TRIGGERnometry - The True History of England with Dan Snow

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

Dan Snow is a British historian, broadcaster, and author, best known for bringing history to life through documentaries, books, and his popular “History Hit” platform. | We use Ground News to escape the echo chamber and stay fully informed. Go to https://ground.news/triggernometry to save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan. Subscribe to Dan's YouTube channel - @HistoryHit Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Protect your wealth with The Pure Gold Company. Get your free investor guide at https://pure-gold.co/trigger - Evening Being by Verso. Get 15% with code TRIGGER at http://evening.ver.so/trigger Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 - Introduction 01:55 - What Is England? 22:09 - The Battle Of Hastings 33:12 - The Rebellions 42:34 - The Medieval Period And The Magna Carta 52:58 - England's Conquests 01:09:48 - The Wars Of The Roses 01:17:36 - The Reformation 01:25:22 - How England Was Briefly A Republic 01:41:09 - The Industrial Revolution And Modern Britain 01:48:46 - What Does It Mean To Be English? 01:55:12 - What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Really Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let's start at the beginning. What is England? England emerges in the aftermath of the Roman province of Britannia. By 9.50, England is recognisable to date. And that's when we get the greatest hero of English medieval history. It's called William the Marshall. And then we see the House of Lords and House of Commons developing. Draught new thing about the Plantagenet family, you get a very uneven performance by its kings. Richard the Lionheart, John Softsword.

You know, Edward I, Edward I, Edward the second. absolute useless Muppet. You get Wars of the Roses. You get civil war in England. Families, fighting families. The printing press has been discovered. The rest of the world has been discovered. From the Tudors onwards,

then we're starting to feel this kind of acceleration. The 17th century, we've got civil war. No one would have said, Brit, that one, those guys there, they're about to run the world. And then we get the monumental global clashes the 20th century. Relax, relax. This is not an ad. If you're not a fan of ads, but love trigonometry, join the thousands of trigonometry members who get extended interviews,

no ads, early access, and the ability to submit their own questions for upcoming guests. Sign up now at triggerpod.com.com.com or click the link in the description of this episode. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at USAA.com slash. bundle, restrictions apply. Dan Snow, welcome to Ignomtery. Thanks, how of me, guys.

Oh, what a pleasure to have you on the show. We've been enjoying a lot of the things that you've been producing lately, but the thing we really wanted to talk about is the history of this country, in England in particular. The whole thing. The whole thing. On which you are fantastic. You've got brilliant stuff on YouTube that, you know,

it's just so, so interesting. And we were talking before we started politically now, too. England, English identity, and therefore its history have become quite a topic, too. So it's a perfect moment. Thank you very much. Yeah.

I mean, it's people have always reached into the past to make, to try and win political points in the present. But it feels like we're living through a time when that's certainly case. Yeah, it is. Well, let's start at the beginning. What is England? The beginning, the beginning, the beginning. I mean, England is an interesting entity because it's only part of the job. Let's start, you probably start with the geography.

It's, it's extraordinary. There's so much terminological inexactivity when it comes to England. People say England's an island. People use England to mean the United Kingdom. they use England to mean Britain. England, so you've got an island, roughly speaking, called Britain. And interesting, if you go into prehistory, what we find is quite a lot. We think in Stone Age Britain, and indeed beyond Britain, we find quite a lot of homogeneity.

We've just learned, for example, that the altar stone at Stonehenge possibly, probably comes from Scotland. We see enormous similarities between Stonehenge and Henges circles, not stone circles, in Orkney. We know, of course, those blue stones, the famous, the medium-sized stones you see at Stone Edge, they come from the Welsh hills that are transported. So it is probable that there was a sense of a community that stretched across the island and perhaps even beyond. England emerges in the aftermath of the Roman province of Britannia. So for nearly 500 years, for a quarter of English recorded history, we are incorporated into this vast empire that extends from, At times, the Highlands of Scotland, but most of the time from sort of roughly speaking, Carlisle,

Fabian's War you'd be familiar with, all the way to North Africa, all the way as far occasionally as the Persian Gulf, towards the Persian Gulf. We are enmeshed into that gigantic transnational imperial project. That comes to a dramatic, well, that comes dramatic end in Britain in the 5th century, in other parts of that Roman world, bits of it survive, chunks of it really do survive, other bits, kind of as a process of transition. But in Britain, it's quite exciting. There's a sort of, it is, it is, it is a, it is a, it is a, it is a, it is a, it is at one end of the scale. There is a mad, max-like collapse. There is a catastrophic disaster that engulfs the people, the people of the province of Britannia, which is roughly speaking, England and Wales.

Okay. We, we have very, we have virtually nothing written down from the fifth century in that period. We hear a little bit from, from the rest of the Roman and post-Roman world. We hear that There are swarms of migration across the North Sea from what is now northern Germany in the Rhine estuary. They are like the wrath of God. And we hear from the one source we do have from roughly somewhere near this period of the Romanized Britons having to choose between death at the hands of these newcomers and being driven into the sea and their choice from drowning. So you've also got, and this really does reflect English history subsequently. The geography of England is you're very vulnerable to invaders across the channel. People think of the English Channel.

You've all been told that the English Channel is a moat that defends England, but it is not. It is a highway. In fact, we're seeing this. The English Channel, the English Channel, it is easier. I was going to say it feels like it at the moment. But it is easier to travel across what, until the invention of the railway in 1830, 400 years ago, this year, in fact, first railway journey, first passenger railway journey. Before the invention of the railway, before the invention of good roads, of canals and then, of course,

air travel and internal combustion and in cars. It is easier to travel across water, especially with bulky subject, but bulky things you want to take with you. It is easier to travel across water than it is cross land. It's much easier for me to get from Brittany to Cornwall than it is to walk and drag a load of tin from Cornwall to Birmingham, right? So the sea around us is a bridge. And you see that in this period. It's an absolute nightmare. You've got people attacking across what we now call the North Sea. You've got people in what is today, Scotland, raiding deep into what is now England. You've got the Irish attacking into Wales. It is a nightmare. We seem to have a bit of climate change. We've got harvest failure. We have massive trade discontinuity. So people's diets are transformed.

You're no longer able to access the Mediterranean foods that had been traded freely before. And we have unimaginable bloodshed and chaos. Let me just pause you just one second there. Is this all partly happening because the Roman? empire is now weakened and it's withdrawn. Yes, it's with... So the people who've remained, who used to have the protection of this great empire, on the periphery of the empire, are now effectively exposed to the vicissitudes of the

hordes that have been held back by the empire. Vicissitudes is exactly the right words. So this is that the Roman Empire has withdrawn for its same attention. Like our blood in our extremities on a cold day, retreats to protect the organs in its core, your fingers, your nose, your toes get cold. and little old England, little old Britannia, is on the edge of the known world. It is the edge. It is the absolute edge of the known world for the Romans. And so the Romans, so we have an evidence of the Brits writing a letter in the early towards them, you know, getting on in the 5th century.

And they say, things are terrible here. Please send troops. Please. You know, we are used to living as Romano British. You have disarmed us. You have given us the benefits of empire. You have claimed the monopoly of violence. We are no longer used to defending our farms dead. We are no longer used to organizing local militias because you used to do that for. We were part of a big centralized bureaucratic state with a regular army. And we don't know what the reply was, or if there was a reply, but it was probably something like, look, mate, Attila the Hun is watering his horses in the Poe in northern Italy. We have got problems a lot closer to home. We are not going to send troops across northern France, across the channel, to try and deal with a province. That was always a

nightmare for the Romans. It was always a horror show for the Romans. You just look at a map, people think about Roman Britain. Again, it occupied only a portion of this North Atlantic archipelago. It was always deeply vulnerable to invaders from across the North Sea. They were built, that's why the City of London got a Roman wall around it. That's quite a tell. At some stage, in the 4th century, they put a wall between London and its own shore. So there's a wall around the outside the city of London, they then wall off the Thames foreshore from London as well. That tells you that something is going on. So there is always a problem with trans-maritime raiders from northern Europe. But you've now got a problem with the unconquered parts of the archipelago.

So there was a nightmare of a province anyway, one of the most heavily militarized province of the Roman Empire. It is now free-for-all, and the Romans aren't going back. There's nowhere they're going back. In fact, the Romans are not going back to nearly all their former Western Empire. And so you get this period and that and in that extraordinary four, three, four hundred years that follows, you get the emergence of something called England. You get the emergence of Wales. You get the, you get the, we start to see that the political complexion of this island take shape in a way that endures. How does that happen? How does that happen? Does somebody win? Like, how does it happen? Gets resolved by the sword. It gets resolved by the sword. It is a, it is a process of conquest. Now there's very interesting. interesting studies being done around DNA at the moment. Is this, are these invaders replacing indigenous elites, as we think the Normans did in 1066, although we're jumping forward there? Are our high-status warriors arriving, killing, marrying into, procreating with local elites and just taking over, and then the peasants beneath them remaining ethnically

similar? Or are we talking ethnic cleansing? Are we talking driving back? murdering, removing people from that, replacing them with settlers from elsewhere. The DNA evidence is so fascinating. Evidence changes on this. One thing I think linguistically, it's very interesting, is in the area that we now call England, there is almost no survival of words from ancient British, which is, roughly speaking Welsh today. So the Welsh, we call, they call themselves Britons. They are. They are, they are the Romano British. And in the Welsh, and the Welsh, they are the Romanos. Indeed, there were Welsh in place like Strathclyde. There were Welsh that were being pushed west across the island.

Now they are restricted to what we call Wales. And Wales is the very early English word for stranger, slave, like foreigner, weirdo. They become the Welsh, which is why the Welsh do not call themselves Welsh. And in that area, Shropshire, Northamptonshire, Yorkshire, that no words survive. We don't have any words. So would that support the ethnic cleansing theory? I think it does. I think it does, right? I think it doesn't.

So these people come in, they slaughter everybody. So we have got slaughtered. So we've got people around. You'll remember these now. We've got the Angles and the Jutes and the Saxons and they're landing here. They're landing in and we see in some area, like the archaeologies, in some areas we see a fusion of culture. So burials that incorporate elements of old Romano-British burglars. And we do see holdouts of, there's a castle down in Cornwall, which people associate with King Arthur.

he's a figure from this, a mythological figure from this period. You see holdouts areas where there is still trade with the Mediterranean world where some of that Romano-British culture may endure, whether it's Christianity can hold out. But roughly speaking over the next 200 years, these new, largely Germanic-speaking settlers come in and occupy nearly all of what is today, England, and really all of what's, Cornwall's a bit more questionable, but nearly all of what's staying in England. And in more than that, right up into Scotland as well. Okay. So Scotland south of Edinburgh, The clue there is that that's a Germanic, as an old English suffix. So that was originally a kind of English castle.

We push all the way up. And indeed, the English will invade right up into North Scotland. Extraordinary battle, Nectonsmeir, fought in the hinds of Scotland. I actually saw these northern English troops, these Northumbrians, catastrophes defeated had that not taken place, it's conceivable there would be no Scotland, and that would have been incorporated into this new kind of, this new Germanic kingdom that becomes England.

