The 100 Years' War with Historian Dan Jones

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In 1328, when there was a succession crisis in the French crown, the young King of England, Edward III, got into his head that one way around this might be to claim to be the King of France himself. That's the fundamental. That's the fundamental, deep-down reason English kings are saying we should be Kings of France. So, Dan, as you know, we're massive feminists on the show and so is all of our audience. And it strikes me that we haven't addressed the central figure in this whole story, which is, of course, Joan of Arc. Dan Jones, welcome back. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you on. We're going to talk about the Hundred Years' War. It's going to be a great conversation. And I was just saying to you before we started, the last one we did about the Crusades is absolutely smashed. It was really, really fun. And our audience enjoyed it. So it's wonderful to have you back. Thanks for coming. Well, I suppose it's one of the ways that the relationship in England and France are shaped. I mean, if you think about any sporting occasion, I mean, we're recording this before the World Cup. I don't know if England will play France in the World Cup or not. But I guarantee that if they were to play France in the Soccer World Cup, you would see some sort of montage. Before the event, that reference like the Battle of Agincourt, when the plucky English took on the might of the French nobility in one. So it's like it's a sort of, it's a common analogy for English-French relations. Is it why we hate the French? I don't know if it's the specific cause, but it's definitely part of the kind of material that's around. Yeah. I mean, I was only joking. I guess what, to give it the serious treatment that I think the subject deserves, I think the best thing to do is to start by explaining, really, what we mean by England and France. Because I imagine at this point, countries don't really exist in the way that we think about them now. These are more personal fiefdoms. And so is that really where we should start with this? Yeah, that's probably a good place to start. And in a sense, like the Hundred Years' War is a shaking out of what these realms are going to be. So if we go back before them into, so just by way of framing it, at the top, usually when we talk about the Hundred Years' War, we're talking from about 1337 through to 1453. Now, you can extend those in either direction. Mike Livingstone, the great military historian, has just written a book called The Two Hundred Years' War. But by and large, that's the core of the conflict we're talking about. Now, if you go before that, you're absolutely right. These are largely personal fiefdoms. There's a fact of geography, which is since the last ice age, you know, Britain has been an island and England is the sort of, the dominant kingdom within that island archipelago. But if you go back to the sort of the early into the high Middle Ages, the notion of what exact, which bits are ruled by whom is not fixed. So at the beginning of the Plantagenet era, since after the Norman conquest, 1154, Henry II takes over as king of England. He rules England, Normandy, which he inherited. Yeah, if actually because the Norman conquest, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, south of Normandy. It's a claim over Brittany and by marriage, the Duchy of Aquitaine, a huge sprawl of southwest France. Now, that adds up to about a third of the territorial landmass of modern France, plus almost the entire western seaboard. Now, that all answers ultimately to Henry II, king of England. But he's king of England and he's also duke or count of a bunch of different places. So this is very. This is very much a sort of personal, this is a set of fiefdoms held together by him. However, even at the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, the early 14th century, you still have kings of England who are dukes of Aquitaine or Gascony, depending what you want to call it. So they still have this strong claim to southwest France, centered on the capital of Bordeaux. They've got a kind of pipe dream that really they ought to be ruling Normandy as dukes of Normandy because of their descent from William the Conqueror. And all of that is constant. And all of that is constantly in negotiation between English and French kings. Who rules what and how and why? And it's only through the Hundred Years' War, really, that you get to a situation where pretty much, even though Henry VIII might have still fantasized that he was king of France, he's not. Not in the way that Henry V almost was and Henry VI actually was. So the Hundred Years' War is like the kind of shaking out of those two kingdoms. So the personal fiefdoms being critical. Who are the key players at the outset and prior to the outset of the Hundred Years' War? Well, ultimately, it's the kings of England and kings of France. So kings of England, well, from, you know, the 10th century onwards, there'd been a king of England rather than, you know, the Heptarchy or whatever in the Anglo-Saxon period. A king of England who rules, call it what England roughly looks like today. Then you've got the kings of France, whose situation is a little bit more complicated. If you go all the way back to the time of Charlemagne, you know, to the late 8th century, early 9th century, king of the Franks, well, Charlemagne ruled what's now France, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Northern Italy, so on and so on. Like the EEC, Foreigner of the European Union, more or