this family who's gotten therapy. And so clearly a therapist is like, it would have been nice if your dad hugged you. And then he's like, yes, and then really decided to write a book about it. But was this a specialist therapist? Because I think it's like a certain, you need a special, like, one that just does royals, really. Basically you. I could do it. You seem, you seem, You seem like you should be in the person that would do the therapy because you'd probably think about this more than a normal therapist. It's true.

A specific category of case. Do you know the most deranged thing that I've ever said out loud in my life? To my husband, I said the words and I meant it is the really messed up part. I said if I had married into the royal family, I would have been able to hack it. Like I would have been able to do it. I can follow rules really well. I would wear the right now polish colors. I wouldn't read the news.

I would just like, curtsy the right way. I would follow all the rules. But you've also done your research. Like, this is what I'm saying. I don't. I would have known what I was getting into. I think so. Would you wanted to do it?

I mean, your husband seems great. And like, I'm not sure you and Harry would be a fit or whatever. But like, would you in the abstract have wanted that job at any level? No. To me, the job of being a royal, it seems like you are quietly drinking all day. with people I don't know if I would like. I'm not a big drinker. And also you have to go to a lot of like ceremonial

hospital openings. It feels like you're going to like three graduation ceremonies a day and your kid is never graduating, right? The job seems boring. I totally agree. And yet there is a small, like distinct subset category of people who, well, there's two, aren't there? There's the people who are born into it and like totally deal with it.

Like, oh, yeah. Okay, this is like a, like I could have definitely been born into a much worse era in history or social position, I'm going to just accept that the cost of having all this great stuff is like a super boring job, even more boring than like being a square John in an office. Yeah, at least a square John in an office, you get to like go have your fun without people making fun of you. Well, yeah, so there are, but there are small number of royals who are like, yo, I'm going to take this, I'll take this deal. It's not a perfect deal, but I sense there are the worst deals of the possible. So that I can sort of, I sort of get my head of, the

ones that definitely are unusual, are the sort of Kay Middleson type people who look at that and think it through, so they do the thing that you've done that possibly Megan didn't do, and then go, oh, no, no, that is actually what I want. Yeah. That's the weird thing. And then doesn't seem to have any regret or remorse. No. Like, was right.

That was what you want. She's very good at what she has to do, which is be conventionally attractive and thin and wear clothing in public. Would you go to Mars if someone offered you a ticket? Absolutely not. Now? I want somebody, and I don't care if he's either of the mask. I just, I don't care who it is.

I want a human being to go to Mars. But if you ask me, would I be that? Yeah, would you do that? I would say no. I would say no. I would be like the 10,000th person to go to Mars. Yeah, okay. After they do it for a while.

I wonder is it the safety that you're worried about with Mars? Yeah, and it just seems I don't know what I would be getting out of it Yeah, the safety and for what reward I'm not a rock scientist I don't know if I would be the best person to put there Could see you as a rock scientist You've got science in your locker haven't you?

That's true You wouldn't go to Mars? Why wouldn't you go to Mars? The safety? I saw The Martian with MacDameen and growing potatoes like tiresome to Yeah, it just no Just the length of the journey

You know I'm a little I don't think it would be for me the length of the journey. You know, Dan, but people, I think a lot of people would say that being a historian would be boring. You've had to spend a lot of time reading very old books. You don't find that very. No, I don't actually. I quite like it. Yeah.

But I don't know a lot of, hmm, are there a lot of people who looked at a historian when I think that's going to be boring? Because I think the case that we've been talking about is people who think something's going to be better than it. I was pretty sure about what being a historianist. You didn't think it was going to be like Indiana Jones? No, that's an archaeologist. But he's sort of in the same, it's the same academic. He's a professor. Oh, he's a professor.

But that I wouldn't have done. I'm not a professor. I could never, ever have been a professor. And that's actually important. So when I graduated from my degree in 2002, I was going, well, maybe. They went to Cambridge. He's not going to mention, but he went to Cambridge. You know, I don't.

I like other people to bring it up for me. And it's the real one as well, not the epoxy one in Massachusetts. When I graduated and I was thinking, oh, shall I do loads of more degrees and stay at Cambridge, sort of everyone that had taught me and knew me was like, I don't think you're like that. I don't think you're like any aspect of that whatsoever. And so the life that I've chosen is distinctly not that of an institutionalized professor. It's the life where I just sort of do my own thing and read what I want to read and write what I want to write and sit in my life. little office in my pajamas, which I'm doing now.

