TRIGGERnometry - The 100 Years' War with Historian Dan Jones

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

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with over 4,000 reviews. Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Hear your free quote at ethos.com slash trigger. That's eth-h-h-os.com slash trigger. Application times may vary. Rates may vary too. The 100 Years War, is that why we hate the French?

The 100 Years' War is a shaking out of what these realms are going to be. In 1328, when there was a succession crisis in the French crown, the young King of England, Edward III, got into his head that one way around this might be to claim to be the King of France himself. That's the fundamental deep-down reason English kings are saying, we should be keen as a promise. So, Dan, as you know, we're massive feminists on the show, and so is all of our audience.

And it strikes me that we haven't addressed a central figure in this whole story, which is, of course, Joan of Art. Dan Jones, welcome back. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you on. We're going to talk about the 100-year war. It's going to be in a great conversation.

And I was just saying to you before we started, the last one we did about the Crusades is absolutely smashed. It was really, really fun, and our audience enjoyed it. So it's wonderful to have you back. Thanks for coming. Yeah, well. The 100 Years' War, is that why we hate the French? Well, I suppose it's one of the ways that the relations between England and France are shaped.

I mean, if you think about any sporting occasion, I mean, we're recording this before the World Cup. I don't know if England will play France in the World Cup or not, but I guarantee that if they were to play France in the Soccer World Cup, you would see some sort of montage before the event that referenced like the Battle of Agincourt when the plucky English to play France. on the might of the French stability in one. So it's like it's a sort of, it's a common analogy for English-French relations. Is it why we hate the French? I don't know if it's the specific cause, but it's definitely part of the kind of material that's around. Yeah.

I mean, I was only joking. I guess what, to give it the serious treatment that I think the subject deserves, I think the best thing to do is to start by explaining actually what we mean by England and France, because I imagine at this point, countries, don't really exist in the way that we think about them now. These are more personal fiefdoms. And so is that really where we should start with this? Yeah, that's probably a good place to start.

And in a sense, like the 100 Years' War is a shaking out of what these realms are going to be. So if we go back before them into, so just by way of framing at the top, usually when we talk about 100 years, where we're talking from about 1337 through to 1453. Now, you can extend those in either direction. Mike Livingston, the great military historian, just written a book called the 200 years war, but by and large, that's the core of the conflict we're talking about. Now, if you go before that, you're absolutely right. These are largely personal fiefdoms.

There's a fact of geography, which is since the last Ice Age, you know, Britain has been an island, and England is the sort of the dominant kingdom. within that island archipelago. But if you go back to the sort of the early into the high Middle Ages, the notion of what exact, which bits are ruled by whom is not fixed. So at the beginning of the Plantagenet era,

since after the Norman conquest, 1154, Henry II takes over as king of England. He rules England, Normandy, which inherited, effectively because of the Norman conquest. Enjou, Maine, Turane, south of Normandy. It's a claim over Brittany and, by marriage, the Duchy of Aquitaine, a huge sprawl of southwest France. Now that adds up to about a third of the territorial landmass of modern France, plus almost the entire Western seaboard. Now that all answers ultimately to Henry II,

king of England. But he's king of England and he's also Duke or Count of a bunch of different places. So this is very much a sort of personal, a set of fiefdoms held together by him. However, even at the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, at the early 14th century, you still have kings of England who are Dukes of Aquitaine or Gascany, depending what you want to call it. So they still have this strong claim to South West France,

centered on the capital of Bordeaux. They've got a kind of pipe dream that really they ought to be ruling Normandy as Dukes of Normandy because of their descent from William the Conqueror. and all of that is constantly in negotiation between English and French kings. Who rules what and how and why? And it's only through the Hundred Years' War, really, that you get to a situation where pretty much, even though Henry VIII might have still fantasised that he was a king of France,

he's not, not in the way that Henry V almost was, and Henry X actually was. So the Hundred Years' War is like the kind of shaking out of those two kingdoms. So the personal fiefdoms being critical here, who are the key players at the outset and prior to the outset of the Hundred Years' War? Well, ultimately, it's the Kings of England and Kings of France. So kings of England, well, from, you know, the 10th century onwards, there'd been a king of England rather than, you know, the heptarchy or whatever in the Anglo-Saxon period, a king of England who rules, call it what England roughly looks like today. Then you've got the kings of France whose situation is a little bit more complicated. You go all the way back to the time of Charlemagne, you know, to the late 8th century, early 9th century, king of the Franks.

Well, Charlemagne ruled what's now France, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Northern Italy, so on, so on. Like the EEC, foreign, the European Union, more or less, well, that's still in the dream of the European Union. There's a Charlemagne Prize given out every year. That's the legacy of the rulers of Germany and the rulers of France. So it's in the minds of the kings of France that they really ought to sort of be at least rulers of Western Francia as had been.

So that's like, if we call Paris the capital, it's what we now call France. But in reality in the later Middle Ages, certainly the early 13th century, the Kings of France didn't rule that much. power extended to a little island outside Paris. And beyond that, it was just theoretical claim of sovereignty over all of these different powerful lords within France. And the drive of French policy from the late 12th century, early 13th century, Philip the 2nd Augustus is the king who really has the great vision, is to start expanding the power

of the kings of France back over what, you know, back over France. and to directly rule and to sort of squash down the independence of these counts and dukes rule directly. And that's a process that takes a long time. Philip II goes some way towards doing it. At the beginning just before the Hundred Years' War, Philip the Fourth gets a lot further. And then by the end of the Hundred Years' War, the Charles' the Seventh, and then certainly by the time you get to Louis the 11th, France is starting to look like what France is now. So the power of the kings has really been extended properly over those two kingdoms. But part of that process for France means kicking the English out.

Because it's a very awkward situation for a French king to have, in his nobility, a Duke of Aquitaine slash Gascony in particular, who's also the King of England. Because, I mean, the resources of that Lord are at least equal to the resources of the King of France. So it becomes a not very biddable person within your realm. So like from the French point of view, getting the English out of the kingdom in their capacity as nobles is a big part of the, there's longer drive to create a greater France. And how does that manifest itself in the war actually starting? Well, the war starts over a very specific incident.