But it becomes, initially, there's all sorts different, Northumbria and there's a kingdom of Elmint and there's a kingdom of Kent and there's a kaleidoscopic post-imperial world. You can imagine it. This is a, that the great, the overlord has departed and what you get are these competing entities that emerge underneath it. No one is able to impose their will strategically on everyone else. At times, Mercia in the middle will sort of conquer everyone else and people will bend the need to Mercia. But after the charismatic warrior king dies, then Wessex will rise. East Anglia will rise, Northumbria will rise. So we could have had any of these. We could have

our capital city in Tamworth. If Mercia had gone on in its period of egemony, we could have our capital city in York. We could have our capital city in Winchester, we almost did. And what happens is the reason that that fuses that kaleidoscope of people with very similar languages, similar religious beliefs, and indeed there's a creeping Christianisation that takes place. over, you know, in 600, 700s, those Germanic people are slowly Christianised. They're sort of impressed by what's going on across the water. They realize they can access elite culture, trade, they get useful monks who can write things down and help them collect taxes and transmit historical knowledge, and they can read Vigetius and be better at war. You know, so the lunar pull

of Christianity is quite powerful. So they become Christianized. But they are all very distinct entities, kingdoms at this point, and what enables England to emerge is the coming of the Vikings. The Northman. The Northman comes. At the end of the 8th century, the Northmen come and they attack Lindisfarne famously, this island monastic community off the northeast coast of Northumbria. It was a raid, but they then go home and everyone's like, what was that? The men of God were slaughtered, dragons were seen in the sky. This was end-of-time stuff. And over the next 80 or so years, you see Vikings coming to raid and then settle. They do so in Scotland. They do in Ireland. They do set all right across and into other parts of Europe as well. And the Vikings

do Wessex a favour because they destroy the kingdom of Northumbria. They destroy the kingdom at East Anglia. They destroy the kingdom of mercy. They occupy it. They bring their religion, their trading networks, their culture. And you end up with the last kingdom clinging on famously, is Wessex, which is the space around Winchester, up into the Cotswolds, almost as far as London, down towards Somerset and Devon. And there comes this critical moment. It's very exciting people who have English history, which is when the Viking, the great heathen army, launches one last great assault on Wessex. And Wessex has a king called Alfred. Alfred is chased out of his palaces. He's wandering, friendless, almost helpless in the marshes of Somerset. And

from there, he launches one of the great comebacks of history, one of the great, dramatic stories in history. From the marshy island, the difficult to penetrate ground of Somerset, he sends messengers out, he manages to build an army that will meet him. He leaves that place, one of the great moments. He leaves going to a rendezvous where he's told people to meet him, but he doesn't know whether his nobles, whether his landowners have reached an accommodation with the Vikings. He doesn't know if they've gone to look fine. We'll bend the knee. You leave us alone. You take a third of our stuff, but on the whole, we'll recognise you as sovereign. And he gets that meeting point, and there's an army.

The people of Wessex have responded. And he leads them to this great epic battle. He destroys a Viking army. He forces the Viking king to be baptized into the Christian faith. And he roughly speaking divides up in southern England, particularly, between the Dane law that people might have heard of, which is the Viking area to the east, and the names are still Corby, Derby, Grimsby,

those are the Danish place names, B.B.1. why I mean sort of place or town or whatever. And then if you look at those place name concentrations, you'll see there's just a huge amount in Danor down the eastern side of the country. And then you get the process. Alfred sits there and he works out. He goes, I'm going to reconquer.

I'm going to take the fight to the Vikings. But I'm going to do so not to restore Mercia and Northumbria and East Anglia. And also I don't think I'm going to meet, I'm not going to coalition build with the Mercians. If I'm saying, hey, West Six is here, maybe. we're here to reconquer you. I'm going to rebrand it. We are English. We are English. I'm going to be king of the English. I'm rebranding Wessex and beyond Wessex. I'm creating a capacious idea of ethnicity of linguistic cultural identity, which is English, which gives us the right

to march into York and go, don't worry, you're being liberated by your fellow Englishman. You like that? And are you saying this is kind of a fabrication or is it really based on a shared history, shared length? Hey, we can get identity. We can get into it. If you've been following the immigration debate, you'll know how different the headlines can look depending on where you get your news.

We use ground news to help us step outside the echo chamber. It shows you how the same story is framed differently across the political spectrum. So you can compare headlines and decide for yourself. Take the story about a massive immigration raid at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, USA. Follow along at ground.com. News slash trigonometry. Using ground news, straightaway we can quickly see that the story is being covered by outlets across the board. However, scrolling down the page, ground news allows me to easily compare the headlines. We can see CNN, which is firmly on the left, highlighted that nearly 500 workers were taken,

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Dot news slash trigonometry. Identity. We can get into it, right? Of course, it's fabricating. We are all, we all choose. They are choosing. the identity, and he's plucking things out, he's emphasizing their Christianity. He's emphasizing their common linguistic and, and, you know, their common linguistic, their common cultural unity.

He's saying actually, there is, why should, there shouldn't be a mercy in a, and a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, we can, we can, we can create something bigger. And it's done as so often with identity, as you see in Germany, in the 19th century, fighting Napoleon, you know, this explosion of, of German nationalism that comes as a result of these marauding French armies across, criss-crossed there. So you see, you know, you see it in America, of course, as well, fighting, fighting the British. So you see that in times of kind of struggle, in some of existential threat and opportunity, you see that that identity taking shape and being forged. And he's very careful to constantly go, I'm not the king of which is why after that you don't have, we, people talk about the Roman Empire.

We could talk about the, we're all, the British Empire was actually the Winchester Empire, right? I mean, it's actually the Wessex Empire, Wessex conquers the right, roughly speaking, the west of England, then England, then conquers Wales and then we'll go on to, as we know, island and elsewhere. So, and yet it's cleverly branded as something that everyone can, everyone can feel part of. And as great leaders have done throughout history, you then get a run, now the key thing. and you see this the Ottomans, you see it with the French, you see it with the Prussians,

you get lucky, you have a run of good leaders. So Alfred's son, Edward, gets the job done. He sort of recaptures London, and he's standing here and sort of incorporates that into England. And then you get Athelstan,

who is one of the greatest warrior kings English history, and he conquers. We effectively, he actually conquers all the whole of the island and including much of Scotland. He,

conquering in that period means something but different, but he will march into the north of Scotland and get the king of the Scots or get the, you know, the, uh, the, uh, their forebeer to, to, to bend the need, to, to swear allegiance. And in the medieval period, allegiance means something a bit different to it. There isn't a sort of, you know, we're not, these are not strong bureaucratic, sort of sovereign states with specific kind of legal cases. There is a, there's an ambiguity that's you're allowed to embrace in that period.

I can say, I'm your, I'm your liege man and you go, fine, well then see in five years, crack on and do your thing. can go away with different expectations around the exact nature of your political relationship and who's subservient to Athelstan. And then there's a period of the tide comes ebbs and flows a bit. But those three leaders and indeed Athelstands, those three leaders and indeed Edward's sister, Athelflad, helps to, those four leaders really help to forge England as we know it today. So by 900, by 950, England is recognised. recognizable today. They don't manage to conquer Scotland. They don't manage to

permanently conquer Scotland. They don't manage to permanently conquer Wales, which means you have got permanent identity divisions on this island that will go on and provide much cause for friction over the next thousand years. So you said the number 950. And immediately the number that popped in my head afterwards was 1066. So let's get into it, 1066. What happened? Well, I should quickly say that the 11th century was an absolute nightmare for England, because it is weirdly conquered by the Vikings, by the Danes in the early 11th century. But it's interesting that by that stage, Englishness is sufficiently rooted, that it endures a foreign occupation. And it's an occupation we now think that is a little bit like we talked before. It's Swain Forkbeard and his son, can you come in, they bring their nobles, they reach an accommodation with an English aristocracy.

They're happy to rule in a way that is acceptable to the English people. There is no wholesale. No, you're all Danish now. Had Can you, the son's been less useless, we might all still be part of this rather exciting trans-North Sea Empire with Norway, Denmark and England, Wales and bits of Britain. That I think would be quite an interesting world to which live. But we want, because his sons were absolute Muppets. And so you get the re-emergence of the old line of Alfred the Great

through all sorts of ups and downs. You get the reemerger to that line in the person of Edward, the confessor, who people have heard of, right? So he is an English king of the line of Wessex. There has been a recent Danish occupation, so there's quite an interesting

sort of Danish flavour to politics and identity at the moment. You've got an aristocratic family, the sort of toughest, biggest family in the land, called the Godwin family, Earl Godwin, Danish wife, lots and lots of annoyingly strong and muscle-bound and feckoned children.

Edward, they marry their daughter to Edward the Confessor and he refuses to have, we don't know, maybe he wasn't into babies, maybe they couldn't have babies, maybe he refused to try and have babies. He does not produce any airs. And the one thing that medieval history, nature uphors a vacuum,

medieval history abhors the lack of an air, lack of a male air. So Edward the Confessor dies in 10 CS26, without a male heir, leaving behind him a strong, rich, unified kingdom. England, which because of this process of fighting the Vikings over centuries, has had to get pretty good at centralising, at organising, at collecting taxation, at storing that century.

It's a money-hoes. It's a fight. You know, if you're in charge of England, it's pretty good. Because as ever, you know, it puts steel into a state. You know, the great wars of the, I'll come on, so I can't believe we're going to do all this. But I come with the 18th century, the modern British state is like forged hard in these wars against France. You know, that's kind of springboard for this great giants of global push for empire. Because you're in training. You know, you've got a clear and present danger every day. So that English state emerges is very effective at controlling the lives of the people that live there.

It's very effective at raising troops, very effective at raising money. It's, it's a valuable, wealthy kingdom. and so everyone's got their eyes on it. The Vikings are back. Harold Hardrada, the superhuman legend of early medieval history, giant tall king of Norway, who's fought his way down the rivers of Russia, commanded the Byzantine Emperor's Imperial Guard in Constantinople,

fought as far as Mesopotamia, married a Ukrainian princess on the way home. I mean, this guy is an absolute legend. He, unfortunately, is interested in the Crown of England. He invades in 1066. And this, unlike the other claim, you're getting to, he has no right to this claim, no connection. Other than he claims the mantle of Canute. He says, I am the sort of spiritual and political air to Canute and England was once part of this Viking empire, this a Norse empire across the whole sea.

So it's the way things ought to be. Edith of the Confessers, as I should say, of course, and we see immediately possibly the same day that Edward the Confessor dies. Harold Godwinson crowns himself, king of England. Possibly on the same day that Edward has put to rest in Westminsterststras. We think it happened. Harold is King of England. Harold Hodrada in Norway is like, I want a piece of that. He prepares. You also have another claimant who is a cousin of Edd of the Confessors, who's Duke William of Normandy. He's across the sea in Normandy. And so you've got Harold of England. He's dealt with internal opposition. He's now got these two annoyingly talented warlords about

to launch invasions against him. In the end, the first one to be in, the first, we'll talk about the English Channel perhaps another time, but William is, up in port, we think, by adverse winds, very difficult to sailor fleets, a huge fleet of square rig ships across the channel with horses on them, lots of supplies. You want to be pretty sure you're going to have a gentle southerly wind, which doesn't happen very often in the channel, because you often get this southwestly wind that blasts up the channel we'll be familiar with. That's what the trees are like this, of South Carolina. And in the end, the first person to land in septu, Harold sits there with a massive army. He's able to, he demonstrates the power of this kingdom. He calls together a huge army. sits there around Southampton, around the Isle of Wight, waiting for William. William doesn't write. Just sorry to keep jumping in. There's all these little bits of curiosity and Francis, by all means, as well, because I'm, as usual, hogging the mic.

But it's so interesting. How does he know these invasions are coming? Have these people said, I am the proud king of England, I'm coming to take what's rightfully mine? I think actually he wasn't certain about Harold Hardrida, but he was a bit, no, he definitely knows about William, because William is going around asking for Mercer, he's asking people to join in.

He asked the Pope. the Pope sent him a sacred banner I believe money changed hands saying because, long story, but because Earl Harrell's an oath breaker, he seized the throne, even though he promised not to, and so said, claimed William,

he'd broken a holy oath, therefore this was actually a crusade. It was akin to crusade. If you go, your sins will be remitted. So young men, what a sweet deal. You go, you get to take part in a great military adventure, you're going to enjoy enormous riches

if it succeeds, because it'll be rewarded and it's fabulously wealthy land. And if you do die, You're doing less time in purgatory. You know, you're getting, you're fast track to heaven. So this is wonderful. So he knows that's happening. William is building a big army. That's why Harold's in the South. Harold, though, in September, he's got to send that army home. They've got to go and do the harvest. He thinks he's survived for another year. September, lots of Gales in the Channel. He's made it through

a campaigning season. Then he gets the news. England has been invaded, not in the South, in the North. Harold Hardrada, the landwaster, has arrived in Yorkshire, where we think, lots of local people. Because of its history of Danish and Viking settlement, there would have been lots of local people that quite welcomed that. So he'd have been shown where to leave the ships and, you know, quick way, you know, good, good, useful collaborators locally. And Harold does one of the most remarkable things. We'd all remember Harold to this day as a great military commander, one of the great strokes of military history. He does a lightning march. There's a great quote by Nathan Bedford Forrest who was a cavalry commander in the American Civil War. He says,

military tactics, especially pretty straightforward. All you got to do is, get their first with the most. I love that. It really does explain nearly all militaries. If you get there first with the most, the chance are you're going to be in the best position to determine the course of events on the ground. And so Harold, lightning marches to York, extraordinary, up the old Roman road to York, through the city of York without stopping. And he hears that the Viking army, Haldoraz army, is just to the east of York in a place called Stamford Bridge. And he surprises them. And the Viking army are like doing some cattle rustling. It's a hot summer's day.