This is an audio medium, but I do want people listening to this to know that Dan is in a very nice set of pajamas. A full set of pajamas, like he's in like Notting Hill or something. I've never seen anyone in like a full set of pajamas. And it's not that late that we're recording, but he got ready for bed. Yeah, but I knew that after we finished, it would be about my bedtime. And then I just thought, I'd just be ready. I could just die straight into bed.

just worm away and like have a little you know sleep. Well if we're talking about diving straight in you're here because you have a novel that's coming out in the United States in paperback? Is it coming out in paperback or hardback over here? Hard cover. They've got so much. Hard cover

of course. Yeah. The real deal. I think we've got one as well haven't you? Yeah, hardcover. Yeah. Hardcover. We're hardcover people. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's us. Oh my gosh and he's drinking wine. He just pulled a goblet of wine out from behind the camera. It is almost, it's quite a large wine

glass but with not much wine in it. So yeah, it does have a sort of goglet vibe to it. It's Monday night. I would not drink heavily on a Monday night. Of course. Well, we are here to talk of course about his wonderful novel Essex Dogs, which I had the privilege of reading. It's just a wonderful novel. If you like this podcast because you like interesting stories from history, well told. Obviously, Essex Dogs is a fictionalization, but it is based on a very true story, and that's what I would like to talk to you about.

Oh, that would be fun. Let's do it. So tell me the story, and my Achilles heel is French pronunciation, because my Eastern European tongue doesn't curl the right way, but the, say the name of the campaign to save me for myself here. So Essex Dogs is set in the Crecy campaign. Oh, Chrissy. That's, I could have done that. You can say Cressy.

Yeah, there's a little... There's an accent that threw me off. Made me nervous. It's a crazy, crazy. But Cressy's fine. So that's one of the first major campaigns of the 100 Years' War, which took place in the summer of the year 1346, which is right at the start of the 100 Years War. If we date 100 Years' War from 1337 through 1453, we're loaded at the beginning, where Edward III's reign. I'm going to interrupt before we dive in, for people who are just listening and have heard probably the term 100 Years' War, but don't know exactly what it is.

Can you set up a bit about what this conflict was and why they were fighting it for so long? Yeah, absolutely. And at its very, very core, the Hundred Years' War is a dispute in the late Middle Ages, in the 14th and early 15th century between the two royal rival houses of the kingdoms of England, on the one hand, and France on the other. and at the very core of the dispute is who should be the king of France. Starts with Edward III, who claims that he should be the rightful king of France because he has a claim through his mother and his cousin, Philippe of Valois, who is the king of France, Philip VI at the outset of the Hundred Years' War, says, well, I beg to differ, I am actually the King of France, and I have a claim to my father, and I was...

My father, the King of France. His father wasn't the King of France, but there's a... But he's got, I think, inarguably a better claim than Edward. However, there are other reasons for them disputing who's going to be the King of France rather than they both want to be the King of France. One of them is that you have an anomalous, a weird position by the time he gets the 14th century, which goes all the way back to the normal conquest of 1066, whereby kings of England have lands in France.

And sometimes that's Normandy, and it's great to extend, Henry 2nd. It's Normandy, Aquitaine, Enjou, Maine, Brittany, Torrein, like this huge sway that almost a third of the current territorial landmass of France is at some point held by English kings technically as nobles of France. And that's a weird situation. It changes and evolves throughout the plantation years. But by the time you get to edit of the third, they still have a small amount of land. Gascany. And the French kings aren't very happy about that because it's irritating to have another king as one of your lords. Vassals.

So, vassals, yeah. So part of the reason for this dispute over the crown of France is a kind of nuclear escalation of this argument. Edna the 3rd sees that one of the best ways to counter Phillips' claim to kick him out of Gascany is to say, you can't kick me out of Gascany because actually I'm the king of France. And you know what? Let's have a really long war about whether or not this is the case.

And it goes, I guess, generation, 100 years is underplaying it. It goes on for 146. No, it's not quite a lot. 116, 117. One of my favorite tidbits, I think from one of your books, the book on the War, the Roses, is when fast-forwarding, obviously, you know, 100 years from this event, when I hope I'm doing this right because it is from your book, Henry the 6th is trying to establish his claim in France,

and they're distributing propaganda posters. trying to trace his lineage back to St. Louis to be like, no, no, he's right. Look at the poster that we made. They get right into it. And it opens up this enormous kind of worms, which you then start to see in the domestic politics of England and France as well. And people say, oh, no, I should be the king because X, Y or Z. I mean, that's what underpins the Wars of the Roses in England, the 15th century, York Lancaster, quote unquote, a conflict for the crown is really some of the principles established in the 100-year-s war,

which are like, I've not a better question. going to the ground than you, and I'm going to fight you with my now enormous armies and improving siege weaponry and so on and so forth. Anyway, back to the 100 years war, as well as a dynasty dispute for the, quote, unquote, dynastic dispute for the Crown of France, it starts to draw in more and more and more combatants around Europe. So you have the Scots fighting the English. You have Castile drawn into this. Eventually, you have sort of kingdoms of Portugal drawn into it. You have Flanders is an enormously important sort of theatre of hot and Cold War. You have the sort of German states in the Kressi campaign. You have the Battle of

Cressy, as we hopefully get to, you have five different kings on the battle. So this apparent sort of neighborly dispute between England and France, in fact, spills out into basically the whole of Western Europe, fighting each other in various combinations for generations. So now explain what the Cressey campaign is. We have King Edward III in England trying to retain his claim in France and what happens? So at this point, which in 3046, the war is young. War is less than nine, less than 10 years old. And there have been already different spheres of operation opened up.