There'd been for decades, generations, these kind of squabbles between the kings of England and the kings of France, specifically over Gascany, this bit in the southwest. because as dukes of Gascony, English kings were technically obliged to come to the kings of France and pay homage to them, you know, kneel before them, hands in theirs, you know, swear I will be your liege man and obey you because I'm a noble of the French mobility. Now, no English king was, by and large, going to agree to do that. So this had always been a point of great friction between the two kings.

To try and resolve that, in 1328, when there was a success, crisis in the French crown. The young king of England, Edward III, got into his head that one way around this might be to claim to be the King of France himself. Now, it took a little while for him to put that into action as policy, but 1328 you have the succession crisis. And just under a decade later, the young king of England,

Edward III, is like, right, in order to secure my position in Gascany and stop the threat of it being taken away from me because I won't pay homage to the King of France. I myself, I'm going to claim to be King of France. And that's going to be my excuse to kind of go for an expansive war. And the claim to be King of France is then something I can sort of use as a bargaining chip to gain more and more and more within the Kingdom of France. And from that point, it's like, well, let's see how much we're going to.

can actually get. So, so from Successional Crisis 20, from 1337 onwards, kings of England registered their claim to be King of France and perpetually are going to war ostensibly to try and enforce that claim. Now we can get into the question of what they really want out of it, but that's the fundamental deep down reason English kings are saying, we should be kings of France. And they make that claim by my reference to a family tree, boring you too much in 1328, the possible claimants for the Kings of France amounted to Edward III on the one hand and Philip Valuas on the other. So this is the moment in the family tree, which everyone's pointed to in saying the English, the House of Valuas should be the Kings of France.

And I'm really glad that we've started talking about Edward III because I was reading your book about the Plantagenet, and he is. just the most incredible historical figure. Particularly where he took England from with the reign of Edward II, I think we should touch on, to how he ascended to the throne. Let's talk about Edward III briefly. Yeah, Edward III is a pretty extraordinary character, particularly, as you say, being the eldest son of Edward II.

So... It was the opposite, right? Edward II was somewhat the opposite. Edward II was in a way the opposite. there are several candidates for this, for the worst medieval king of England, but Edward II's got a shout. Edward II was in many ways

the kind of the opposite of what you should be as a king. Fundamentally just didn't understand what the office involved. And his reign was politically dominated by a succession of, a short succession, but a succession of favorites. Pierre Gaviston, early in the rain, his kind of,

adopted brother, possible lover, certainly his obsession, without whom he would basically do nothing. And with him, he was obsessed. And a series of crises at the beginning of Edward the second train where the Barons of England couldn't stand having Gaviston around. They kept constantly trying to kick him out. And Edward would try every devious mean to get him back until Gaveston was murdered by the Barons of England. Later, Edward took revenge. for this and then he around the same time he fell under the spell of another favorite um uh hu da spencer the younger eventually edward was deposed forced to abdicate um by his estranged wife isabella of france the daughter of the king of france philip the fourth and her lover roger

mortimer a dissident english noble anglo welsh noble uh they they kicked edward the second off the throne um murdered him had him murdered in Barclay Castle in 1328 and put his young, his teenage son, Edward III on the throne. For the first three years, Edward III was kind of a puppet. He was a teenager, but in 1330, Edward III aged 1718, took control of the kingdom in his own name. And he did so with a group of young, kind of youngish nobles of his own generation. around him. And as that generation grew up, they kind of pieced back together politics. You know,

politics had been deeply fractured for a whole generation by the kind of old guard, Edward II and his kind of cronies on the one hand, his cousin, Thomas Earl of Lancaster, other rebel lords on the other. And this deep division got into the bones of English politics. And it took a long time to sort of start piecing them back together. One of the means that Edward III found to bind together the new nobility, the new generation of nobles who were sort of his friends, his allies, his comrades, was foreign war. And it's, in a sense, it's one of the oldest stories in the historical book, isn't it? You've got problems at home, what'd you do?

You go and go fight abroad. We see it every day and in every historical era. certainly this is it worked for edward the third so he latches on seven years into his independent reign of 1337 to this fact that he has this claim to the french crown that he wants to go and enforce and from that point on his his reign is really a succession of phases of campaigning in france which are miraculously successful and i can't use that word advisedly because it does seem like for a very long time god is smiling on edward the first wish to be King of France. He just, he wins this spectacular against the odds battlefield victories at Cresi in 1346, son the Black Prince, Poitier in 1356, at C in 1350 at the Battle of Wind Chelsea. He just seems like he can't lose for a long time. And he is this, like dashing, glamorous figure.

Holmes these great parties, you know, creates the Order of the Garter, as an elite aristocratic club for his mates. I mean, he really, he kind of, he just has this instinctive understanding for bringing people along with him and seeing the English aristocracy as his allies, as I say his friends, as people with whom he has a common interest

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description. Thank you to Pallad for sponsoring today's episode. Because it's a remarkable transformation in the fortunes of England. When you look at Edward II, who was essentially deposed, constantly at war with the barons, England was broke, to where it was under Edward III, who was this incredibly charismatic ruler, and then went and then stuffed the French battle after battle after battle. And can you talk also a little bit about, you talk about against the odds, I think it's worth explaining that piece of it as well.

Yes, I mean, it is a remarkable transformation, and there's no doubt that if you take Edward's reign at its highest point, let's say, 1360 after the Treaty of Breitini, where he effectively trades away the claim to the French crown for a massive territorial grant of Aquitaine in full sovereignty, of other bits of France as well. I mean, that's a hell of a turnaround in 30-odd years. Sorry, what was your question, Constia? About the odds.

Yeah, and he does it against the odds victory. I mean, the signature piece is the Battle of Cracy in 1346. So Edwards campaigns to France sort of get going in the early 1340s. And in the summer of 1346, he decides to go for a really, really, you know, a grand sally out against the French. So he lands on the beaches of Normandy on the 12th of July 1346, 15,000 men. You've got a picture of sort of medieval D-Day of this enormous landing. I mean, roughly on the same bit. not on, I don't think it was, it wasn't a D-Day beach, but Savalogue, just up from Utah Beach on the Cotidun Peninsula,

he lands a huge army and they march off into France. The English tactics at this point are what's usually described as chevot-chaise tactics. It's the flying columns of people burning, destroying, killing everything in their path. It's a war of terror. But the point of the war of terror is to try and convince the people of Normandy and this. this case, the resistance is futile, that their king, Philip the 6th, is incapable of protecting them and that actually, if they've got any sense, they'll show their allegiance to the rival king, Edward III of England.