They've left their armour on the ships. They're just chilling on the banks, a river bank, stealing some things, having good time. And they suddenly see this massive dust cloud, and they see this armour coming in. The sun is glinting off it, like the sun off broken ice we hear from the saga. And Harold Hadrada just goes,

shit. It's the English Royal Army. I'm here. Half my army about my boats, half the army here. We've got no weapons. And there is then this extraordinary battle, I could go into it,

but they surge across the river there, it's down for a bridge, and they destroy this Viking army, destroy this Viking army. They come across in something like 200 ships. They need something like 20 ships to return home. Harold Hardrada is killed with an arrow to the throat after he went on a kind of berserk, two-handed sword charge. He died in a way that did him great credit. And then Harold is celebrating one of the great victories over the Norse,

over the Vikings in history. And he gets a message while he did, York. He's got some terrible news for you. England's been invaded again. Duke William has landed in the south. So he goes all the way to start. He tried to pull off the same trick twice. He doesn't stop in London.

His brothers beg him to stop in London to wait for more forces to come in. He thinks no one is to surprise him. So his forces are exhausted, basically. Well, we think he's got a core professional army called the Housecars. These are full-time professionals. He's probably brought with them.

The sort of mass of his army are probably men called up from various local regions. So as he's coming back down with the housecals, who would have been exhausted. They're the elite of the army, and they would have suffered casualties and they'd be fatigued. But as he's doing so, he's sending messages go, I need the men of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire to meet me here. So he is, there is a fatigue issue. It's not quite the case that the whole army had marched all the way. However, also, but the northern

levees, these northern counties that had he had had time, he'd have said, actually, Midlanders, northern has come and join me. He's trying to take on William with the sort of southern counties and his elite who are battle damage. So it's somewhere in between, but it's not ideal. He tries to trap William exactly the same. It doesn't work out. They fight the Battle of Hastings. Goes on all day. One of the most remarkable, some attritional battles in medieval history. And William wins. He doesn't just win. He annihilates the ruling class of Anglo-Saxon England, which is important. He kills Harold. He kills his two brothers on that battlefield. He kills a lot of important. He he decapitates Anglo-Saxon England to a large extent. He then is the Anglo-Saxon's

bend the knee, they offer him the crown. But then that's not the end of the Norman conquest. He spends the next few years, discovering the nightmare that is England. And there is an uprising in East Angus and uprising in Cornwall, in Exeter, around Exeter. There's an horrific uprising in north of England. He's forced to commit some genocide and ethnic cleansing cleansing. The Vikings have a little sniff at that point as well. He's forced because of this problem that we have of crumbling frontiers, this will be a problem for all empire bills over the centuries. He's forced, if you want to dominate, at England, you discover that you can't stop at the borders of England. You have to push into Scotland. You have to push into Wales because your foes will cross the border. And as we see in Israel, Palestine today, as we've seen, it is, borders are poorest things. And you end like, well, Vietnam War, you end up having to project force beyond the place where you wish to. So he marches into Scotland, gets the King of Scotland to bend the knee to him, which is important later on.

He marches into parts of Wales and beats the Welsh princes and sort of doesn't, doesn't own or occupy them, but sort of achieves, receives promises of submission that they'll then forget the minute he's gone back to me. Dan, let me ask another stupid question because... No stupid questions. I know, but I'll do my best to ask one anyway. I'm curious, this will sound very strange, but I actually think it's worth asking, what is the nature of these rebellions? You know, a lot of the people, you've, like you said, the ruling class has been killed off. Yeah. Mostly, right? So you're sitting there in Yorkshire, wherever it might be. Why do you want to... to risk your life, the life of your sons, the lives of your family, everyone, for what?

That is a very good question. What are you finding for? It's something that I think all the time, because it's very, you just go, popular uprisings, maybe this is the nature of the historical records. You don't learn about the times when William the Conqueror or another medieval king just goes, there's a bit of an uprising there, or just send them some money and agree to what we want. It seems to me that a lot of the time, the king arrives, and just murders everywhere. I mean, I don't know, if you're a local member of the gentry, you know, your family have survived tastings, you're still a bit of a landowner.

The local Norman Lord is encroaching on your leg. That's what I'm saying. You feel pushed into a corner. I mean, sure, buddy, what are you going to do? Take on the might of Norman England. Now, there are sort of occasions where perhaps it works that we, but we don't, it's funny, I don't think we hear about this as much. And maybe you, maybe you mark your tenants out and the local Norman enforcer, the lord, you know, the brother, the bastard brother of him, William I first or his nephew, his cousin. marches and go, look, let's not fight, all right, you can have your land tenure back.

Maybe there are examples of these rebellions actually achieving some kind of political outcome. But often, as far as I can make out, what happens, particularly in the Norman conquest, post-conquest period, is Exeter. He just kicks the shit out of everyone. Well, actually he does, well, he gets his own way, and he builds a massive castle in Exeter. That rebellion doesn't, I don't think, succeed. That may be that beneath the surface, there are some deals done and everyone agrees to chill out of it. But, I mean, certainly in the north of England, it's sort of genocidal war. And in East Anglia, you get an aristocratic Anglo-Saxon who was apparently called Heroid the Wake, one of the great characters.

He may have been abroad for the Battle of Hastings. He may have been a mercenary abroad, but his family were dispossessed, his brother was killed. And so he comes back and fights this kind of hopeless battle against the Normans for reasons. Again, I sort of struggle, but I think they're often elite-led. So they will be, and they will call up their tenants, they will call up other people that are at risk of being deposed. And I suppose if your entire status, your entire lifestyle depends on maintaining land holdings, if the local Norman lords who are being put in across the country as enforcers, they're locking things down by building these castles that they've been seen before in England,

and indeed in Wales, the land's gots. So you're locking in that power. Castles are what you build when the locals hate you. So if you're in a castle, it is a statement in stone, initially in wood and soil, but then in Stoke, we're going to wait this out. We're going to sit in this goddamn cast for three generations if we have to. We're going to lock it down. It's what Western Allies were unprepared to do in Afghanistan.

You just go, mate, actually, do you know what? If the Taliban sort of control the countryside, we don't give a shit. We're going to control. We're going to control Kandahar and Kabul forever and not going anywhere. Now, of course, no one believed that. The Western Moxies had that level of stubbornness or commitment. to Afghanistan rightly, they didn't. Whereas the Normans are saying, we're here, mate.

And so you get a situation where there are just these beacons of Norman might, and the English can't get, the English owned the knight, they owned the countryside, they would cut Norman throats on a road if they met them. But you've got these little nodes of Normanness that eventually allow Norman power to be sort of embedded and allow Normans to marry, you know, occasionally they'll marry in for the local elite, they'll co-op the local elite, they'll kill them, they'll dispossess them, and it's a generational project.

Dan, so when you're talking about the resistance, part of me started to think, how much of actually English culture at that time was an honour culture? Yeah, exactly. It could well be that you said, well, I am, I would rather choose a certain death than submit to these, you know, foreign, French-speaking landowners give up my place in society, give my place in the hierarchy. Because when you talked about that, the nobleman returning whose family had been slaughtered

and he fought a hopeless war, well, I think if you look at it from a logistical point of view, you could say it's hopeless, but from an honour point of view, this is revenge. Of course, absolutely. Yeah. And these people, once they've been outlawed, once they've crossed in that sort of invisible, perhaps quite visible line,

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So we see Norman England, we see the tentacles of the Norman rulers stretch out into the English countryside, subdue, submit, take control. How does that then transition into the medieval period and the dark ages? Well, so the dark age is what people used to call this bit after the Roman rule. So the Dark Ages are what historians now call the early Middle Ages. Is it politically incorrect to call them the Dark Age? Yes, you should not call them. Really? Because there was all sorts, no doubt, of wonderful things going on, but we just don't know as much about them because it's a bit more... I always thought that's what the Dark Ages meant, that we didn't have the light to seefully into them. You may think that I couldn't

possibly... I didn't realize this was a controversy. No, you know, it's a big controversy. I'm glad I've just let you know it. It's the age of color. We don't want you guys getting cancelled. The age of colour. This was a very colourful. All right. But seriously, it's a controversy. It's a big of a girl. No, you should call it. Yeah, no, it's common.

That term is now gone. Look, I think there is an element. Because that term, it is not just in an archival sense. We find, we see, we find it difficult to see what's going on. I think it was in an era where we thought that Christianity, the light of Christianity had sort of disappeared from much of, much of England following that, you know, following the crashing out of the, of the, of the, the Roman Empire from of Britain. So I think it was probably, I think it's a term loaded with

inference around the, you know, that tragically the light of Jesus, our Savior, have been withdrawn from us as well. But in terms of, yes, in terms of our ability to see exactly what happened, there were less, there was less impressive record keeping at that time. So, so, and traditionally we would have said the end of the dark age, the end of the early medieval is this Norman claim. It seems a watershed moment of English history, which is why our king list, inexplicably, dates from William I first, you know, which is weird when you think about it. So my hottest take is that Edward the first should in fact be Edward the fourth, I think it is. But, you know, so the Anglo-Saxon kings of England should be included in our kingness. Very strange. Anyway, so we get William and then

that tends to bring us into what people call the medieval period. And you mentioned tentacles are in England. Of course, actually, it's the beginning of a process by where these Norman lords and kings will very stop start, but try to bring. bring the whole archipelago under this way. So we get... Wales happens very quickly, these marcher lords, these thugs who William the Conqueror puts in charge

of key castles and key territory on the borders of Wales. We get Hugh the Wolf in Chester, for example. He lunges along the North Wales coast. He captures Anglesey quite early on. We get pushing into Glamorgan. We get, as I say, pushed into Scotland. And then eventually,

under Henry II, so William Conqueror's great grandson, we will get pushing into Ireland as well. So you start to see, and this is why, you know, this kind of Englishness versus Britishness versus British and Irishness, it's complicated, it's complicated. So we now have this medieval period, and one of the things that we think about with the medieval period

is the Magna Carta. Yeah. So let's talk about the Magna Carta. All right. I'm into it. I'm into it. The wellspring of Anglo-Saxon liberty. Let's do this, the rule of law.

Okay, so William the conqueror spends his entire life with his ass in the saddle and his sword in his hand, trying to keep this ridiculous trans-maritime empire in one piece. Campaining in Scotland, campaigning in England, campaigning in France, which is just a nightmare on the borders of Normandy enemies all over the shop. His sons fight each other. Robert, Henry I, William I first, all at each other's throats the whole time. Henry the first succeeds eventually.

Henry the first dies without a male air. Oh no. He had hundreds of illegitimate children, but he could not get the legitimate male air done properly. He did have a couple of legitimate kids, but he died in a famous shipwreck called the White Ship. He leaves the throne to his daughter. It doesn't work out.

Controversial. Yeah, introvert. It does not work out. So Matilda and her cousin, Stephen, so William Conqueror's brothers, William Conquerous sons fight each other. Matilda and Stephen fight each other. Matilda's son, Henry, fights Stephen, and eventually Stephen dies. His son, thankfully, dies. And so Henry is left as the uncontested sort of King of England.

The line of William, if you like, has been sort of winnowed down and just about, you know, after into Nissan fighting. So Henry II, guess what his kids do? His kids go after each other as well. We have Henry, we got several kids. Henry the Young King. We have Richard the Lionheart. We have John.

We have Jeffrey. So they all fight amongst each other and with their dad, an absolute nightmare. Richel of Lionheart becomes king, absolute baller, smashes people all over France, gets the nickname Lionheart. Now, he dies without an air,

horrific wound from a crossbow bolt while he's besieging some pointless little castle in France. die, absolutely tragic moment. And his little brother becomes king because he doesn't have his sons either. His little brother's nickname is Soft Sword. So Soft Sword takes her from Lionheart and guess what happens, lads?

The King of France just motors in and just smashes the whole English Empire in France. That all just goes. All the lands in France go. Normandy goes, the whole lot. In England, the barons, so these lords turn on John. They sniff weakness. And you get Magna Carta, which is a peace treaty

between the lords of England and this useless king, this weak king, and they think, we're going to get some concessions out of this guy. Now, he's a deeply unpleasant man as well. So he's done things like starve his enemies today. He's treated the noble... His death duties are through the roof. They don't like paying death duties.