There's fighting going on down in Gascany. There's been a great sea battle at Schlois, which is sort of a modern Netherlands. But this is the first big invasion by one side of the other. So in July 1346, Ed, the third lands approximately 15,000 troops on one of the Normandy beaches. When I say Normandy beaches, you probably think D-Day, 1984 World War II, and you're right to because it is a beach on the Cotentam Peninsula of Normandy, slightly up from what in the Second World War was called Utah Beach at a place called Somvaloog, where Edwards put 15,000 men onto a beach. And you can

sort of imagine this as a medieval saving private Ryan. In fact, the idea of a medieval saving Private Ryan, you know, medieval D-Day was the first picture I had in my head that sparked what became the novel of Essex Dogs because I felt like I'd never seen a kind of band of brothers, second private Ryan, American hard-boiled version of a medieval amphibious invasion. But that's how the Crescent campaign starts. Edward III says, you know what, I'm off to France and I'm going to, well, is he actually going to try and take Philippe's throne in Paris, possibly? He's certainly going to cause as much trouble for Philippe the 6th of 3rd.

France as possible in northern France in order to discomfort him so much that possibly his nobles rebel to rebel against him and his people will start to abandon their fieldry to him. So that's what Edward sets about doing. 12th of July 1346, he lands this huge army. Probably over the course of the next few days, they decamp onto the beach. They're opposed by local militias, but the local militias who are opposing them soon see that this is an enormous, enormous army. I mean, a gigantic invasion army.

This is the biggest army that has ever been taken from England to France. And they're going to do some serious damage. So the small militia who were on the coast, because Edward had kept his invasion plans or the location of his invasion at least secret, spies had been in London for months and months. They knew an invasion was coming, but they had no idea where. The parallels with D-Day in 1944 are striking. There's not much opposition. They start falling back.

And so Edward really has then the run of the Gotterdam Peninsula, this bit of Normandy that sticks out, sort of going up to Shubour. So between Normandy and Calais? So it's hard without drawing you a map, but there's a sort of pointy bit that's not Brittany of France. Okay. That's the bit of Normandy we're talking about. And they come in right at the tip of it. And the French strategy for the first couple of weeks is essentially a Fabian one, is to fall back, try and delay the English advice. as much as possible by breaking bridges, by burning things, but not by engaging.

And so the English do what will become a standard tactic of the Hundred Years' War, and they sort of launch it in earnest in 1346, and it's called the Chevouchet. So they set their army out, essentially into the field to just burn and plunder and cause as much terror and mayhem as possible. It's to carve a path through the landscape, a path of terror. Now, I wrote Essex Dogs, when did I finish writing it? I finished writing it through March 2021, so shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But if you can cast your mind back to Russian tactics at the beginning of the war in Ukraine,

which was to burn and plunder and rape and kill and cause as much mayhem and terror as possible, that's borrowed directly from a long military playbook. Ender of the Third did not invent the Chevrechet. The Mongols have done it before. I'm sure in the Bronze Age it has happened. You know, we can go back probably as far as human history. and Mounted Warriors anyway go to see examples of similar tactics in warfare. Sure.

But this is like Edward really master, the English master the Chevrochet in war. So the first sort of, or probably half of the aggressive campaign is effectively one big, long just campaign of absolute terror as the English push through the Norman countryside, through the sort of bookage and all the stuff. Again, if you know your saving private rival, band of brothers, you know, these little lanes and the hedgerows, English just burn a sway through it, heading for the major towns of Normandy,

which will lead them to the same valley, and then they can go upriver towards Paris. And so in your fictional version, we're joined by 10 men in Essex dog, the story is 10 men who are sort of more loyal to each other than any crown. Right. So this story of the Chrissie campaign has been told in history and in fiction

many times. But it struck me when I was thinking about it, or thinking more generally about the realities of warfare in this period, which is something I've written a reasonable amount about in my history books, struck me that we very seldom see medieval warfare through the eyes of what in the World War II film you'd call the ordinary grunts, right? Just the rank and file. The Crecy campaign is really famous in medieval history for things that aristocrats and nobles do. There are lots of little famous vignettes and set pieces. When Edward III lands on the beach of Somalough, for example, he trips over in the surf, bangs his nose into the sand and gets a nosebleed, and he has the quick wit to say,

ah, this just shows the land wants me, because I'm worried this might be an omen. When we get to later in the campaign at the Battle of Christi, the Black Prince supposedly performs great heroics, he's in danger, his father refuses to come to his age, so the story goes. He says, and let him win his spurs. And at 16 years old, this is the Black Prince's kind of magnificent emergence as a chivalric warrior. Anyway, Chrissy throws up lots of these vignettes through the writings of chroniclers like Jean Foucassar and various others of that type. But we don't often hear anything at all in this campaign about what it was like for ordinary people. Now, if we consider that in a medieval army of about 15,000, somewhere between 10 and 20%, would be what we'd call nobles and knights.