This campaign goes on through the second half of July into August, but as it goes on, Edward finds his lines stretched more and more and more, and he's losing men, you know, by parish as a basic attrition as they besiege cities, as they, you know, as they fight skirmishes and so on. Phillips men fall back and refuse to engage. They break the bridges over the river Sen. They break the bridges once the English cross the Sen, eventually they break the bridges over the river Som.

And eventually they just wear the English down until things look pretty perilous for Edward because his lines are overstretched and he's been in enemy territory for too long. And this all comes to a head in a battle between the English and the French at Crocee. in which the French have sort of bided their time and marshal their resources well and bring up a far larger army than Edward has and a far fresher army than Edward has, stuffed to the gills with knights, whereas Edward is now quite heavily reliant on archers, you know, people of peasant stock, in theory, inferior troops.

and yet Edward wins this extraordinary victory over the French. I mean, demolishes the French, you know, kills hundreds of their knights, a cream of French chivalry destroyed on the field, humiliates Philip, and seems to draw down, and this is something that's important, I think, throughout the Hundred Years' War, seems to draw down evidence of God's favour. You know, you win in battle in the Middle Ages, it's a form of trial. I mean, you're asking, there's very few battles, a fought in the Middle Ages for the reason that there is enormous jeopardy in fighting a battle.

You find a battle, you're basically asking God to judge your cause, and that can go badly wrong, or it can go for you. And at Crosy, where Edward is, by and much forced to fight, wins this miraculous victory, it looks a lot like God is smiling on his cause, and it's a terrible humiliation for the French. Edward then goes having won this victory and fights another very, very difficult battle of a totally different sort. This is a long winter siege over the winter of 1346-7 at Calais.

And so he besieges the coastal town of Calais, obviously the nearest port between on the French coast to England, besieges it for almost a year in really difficult conditions, but manages to break. Calais as well. And so comes away from this Cressey campaign with a bridgehead on the French coast and this kind of burgeoning reputation as the coming man of Western European politics. He's proved himself against the odds. And it's the beginning of a succession of victories throughout the 1350s then with the interruption of the Black Death in 1348, obviously quite disruptive to campaign, although they do campaign throughout the Black Death. This is, I say quite distraptive. and disrupted, and I do mean quite disruptive, because it doesn't shut, there's not mass

lockdowns of the way we think in COVID terms. I mean, people do get on with stuff in the Black Death, albeit under somewhat difficult conditions. So through the 1350s, Edward was dominant, and the more dominanty is the richer he gets, you know, because one of the things that happens if you win a lot of battles is you typically take a lot of prisoners, valuable prisoners. It's not the done thing to kill knights generally. not being on the battlefield, you take a prisoner and ransom.

There's a whole ransom market, whole sort of secondary market in ransoms. So you can mortgage people, you can, you know, the third party ransom agents. So there's a huge financial market in ransoms. And you start to see across England places like Warwick Castle, if you ever been to Warwick Castle, it's a lovely day out these days. But I mean, the grandeur of Warwick Castle owes a lot to the high point of the Hundred Years' War with the Earl's of Warwick were big players in the Hundred Years' War and just came back, you know, laden with gold.

And the massive influx of wealth into the country was also helped after the Battle of Poitiers in 1346, where the French King Jean II was taken prison himself and ransomed for millions, millions and millions of gold echoes. And one thing that we haven't touched on is the technology, because the English, had superior technology, didn't they? And that's probably the main reason why they won. Superior, yes, although it looks inferior. So the longbow is the critical weapon

on the English side for most of the Hundred Years' War. Battle of Cressee 1346, you do actually see handguns on the field probably for the first time in Europe. But very, very crude handguns. Then it's not much more than fireworks, really. It makes a lot of noises. It scares the horses, but it's not,

there's not Passion Dale, do you know what I mean? So the battles like Chris, in particular, later under Henry V, Agincourt, are won by English longbowmen. Now, you look at a longbow, it's a simple, apparently simple piece of technology. It's a long piece of you

with a taut string, and it shoots arrows, which is not complicated. you sometimes hear described as the AK-47 of the Middle Ages, which is, it's completely wrong. Because an AK-47, the success of the Kalashnikov, right, is that any idiot can pick up an AK-47 firing. It's pretty reliable. Just point and shoot.

Almost nobody who hasn't, well, no, nobody who has not trained for years can pick up a long bow and shoot it. If you ever tried to shoot a longbow? It's, you just can't do that. I mean, unless you've trained a long time, because the longbows, great advantages, range, and it means it's very hard to draw. So in order to draw, you can't muscle a longbow,

you have to get right inside it, and you have to have, like, extraordinarily strong back muscles in order to get inside and fire this, and, sorry, shoot this weapon effectively. So under Edward III, the English do something quite smart, which is they make it mandatory for everybody on a Sunday to practice shooting a longbow. So you have a whole population that's trained to use this simple and cheap weapon. So when they go into the field in France, for generation after generation, they've got these ranks upon ranks of cheap troops who can shoot a cheap weapon, which is actually. absolutely deadly. It's got a longer range than a crossbow, which is a more expensive and more,

you know, and more temperamental piece of technology because it's got more moving parts. And deployed correctly, ranks of longbowmen are very effective against a cavalry charge as well. Horses don't like charging into hail of longbow shot. And you can keep a lot of bigger range. I mean, all sorts of But yeah, the critical piece of technology for most of the 100 years war on the English side is the longbow. And you see these victories all the way from 1346. Gracie, Ashen, Clause, the famous one, 1415, but even 1424, you've still got great longbow victories for the English. And is that the reason that the French don't just go, oh, Longbo, that looks good, we'll do that, because it takes a lot of training. Or is it ideological in their part?

because, you know, the knights, chivalry, you know, charging down the plebs. It sounds like fun. It's a bit of both. It's a bit of both. I think there's an ideological preference for cavalry, a bit on the French side. And I think that going back to what we talked about with, you know, with the King of Kings of France, still being in this phase where they're trying to extend their authority directly over their own realm. It's actually much harder for them to institute policies that in England you can institute quite. directly. If the king says, and if the king says, I want everyone to train with a longbow in England

on a Sunday and pass a parliamentary statute, that gets done. The power concentrated in English King's hands at this point and mediated through Parliament and national gathering is considerable. And so there's a higher degree, I suppose, of... or centralized authority. Centralized authority in England relative to France. That's really interesting. And so Fabia, for me to be skeptical of God's involvement in all of this, but you mentioned that in that moment, in that time,

it would have been a huge part of how people perceived the successes that Edward III is having on the field. Absolutely. Other than guards' involvement and the Longbow, are the other reasons why in that phase the English are as successful as they are, as you said, against the odds? Or is it just those two? Just God and the Longbour.