He's making people pay inheritance tax. He's marrying heirses from the aristocracy to his mates so that they inherit their estate. He's a deeply unpleasant human. being, and he's a bad politician, and he's terrible in the battlefield. So he's just the absolute perfect storm of shite medieval king. And so sensing weakness, they present Magna Carta, which is a series of concerns they have and the obligations they want him to sign up to. And he has no choice, he does everything possible, and he signs up to them. And it roughly speaking, it sort of implies

that the king is prepared to abide by legal agreements, which is the thing that we all now find important, that the tyrant, the Hobbesian Leviathan, is prepared to be bound by the law of the land. And let's just put a double click on that for one second, because one thing I think modern humans, or certainly modern Western humans, let me make that exception, find very difficult to understand in a monarchy of the kind of, in an absolute monarchy of the kind that we're talking about, there is no law, there's the king's will. In, right? In theory, yes, in practice, there's a all sorts of customary and sort of traditional ways in which the king would demonstrate that he's ruling well on behalf, in hand in glove with the church and the aristocrats. So technically, yes,

the king can just go, you, I want to chop your head off. Right. But there is a, there is a sense in which the king is bound by the customary traditional. Unless you get a king Joffrey or a king. Unless you get Joffrey, Game with Thrones, unless you get King John, who will go, or in later periods we see, you know, Charles the, we'll come to those. So, John says, roughly speaking, I will be bound by these obligations, and that involves a lot, most of it's due with money and the concerns the aristocracy, but there's things like, I will detain no free man and no free man will be tried by other than by his peers and fair trials, all that kind of thing. King John Renegs on that a couple of months later. So it sounds like Keistama. Yeah, it's a dead letter.

It's not what the paper it's written on, and we would never have heard of it, were it not for a few things that happened. The barons then invite the French prince come over and take the throne. Many of the barons. So there is this civil war, brutal civil war in England, invasion.

People say 10-6-6-last invasion of England. Absolute balls. There's a great invasion, but this one's backed by lots of people in England, And all these barons are marching with Prince Louis of France and Prince Louis and St. Paul's Cathedral. Yeah, he wasn't crowned, but they sort of acclaimed him king in St. Paul's Cathedral. And then he goes north. And that's when we get the greatest hero of English medieval history. It's called William the Marshall, who just goes, he's like, is 70 years old.

He's fought for, he's like, he's been the power behind the throne of like four kings at this point. And he just goes, no, I'm sticking with John. And that decision is made easier by the fact that John dies of dysentery, which is great. So John saves his dynasty by dying of dysentery. He completely screws the whole thing up. He's absolutely hopeless. And he ends up losing the crown jewels in the wash. He crosses the wash.

The tide comes in. He loses the crown jewels. You end up in Lincolnshire. He's in Newark, I think it is. He's got dysentery. He dies. Best thing he ever did. So he leaves a nine-year-old son.

And so you've now got a choice between this French prince, or actually the nine-year-old son, who might be quite pliant. And the nine-year-old son has got the marshal on his back. And the marshal meets the nine-year-old son, And the nine-year-old just goes, my kingdom depends on your work. Marshall could have killed him there and then. He could have said, fine, I'm sorry, I'm with him.

And the Marshall knelt down and went, fine, I'm with you, kiddo. It's one of the most romantic and amazing moments in English history. And he kneels to his sovereign, and he says, and then he says to people, people say, it's a hopeless cause. And he goes, I decided I'm all in on the plantation at family. I'm all in on this, Henry III. And if I have to carry him on my back from island to island, I will protect the life of that boy. And so he goes to Lincoln and he smashes the French and rebel army at Lincoln.

One of the great battles of English history in the streets of Lincoln, William the Marshall, 70 years old, piles in, just absolutely smokes a night. We have this account written admittedly by William Marshall's son. It just absolutely rinses this one particular guy. And then the French, and then there's a great sea battle off the sandwich in Kent. The French relieving army get crushed there. one of the many sea battles in which the English and British will smoke the French over the centuries, which is a recurring feature of history, thankfully. And then, so England, Plantagenet, England is safe, so you have Henry III. Now, he reissues Magna Carta to get the barons back. He'll he, so he is the one,

weirdly, William the Marshall, Henry III, go, they go, you remember that thing you made my dad's side? We reissue it now. So we will embrace it. We are signing up to this. And it's that reissue, and they're reissue by Henry's son, Edward. It's the fact that, it becomes this sort of document that is imbued with meaning, which is what, yes, we promised to rule by in the ethos of this bloody Magna Carta thing that you made my granddad sign. You know, that's why it matters. It matters because we have placed our faith in it. It's like a sort of religious document. But the other reason that matters, and correct me, if any of this, is incorrect, is that it's one of the first times in history when the absolute power of the monarch

is constrained. And that's why people argue that it's, it's, it's, a founding document you might serve our democracy because it's people think it's about giving power to the people that had nothing to do with the people. But it's a way of just diffusing some of that absolute power to the people below the ruler. The king, the sovereign, is subject to the written word of the law. That didn't work in practice. And it was based on things before. Henry the first issued a kind of proclamation when he was crowned. He was trying to win over and over and I promise to rule in these ways. So it's a promise, it's a commitment. It's Magnicata, it's unfinished, guys. It's unfinished, right? As we all know, okay, this isn't, it's like the

Gettysburg address. You know, we're still seeing whether this all works in practice. So, but it, yes, it is, the king appears to say, I accept the fact, I can't do whatever I want. I am subject to the law. And because, and then subsequent generations keep, we venerate it so it grows stronger. It's like a, like, like the Bible. When, when the, when the, when the, when the, when the, book of Genesis written down. There's no power in that paper. They've written that parchment. It's power because of the power we all give it. So when Edward I want to raise more tax and he goes, fine, I'll reissue Magna Carta. I was like, fine, you're done, here's more tax. So it becomes something. It means something. And so we get to Edward I first and then and Magnicator starts to be embedded in this

system. We also see the development in the 13th century, partly because of Magna Carta, there's been controversial, of a system of a system where the king will gather advisors to him where he will not try and raise money without the consent of his aristocrats and also of his leading townsmen, his merchants, his burgers. And then we see the House of Lords and the House of Commons developing. So we see the beginning of that kind of consultative bodies. And Edward, the first occasionally gets it wrong. But on the whole, he is a very dynamic, military, charismatic, impressive king who asserts his rights, but he sort of seems to understand, he needs to, he needs to pay lip service desire to work with that, this tradition of Magna Carta and Parliament

that is built up. We should say about it with the first, by the way. He is, he goes a step further than those previous things. He really does try and invade, occupy, conquer, integrate these other parts, this unfinished business of the other parts of Britain. Wales, he largely succeeds, although there's a big uprising a hundred years later, which will shake that. But Wales is incorporated into England, which is why, for example, the Wales, the flag of Wales is not on the Union Jack. It was not an act of union, a coming together of equals. It was a England conquered Wales. That's why the legal system, this is an administrative system of counties. It is English and is imposed on Wales. Scotland, it almost very briefly succeeds there, but the first

very briefly sits there as the King of Britain. And it's a very, it's an interesting moment. He claims the throne of Scotland. He, and he says, Scotland is essentially part of, it's part of now my imperial crown. There is the uprising. People may be familiar with William Wallace. So, Joe, I was about to say this. Edward I was the evil guy in Braveheart.

He's the evil guy in Braveheart. That's right. He is, yeah, he's a kind of madly homophobic. For our American audience. Yeah, that's right. Americans, welcome to the conversation. You're still here. Yeah.

So this is, this is, ever the first. Long shanks. Long shanks. And he was called long shanks. He had long legs. And he was very tall. And then he dies. He dies at the sort of critical moment where William Wallace at first and then Robert the Bruce, this Scottish nobleman, our resistance is, it proves very difficult to conquer Scotland. It's a pain in the ass. And Scotland's difficult place to conquer. Why is that? Sorry, just very quickly. Is that because the Scots?

You met any Scottish people. Yeah. Is it the Scots? Is it the climate? Is it the landscape? Or is it all a combination? I think the Scots were particularly jealous of their independence. They realised quite early on, whether it's fighting the Romans, whether it's fighting. You know, you realise that there is a powerful entity to the South. Be that Northumbria, be it the Roman Empire. So generationally, you're protective of your independence. You are aware, there's always people in the South East Island trying to march north and take your land and your things.

Secondly, it is a bit of a nightmare militarily. The climate's tough. The Highlands provide this place where you can withdraw to it. the Bruce. So Sterling Castle, Edinburgh Castle, all of these castles are taken by the English, but it is very hard to project force into the Highlands, to pacify the Highlands. The Highlands were not pacified until the 18th century with an early modern army. It is very difficult terrain. And so there's always a place where you can withdraw to. The Kings of England, as the Roman Emperor's were before them, like, okay, I think I'm, I think I might spend enough

time in Sterling, thanks. I've got stuff to do in my lands in France. I've got stuff to do And then the minute you withdraw, then the undefeated forces of, as it were, independent Scottishness can re-emerge and keep contesting those spaces. So I think geographically it's very hard. And it requires lots of naval assets. It's a different. Isn't there also a cultural thing? I remember reading quite a bit. Thomas Sol has written a lot about the cultural differences between mountain people and people who live down in the lowlands.

and effectively mountain people tend to have this martial culture. So the reason the Swiss supplied a million mercenaries to the European armies over the years, et cetera, is because when you live in these more mountainous regions, the people there develop a much more combative sort of fierce. Look, of course, there's elements to that, and it plays, there's all sorts of examples that through history. You know, there's, as someone lives in Hampshire, I'd put down the Hampshire Regiment, are tough as you like in the wars of the British Empire.

kick ass the whole time and it's no hills there at all. But yes, it is, there is an element that there is also an element in which a almost tribal society endures in that pot of Scotland that makes it very easy for noblemen, for leaders to call up men of military age. So the, you end up with, you know, this, people have heard of clans and clan chiefs. And certainly by the 18th century, you have the tradition of, um, in the, uh, of private military. that's been stamped out around the rest of Britain by that period, right? So that is an enduring problem in Scotland. So I think it's easy to raise warlike, hardy, tough men who are good with a knife.

Yeah, there is a tradition of cattle rustling. There's a tradition of kind of endemic conflict with your papers in that because it's not a settled agricultural landscape. So yes, there are very sort of interesting complex reasons for that. So Edward I first fells, and Edward I makes the extraordinary thing about the Plantagenet family is you do just get this very uneven, you get a very uneven performance by its kings. Richard the Lionheart, John Softsword.

You know, Edward I, Edward I second. Absolute, useless Muppet. Okay, so he falls out with everybody. He leads a massive army up north into Scotland and loses the Battle of Bannickburn, one of the great battles of British history. 1314, there's a great moment. One young British nobleman trying to make his name,

Gallats up to King Robert the Bruce, is sitting on his stirred little pony, Robert LeBrucester's watched him come, then stands up in his stirrups and just smashes down with his battle axe and just cleaves this guy in half down to the trunk. And he falls off his horse. That's the start of the battle. So the English are like, I'm not sure this is going to go well,

so then there's just this absolute demolition of the English army at Bannockburn, and the key Scottish fortresses fall to Robert the Bruce after that. And that is a, to see this decisive moment, it means that Scotland will not be conquered by England. Scotland will remain as a separate kingdom until they are joined, but it will be a political union rather than an act of conquest. So then we get the 14th century in the 1300s, which is an absolute nightmare,

because you get the black death, you get the plague, which kills around a third of the population, perhaps only half the population of Britain. You get the start of the 100 years war when Edward the second son, who may be Aber the second son, or he may be somebody else's son, he decides he wants to be King of France, various reasons. He gets 100 years war that lasts more than 100 years, in which the flower of English youth is hacking and thrusting and bleeding out in the mud of France. So it's a tumultuous time. And English identity, if you want to talk about identity,

is really forged in that period because you really start to see Englishness as quite distinct from Frenchness. You start to see English language being used by 1400, 1415. English language as being, which had been the language of peasants, the language of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman courts, the clerics spoke Latin French. you know, Norman French, Henry V starts using it in court documents. So you suddenly, hey, I think we're English now. I think we're fighting the French.

So that's an interesting moment. And then you get, and then... Well, we can't skip over... Sorry, sorry, sorry. We can't skip over the 100-year war. Okay, it's not. Quite a long war. Yeah.