still that leaves the vast majority of the army as not nobles and knights. And what I wanted to do was somehow or other capture the experience of one small group of warriors on this campaign who were ordinary people. And so I created this little platoon really called the Essex Dogs, who are quite typical of what we know of the rank and file of medieval armies in this period in that they're not professional soldiers because there are no professional armies in this point. they are sort of just you call them

mercenary freebooters chances you know in in war time they will seek out military contracts and go fight for whoever's paying and in peacetime they'll use exactly the same skills for whatever jobs require them and that tends

to be sort of thieving piracy if you need someone beating up who'd you call you know they're dead so they're a group of violent or of men for who violence is their profession, but not all of them are violent men. And so within this group, you have some people who are unthinkingly committed to the profession of fighting and causing mayhem. And there are some who are new to us and don't really know what they've gotten themselves

into. And there are some most, or best epitomized by their leader, Love Day, who was into we're starting to have second thoughts. And so what we see unfold across their adventures within the Creasy campaign is the dissolving of the bond between that group, as they all are supposed to be trying

and keep the group together. They're committed. They're all verbally and in some sense mentally committed to one another to keeping this band together. But actually it's all going to shit. It's like the end of the Beatles. You know, everyone wants this thing to continue.

but it's, you know, it has to finish. Although by the end of Cressey and the siege of Calais, it's a victory for the English, isn't it at this point? That's the thing about the Crecy Campaign. You have this Chevrechet. You have several big sort of dramatic scenes in Norman towns at Saint-Loc, Kahn, Ruon. You have dramatic crossings of two rivers, the River Seine,

and then north of that, the River Somme. and then you have this enormous battle at Chrissy at the end of August 1346 which is a seemingly miraculous victory for the English subsequent to that they go off to Calais and besiege Calais that's the topic of the book I'm writing at the moment which is a sequel to rest itself

called Woolza Winter Sorry to spoil the ending Wikipedia would do the job just as well of spoiling I mean not of not a brushing a novel No but AI might be might be close behind I think GPT

four might have me. Yeah, and I like to say five, but it's actually four that's going to catch me, I think. So, yeah, and then, well, then you have the siege of Calais, which follows, which is a very different kettle of fish. If the, the Grisci campaign lasts roughly seven weeks, the Calais campaign is an 11-month siege, which ends with them starving the people out of Calais. But, yeah, the end product of the Griscaptain is they take Calais, and that's in English hands until Mary Tudor's right in 1558. It is wild to consider a starry. a city out as a victory. Yeah, but that's the tactic in medieval siegecraft by and large is hang around until

someone gets bored and gives up or gets hungry and gives up. And the victory is that Calais falls into English hands. And this is not just where we took a city, military terms. There's an enormous economic component to this warfare. Now, in Essex dogs, when I try and show really, really up with. the camera locked to this very small group of men is what does the war look like from this in this claustrophobic environment of a single military platoon. What I'm trying to do with the Siege of Calais, Wolves of Winter, is to show actually what are the other interests in this

war? Because we've all heard the cliche talking about British and American and Allied activity in the Middle East over the course of our lifetimes. Oh, it's all about the oil, it's just all about money. Well, that's kind of, people say that because there's a lot. They're a lot. They're part of that that's true. It's also true in the Middle Ages that it's about the economy. And Calais is an enormously important strategic town halfway between, it's between France and Flanders. It controls a very narrow, the narrowest bit of the English Channel. It's in easy reach of the most economically prosperous port towns in southern England, names the Sink Ports. It's been a haven for pirates for years and years and years who can prey on part of the city.

and shipping. It's both a menace and an incredibly, it'll be a bridgehead for any further English military operation. But fundamentally, once the siege of Calais falls in 1347, Edward I clears out everyone who lives in Calais invites in the richest merchants from England to take over this town and run it as an economic entrepreneur on the continent. Again, not new thinking. This was exactly what had happened in the Holy Land during the Crusades. The same thing had happened. The Crusades, they had a big religious purpose to go to Jerusalem, but then the thing that kept everyone interested was the economic viability of the port tax. Well, this is sort of the same in the Hundred Years War. There's a massive financial imperative to doing this.

And the only reason that these wars are possible is because people are prepared to lend Edward III. Astonishing amounts of money. He bankrupts the Vardy Bank. He bankrupts the Vardy Bank. He almost bankrupts the Fresco Baldy. He's running up these. gigantic debts to syndicates of merchants from the richest towns in England to continue paying for this war. And they're all very happy to continue financing the war, because war is fantastic for business.

The more money they lend him, he mortgages, effectively creates a mortgage to pay for these wars. He says, give me the money now, and you can take over to the tax revenues of all these different rich ports around England. So the Hull merchants take over the Hull, the Yarmouth merchants take over the tax of the ports of Yarmouth, the London merchants in London, and some of them of Dover and so on. So once you really start getting under the skin of this war, which looks like, if you read Fossa, knights and nobles doing heroic deeds, that's just all like, that's the icing.