That's all it means. What else do you need? There's connected to this centralised authority, the English have also probably better at taxing the realm. So the relatively early development of Parliament in England in the Middle Ages, Stemmington, the 13th century, out of Magna Carta, through the reforms of the middle of Henry the 3rd's reign in the 1250s and 1260s, create a relationship in which there's a kind of a negotiation mechanism between the whole realm and the king, which are these irregularly called

parliaments. So the king, when things are functioning well, says, okay, I want to fight a war, cause a parliament, sets out the case for war, parliaments effectively appropriates the funds, they're quite efficiently collected and the king has easier access to the wealth of his own kingdom. So it becomes, I mean, of course every time there's a war,

everyone's constantly complaining about the tax. In fact, every time there's any tax of any sort, everyone's constantly complaining. Of course they are, except when people are winning. So if you look at, say, Henry V, who had a very successful time

of the 100 years' war in his reigns, early 15th century, England is probably under the highest tax burden ever is in the middle ages, as I can think, but Henry just keeps winning and winning and winning. So people are generally happier to pay for a war when they're winning. But in answer to your question, yeah, I mean, English kings have somewhat better access to their own tax base. And, you know, they're also fewer things to think about, in a sense,

Because there's something that pertains to the physical geography, I think, that also really matters. And this is a much bigger point about English and British history, you know, from the Middle Ages onwards. There are so many advantages to specifically where this big island and archipelago lies. the defensibility, you know, the relative, you know, the few borders, the dominance of the English by and large over their neighbours, with the exception of the Scots, who are typically alive with the French, but even in that case, England is heavily dominant. You never see Scotland until, you know, James Six comes along. You never see Scotland conquer England. And so whereas France has, I mean, the French have much more to think about than just the English. I think this is also, to return to your joke at the beginning, the French kind of live rent-free in the English heads in a way that I don't. How dare you? It's not necessarily the same the other way around because, you know, let's just take one example.

Well, they have the Germans next to them. It has the Germans next to them. I mean, there's the question of what's going on on the Italian border. Like, what's the relationship with the papacy and where should, you know, at the same time as the 100 years before, you've got this debate about whether the papacy should be in Rome or in Avignon, not technically in France, but basically in France. You've got questions about sovereignty in Flanders. There's a whole ton of stuff going on to French kings to think about, in which the English or only one. I think, you know, maybe we talked about this when we talked about the Crusades.

And there's something analogous there, which is, you know, in the Crusader's mind, going out. conquering the kingdom of Jerusalem and kicking the Muslims out and doing them over. It's like, that's the number one thing. The Muslims in the Middle East are like, yeah, okay. But we're quite busy fighting the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia here. And it's like a way more to think about them, just you lot. So perhaps something similar is going on. All right. So the English have this structural advantage in terms of centralized power,

taxation. They've got the technological advantage with the longbow. God clearly is on England's side, as we've established. Until he's not. And this is where I'm going with is, how do the wheels come off the bandwagon? You've got Edward III. Brilliant. Son is a badass, by all accounts, the Black Prince. How does the whole thing turn?

Because ultimately, the Hundred Years' War is not a success for the English, right? No, and ultimately, the Hundred Years' War is a massive failure. The Hundred Years' War shakes out so that the English are completely kicked out of France, with the exception of Calais. But it depends where you stop the tape, you know. So, Edward III, up until you have these victories we've talked about. Croissy, Poitiers, for others. 1360, there's a settlement, Treaty of Breitini.

From that point on, the French start chipping away at the Bratini settlement. Edward III is succeeded in 1377, not by his badass son, the Black Prince, who dies shortly before him, of an illness picked up on campaign in Spain, But by his grandson, Richard II, who has no interest in fighting the French War whatsoever, and is perfectly happy to, you know, if you asked him, he'd have resigned away everything that England had never won. It's just not his cup of tea at all. He's deposed in 1399. Henry V, his cousin picks things up.

Henry V then launches a kind of really retro campaign. modelled in large part on Edward III's great victories, although strategically somewhat different, and wins a startling succession of victories between 1415, the Achenkoor campaign and his own sudden death in 1422. Henry Vith is taking advantage of a civil war in France between two factions called the Burgundians and the Yarmagnacs, who were at war because the French king has gone mad, Charles Sixth. So Henry the 6 kind of inserts the English into this war, teams up eventually with the Burgundians, destroys French armies, conquers Normandy, gets all the way to the wars of Paris,

and forces in 1420 a treaty on the French called the Treaty of Poir by which Henry V of England becomes, quote, air and regent to the crown of France. When mad Charles of 6 dies, Henry the 5th is going to be not only King of England, a king of France as well. Sort of like he's beaten the ultimate boss. Then Henry V. D.5th dies at the age of 35 of dysentery and leaving an infant son, not even one year old, as his successor.