So you mentioned one guy wants to be king of France. Why does it all last 100 years? Because neither side has got the strength to win decisively. it is just two punch-trunk boxes just going at it. They take some breaks, they take some breaks, but they come back swinging. Edward III, his mother is the Princess of France. The French royal family suffer an extinction-level event. They've inherited father-to-son for something like 12 generations.

I can't remember it, but it's called the Capitian miracle. It's one of the reasons that France is the size it is today, because the French just had a very successful run of kings, and that really helps in the medieval period. Then that just all comes to an one with three brothers, die in a row, a baby dies, like the whole family just get wiped out. And Eber the third goes, he gets his scrolls out, he goes, family treat you, he goes, lads, I think I'm the closest living descendant of the former French king. And the French go, oh, yes, we've got an interesting

problem. There's an ancient law we've just discovered, which means you can't inherit through the female lines. Sorry about that. And so he goes, God damn it, I'm going to go to war for this. And he says the house of plantagen, I better claim, the house of Valois. And he fights, Edward III fights quite successfully. They get all at the gates of Then weirdly, a massive hailstorms smashes down and this mountain was a monumental climate disaster. Seems to kind of put Edward III off a bit. And he signs a bit of a peace treaty, but gobbles up more French land. His son, Edward the Black Prince, is a legend.

He captures more land. He goes on these rampages, rapinage and smashing across France. He wins these great battles. People who know, we talk about a battle of Cressy, Bacquerier, we'll be familiar with. And then, Edward III. And Edward III and his son die very close to each other. And you get classic Plantagenet situation. and you get rich

than the second on throne is absolutely useless. Lovely chap, apparently, but just not really up to the guy. You want if you're fighting a gigantic war in France. This is one of the thing I've always wanted to ask Kestorna as well.

Say you are a very nice guy and totally useless king and you are embroidered on this wall. Why don't you just go, you know what, I can't be asked. Have some of this. I no longer claim the Crown of France. We leave, have Calais back,

we don't care. I'm coming home and I'm going to plant my whatever. And that's pretty much what Richel of the Second does. So there's a long break in the war, and Rich Steg does that. Now, one of the reasons you don't do that is if your, if your status and legitimacy and vibe depends on being a great military commander, which by this stage,

the medieval area, it still sort of does. A king is first and foremost, someone, I think, who's a protector of the kingdom, a sword of state. I think it's a little bit embarrassing to that. But I think Richard II could have sort of pulled that off, but he makes mistakes at home. He alienates key people, his cousin, importantly. and he gets in trouble with the Plantagenet family is, you know, you think your family is difficult.

I mean, the Plantagenet family is all drama. And Henry Bowling broke, his cousin, comes back, invades England, and Rich the Second suffers. A terrible, unfortunate accident shortly after that, which is really sad. So he is deposed. Henry takes over as Henry IV. And the reason Henry the Fourth then faces a massive uprising in Wales, he faces civil war in England, so he's then going to impose himself on England. He said that's a hundred years war still in the chest freezer.

But his son comes to throwing in with the fifth, who is an absolute, like a mentally impressive warrior. He's been commanding army since he was a teenager. He got shot in the face with an hour at the Battle of Shrewsbury, so he's like hideously disfigured. He is just a total baller. And he and his dad pacify England and Wales. And he restarts the hundred years war,

because he's looking for a little bit of a mission. He's got some momentum. They've crushed their internal enemies. They're still a bit uncertain on the House of Lancaster. Yes, they're Plantagenet's, but it's a bit naughty. His dad sort of thrown. There's a couple of other older children who probably have better claims. And so he's like, I know what I'll do.

Foreign military adventure. So he says, actually, we've all forgotten about this thing, but we're still Kings of France, by the way. So he lands, and he fights the Battle of Agincourt, 1415, people familiar with, absolutely rinses the French. royal dukes, prince of the blood crushed to death under the hooves of their own men, longbow bolts, longbow arrow heads embedded in royal princes and dukes. I mean, it's an absolute distr. Henry V at one point stands over his wounded brother,

fighting hand to hand to protect him as he gets up and goes to seek medical attention. Extraordinary battle. And then after Agincourt, he then goes on a bit, but he comes back and he invades and occupies much of northern France, and he achieves, he gets his wish. The French king, well the French king's mad at this point, the French elite promise that he can be the success of the king. When the king dies, Henry V will be the king of France. So we've done it, lads, we've done it.

And then Henry V dies a dysentery just before the king of France, weeks before the king of France. Did you know that Saffron has been shown in human studies to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer and wake up without groginess? That's what makes evening being by Verso, interesting. Most saffron supplements don't work because they contain cheap, unstandardized saffron, often cut with fillers or low-potency extract. Evening Being contains only the most researched bioavailable extracts available. Paired with other clinically studied ingredients, drinking Evening Being of an evening promotes relaxation and deep uninterrupted sleep. Check it out at V-E-R-S-O.

Evening Being customers soon become fanatics. Here are some of the things people are saying. Dennis said, I've had trouble sleeping for years and evening being is the only thing that keeps me asleep at night. And David wrote, I was pleasantly surprised how effective this wasn't helping me sleep through the night. Click the link in the description or head over to v.r.so and use the code trigger at checkout to save 15% on your first order. Do you know what's so interesting listening to you, Dan, is that when I listen to the story of England, I love history. but I did a degree in theatre. So everything that I know is filtered through the prism of Shakespeare, which is, let's be fair, as well, that's kind of propaganda, isn't it?

Yeah, totally. Because so, Henry V, I put Once More Into the Breach, dear friends. He probably never even said that. He almost certainly never said Once More to Beating. In fact, I'll tell you exactly, you never said that, because they didn't go into the breach of Hauffler. The people of Hauffler surrendered because there was a rule. that if you create a breach, you blast your cannon, you create a breach in the wall,

you then say, hey lads, people of half-flur, you've got two choices. Surrender now, and you will be okay. We'll take some stuff, but it'll be organised transition of power. Or we send the lads through that breach, and I'm not going to be responsible for what happens when they're attacking, their blood is up, and they're attacking through the narrowest streets of your town. Your wine cellars and your daughters and your treasure boxes. are going to be up for grabs. And so the people of Halflow went, we're done, we're done,

we'll take that deal. So they didn't storm the breach of half of them. So no, I mean, Shakespeare's wonderful propaganda, like Braveheart. You know, it's stimulating nonsense, but inspired by these great stories from our past. I wouldn't go to Scotland for a few years after that way. So Henry V does his goddamn hands

and dies of dysentery. He, the French king, very shortly after. So Henry V would have had his moment. One of the great warrior kings of medieval history. I mean, who knows what you could have done? He could have done Alexander the Great. He kept going. Who know? We don't know. Great turning point of history. And he leaves his baby son on the throne, who's A, a baby, Henry the 6th, and B, turns out to be absolutely bloody useless as well. Actually, very nice guy to your point. We think Richard the 2nd and Henry's is probably quite nice chaps. But Henry the 6th, really genuinely poor thing. A, ineffective. Be very, very nice.

and C suffered from a declining mental and physical health that saw him have fundamental mental breakdowns through the later in his career and became sort of catatonic at times. I mean, very sad, does not the man you need at this critical point. And so you've got a situation where Henry Vist brothers are sort of regents. They're trying to keep France together. The French are like, oh yeah, you know our deal with Henry Ville. He's dead now, so we don't really. So we've got the French that's saying, no, no, we think actually this guy charged be king of France.

And the Brits are the English saying, no, no, remember, our little baby is king of France. This little baby playing in nanny skirts. Not a great, not a great cell. And then who joins the chat? Joan of Arc. This peasant girl. Teenage. Can't read.

From the very fringes of the French kingdom arrives at the French court and go, hi, I've got a very strange message for you. I've been sent by God to rid this country of the English. Historian once described to me, if it wasn't very well attestimate, it is very test. We have the court documents, our trial.

If it wasn't well attested, was no way you'd believe this happened. It's like a script out of Hollywood. And she leaves the French army who are on the back foot. They are nowhere. She leads to French army. She delivers victory after victory. I must pause you there because among other miracles, this is medieval France. And you just kind of skipped over the fact that you've got this peasant girl leading an army. Like, what? Well, I agree. What? And I've looked into this quite carefully. I don't understand. There is, I think initially they thought that, and there is a tradition of this, that she'd be kind of useful mascot, that, you know, that idea of you send with the army someone who seems

to be, like, touched by God. And they might be speaking in tongues. They might be a bit weird, but they spit prophecies. And there is a bit of a tradition of nobleman going, look at this strange peasant girl who I've just found, who says that I should be the Duke of a l'Anseigne. So there is a little, it doesn't come from nowhere. But what's interesting about her, she arrives, everyone thinks, well, okay, let's sort of take her along with us. But she goes, great, I'm in charge. And she does appear to exercise a kind of operational control, actually, over this. Oh, really? I know, really, yeah. So she, she is so charismatic and so driven that she appears to sort of win over these veteran commanders. So she goes, tomorrow we're going to go and attack that

fortress. And the French are like, no, you're mad, we've tried for ages, it won't work. She goes, we're going to, we're going to do it. And then, and then, because that's how medieval battles work, she just plows in, this teenage girl plowing in, she's wounded, and she sort of, she stands up and she goes, I'm not leaving these at the front line until we skis. scale this wall. You know, she's charismatic, visible leadership. And I think lots of time in battle, particularly in these kind of battles, it's belief. The men surge forward. And if you're clinging to that parapet, if you're climbing that ladder and there's an Englishman at the top and you've got your shield race, I think it's a game of inches. It's like any given Sundays. And if that,

if that final inch is that little bit more belief, you just get your hands on that parapet and your mate hoist you over and then you're the first man up, if you just think, our leader's a crap. and you're slightly looking behind you, then that's the difference, I think, in these moments. And the difference between victory and defeat in these moments is that first guy atop the battlements, the ramparts, that first, like, virus entering the enemy body, and then you get two up there, you've got a little shield wall,

and you can reinforce that, and then suddenly dominoes start falling, and then that belief starts to increase, and develops this snowball-like momentum. And that's what she does. That's what she does. And she just drives the English, under Greek, sways this territory, and she is eventually captured and burned, but by that stage, the French are on the front foot. And Henry the 6th, so he's completely unable to hold onto his

lands in France, like King John before him. And that's a kind of brutal body blow to his reputation, his respect. He's a sort of gentle, nice guy, found at Eton College. You know, so he sort of, and eventually his sort of super masculine cousins just kick the shit out of it. You know, eventually, there's a sort of inevitably there's a fight at court. We'd like to be your advisor, we think you're getting bad advice from that dickhead over there. And so these kind of overmighty factions start jostling for power. There's a vacuum around the king. Now, if you're Edward I'm the first, only the fifth, you'd be like, I'm in charge, you can get back in your box, mate. But if you're hanging in the sick, well, I was just listening to advice from him and

Somerset, but now maybe the Duke of York saying, and you get, and then of course, blood begets blood, you know, there's a little scrap. And you've killed brothers, cousins of this duke, of that Duke, and it becomes a, it becomes bloodlive, it becomes this savv it and you get a war, you get Wars of the Roses, you get a civil war in England, in families, fighting families between these, the Duke of, between Henry the Sick, the House of Lancaster, the King and his cousin, the Duke of York. So, back to Shakespeare. You know this from Shakespeare. Was Richard III? Was he all bad? Did he have a hunchback? Did he murder the twins? Okay. This is, this is going to get me, this is the bit that I'm nervous about going to be

cancelled. Because the Richard of the Third stands are busy out there, and they're on the internet. Let me tell you. So Henry the 6th has the great misfortune to come up against another superhero warrior king of English medieval history which is a cousin Edwin the 4th. Age 18, beautiful looking guy.