This is really just about merchants and pirates, struggling for financial dominance and poor grunts dying because of it. If we're talking, you know, chivalric deeds, I feel like the legend of Edward the Black Prince, who is the son of King Edward. Edward III. Obviously, Edward dies and never takes the throne, which, you know, leads to challenges in the War of the Roses. But he's, in my understanding, in British culture, very much seen as a gallant hero. How did you portray him in your book? She answered in a non-leading question.

Oh, how nice she to ask. Edred of the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III, does have this grand reputation as the sort of paragonal of chivalry. It's him, it's Henry the fin. It's after him and it's the ridge of the lionheart before him. I only think you would have wanted to run into any of those three. Actually, I was going to say in a dark alley, but anywhere ever. Well, I would. I'm very charming and a lady. They would be very nice to me.

No, they wouldn't. That's the horrible thing. They really absolutely massively wouldn't. None of those three men would be nice to you at all. They'd be ghastly to you. And they'd be ghastly to me as well. because I'd be a sort of Welsh peasant person. So, but he has this great reputation.

I think it's great that he never became king because the reputation would have evaporated. He was by no means as subtle as his father. He was in later life an extraordinarily effective warlords, a medieval military tactician, if not a strategist. he was a brutal absolutely like Henry the fit absolutely brutal in an age which demanded that by and large of its military leaders in the Cressey campaign he's often romanticised as having been this kind of 16 year old his first time on campaign and so the story goes based on very very thin evidence he acquits himself immensely well what do we mean he quits himself well he sort of doesn't really do anything for the whole of the campaign because he's being babysat by the Marshal of the army, Thomas Beecham, Earl of Warwick, and the constable of the army, William Daboon, Earl of Northampton.

When he does sort of have an opportunity to do anything, the first thing he does of real note during the campaign is sack a monastery. Then he allows, then a bit later, once his father has issued instructions, they're on the run from Philip's army at this point, between the Sen and the Somme. On no account are we stopping to sack monasteries. he lets him then sack another monastery for which 20 of his men are hanged summarily by his father. And then when we get to the Battle of Cressy,

well, Edward the Black Prince comports himself in quite a strange way. He's placed a sort of front and centre of the action. But he doesn't really obey orders or seem to understand the tactics of the battle very well. And he allows himself to be pulled out of the English lines. and effectively captured, and his standard falls. And this is a big disaster in the heat of the battle for the English. Now, the legend goes that he had been seen surrounded,

and his father who was commanding the battle from the rear up on a windmill so he could see across the whole of the battlefield. His father was informed that he was in trouble and said, oh, you know, let him win his spurs. It had to prove himself a man. But none of that in point of historical facts, and there's been some amazing research on Crecy, historical research on Grously recently by Michael Livingston,

which has revised the location of the battlefield and everything basically happened on the battlefield. Says that that's really not what happened at all. He was captured and he was enormously lucky to be rescued. And his father was extremely annoyed with him after the battle. Anyway, so knowing all this, as I'm trying to write the Black Prince into the story of Essex dogs, I also asked myself, well, firstly, you say,

say, well, people can change throughout their career. And I ask myself, what would a 16-year-old placed in charge of an army when his dad's also the king actually be like? And my answer was not a, well, there's a degree of petulance, which, to go back to the beginning of our conversation, one does see sometimes in princes of the royal blood. There's an enormous... No, calm, I'm a room. Yeah, thank you.

An enormous man of arrogance. There's a total irresponsibility. and since I was trying to write a fun novel and there's almost nothing that's known in reality about the Black Prince's character from this time, i.e. it's not written afterwards by people just seeking to lionise him. I thought, well, let's make him a drunk, let's make him a suspicious little swine.

But also a guy who has beat, and here's Harry again, has had to deal with the fact of a father as a king. His only has his father has been king since he was 15. His father has not deemed to all his school plays, let's say. He's a horrible little shit because he's lonely.

But that doesn't excuse his atrocious behaviour throughout Essex Dogs. And we have a mirror character among the Eschoggs who's called Romford, who's also 16, but who's a sort of street kid from London, who's been found his way into this group of the Essex Dogs at the last minute, literally as they're getting on the boat

to leave France, he's trying to run away from England and succeeds. He and the Prince cross paths with for Romford's emotionally disastrous consequences, and for the Prince, absolutely no consequences whatsoever. He learns nothing. He sees nothing. He's completely untouched by the gentle suffering of his little acolyte.

And so there's a kind of, it's not quite a romance between them at all, but there is a collision of these two 16-year-olds in war that I found quite interesting to write. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wode. My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell.

Woo. Woo! Woo! My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day. And I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent.

He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you. Which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. and he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.

It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Wadam.

My next guest, you know from Step Brothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come. Look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.

Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that.

There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was going to ask, I don't want to do another too much of a leading question, but there is a little interesting thing you play with around sexuality. And can you talk a little bit about the fluidity maybe of sexuality in the 1300s that maybe modern audiences don't understand necessarily or want to think about? Yeah. There's quite a lot of really respectable authors, and I can't possibly include myself in that bracket. But, you know, there's proper writers writing about the Middle Ages at the moment. The temptation, of course, for modern novelists approaching the Middle Ages is to just dump 21st century priorities onto this canvas.