So that's 1422. Now, things don't go immediately wrong for the English, which is remarkable, really. In fact, they stay pretty okay until 1429 when Joan of Arc comes along. But at the moment, Joan of Arc rises in 1429, The English with Burgundian support have sort of conquered everything in France down to River Loire, and it's not unthinkable at the siege of Ollion, that if they take Olean, they're going to enter southern France,

and the full conquest of France is on the cards. However, in 1435, the Burgundians switch up on them, and France reunites, under the king, Joan Bark had helped Charles the 7th. And from that point on, England is at a increasingly at a disadvantage, partly because, largely because the King of England, Henry the 6th, Henry V's son, who'd been an infant in 1422, has grown up to be absolutely uninterested in war, absolutely incapable of domestic or foreign government, and shell-shocked in the face of the reality of power, completely hopeless England dissolves into a leaderless crisis of its own, and the French start to chip,

chip away at all the English possessions in France, in Normandy in particular, the Tain back, until in 1453, the Battle of Castion, not only if they won back in Normandy, they also have shrunk Gascany, that bit in the southwest, down to almost nothing, destroy the English and Gascany, take Bordeaux, and it's always. all over. There's nothing left except for Calais by the end, by the, by 1453. And that then sparks in England, the wars of the roses, the civil war, the dynastic wars between what becomes known as House of Lancaster and the House of York. And from that point on, there's vanishingly little possibility of the English doing anything whatsoever except defending Calais. There's a late stage hurrah

in 1475 under Edward V. Yorkist King, who tries to do a little bit of Henry V. cosplay, raises a big army for 13,000 men, takes it over to France. But as soon as it gets there, he realises, I'm not really into this. I'd rather be at home kind of squiring wenches and eating cakes, basically. And so, signs a deal with the French where they agreed to pay the English to just off and leave them alone. Treaty of Peking of 1475. The claim to the Kingdom of France is not dropped. So Henry VIII, early in his reign, 1430. He's a young man, comes to the throne, decides he's going to do his own Henry V. Cosplay, but again, it comes to nothing.

With the benefit of hindsight, 1453 is the end. Once the English had been kicked out, they're really not coming back in any meaningful sense. You know how at the beginning of every year, people say, this is a year things change. Then by February, everything looks the same. If you've been seeing on a business idea for months or even years, 2026 is your line in the sand. The most common thing that separates people who talk about building something from the people who actually do it is taking the first step.

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That's Shopify.com. dot UK slash trigger. Dan, as you know, we're massive feminists on the show, and so is all of our audience. And it strikes me that we haven't addressed a central figure in this whole story, which is, of course, Joan of Arc. Of course.

A miraculous character, genuinely. genuinely, one of the miraculous characters of history? Yeah, an extraordinary character who's, it's so difficult to disentangle, maybe this is true of a lot of characters, but it's extremely true of Joan, to disentangle the real person from the sort of the shroud of myth and storytelling that kind of sits over the top of her. but makes a material difference at this pivot point in the hundred years war. It's the siege of Orleans, 1429, the English seemed to be ascendant.

The direction of travel seems to be relentlessly south, as in the English, is pushing further and further and further into what remains of French-held France. And then suddenly, this peasant girl from this weird bit of eastern France turns up, you know, waving the flag and saying, you know, God spoke to. to me, I'm going to lead the Dofan to his coronation at Rang, and we're going to take back France, and then it actually happened. Well, not only does it happen, but she plays an active role. She plays an active role.

She's never been trained as a knight goes into combat, leads men into battle. I mean, is there an ex... I asked this question genuinely. Is there an explanation that does not include the divine that actually can tell us what happened? Yes, I mean, I don't know how much sports, you're a sports fan you are, but this idea of momentum and belief. Like, we talk about this in sports all the time,

that something will galvanize a team. And that's that... Sure, but it isn't what happened a little bit more like me turning up, persuading Pep Guardiola that I should play up front, and then he sticks me up front and we start smashing them in. Isn't there a bit more like that? No, because Joan wasn't smashing them in, you see. It's like...

It's like having this... In a manner of speaking. I'm sure you would be. It's like having this incredible kind of mascot just suddenly, but you can't disentangle it from the divine. I know that you want to. I don't want to. I'm asking if it's even possible.

No, I don't think you can... You can't disentangle Joan of Arc's effect on the French at Ollion and for a little while thereafter from the medieval world. worldview that God is active in the world and through people at times, you just can't. And she, whatever, you know, there's a whole set of language that is a modern language that we could use to describe Joan of Arc. And some of it would come from the language of mental illness,

and some of it would come from sort of, you could, you could use the language of sort of the like the woo-woo realm of or sports psychology or any of those things. I've just picked the sports psychology one and tried that out. Ineffectively, as it turned out. It's no good. You have to use the terms of the time. And the terms of the time are like there was this moment when God intervened. That's how it was understood by everybody at the time.

And so that's the best explanation. It didn't last very long because God's intervention was timely. limited through Joan. She outlived her usefulness and at the end of her story is a tragedy, really, discarded by the French and then treated pretty appallingly and in just basic human terms by the Burgundians and subsequently the English. But then revived later, you know, her revival is as much of a part of her story as what actually happened at the time. And this 19-13, 20th century revival of Joan of Arc as a symbol of Frenchness and of the kind of the miraculous, the providential within the French character is important.

And, you know, you introduced her with a comment about feminism. That's a part of Joan as well. You know, she's now, she drifts through different types of being an icon. At a moment, she's a sort of partially feminist icon, right? I mean, and it's not hard to see why, because she's, She dons the male armour and she comes into a man's world and she seems to materially affect it. And she satisfies a lot of the yearnings of modern feminism. But she also used to satisfy a lot of the yearnings of modern French nationalism.

She's just a, she's a palimpsest. You can write your own story onto her and she still looks good standing there with a helmet on and the flag in her. So what you're saying is she's Claudia Raniari at Leicester City. I knew that that was what I was looking for. She's Claudio. And now we've reduced the number of of people who get the references down to about three.

Well, at least three, yeah. At least three. But from a historian's perspective in a practical sense, do you believe that the turnaround in French fortune happens if Joan of Arc doesn't come along when she does? Oh, what a great counterfactual. Probably eventually. Really? Probably. How much further could the English have pushed, realistically?

I mean, behind the scenes, Henry the 6th by this stage was coming on for his eighth birthday, within five years, it would be pretty clear that this was not going to be a military leader of any sort whatsoever. So the English willingness to finance effectively a civil war in France, which is what the English,

so the English kings, up until the Treaty of Twine 1420, when Henry V signs this treaty that says, I'm the heir and regent to the crown of France, it's the war from the English taxpayers' perspective is we're paying to win back what's ours by right. Once the English king starts to make reality of becoming the King of France, so that it's the possibility is going to wear these two crowns, the English taxpayers get very cold feet and say, well, if you're

king of France, tax your French subjects to pay to conquer the whole of your realm of France, because that ain't our concern anymore. The whole calculus of the war shifts. So, to return to the question of the 1420s into 1430s had Joan of Art not come along and now I realize I'm flicked like him back to be more of a structuralist than a great man but deep down you wouldn't the English would not have had a the king was growing up to be absolutely uninterested in war the English taxpayer would probably not have stomached much more of this making the the French pay for their own conquest was difficult at some point something had to give and probably would have. But Joan is this, she's the spark, right? She's the spark, and she gives the French the belief momentarily that they can win this critical siege at O'Lean

and then the momentum shifts. There you go, you believe in the great man of history unless it's a woman. I believe in the great woman. I believe in the great woman. I'm just messing with you. The more I read about history, particularly English history,

the more I realize, really dependent on the king. Edward II, terrible, England was in the indulgements. I know this is a simplistic view of it. Edward III, great king, England rose again. And you look at, for instance, the black prince, who I think he developed dropsy, didn't he? Yeah.