Aps 6 foot 4. Age 18 wins the bloodiest battle in the history of England to that point we think, the Battle of Toulton in Yorkshire. He leads his army in the front rank. He's just hoeing down men left and centre. the sixth, not there, not there. He's not going to be on the battlefield. At one stage, he's injured

during a battle, he's under a tree sort of contemplating nature. Sounds like, again, sounds like a nice guy, but unfortunately you're up against your cousin, the future Edward VIII. And he, there's a lot of back and forward, but eventually Henry VIII is killed in the Tower of London, where he's imprisoned, although his enemies said that he died of melancholy. And so, Edward VIII gets the throne. He goes to Seed takes the, just starts chasing girls all day, he starts drinking, because he falls apart. Anyway, and dies, and his little brother, Richard, the third takes over, rather than those prince in the tower. The princes are the two sons of over the fourth. We'd, I mean, my gut, people at the time thought it was likely that Richard had killed his, his nephews,

or made them disappear. And it's funny, though, that we uniquely think about Richard's Shakespeare. King John killed his nephew, killed Arthur of Brittany. You know, like, it's, there It was a thing, but it was not unprecedented. But anyway, they disappear. Rich the third takes the throne. But in the end, someone who had the flimsiest claim to the throne you've ever seen, guy called Henry Tudor, Henry the Seventh-the-Rise, awkwardly, French backing, French money, sails from France to Wales, but that builds an army, a guy has an army around him,

fights Rich and Third. One particular family in particular of nobles stand on the sidelines till the last minute and then decide which sides to back. And then they charge in on Henry Tudor's side. They become the elves of Derby, still very rich, powerful landowners to this day, as a result of their decision made at that battle. And Rich the Third is destroyed.

So then you got the Tudors. We're into the Tudors. Henry the seventh, we were the Tudors that arrived. Right, okay, so before we get into the Tudors, my horse, my horse, the kingdom for a horse. Battle of Bosworth? Yes. Go into that a little bit, and was that true?

Well, so Richard, I can't remember if that, That's true, actually. I should know that. This entire episode has just devolved into fact-taking Shakespeare. Richard III does, he does fight. I cannot remember. No, I don't think he does ask for it. I don't think he asks for us because I think he actually at the end fights pretty bravely. So he's not the kind of crooked, like utter villainous portrayed by Shakespeare, no way. Okay. But I think actually in the end he does fight and die like a King of England.

So we get to the Tudors. And does this, obviously it's just a different family, but does this signal some kind of big shift in the culture and history of Britain, or is it more of the same? That's a very good question. The Tudors didn't think of that Henry VIII would have thought to himself as kind of from the Plantagenet line.

Like, nothing to see here. We're all descended from, you know, it's fine. In, no, I think, look, the world starts, we're entering this, we're entering this modern period. This mad ride that we're on now, this starts changing, that the printing press has been discussed. discovered. The rest of the world has been discovered. Britain, this is what, you know,

for me, this is the bit that I'm interested in really particularly. We go from being this kind of outlying rock on the edge of Christendom that's played. No, super significant part in the story of Eurasia to that point. Well, suddenly, if you look at maps, you go to maps, we're on the edge of maps and medieval maps. You look at maps in the 16th century, the late Trude period. We're in the middle. As we should be. Well, as we should be. Because the new world has been discovered by European. Hold on. This is a this is where we have a sense now of this world and it turns out

we're bang in the middle and we're in a pretty we're an axis, we're in a crucible, we're in a great place right acrossroads and so that's happening. So Henry the 8th's reign is so interesting, people know about the wise but Henry X is for me because he starts where he's trying to emulate Richard Henry V he's like putting on his armour and going to France and trying to fight the but he calls himself the King of France.

But that comes to known quite quickly and what's going on is that meanwhile people in Devon, Devon, and Bristol and Kormulite, there's something they're mate, there's bigger fish to fly now. We're going west. We're going west. We're going down to Africa. We're going across.

We're enslaving people in Africa. We're going to the new world. We're getting sugar. We're getting raw materials. We're getting spices. We're going to follow the Portuguese. We're going around the bottom of Africa. We're going to Asia. We're going to access the trading emporium that is the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea.

So it's all this, and now and now I think, look, human beings have been on a ski jump since the invention of the smelting of bronze, you know, the invention of bronze in, you know, five-ish thousand years ago. But from there to a drone on Mars is not that long in terms of our history. But really from sort of 50, from the Tudors onwards, then we're starting to feel this kind of acceleration.

And everything really starts to rapidly change. You mentioned the words rapid change. And to me, into a lot of people, see the time of Elizabeth I first as the golden age. Was that the golden age of Britain? Well, Britain... Well, I was in the Tower of London just this morning, and the beef eaters at the Tower of London, they do their tours,

and they go, and then everyone, next came, Elizabeth I first, like that, and everyone's supposed to go, yay! Like, that's the perception. And I defer to that one in my love of Elizabethan seafaring and the kind of revolution that was going on this period in England, spreading its gaze to the horizons, Sir Francis Drake, the extraordinary, this maritime religion

that has begun under Henry VIII and continuing by Elizabeth. But at the same time, England is fighting an unbelievably savage war of conquest in Ireland at this point. And so, and it's something, you know, we've, there are, there are huge battles taking place in art, like really interesting, big pitch battles

taking, the Earl of Tyrone is fighting Elizabethan army. Elizabeth is almost bankrupting the treasury, trying to impose, English rule on Ireland. So she is like obviously we, obviously it's a nuanced picture. But in England it's remembered partly because of Shakespeare, partly because of what comes before and after, you know, before we had sort of the Protestant of dominant Whiggish telling of English history is that you get met, you get a bit of instability, you get Edward the 6th rules briefly after Henry the 8th, you get Queen Mary, Protestant martyrs, Protestants are kind of burned,

they become martyrs. There is, there are uprisings. it's, there's instability. There's instability than the Henry the 8th. You get the Pilgrimages of Grace, get the Reformation. This is tumultuous stuff. And then in the 17th century, after Elizabeth, you get the probably bloodiest war in British history, British and Irish history per capita,

including the First War, so relative to the population, which are the civil wars in the mid-17th century. So Elizabeth is seen as a period where there was art and, you know, Shakespeare and other poets. And England taking these baby steps out to establishing this empire that until, you know, recently, where scholarship and historiography is changed, was regarded as this untrammeled good for the world. You know, the British Empire is this fantastic thing. It's what school kids were taught. And people have seen the genesis of that, which is

partly true, you know, so that is when England's first colonies are sent out. Francis Drake circumnavigates the world. You know, the Spanish Armada is defeated, you know, one of the epic stories of English history. And so, yes, that's why it's seen as this kind of, it can be seen is a kind of golden age. Let's come back to the age of exploration, because this is a fascinating thing to me, on many different levels, of course, but one of them is,

if you said to me now, Constance, you know what you can do? You can go halfway across the world to these unknown lands filled with, I'm using inverted commerce because it's politically incorrect now, but this is how people would have seen it by savages who will probably stick an arrow

for your throat for landing on their turf, and you'll probably die of diseases you've never experienced and blah, blah, blah. Like, that's not an appealing vision for me. I know. So what is it about this period that people are so willing to travel halfway across the world on rickety boats into oceans unexplored? I cannot even begin to agree. The stories of the Portuguese and English exploration are astonishing.

The hardships they enjoy, the teeth falling out from scurvy. When you get scurvy, old wounds open up. Your teeth fall out. And then so if you have a scar from a child, you know, in previous battle 20 years before, whatever it might be, they will just spontaneously open. You'll start bleeding from these. Scurvy is one of the most horrific things, obviously not enough vitamin C in your diet.

They had no way of taking source of vitamin C with them, fresh fruit and vegetables on these long sea journeys. So they were horrific. The conditions, I love sailing, and I would not get in the golden hind that little old ship that people could still go and look at the replica in London Day

and think, I'm just sat around the world in that thing. You'll be kidding. I think it's a product. I think it's a store. I think it's, look, this is also we might come to this. why did young men go over the top in the trenches of World War I? The whistle blew and nearly all of them. Nearly 99.9% they climbed the ladders and they marched over no man.

I think part of it is young men. We know the bits of the brain aren't fully full. Genuine, I think if you're a teenager, you're in a rural setting, you're a younger son, you have a life of subsistence farming, you have a life where your ambition, your older brothers can inherit what property there might be. You go and you want to, some of you might have a career in the church. You think, actually, I'm going to roll the dice.

Adventure. Why do we buy lottery tickets? All those 18-year-old boys at the song, they thought they were going to. They knew that there might be 50% casualties, but they all assumed that they'd be in the 50% that made it. And I think that they're always willing recruits to these kind of incorrect, because, and also dead men tell no tells, who's coming back? The guy's going, you know, I'm going to believe this.

I got this awesome swag. You know, I'm rich. It's who's on the social medias, right? It's the people that have won. And the guys who have been in shallow graves, they've been hacked to pieces in Southern Africa after months of malnourishment. You know, those guys are not coming home telling the story.

So it is a really interesting point. But I get you, you, oh, and I should also say, actually, it was always quite hard. It was hard to find recruits. Like, it wasn't easy. It was sometimes easy to find gentlemen recruits, because they are, as I say, there might be this of impetus for, they want that. They're sort of middling rank and they want that more stage.

Like Francis Drake, he's or so. But it was quite hard to convince sailors. Like, oh, what do you do? I sail, I go and fish off the Grand Banks, or I go down to Basque Country. We have a regular, I take Cornish tin down to bar. Well, do you want to come to India? Actually, no, I don't, mate. So Francis Drake had to trick on his trip around the world.

They all thought they were going to East of Mediterranean. That was they going past Morocco. The lads are like, uh, what's going on here, mate? And he goes, well, we're going to South America and beyond. They were like, right. Yeah. Before we carry on with the chronological history, which is fascinating, Dan, and by the way, just to say, I love the way you bring this stuff to life.

It's just fantastic. I'm so glad we've got you here. One thing, I was watching a documentary about the history of England, which starts at Stonehenge. And you were talking to one of the experts, the local people there who works there. I think it was a woman. And you're standing among these giant stones. that had to be transported in some way we might not even know and then erected in some way we can't even imagine at this point.

And she sort of said something as a casual comment, you know, well, you've got to understand these people were just like us. And I know she didn't mean in every way, but this idea doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Like if you said to the people of Britain today, what we're going to do is spend a quarter of our national GDP on erecting some giant monument to the gods or to God.

Or to God or to Jesus even, you're mental, mate. We've got the NHS to do with the taxes are too high. You know, we need welfare spending. Like, what are you talking about? Yeah, no, that's a really... So the thing I always think about is, I don't think we were the same. We are the same people.

And I think the culture and the mentality of the people through these different phases that we're talking about must have been profoundly different to the way that we see the world. I think that's a really perceptive. And I think as a historian, you find yourself sometimes being shuner,

struck by similarities. You know, when you're at Pompeii, they're at Pompeii and they were, they were excavating when I was there and there are little child charcoal drawings of gladiator figures and and and these, so these could have been drawn because, you know, rain would have washed them off. They could have been drawn days, hours before the eruption of Vesuvius. And that just touched you, you think there's kids here with their charcoal drawing doing what kids do and there's these moments domestically like that. And then there's these moments when you read about the absolute sorrow that was endured, for example, by Edward III, when he lost his daughter to the black death,

and you think, God, that's very relatable. And then you're right, there's other times, you're like, I mean, erecting Stone Edge, being a concentration camp guard, you know, that you think, okay, this is, this is, so I find myself, you find yourself asking that question again and again, you're like, what is essential to our humanity, what is very different?

And yeah, belief systems, did these people genuinely believe when they're going into battle? Genuinely, they were hungering for death because they thought there was a better life afterwards, you know, that kind of thing. I, you know, and I, I actually flip around on that quite a lot, because you read a source, like, okay, you know, how far, this is, this feels right, and then you read something going, wow, okay, no, that is, that's very, very relatable to us, that feels very similar. Because I have noticed that in the way that you talk about it,

you often related what I previously understood as spiritual or cultural transitions. You kind of put it into more pragmatic practice. That's interesting. That's my own bias. I wonder if that's right. I wonder if I'm under. Look, we all... When you talked about the spread of Christianity, for example, in England, and you go, well, you know, they had these monks who could read, who could collect taxes. That's a good point. That's a good point. But I wonder, you know, I think about the Aztecs, for example, right? Or people in, there would have been people throughout history who sacrificed their own children to the gods in certain contexts. And you go, I don't think these people saw the world the way I do. I just don't. The Aztecs human sacrifice is, Inca, human sacrifice is a great example of that. Yeah, you'd give up, they gave up the best.

Well, again, we don't know. But the suggestion is that aristocratic families would be happy to give. I mean, I personally now would have been like, no, I think my child's got a few blemishes. I'll tell you about that. Beautiful. Or the Spartans, right?