Because it's like, it's a cool mash-up, and I get it. It's hey, nony-no, but guess what? We're all sort of gender fluid or whatever it might. Some of these knolls are great in their way. But I found it like not that satisfying a thing for me to do, to go and do that. And what I tried to draw out in Essex dogs, particularly in this story I've alluded to between Romford and the Black Prince, is something about what sexuality was like in the Middle Ages, which is not so categorized, let's say, as it is now. Yeah. We have in the 21st century a weirdly 19th century pseudo-scientific sort of approach that we've put into gender and sexuality that were we to see it in terms of ethnicity and like shapes of heads and shape. You go, oh my God, that's the wackiest, wackiest end of 19th century pseudoscience. But we've sort of got a version of that around sex. In the middle age, you don't have any of that. You've got lots of really wacky, weird nonsense science. but it doesn't seem to have been applied to categorising sexuality.

So the love between men, which we would probably categorize as homosexual, isn't really thought of in that way as the Middle Ages. There are distinct categories of sexual in misconduct. Well, there's really just one, which is buggery. Saddam. As we were saying. Son of me. Yeah.

There's that. And then there's everything else. Or rather, there's one. What's legit under church law in terms of sexual conduct, which is very strictly by this stage, defined as sex between one man and one woman for the purposes of procreation. And then there's everything else, which is pretty much, you know, which could be covered. Now, that's a very strict church definition. And it's not very well policed, and I don't think it's very well observed or evade.

In fact, it's definitely not very well observed or obeyed by ordinary people. But as regards, you know, the sort of versions of same-sex attraction, which in the 21st century, we would be extremely keen to categorize and delineate and make sort of names for and acronyms and hashtags and stuff. Like, that's us. They just don't do that. I'm not like passing judgment, really. I'm just saying that's not how it works in the Middle Ages. When you try and make the Middle Ages do that, it doesn't ring very true. So what I tried to do in Essex-Stokes is just play with this idea that there is, an attraction, certainly from Romford's side. Yes. That came across to be as a reader. Yeah, older men are attracted to Romford.

Ronford doesn't really know what he's about because he's just like a fiend and a drifter. He quite likes the prince, but he doesn't sort of torture himself by asking what that makes him. He just has this kind of attraction towards the prince, which is in some sense sexual, but is also in that sexual,

attraction is indistinguishable from a role that Romford is given as a squire, as a sort of social inferior to the prince. So he looks at him with this kind of daunted admiration, which spills over into sexual attraction. But that's so much of that is part of his feel like the social difference between them. And you can't unpick in the Middle Ages the difference for me between social longing and sexual longing. They're bound up. been the same thing. And so the love story such as is between them is quite subtle, I think. It's certainly in its resolution. Yeah. Yeah? And doesn't push it into the psychological component of romance that we are familiar with. And that really is something I've tried to do throughout

Essex dogs is show you the Middle Ages with as little 21st century psychological intrusion as is possible without making it just totally confusing and weird. So they do, in order to make it comprehensible, they speak in a sort of form of modern idiom. But they don't do things. Even the sympathetic characters aren't really sympathetic in ways that we would find sympathetic in a novel set in contemporary time. I find that challenge so relatable. I wrote a book and another book coming out in February that takes place in the early 1800s,

and I tried to keep everything as palatable for a modern audience as I could, while still maintaining the feel of, you know, the regency period, pre-regency period in this sense. But my copy editor and I went back and forth a lot because I wanted to have characters say, okay. And she was like, you can't. And I was like, I know it's not historically accurate, but to me it conveys sort of a youthfulness and a teenage, you know, conversationality that a younger character would do, that I kept them. So it's like even the mistakes that I, mistakes I put in air quotes I made, I think I tried to make as deliberate choices for the text.

As you know, I absolutely loved an attitude. Thank you very much. I cannot wait through immortality. And I think you're brilliant. And I just, I read that first book. He was in like one. I didn't. I didn't put him up to this.

No, no, no, no. You absolutely didn't. You absolutely didn't. You absolutely didn't. You absolutely didn't. And I read it in one go and I was transfixed by it. I remember as I was reading it, I was sending your message saying, this is just such like, I was transported to that to Edinburgh at that time.

And I thought that you just handled all of the stuff. that I've been sort of agonized, I was agonizing over as I was riding Essex dogs at the time I was reading that. It just felt, I'm sure effortless is not the right word because, you know. No, I agonized over those things too. You have to make those sort of choices. But the result that you end up with feels just, you know, once the reader falls under your spell in anatomy, you know, they're just there. They're in that world. And it just, everything feels right.

And I think you've got to earn that. And I think, you know, as you know, I thought you earned it magnificently in that book. But I think any writer has to, you have to earn the right to do things that aren't period accurate within a period book. And that means getting an awful lot of stuff right or close to right. So that you then say, okay, well, you earn the reader's trust. And they're going to go with you even when it is clear that you're doing things that are not possible in that period. So in essence dogs, you know, you've said, you have people saying, okay. I really struggled with, I'm writing a book about men in an army.