And you think, how different would England have been if he hadn't have got sick and he could have ruled for a long a period of time as Edward III? And maybe that would have deferred Richard the second coming to the throne who made a complete what's it of it? Yeah, this is right.

I mean, the quote-unquote great man theory of history goes in and out of fashion, right? When I was growing up, when I was studying, it was well out of fashion, and everything was structuralist. And the whole belief was really this concentration on the character of leaders is for the birds. It doesn't really make much difference.

The history is the product of grander forces than this. And here we are in the sort of early 2020s, I think that you'd be a fool, right? You know, we're living in an age where the personalities of the rulers of their superpowers are critical to the state of the world and this historical pivot point to which we seem to be living. If you take Xi and China, I mean, his conception of Chinese history, his personal belief about how China should be in what it looks like, vitally important to Chinese policy, Trump and the US. His disinterest in most of history, his kind of personal peccadillos and notions of how things should be absolutely critical to America's development of power, Putin and Russia, and so on and so on.

So to take that back to the kings and queens of England, yeah, it does matter that Richard I was a sort of petulant. kind of pacifist with a narcissistic personality disorder. That's a material importance to English history, to your counterfactual. What if the Black Prince had not gotten sick at an error and had succeeded as Edward the Fourth? Things could have looked different. I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean better. Of course, it could be a different kind of bad.

The Black Prince was a fantastic general. but he probably lacked some of the kind of easy flexibility, the sort of diplomatic kind of smarts that his father had. He's a more rigid kind of militaristic leader. That could or couldn't have been the best thing at that time. Another good counterfactual is what if Henry V hadn't died at the age of 35 in 1422? to, you know, what if Henry the Sixth had had an apprenticeship? Henry V's great advantage was that he became king at 26, or one of his great advantages, king at 26,

after a long, difficult, 13-year apprenticeship where he was fighting, where he was standing in for his father, when he was ruling as regent effectively when his father was ill, he came to the throne like a complete politician. Henry the 6th came to the throne at nine months old and had to grow up as king. You see a rough pattern. across English history of kings who've become king as children having a really difficult time.

They never have this opportunity to make mistakes. They're growing up way too close to power. So yes, there are all these counterfactuals we can run, but I think that to your point, yeah, really it does matter who exactly these people are. And there are some advantages in this period to having hereditary monarchy based on primogeniture. In theory, it cuts down the likelihood of a gigantic civil war every time you need to change care. Because the rule is the rule is the rule. But it also introduces this massive genetic lottery to government. Like, who have we got next?

Oh, Christ. Oh, hell of this. Or who've got next? Yay, by chance, I've always wondered about this, Dan, though, because, you know, there is a saying the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. like, I'm not exactly like my dad, but I've inherited quite a bit from him. I'm sure the same will be with my son. But the story you tell, it's almost like, you know, the son is Nigel Farage, the father, Zach Polansky, and you just, you go from Trump to Biden within one family.

How does that happen? Well, we've all seen this happen in families. It depends, you know, that, it sounds like you've, you know, you admire your father from that. Sure. Somewhat, sure, in some ways, yeah. And, but there are, you know, we often see these cases where the child wants to become the opposite of the parent, right? Or the child takes after the other parent or, you know, whatever it might be. You know, we don't create these identicates of our children.

And then, you know, you also have the spoiled rat phenomenon. It's like the kid who grows up not having to struggle. This is a sort of trope, a mainstay of history. just talking about kings and queens, but I can't remember who someone's written about this, you know, one of those oldie-timey Malcolm Gladwell type people, you know, you wrote just John Ronson or someone wrote a study of, you know, kids of successful people. They don't have to, or very seldom, do they have to really struggle themselves? And sometimes it's the struggle that makes you.

So, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons why, oh, you know, if you take Edward the second as an example, Well, he was the younger kid. He was the baby of the family. He was like the 14th or 16th kid to be born, right? And we were supposed to have King Alfonso, his elder brother, Henry Lier, who was supposed to be King Arthur. And then King Arthur was no more. And it was the younger son who's sort of the spare who's thrust into the limelight,

having grown up preparing for something totally different. So, I mean, this is what makes it fascinating. And I'm glad to sort of cite. I'm glad that we're back in this age which people are taking personality and history seriously because it just makes it more approachable and meaningful and this faceless era of total structuralism within history I found quite depressing. I like the people. Taking the historian's eye and looking at our society and our civilization, there's been a lot of talking a lot of talk about, you know, the West is in decline, all of that kind of stuff. From your perspective,

what do you see, then? Do you think we are in a lull, in a bit of a dip, or do you see it as being terminal? Is the West in decline? No, I don't, I mean, I think these sort of grand arguments are really attractive, right? We love to talk in epic terms. The idea that, and increasingly, and this is a sort of sidebar, but increasingly with the hybridization of human thinking and machine thinking, we like to think in binaries as well. It's this or it's this. We're in decline or we're in ascendancy. Well, history don't want too much like that. But it seems fairly likely that right now we're living at an inflection point. And that the future because of the technological revolution we're living through, which is being applied

across the board from warfare to employment to, I mean, almost every facet of life is undergoing rapid change, that this is an era of opportunity. And I think in some ways it's being thought about at a leadership level more seriously. in the East than in the West. I mentioned she earlier on. I think he may not be right in his analysis of history or his assessment of Chinese likely superiority. I don't know that he is completely right in that.