Or your child's imperfectly, let's throw them in the room. Yeah, I agree. Look, I think that's right. I think, following Karl Marx, we talk more about the economic drivers for these things. We're all sort of, when it comes to history, we're all kind of, we're influenced by that. Marx's school, so we go, well, I mean, it's the rise of the middle class, isn't it? Whereas previous

historical traditions really talk more about the great man, you know, this ability. And actually, again, I find myself just sort of torn and shambolically moving between all these, because I think there are examples in history of individuals who can absolutely galvanise and take things off into a different direction that they would otherwise previously not gone in. But there are also examples clearly where the fact that British government is able to borrow at lower rates of interest in the 18th century means they tend to win the war. against France, even though they had like your Nelson's and your wolves and you know, so, so I'm, you know, you have to try and think of all these things. I think you're right about

Christianity. Christianity is obviously is a very powerful and compelling and message, one of personal salvation and love, but it's also attended in this period by all sorts of practical real world advantages as well. So I think it's probably a mix of everything, but you're right, That's interesting. It's good to pick me up on. So we have the Elizabethan age. Yeah. And this age of exploration, this age, cultural explosion in the home country, the war in Ireland. What came after that?

Well, what comes after that is all the things that Elizabeth, she does the key thing you do when you're a great ruler, is you live for a long time. I mean, I cannot tell you how important that is to your reputation. Because ultimately you get to a point where no one can imagine you not being a ruler. Louis XIV, Ramesses, Queen Elizabeth the First. Queen Elizabeth the second. Queen Elizabeth second, yeah.

And so actually you, that sort of, it does tend to sort of put a little bit of a dampener on opposition because people go, well, it's the old queen, isn't? I mean, yeah, we've... And so what happens after is many problems that were unresolved in Elizabeth Rain that she had managed to kind of keep just about what played whack-a-mole with. So this gigantic religious schism, religious intolerance that is being the Counter-Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, Europe, there's a monstrous. violence and sort of pogroms going on against people who, there was slightly different

interpretations of the scriptures than you. That sort of blows up in the 17th century, in England. England gets sort of sucked into this pan-European schism between Protestantism and Catholicism and resurgent Catholicism, different types of proxism is all going out of each other. And imperial rivalries, because you suddenly go, you know, hang on a minute, everyone's trying to grab this, get onto this kind of money train and this trades, you're fighting at sea, you're fighting at sea. you're finding him. And it all just evolves into this perfect storm. And then you get a kind of a king that can't cope with it. It lacks the political skill set to deal with some really

challenging headwinds. That's Charles I first. He insists on sort of ruling as an absolute monarch. He just can't. His interpretation of Christianity is different to many of his kind of lairy subjects who want a more Protestant, sort of muscular Protestant form of, and by the way, with that interpretation of Protestantism comes, as a Protestant, A, I want different liturgical things. So to your point, I'm spiritually offended by what the king is doing in terms of this new prayer book and things, but I'm also strategically offended by the fact that he wants to make peace with Spain, the Catholic Spain. Protestant Englishmen should do what Francis Drake did.

It is the right thing for Protestant. We have now got a Protestant English identity, which is taking the fight to the Catholic powers of Europe, the absolute powers of Europe, and smashing them up and taking their stuff, right? And so you get this kind of melding of ideological, religious. And by the way, we as sort of Protestants believe in the way that we meet and reflect on our faith is also a way that we'd like to organise our politics. We want to come together in the House of Commons. We want to debate. We want to talk. We do not want orders to be handed out on high by the King, like the Catholic Church. The Pope says this, the bishop says that, right, sort of and go and do it.

We are Protestant. So you see this kind of really interesting and complicated, very, very, very, very, very, very. All of these different sources of conflict feed into this astonishingly complex war in the middle of the 70th century. On top of which is this unfinished business of this English conquest of Ireland. And that has now got a Protestant Catholic bent on it as well, because you're not just trying to conquer Ireland as the English had been doing for a long time. The Irish have said, we are not going to adopt the Reformation. So the English conquerors are now not just an English and Scottish conquerors are now not only foreign conquerors, England, Scotland, Britain. They are now a different faith. So now you've got a really hard edge on that conquest. It's made it even worse. So, you know, you feel more justified in sort of hurling Catholic,

Irish people off the land, you settle, you put English Protestant and Scottish Protestant settlers on the land, the plantation of Ulster. That, the sort of ethnic, the horrific ethnic violence in Ireland, this king in England has seemed to be a bit easy on the Catholics, so the people in England, like, you're not being robust enough with these Irish Catholics who are burning and committing atrocities against these Protestant settlers. It all just builds to this crescendo, and you get an astonishing war in which you last for a long time, the various phase of it, but which ultimately ends with the destruction of the English monarchy, House of Lords. It's our revolution. And Cromwell, this is the great, fascinating thing. It's like wildflower seeds.

When you scour the land and mash it all up and smash it all up, you get the beautiful wildflowers growing up that you didn't know were there. And that's what I love by history. In every generation, there is a Napoleon Bonaparte. There is a Stalin. There is a Cromwell. And if you, like, there is somewhere out there today there's an insurance salesman who is a military genius, but he never knew it.

And he or she could, given the right circumstances, given upheavals and foremen, will be thrust into position of command and become a dictator that will conquer England, conquer Wales, conquer Scotland, conquer Ireland. The whole of the British archipelago, in a way, Cromwell ironically achieves the dream

of the plantagenet, his plantagenet forebears on the throne in all but name, he conquers the British and Irish Isles. Briefly, there is this kind of unitary state over it, this military dictatorship. Traditional aristocracies are kind of thrown aside. It's military rule, it's dictatorship. And it's a super army. He goes and beats the French, the spouts. They go to Morocco. They go to North Africa and kick the snort out. And give us a little bit more detail on him for anyone who really doesn't know anything about over Cromwell. He is a minor gentry. So he went to Cambridge, so he's a sort of educated guy from East Anglia, goes to Parliament, is religiously quite fundamental. So he's a sort of

you'd say fundamentalist Protestant, doesn't believe in bishops, doesn't believe in kings, doesn't believe in being told what to do, has embraced this idea that everyone has their own individual communion with God. You read the scriptures and work out for yourself in the Catholic faith. Like, yeah, there's nothing for you to read. That's all in Latin. Don't worry about it. We're just going, and the priest will tell you what to do from the pulpit. You know, these people had prayer meetings, they'd gather, they'd discuss, they'd decide on how best they felt their community should adhere to the principles of Christianity and stuff. So he's quite a radical guy. And then he puts, and he leaves the throne to his son. He's not crowned, but he leaves the

dictatorship. Wait, you skipped off a quite a bit. How does he get to the throne? So he then, he then raises troops, like everyone's, like the civil war breaks out and everyone's sort of raising troops and he gets a few lads together from his area and he's staying here. And it turns out they're just really, really effective. And so typically cavalry commanders, you charge cavalry on your horses, you smash the enemy in front of you, and you just keep galloping, you chase them away in ones or two, you loot their camp, you steal their women and booze, and you have a great old time. Rather alarmingly, like the Mongols, Oliver Cromwell would charge, charge, charge, smash the enemy cavalry, and then stop, these highly disciplined, sort of non-drinking, you know, quite sort of, you know, strict, prostant guys.

Might not be the best night out with these chaps. they would stop and he would go and they'd wheel round and attack someone else. So incredibly effective, incredibly effective. He held on to these men with an iron grip and he defeats the king in the king's force in battles after battle

and there's various spasms of resistance but eventually he does conquer the whole and he commits atrocities in Ireland famously but he conquers the whole of the aisles but this is the big problem you have in revolutions. One second because I'd love you because I don't think our American, I think British

people might know this story. He had the king executed. I think this story is incredible. The execution of Charles I first. That's a very good point. The first judicial execution of a crowned head we think in history. And he eventually, they say, well, let's put Charles in prison and in Charles escapes. Well, let's get Charles to sign up to this deal saying obey himself, and Charles goes back on it. And eventually Cromwell purges people from, he purges, this is what happens in revolution? It's just purges, but you had the hardliners. I don't. You had the hardliners. I don't. up in charge. And Parliament ends up full of like pretty tough people and they vote. They say, look, ultimately this revolution and us, because we're the vanguard of this revolution. And if

the king gets in, we're for the chop. So it's about personal safety. You think about it, right? So the revolution, this new political settlement, this new Commonwealth, this new Protestant realm is not safe because Charles Stewart will try and reverse these reforms. And we will also absolutely knacker us if he gets chance well. So eventually, decided they're going to put him on trial for treason, and there's a trial in Westminster Hall, which is still there, and Charles says, I don't recognize the right of this court to try me. I don't know what you're on about. He does a bit of a slobber there in Milosewicz. You remember that? And then he is condemned to death, and he says goodbye to his children. He walks out

of Whitehall Banking Hall that's still there. While Palace Banking Hall is still there, and there's a scaffold built in front of it, and he wears, it's January day and he wears two shirts. He doesn't want to shiver. He doesn't want to make it like he's scared. And he puts his head on the block, and he dies well. And he chop his head off. And that is just a huge moment. And it's a huge moment. It ripples across Europe. It ripples around the world.

Why is that a huge moment? Because an anointed, the king, the king is, but it was widely believed the king is the anointed representative of God on earth. And when you say it's a huge moment, is it because people go, oh, wait, kings are not the anointed representatives of God? Or is it because they go, oh, God, they've killed the representative of God. Both. I think in a way, you're absolutely right.

And that's a good point. I think there's two separate political traditions grow up at this point, which roughly morph into the Whig Party and the Tory Party, actually, as well, which will come on to which are the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party. These two great political traditions in England, but elsewhere, which is, once I go, oh, okay, you're just a guy. So we can, and we should chop and change the guy if the guy is not delivering for us and the people. And the other side go, this is, this is, you know, blasphemous, it is a design. disaster, the more conservative telling would be we have to find ways to avoid chopping heads off kings. And in a way, the years that follow, because, yes, there's a religious dimension too, but there's also the dimension which is that those people who support the divine

right of kings to govern, they're edged out from their positions of influence. They lose out to these new kinds of people. They don't command naval vessels. The patronage goes in other directions. So this is existential for them as a class as well. So as ever, you see these religious and self-interested of economic and social motivations just layered in, melded in together in a way that you've pointed out really nicely. And so, yes, both sides draw different lessons. And in America, people draw lessons.

Because the American colonies are part of this. King Charles was king of America, many of these American colonies too. And so they draw different lessons as well. So some of those American colonies believe that that moment enshrines the right of resistance, so-called right of resistance, which is removing an illegitimate king or an executive authority that you disagree with, there is the right of violent resistance against that, if, you know, when that becomes intolerable, and you see that in the 18th century of the American Revolution.

And so Charles has gone, there's a new regime, but like all new regimes, it's quite hard to bed in. You can't command the loyalty because everyone goes, well, you're only 10 years old. You know, the Plantagenet family had been around for generations. I mean, I can understand why they're in charge, but I mean, you guys. I mean, you just made all this up yesterday, right? So when Cromwell dies, everyone's like, what happens now? everyone's, we put Cromwell's kid on the throne, and everyone goes, no, he's useless. And then there's a bit of jockeying for position. In the end, Cromwell's own people go,

well, let's just get, let's get King Charles's son back, because at least stability is better than chaos. And we do not want to go back to war. And they get King Charles second back, but this is the kind of critical moment, which is why this still matters. King Charles second is clever enough, unlike the French, when they're restored after French Revolution. He goes, okay, you know what we're going to do? I'm back, the monarchy's back, let's pretend nothing ever happened. But deep down, I get the changes that have occurred here. I'm cool with the fact that we now have a parliament that is almost co-equal to me in terms of decision-making in this kingdom. I'm not going to force it. I'm still going to run around like I'm a divine king. I'm a fabulous

steward. I've got my palaces. I've got my hair. Got my mistresses. But I kind of get it. I get it. I'm going to be a bit more sensitive. Charles II's brother, Charles II, many, many children who acknowledged, but they were legitimate, like Henry I first. Charles, no legitimate children. Poor Catherine Brighamese, his wife. One of the most long-suffering women in history. Charles II succeeded by his brother James second,

who lacked that tact, lacked deft touch. And he just barrels in and says, no, I'm divine right of kings, you guys. You know, the Stuart's, I'm the Stuart family, we're still in. We, you know, we were restored to the throne, take it, or leave it. And he lasts three years. And I think that's a reflection of the fact that there were profound changes that had taken place in the middle of that 17th century that people had gone, do you know what, we need, we're now political tradition in this country where we've got different, we're not an absolutist monarchy. There were people who were shocked at James, of course, a division within the political elite, it was all. They found, they put James II's son-in-law and daughter on the throne as equal monarchs. But there were a series of acts of parliament, there are a series of, as we used to say at university, de facto and de euro.

changes in the 1690s that meant that Britain develops effectively that kind of constitutional monarchy that we're now in a slow process, but a big changes take place. The king is not allowed to raise money in certain areas without the permission of Parliament. The King has to call Parliament every Parliament has to exist. He can't just go, go home for three years, I'll run the show by myself. There are big changes that take Britain down that path to constitutional monarchy. So that is the 17th century. A big battle see where power lies in Britain. And so what's really interesting about that is that it shows, and it resonates today, which is the moment you give up power, you ain't going to get it back. Yes, I think that's right. That's right. Yes. And it also shows that, for me, it also shows that elites that were prepared, like compromise. The people talk about this and compromise, this sort of identity, British identity of compromise.