How am I going to have them speak to one another because they've got to be somewhat profane. Yeah. But the profanity of the Middle Ages is blasphemy fundamentally. Our profanity is scatology and it's sexual. That's how we swear. I had a lot of trouble about, am I going to use the F word in this? And eventually, yeah, I use fairly liberally to punctuate military speech because you have to translate dialogue. It communicates it to a modern audience what you need to convey.

It's part of the Tiffany problem, right? The Tiffany problem. Yeah, so that's just sort of the colloquial name for it, the fact that like if someone hears the name Tiffany, they're like, oh, 1980. let's go to the mall. But Tiffany is a name that existed in the Middle Ages and the high, you know, for years and hundreds of years. But if you wrote a historical fiction book and made your main character named Tiffany, it would seem wrong even if it's right. And so the Tiffany problem is a colloquial version that someone told to me when I was writing anatomy, where sometimes you have to make things a little wrong so they feel right to modern readers.

Do you know what? I love that. I've never heard of describes the Tiffany problem. before, but it's, that says it, that says everything. I always think it's like castles, you know, I like a good castle as much than that. Famously, not really more. Watch, watch, watch Dan Jones walk their castles on Netflix. Please, please squander your life in this pursuit. But they're the wrong, you know, you see them now, they're so bland, all medieval churches. They're just devoid, almost, they're usually

devoid of wall paintings and color and no whitewash. If I went down to Windsor Castle, which is about five miles down the road from my house with my tin of whitewash and I just whitewash one of the towers, I reckon trees and laws would be dusted off. But in the middle ages, it would not be unusual to have a sort of a brightly colored castle. But we just think, so if you saw it on film, you'd say, that's absolutely nonsense. These people don't know anything about the Middle Ages. So you're right. This is a version of the Tiffany book. I call it the Whitewashing Windsor Castle problem. Copyright Dan Jones. Another thing, I also think, I mean, I loved Essex Dogs. I thought it was just, I felt like I felt like

was learning. This was a period of history I didn't know much about. And it made a battle feel so immediate and personal when I tend to be so bored by military history. It was so brilliantly done. Your characters are so well sketched. And I think that your use of violence and gore is so well placed. You don't use it gratuitously, but you convey how brutal these battles were. Well, thank you. And I don't read a lot of military fiction. And I don't run. I mean, I sort of, some of the books, you know, books like The Crusades, you can't get away from it, but they're political as well as military. It's not, you know, I'm not a battle nerd, really, but I am a kind of people nerd. And if one of the techniques I tried, or the main technique I tried to use in Essex dogs, in order not to have very sort of either cliche or just like gratuitously unpleasant battle scenes was just a lock, focus, super, super tight with one character. And you follow mainly two characters. You follow the group of characters, but you're locked with a couple of viewpoints,

Love Day and Romford, through most of Essex Dogs. And not as much as you, but I have worked in TV as well as in writing. And one of the directors I worked with on a show a few years ago gave me a very good piece of advice, which was if you're having trouble writing your way through a scene, just lock that camera on one person's shoulder. And I found that the more I did that in Essex Dogs, the more the battles sort of gained very similitude. And there's one, which is the, I suppose it's, it is a Cressy where, for part of it, we're with Romford, and he's just on the floor.

Yeah. She's on the floor. And all you can see his feet, being kicking it. But it's really annoying. Yeah, it's horrible. But it can't get up. But it can't get up. And you don't see anything else.

Like, in flashes, you see other stuff. That also, I found, like, firstly, it freed me from having to write endless, endlessly long, boring battle scenes. So you've just got this, like, confused, chaotic vision through one person's eyes. But I found it also enabled me to make jokes because anyone who knows or is invested in the history of the Crescent campaign will come to us and we'll be able to see where there are there's little Easter eggs for the homeboys, right?

Like if you know the Black Prince, if you hear about the Black Prince to go, well, it wasn't actually true that the Black Prince wore black armour that's a Victorian myth. Right, that's okay, that's true. Then there's a joke for you about how he gets that name and the way he acts when someone offers to give him some black armour is like, but if you don't know, it doesn't matter.

It stays in character. But they're picking viewpoints that are attached closely to one character, usually a lonely part of the social hierarchy. I just found I had much better ways of having jokes and subverting history and messing around with it. And I enjoyed myself doing that a great deal. But then look, I'd never written a novel before. It was all new to me.

And now you're doing another. There's a sequel coming out. I believe it's part of a trilogy. It's number two of a trilogy, yeah. And I've got to really finish writing that thing. Yeah, get on it so that I can have you back on and we can talk about it again. Yeah, siegecraft's different.