less. Well, that's still in the dream of the European Union. There's a Charlemagne Prize given out every year. That's the legacy of the rulers of Germany and the rulers of France. So it's in the mind. of the kings of France that they really ought to sort of be at least rulers of Western Francia as had been. So that's like, if we call Paris the capital, it's what we now call France. But in reality, in the later Middle Ages, certainly in the early 13th century, the kings of France didn't rule that much. Their power extended to a little island outside Paris. And beyond that, it was just theoretical claim of, of sovereignty over all of these different powerful lords within France. And the drive of French policy from the early, from the late 12th century, early 13th century, Philip II Augustus is the king who really has the great vision, is to start expanding the power of the kings of France back over what, what, you know, back over France. And to directly rule and to sort of squash down the independence of these counts and dukes. Rule directly. And that's appropriate. So in the process, it takes a long time. Philip II goes some way towards doing it. At the beginning, just before the Hundred Years' War, Philip IV gets a lot further. And then by the end of the Hundred Years' War, Charles VII, and then certainly by the time you get to Louis XI, France is starting to look like what France is now. So the power of the kings has really been extended properly over, over those two kingdoms. But part of that process for France means kicking the English out. It's a very awkward situation for a French king to have in, in his nobility, the Duke of Aquitaine slash Gascony in particular, who's also the king of England. Because, I mean, the resources of that lord are at least equal to the resources of the king of France. So it becomes a not very biddable person within your realm. So like from the French point of view, getting the English out of the kingdom in their capacity as nobles is a big part of this longer domain. I think it's a big drive to create a greater France. And how does that manifest itself in the war actually starting? Well, the war starts over a very specific incident. There'd been for decades, generations, these kind of squabbles between the kings of England and the kings of France, specifically over Gascony, this bit in the southwest. Because as dukes of Gascony, English kings were technically obliged to come to the kings of France, and pay homage to them, you know, kneel before them, hands in their heads, you know, swear, I will be your liege man and obey you, because I'm a noble of the French nobility. Now, no English king was, by and large, going to agree to do that. So this had always been a point of great friction between the two kings. To try and resolve that, in 1328, when there was a succession crisis in the French crown, the king, the young king of England, Edward III, got into his head one way around this might be to claim to be the King of France himself. Now, it took a little while for him to put that into action as policy, but 1328, you have the succession crisis. And just under a decade later, the young King of England, Edward III, is like, right, in order to secure my position in Gascony and stop the threat of it being taken away from me, because I won't pay homage to the King of France, I myself am going to claim to be King of France. And that's going to be my excuse to kind of go for an expansive war. And the claim to be King of France is then something I can sort of use as a bargaining chip to gain more and more and more within the Kingdom of France. And from that point, it's like, well, let's see how much we can actually get. So from Succession Crisis of 28, from 1337 onwards, Kings of England registered their claim to be King of France. And so they're going to claim to be King of France. And perpetually are going to war to ostensibly to try and enforce that claim. Now we can get into the question of what they really want out of it. But that's the fundamental deep down reason English kings are saying we should be Kings of France. And they make that claim by reference to a family tree. Boring you too much, in 1328, the possible claimants for the Kings of France amounted to Edward III on the one hand and Philip VI of France. And so they're going to claim to be King of France as it became Philip of Valois on the other. So this is the moment in the family tree, which everyone's pointed to and saying the English, the House of Valois should be the Kings of France. And I'm really glad that we started talking about Edward III, because I was reading your book about the Plantagenet. And he is just the most incredible historical figure, particularly where he took England from with the reign of Edward II, which I think we should touch on, to how he ascended to the throne. So let's talk about Edward III briefly. Yeah, Edward III is a pretty extraordinary character, particularly, as you say, being the eldest son of Edward II. So he was the opposite, right? Edward II was somewhat the opposite. I mean, Edward II was in a way the opposite. There are several candidates for this, for the worst medieval King of England, but Edward II's got a shout. Edward II was in many ways the kind of the opposite of what you should be as a king. mentally just didn't understand what the office involved. And his reign was politically dominated by a succession of, a short succession, but a succession of favourites. So you have Piers Gaveston early in the reign, his kind of adopted brother, possible lover, certainly his obsession without whom he would basically do