And I don't think that his assessment of American weakness is accurate, totally accurate either. but I'm certainly thinking seriously about the historical moment. I think that in the West there's a recognition that, oh, something's up. But it's not being necessarily gripped hard by anyone at the moment in government. I think it's being gripped pretty hard by people at the top of the tech industry. strong argument to say that the people at the top of the big tech companies at the moment are the effective rulers of the world in many ways by proxy.

And I think that we will certainly look back on this period, mining it for all sorts of clues about how the world that will ever unfold by, say, 2050 comes to look like. But this talk of is the Western Terminal decline. It's very tempting, but it's things aren't really well. Well, you added the terminal part. I think the terminal is where that's where it becomes a bit of a tenuous claim. But I think if you were to look at the civilizations that you outlined and their relative positions and directions of travel, you can hardly look at Europe in particular

and say this is Western Europe and this is a... Oh, there are a lot of metrics that are very worrying. Yeah. Of course there are. Birth rate. the growing inequality gaps, the basic ability of young people to find a stake in the essential bits of society, you know, as a matter of course. The grand problem of the size of the state that now afflicts so many Western countries that, you know, the basic unaffordability of what's been set up. And the lack of a seriously clearly stated alternative for the post-war settlement.

That's part of the story of our times. What are we now? June, we're talking in the UK, in a period where the prime minister is a sort of lame duck. There's no political arithmetic that should allow for this, but has completely failed to articulate any policy vision. of how this country should move into the future, has just sort of said, well, we'll just kind of see what happens. And there's a clear awareness among, you know,

you don't have to be a student of politics, you can just be any engaged in a pub. We're good to say, well, where are we going? What are we doing? What are we going to do about all of these obvious problems, which are, you know, the failure seriously to tackle the social dislocations of immigration. As I say, you know, the employment opportunities of young people coming into the work.

What are we doing about it? So there's a decline in the quality of leadership, and there are some pretty worrying metrics out there. Well, this is what I was going to say is if we take your comments about the great man of history theory, it sort of feels like we've got, you know, ten duds in a row, basically. Well, yes, I agree. I do agree. There's not a lack of people with ideas out there. Not a lot of them want to go into front-line politics for reasons we can discuss. Something else that's happened in the UK, not so much in America.

Well, possibly in the States as well. It does have a medieval analogy. And I promise that I don't believe everything has a medieval analogy. But this does. In the Wars of the Roses, which is that English Civil War I mentioned, which follows on from the Hundred Years' War, which we've been discussing, after about a generation of polarized politics, as we'd call it, of factionalism and of the decay of central authority and growing lawlessness

and social dislocation and economic drift, The smart analyses of the time all tended to say what's happened is that we've introduced what they call variance into our politics, which is to say there's a toxicity in the political process, which is the irreconcilability of factions, which is the bitter quality of politics, which is the negativity. That in itself is the problem. the constant churn of leaders is in itself the problem. And I think if you look at British politics over the last 10 years, let's say, or even let's say, yeah, certainly 10 years since Brexit,

but maybe going back to 2008, a financial crisis, you could say that the problem in itself is now the kind of the riving and the disaffection, that that self-perpetuates. And the moment that you, you know, we're looking at ditching the prime minister, because as the chant goes, Keir Starm as a wangher. Like, you know, that's like, everyone thinks that. But the next reaction to that is,

well, fuck off and get someone else. Right. That, and as soon as that person hits a sticky patch, fuck off get someone else. They become the wanker. They become the wanker. And the reaction to the wanker is to pitch them straight away.

And so what you then have is a politics that on a sort of pragmatic level can go nowhere because it's, it never gets beyond like its first trimester or whatever. You know, like the government can't develop, grow, institute policies, have people in charge of departments that can do the really sensible, boring stuff

and kind of turn departments around. If you think about the success stories in British politics, over the time we're talking about it, they tend to be where someone stuck around for a bit in a job. You know, Michael Gove was in charge of education. You know, there was the possibility of serious reform. and slow reform. But what we're about to see in the UK

is change the... I mean, already the health secretary West Street and quit, having actually started to make slow progress on the big problems of the NHS and then quit because of factional politics within the party. And so now someone else would come in

and it all starts again. So these constant restarting, the variance that's in the politics, is now a central part of the problem. And it shouldn't be, at the moment, because in the UK you have a government which was elected with a gigantic parliamentary majority. Fume is a flavoured air device

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already helped over 700,000 people take steps towards better habits. Use code trig to get a free gift with your journey pack. Head to tryfume.com and use code trig. That side again is T-R-Y-F-U-M-D-com and use code trig to claim your free gift today. Yeah, I'm in two minds about all of those points because on the last point, yes, it's true they got a massive majority, but they only got it because reform destroyed the Conservative Party, my subjective opinion. And then on the other stuff, I mean, the toxicity of politics is something that I think everyone is really concerned about.

But I also think, I imagine someone else sitting here making the opposite argument and saying the taxic. The toxicity of politics is the consequence of the fact of where the country is at. And then, of course, you add the technological piece on top of that, which is we now, I mean, I've given this example a thousand times, but I really do think it's, it just explains everything. On YouTube, I was many years ago sitting later than I watching YouTube because I didn't have kids down. Are you soon doing that being watching Kotein Mellon with? Well, what I was watching was William Hagan, John Prescott having a parliamentary debate when. and they were both deputy to the leader.

And it's a game. It's a playful game because the social media isn't there. They're not trying to get a hit on TV yet quite. So William Hake takes the piss out of John Prescott, basically not being able to speak properly. And John Prescott doesn't say, look at these snobby Tories abusing the hard work and working classes. She says, on this side of the house,

we may get the words wrong, but we get the judgment right. In other words, it's a game that's played according to a set of respectful rules, even if the parties are, they're not enemies, they're opponents, right? And then you have technology like we have now. We changes that completely. And now everyone stands up in Parliament so that they get a clip on Twitter or on whatever. And I think that's why it's, I hear and agree with people when they say politics is toxic. But then I kind of go, well, A, you've got the technological piece.

And then the country is kind of, and you have to unfri for people to become untoxic about it. I think we'd probably agree. I mean, I think that the part of the toxicity of politics is that it's now optimizing for a different set of media. Yeah. And just as, I mean, Hague and Prescott, in the example you give them, were probably somewhat somewhere maybe optimizing for the parliamentary sketch writers up in the gallery. That's right. And maybe a bit on the news, but who knows.

whereas now it would all have been thinking about optimising for a totally different media, which rewards a totally different style of it. And the obsession, that obsession with optimising for social media, for all sorts of reasons, one of which is it gives you like definable metrics, which is, you know, it's job's worthiness. That's part of the poison in part of the reason.