Siegecraft is very different, very different narrative challenge. I'm finding it writing the story of a siege to the story of a campaign. A military campaign is pretty easy. Oh, of course, yeah, famously easy. All of us are thinking that. But what you have built into it is narrative imperative. It goes forward because the army's moving and all you've got to, well, not all you've got to do,

but the thing you've got to, actually, a thing you've got to do with a battle campaign that's difficult is not make it inevitable the way they're going. And you've got to throw red herring after red herring in and give them different diversions. So it's not just, oh, well, they're on a train and the train's going to this station. Stop them here, yeah. The difference of the siege is, man, this train isn't going anywhere. The stranger's at the station. It's going to be at the station

until everyone gets off. So it's very, very rich in textural opportunity. Unless it's a teenage girl on a horse who thinks she talks to God, it shows up. That's good for your siege. You know, you sit about,

the trouble with Cali. The trouble with Cali is it's not Orlane. No, true. What you do have, just in the same way, at Ollio, you've got Joan of Arc and the White House. And instantly, when you say that, everyone knows what you're thinking if they listen to this podcast anyway.

Yep. I haven't done a Joan of Arc episode, but I will. Well, you've got to get Helen Castor to come and do it. She is brilliant, yeah. She's the best. Put that aside, Calais, you have a very, very, very, very, very famous end to the siege. So if you've been to Calais, there's a row-down sculpture in Calais or the six burgers of Calais,

and they're coming out with the nooses around their necks to offer their lives to Edward to buy the freedom of everyone who's left in the city who's survived by eating rats and horse leather and whatever, whatever, whatever. And it's a really famous, really famous scene. And then you have, of course, Edward says, no, I'm going to hang you all, and his wife's still up, oh, please don't do that, oh, okay, then I won't. It's a bit more dramatic than that. More pathos in it than that impression suggested.

But there are things in Calais to write towards that they're there from the history. and so that's helped all. I love this. I don't know anything about this. There's so much history, Dan. That's the lesson of history, isn't it? There's tons of it. Every time I think you've got a handle on it,

there's some more comes along. I've been reading nonstop history for a few years doing this podcast constantly, and I've never heard about these burgers coming out with nooses around their necks. Oh, the rodents. Just don't Google the Rodan sculpture, because the rodent sculpture,

there's two of them. There's another one, I think, in London. Maybe not London, maybe somewhere else. I made a couple of films like the real history of Essex dogs I made them in the summer last year and we went to Calais and I stood and looked at that Rodan sculpture and it's

just, I mean obviously it's not 14th century, it's Rhodo, it's modern but it's a sensational piece of sculpture which each of these six burgers has a different form of grief conveyed by their mannerisms in their face and they are, what's amazing about it is he has given them individual

character. And when we think about so many of these set pieces from medieval history, if it's not the king or someone near the level of the king or Joan of Arc or whatever, they're just sort of generic noble or generic knight or generic peasant or generic archer or whatever. And what Rodan does so brilliantly in that sculpture is say these were real people, each one individual and each with a different reaction to this, what we now see as a sort of a fixed historical tableau. And Rodan Dan is an immeasurably greater artists than I will ever be, obviously. But the...

I don't know. He never wrote Essex dogs. Well, but the aim in righty essence is to capture some of that is to say, like, an army of 15,000 is 15,000 individuals and each one of them with their own take on the thing that they're experiencing. And when we think of medieval archer, yeah, okay, that's like, that's a type. That's somebody who shoots a pretty similar bow with a similar arrow. of a similar bow in a similar place, but each one of those people was an individual, and in the realm of fiction, at least, that gives you such rich opportunity to do things

with the past that nonfiction doesn't always allow you to do. So that's for me why I've enjoyed my little gap here in fiction. Brilliantly said, Essex Dogs comes out in America, February 14th, I believe, makes a great Valentine's Day, the week before, yeah. It's a pregame to immortality. Are you 21st? I'm 28th, two weeks before. It's a little, plenty of time to read it and get ready for immortality.

Your February could be sensationally good fiction-wise, couldn't it? Right. Get a good Valentine's Day gift for the medieval history lover in your life. Yeah. And they'd get a, get Dana's book after that. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me clearly when you're ready to go to bed.

This is what I planned. A fireside, chat. Roll from here straight into my slumber. Next time I'm in London. Will you take me on another tour? Can we go do something? Yeah, what do you want to see? I'm coming this summer.

Are you? Yeah. I'm leading a tour to Cornwall, but I'm going to be in London for a bit. Okay, so we went to Westminster Abbey last time, didn't we? Yeah, I got a personal tour from Dan Jones in Westminster Abbey, not to brag, but it was wonderful. We had to queue up. I'd never done that before.

I know. He was like, when you're on TV, you don't have to wait in the line. Well, why don't we go to the Tower of London? Done. I'm there. Let's do it. Tower of London's good. Yeah, we'll do that. Great. I'll see you the summer. And I'll see you even sooner because we're talking about your book again for your launch. Oh, and then I'm coming to L.A. in April. I'm coming to see Iggy Pop. You're going to get so tired of me. I see you so much. This is going to be. Yeah, this is fantastic.

Great. Order Dan's buck. Dan, I'll see you so soon. I can't wait. Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron. What's up, everyone? I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell.

Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an instant. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be.

Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.