If at the end, the kind of ultras blink, they go, do you know what? This is not worth fighting a one. I mean, it's the experience of that trauma of the 17th century that's made British aristocrats and elites through the 18th and 19th, 20th centuries. They often, they, there are constitutional crises where dukes and earls and Viscounts go, no way, man, we're not doing death duties, we're not allowing this. And in the end, they backed down. And in the end, there is kind of organic incremental change, possibly because of this trauma of the 17th century,

possibly something in the British character and an understanding, so it also suggests that compromise change is possible. Whereas in Russia, the altrues go, no, no, no, there's going to be no, it's autocracy, it's autocracy, it's autocracy until it wasn't. You know, and then your princess... Different type of autocracy.

That's right, and different type of autotoxy, and then your princesses are in a shallow ditch, right? And I think that is something that gives modern British history, a kind of interesting, different flavour to some of things going on elsewhere. Down, we could keep going for hours more, and I would love to. But our time is running low.

We've probably got another 10 minutes or so. Okay. So I want to... We're actually just now getting to the good bit. Give us the good bit. No, no, you'd ask me the question. Well, I actually was going to move on from the chronology. So perhaps if there's...

If you want to take a couple of minutes just to fill us on on the rest of the story. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so then we get the 18th century. Where Britain... So Britain's known to the land of revolutions in the 17th century. You've got civil war. You've got a king killed, another king depose. James 2nd, you've got various uprisings going on. It's a difficult time. No one would have

said Britain, that one, those guys there, they're about to run the world. But that's exactly what happens over the next 150 years or so, because the industrial revolution happens in Britain, because the commercial revolution. There are so many revolutions. And why does it happen in Britain? Oh my God, oh my God. I've always saw it's the shit weather because there's nothing else to do but work. I think that's part. It's everything in it. It's accessibility. Britain is the Saudi Arabia of coal. It's accessibility of high energy, coal quite near the surface, which is you can get at. Britain is surrounded by water. There's great rivers.

You can build canals quite easily. So you can get that coal to industrial enterprises really easily. Britain, because of the constitutional changes of the late of the 1690s, you've got Parliament that can kind of enforce laws. You've got stats, you've got, you know, things like you can invent, you can, there's venture cap, there's ready availability of venture capital because of this trading commercial revenue. People are making vast amounts of money from slavegrown sugar.

they invest that in what that funny little man's doing up the way, tinkering with steam engines. Britain was not over-embowed with genius. The French worked on steam a lot, but it takes off in Britain. It takes off in Britain. You get this culture of self-taught men who are able to attract funding, who are able to defend their patents, which is important, unglomerous stuff like that, and they then build businesses. So it's all of the stuff we're still talking about now.

Why does economic activity happen where it does? So it's raw materials, lots of iron, lots of coal, accessible, a common market, ships, they're able to, it's really interesting. And then Britain used that industrial might to, partly use that industrial might, that's scientific progress to conquer great swathes of the world. There is a qualitative, Britain first goes to India in the 17th century. Local, in battles, the British, English no more like to win than the locals. It's very evenly matched.

By the late 18th century, you've got better muskets. you've got better logistics supplies, extraordinary ships carrying can mounting cannon like HM's victory. You've seen that in Portsmouth. It is this plethora of things. And Britain is then engaged in this mighty war, not unlike Alfred fighting the Danes, the Vikings, war sharpens this national enterprise. Britain is locked in combat. The Chinese, you know, the, the Qing, for example, you get a little bit rusty, okay, because you're hegemonic in your region, you're chilling out, you're not, you're not in the gym. It's just fighting constantly.

And there are innovative, Eisenbard, Kingdom Brunel's dad is over here, going, oh, if we, what if we do this? And he invents production life. There's entrepreneurs going, if we attach copper plates, the bottom of these ships, it might give us a slight advantage against the French. It is really, really productive and innovative. And that then leads to, like America, the American military, 20th century, buying up microprocessors and chips, the Royal Navy is this gigantic consumer of the industrial,

of industrial projects. Anyway, so then you get to the 19th century, Britain has this huge advantage and conquers this monument, the biggest empire in history of the world, partly because of its own technology and money, but also luck. India, China was having a bad time. America hadn't got stuff together yet. Germany had not yet invented. So actually, the British power sort of emerges in the world and feeds off this lack of competition. That competition gets its game on in the middle of the 19th century, and this may sound familiar to people in America, but the Brits miss out on the next spasms the Industrial Revolution, they kind of miss out on chemicals, they miss out on cars.

They, so the Germans and the Americans in particular, sort of getting better at things they overtake the Brits, and then we get to the 20th cent. But Britain's still a great global power in the late, late 19th, 20th, and then we get the monumental global clashes the 20th century. First and Second World War, which I think in future will almost be seen as one gigantic sort of 30 years war, in which competitor powers, influenced by the building of these massive global empires, and I include America in that. America conquers North America. Russia conquers northern Eurasia. Britain conquers much the rest of the world. And driven in that context, competitor nations, rising nations like Germany and Japan, they want a piece of it.

And you fight these ginormous wars for global empire that finally come to end in 1945, then you get the Cold War and at the end of Britain is a great power. But yeah, so that's a dashed for it. Well, that was awesome. Really enjoyed that. We will have to invite you back and talk in more detail about some of the things. But for now, in terms of the chronology, you'll probably leave it there. The one thing I wanted to ask you in the last couple of minutes is, with all that said, what does it mean to be English? What does it mean to be British? Are there trends that you might pluck out from history and from the way that people are here versus the way people are in other places? I was born in the Soviet Union and came here in 95. So it's a question that's always fascinating me. But I also think it's a question that is very pointing today because I feel in the moment when we are trying to find a way to have an identity that is sufficiently clear, but also that people can buy into

so that we can live in a cohesive society. So if we were to say, you know, what does it mean to be British? What does it mean to be English? What's your answer? I think history is difficult here because what's pretty clear is that identity is something that we take on. It's not an external force. We're not passive to identity. It doesn't come and

occupy us. And in the 17th century, that's what they're fighting about identity. Who are we? Are we Catholics? I mean, Britain has been through, Britain's been through some 180 degree. Britain used to regard itself as a bastion of mixed aristocratic, royal and representative government against democracy. Britain used to, you know, there were peals of laughter that it was just an house of commons that women might one day vote. So do we say, well, we've always believed in equality? So Britain was leading participant in the trade and enslaved to human beings. But also, but also, exactly. But there were huge debates, but there were huge debates in Britain about this is filthy money. We don't want this, right from the 17th century on the way through. So, so these things.

So, and then we talked about the 17th century, like, who are we? Are we Protestant? Are we Catholic? Are we high church, probably? What kind of Protestant Catholics are we? Are we people that go and fight the Spanish and carve out empire. Or are we people who are like, what are you on about? We just trade with them, man. We'll make more money trading with them. You know, so I'm not sure that history has any consistent, I mean, you know, so until there's a great expression for the 18th century

that says to be an Englishman is to hate the French. You know, like, I mean, I'm not sure that's super valuable today. In fact, with Vladimir Putin on the march in Eastern Europe, I think we should hug the French as close as we can. I mean, I think we need our European allies, right? And in fact, in 20th century history, Britain fought the two greatest wars and its history on the same side as the French and most those wars.

So this was a country that gloried in bear baiting and fox hunting. Identity is something that has evolved quite. So I think I don't know what his teachers about identity other than identity is what we choose. It is malleable. But of course it's influenced by the past. And yet it's something that I think we need to be active in forging ourselves. It's not something this is going to come to us.

It's people like you on this podcast that are forging identities. That's why the Normans built gigantic Romanesque cathedrals around England. They said, by the way, guys, this is now the kind of Catholics you are. This is how you worship. you know, identity has often been quite an elite project. Well, and you mentioned, for example, was Alfred the Grey? Yeah, you know. You're not mercy in, lads. You're English. Now getting the ranks.

Well, right. And it's interesting because there's, as I'm sure you're aware, there's this whole big flag debate at the moment. And I remember Francis and I went to private dinner, in which there was a speaker who talked about the fact that flag flag waving is not a very British thing, historically speaking. And he made the point that it tends to be something, generally speaking, that becomes prominent at times when people feel fairly insecure. They feel that there's an external threat or maybe an internal threat or there's some kind of challenge. And it feels like maybe that's where Britain is at the moment. Possup, some people. I think there was a great complaint by some in the late 19th century that the British people didn't care about their empire. And if you read Jane Austen, if you read fiction for the 19th century, a lot of the time,

like the fact that you've conquered sway in Southern Africa, no one really cares. You know, there's a big debate. Like, who's benefiting from empire? Actually, often it's the settlers in Southern Africa and bloody Whitehall's writing the checks when they go and antagonize the locals. Oh, great, well, send the red...

You've nicked everyone's land. Now we're going to have to send the red coats in. You know, so these things are really complicated. Then, but then in the late 19th century, you do see this jingoism that kind of, they get it on, that the music halls, the popular press, you've got more union flags, you know, just the Navy, they park,

big battleships. They deliberately do that. They take it to Liverpool. they take it to Glasgow. HMS warrior, people going to see in Portsmouth, when that's launched, it doesn't fight a shot against the French. It spends a lot of time doing propaganda tours in the UK, and people are encouraged to go on it, look at it, this is it, lads, we're a maritime nation now. Now, Britain was, I love the sea, Britain, but now we see lobbyist people. I go to conferences, we talk about sea blindness. The people of Britain don't consider themselves. I don't think a super maritime people.

It's not something that you, your friends and family don't go and serve in the murder. merchant marine, the merchant navy. You don't meet, our politicians haven't served in the Navy. Our politics, you know, so we, but Britain used to be, and people like me are engaged in a kind of low-level and, frankly, hopeless effort to sort of, to nudge the identity a bit in that direction, to help people reconnect with the sea that our destiny lies on the ocean. So I feel that history, again, I just come back to the fight. We get to choose. our identity. And that will inevitably be a battle. It's a battle between, look, flag's a great example. We have an English flag. We've got a British flag. And that's fascinating. I find that

people, for some people, there's an elision there. But by putting that English flag on there, you're saying something fundamentally different to putting that union flag on there. That in itself is a massive schism that exists, even within the flag putter up us. Yes, it's true. Dan, what a pleasure. It's been. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Before we head over to Substack where we ask you questions from our supporters. First, tell everybody, I'm sure there'll be loads of people wanting to find more of your work where they can do that and then we'll ask you to find the question. Just got a history hit folks like you guys. We're on all the platforms. We're spraying it out everywhere we can. History hit podcast, YouTube, subscription, video, all the

stuff. Final question. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Well, in this conversation, we, I do, I do think, I'm a bit nervous about the Greenland ice sheet falling off into the North Atlantic. I mean, what's interesting about, I mean, so I catastrophic climate change, kind of disease, those kind of like antibiotic-resistant drugs of strains of disease, I think that we are all so busy. Inevitably, we got the cut and thrust of who's in and who's out in Whitehall. There are these massive systemic things we're not talking about. So, and what's really interesting about prehistories, you can look at, there have been moments in pre-street, for example, when the English Channel was formed,

that seems to have been quite a catastrophic event, these not glacial geological terms. that we could, as somebody lives about two meters above sea level, I'm really worried about catastrophic sea level rise, and, you know, as I say, the Greenland ice sheet just falling off. And so I would say, I'm unfortunately, you might call me a progressive lib, you know, crybaby, or whatever the expression is, but I do think existential, civilizational shock

as a result of super volcanoes, disease, climate change, but climate change, both man-made in other forms, I think is something that we're under-valuing here. So enjoy that. All right. Head on over to Substack where we ask Dan your questions. How much do you think the Board Award? Do you like the reaction?

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