Part of the reason why it's incredibly hard for anyone to actually do anything in politics, because all the frontline politicians are just thinking about how this is going to clip up for Instagram. You have behind the scenes, the blob, as it's often called, but a civil service, which is dominated by a completely different set of thinking, and knows that it can just dig its heels in and not be bid, and can run a completely different set of policies. And vanishing out, and then you plug in. the lack of appeal of a political career to really elite forceful thinkers.

I mean, there are tons of problems with politics in the moment. And to sort of plug this into the Great Man theory, one of the superficially appealing, but I think probably troubling trends that I hear a lot is people saying, well, what we need is a benign dictator. because they're so disillusioned with the failure of political process that they want an easy answer. You want, okay, well, give me a great man. Give me somebody who's going to come in and just ride roughshot over process.

That's part of the appeal of Trump. This, you know, this outsider who rides into politics. And it's part of the appeal of Farage as well. He said, I'm going to, you know, I'm outside all this. I don't deal with all this. I just come in and speak straight sense and we get on with it. well, yes, to an extent. But do we even need to rehearse the dangers of creating dictatorship?

Maybe we do. Maybe that's another part of what we're grappling with at the moment is the receding out-of-living memory of the 1930s and 40s. and, well, and the 20s, for that matter. The sort of disappearance into sort of abstraction of, what was the world like last time that there was, you know, that all the international kind of institutions were sort of discarded, and, you know, the falling into spheres of interest became the way that politics were,

what was it actually like, what happened? That's now something that's in the history books, to which most people, let's be honest, don't pay attention. My grandma died earlier this year at nearly the age of 100 and when my mum was clearing out her house, she found the handwritten war memories, my grandfather, who'd been 15 or 16 years old when he went to sea with the Merchant Navy in the Second World War, the outbreak of Second World War, 12 or 14 pages. And it's his memories of sailing around the Atlantic, I mean, we've sailed around the whole world in the Merchant Navy being pursued by U-boats, blown up in the Thames,

by German mines, survived that, you know, all sorts of adventures. And I remember him telling, not telling many of those stories, but I remember him. I remember him as being somebody who still, who, and my grandmother, both my grandmother spoke about the Second World War and it was within, it was not within my memory, it was not within my parents' memory, but it was within our family's memory. Everybody knew somebody who'd served or been affected by the Second World War, who'd been affected by this set of, of disastrous political unravelings, that the whole of the post-war settlement

was designed to mitigate against happening again. And now all of that, vanishingly few veterans left, and most nobody knows one. So all of that has receded, and it's like that settlement is clearly, you know, looking pretty tatty, and there needs to be a new one for a new world

with new technologies. new modes of thought. However, to lean back on things that were tried and tested to destruction in the 30s and 40s. No, I definitely agree with you that that sentiment is rising. I'm not sure I'd quite agree that Farage is attempting to be a dictator. No, I don't agree with that either, but I agree that part of his appeal is being the outsider. You're really clear. I don't think Farage has those dictatorial instincts. In fact, I think he actually doesn't, quite the opposite. I agree. But I think that

his appeal is that he seems to be, you know, if I go down the pub, not many people talk about reform policies, but they know Nigel. Like Nigel. It's Nigel. And it's this idea that there's a guy out there who gets it, put him in charge, that will do. Now, I don't know that it will do.

We'll find out. We'll probably find out. We'll probably find out. Sorry, were you going to jump in? No, because I was going to say that reading your book about the Plantagenets, it just opened my eyes to strong and weak leadership. Yeah. And I look at Kirste Starmer and what's happening with the West Streetings of the world and his ministers,

and it just reminds me of Edward II and the nobles. Does hope he doesn't end up the same? The way that read was quite brutal. I've never thought about, for all that Kirstarmer is a wanker. I've never thought about him as Edward II. But I'll say this. The effective leaders are the Edward III's who understand how to bring people with them and who are able to galvanize and empower people around them.

I don't necessarily think that that's the leadership that we've got at the moment. And the key to whoever is the leader that stands a chance of really delivering some meaningful change in this country will be somebody who has the strength of character to bring a strong team along with them. And if not to do the serious thinking themselves, to have that among them. I know you're going to talk to my old pal David Starkey soon enough. and that's some of the thinking he's doing right at the moment. You know, the awareness that it's quite likely that the next but one leader of this country or next but two or whatever after the next general election will be Nigel Farage, not unimaginable at all.

The work has to be in place for that. There's a moral responsibility for the work to be in place to make that a serious government, a serious government with serious thought running through, serious analysis, a clear, clearly explained and defined set of policies that go beyond the personality. Because it's, yeah, the strong leadership thing, a lot of that is vested in personality, but personality is just not enough. Personality has to come along with and be able to be a vehicle to articulate policy. Yeah, no, that's completely true. And from your lips to gods, and frankly, whoever is elected, I would hope that is all true, right?

Whether it's Zach Vlansky or Nigel Farh. Final question is always the same. What's the one thing that we're not talking about? We really should be. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Castles? I never do well. I was too modest.

I genuinely love a castle. I'm glad you love a castle. I love a castle as well. And we were talking before we came on that there was a piece of UGov research done in 2024 that said 70% of, 77% of people think castles are the best thing and the whole of the Middle Ages, and I would count myself among them. You've written a book about it?

Written a book about them. This is, I mean, it's castles in the biggest, broadest sense. 3,000 years of history, goes from the Bronze Age, you know, the origins of castles in the kind of, I mean, it starts with Troy, you know, the citadel, seed of the wars, not only the birth of what becomes castles, but the birth of Western literature, and it charts its way all the way through to nuclear bunkers. So it's like, it's the big, it's the big history of, It's the history of structures, but it also asks a kind of deeper question, which is how do we protect the things that we love and care about?

Wonderful. Well, I haven't had a chance to read here, but I definitely look forward to it. Thanks, ma'am. Thanks for coming back on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.com.uk, where Dan's going to answer your questions. How much were common soldiers paid, if you're a long woman in the English army, let's say. How much would you be paid, or was the promise of loot your only reward?