nothing. And with him, he was obsessed. And a series of crises at the beginning of Edward II's reign, where the barons of England couldn't stand having Gaveston around, they kept constantly trying to kick him out. And Edward would try every devious mean to get him back until Gaveston was murdered by the barons of England. Later, Edward took revenge for this. And then he, around the same time, he fell under the spell of another favourite, Judas Spencer the Younger. Eventually, Edward was deposed, forced to abdicate by his estranged wife, Isabella of France, the daughter of King of France, Philip IV, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, a dissident English noble, Anglo-Welsh noble. They kicked Edward II off the throne in 1338 and put his young, his teenage son, Edward III, on the throne. For the first three years, Edward III was kind of a puppet. He was a teenager. But in 1330, Edward III, aged 17, 18, took control of the kingdom in his own name. And he did so with a group of young, kind of youngish nobles of his own generation around him. And as that generation grew, they, they kind of pieced back together politics. You know, politics had been deeply fractured for a whole generation by the kind of old guard, Edward II and his kind of cronies on the one hand, his cousin, Thomas Earl of Lancaster, other rebel lords on the other. And, and this deep division got into the, got into the bones of English politics. And it took a long time to sort of start piecing them back together. One of the means that Edward III found to bind together the new nobility, the new generation of nobles who were sort of his friends, his allies, his, his, you know, his comrades, was foreign war. And it's, in a sense, it's one of the oldest stories in the historical book, isn't it? You've got problems at home, what do you do? You go, go fight abroad. We see it every day and in every historical era. Certainly this is, it worked for Edward, Edward III. So he latches on seven years into his independent reign in 1337 to this fact that he has this claim to the French crown that he wants to go and enforce. And from that point on his, his reign is really a succession of phases of campaigning in France, which are miraculously successful. And I kind of use that word advisedly because it does seem like for a very long time, God is smiling on Edward III's wish to be king of France. He just, he wins this spectacular against the odds battlefield victories at Crecy in 1346, on his son, the Black Prince, Poitiers in 1356, at sea in 1350 at the Battle of Winchelsea. He just, you know, it seems like he can't lose for a long time. And he is this like dashing, glamorous figure. Holds these great parties, you know, creates the Order of the Garter, a sort of, you know, elite aristocratic club for his mates. I mean, he really, he kind of, he just has this instinctive understanding for bringing people along with him and seeing the, the English aristocracy as his allies, as I say, his friends, as people with whom he has a common interest rather than kind of devious nobles who are bound to be out to stab him in the back the minute he switches off. Most of the useful information I get in a week doesn't come from reading. It comes from conversations, meetings, calls, interviews. The problem is that spoken information disappears unless you're stopping to write things down, which means you're not actually in the conversation anymore. That's a problem Plaud solves. It's a compact device that captures conversations and turns them into searchable notes, summaries, and insights you can actually use later. You can ask it a specific question like, what were the actual points from that call? And it pulls the moment and the summary instantly. 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We'll see you next time, bye for now. Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords Transcription by CastingWords everything in their path it's a war of terror but the point of the war of terror is to try and convince the people of Normandy in this case the resistance is futile that their king Philip VI is incapable of protecting them that actually if they've got any sense they'll they'll show their allegiance to the rival king Edward III of England. This campaign goes on through the second half of July into August but as it goes on Edward finds his lines stretched more and more and more and he's you know he's losing men you know by parishes of basic attrition as they besiege cities as they you know as they fight skirmishes and so on. Philip's men fall back and refuse to engage they break the bridges over the river Seine they break the bridges once the English cross the Seine eventually they break the bridges over the river Somme and eventually they they just wear the English down until things look pretty perilous for Edward because he's because his lines are overstretched and he's been in enemy territory for too long and this all comes to a head in a battle between the English and the French at Crecy in which the French have sort of bided their time and marshaled their resources well and bring up a far larger army than Edward has and a far fresher army than Edward has stuffed to the gills with with knights whereas Edward is is now quite heavily reliant on archers you know people of peasant stock you know. In theory inferior troops and yet Edward wins this extraordinary victory over the French I mean demolishes the French you know kills hundreds of their knights a cream of French chivalry destroyed on the field humiliates Philip and seems to draw down and this is something that's important I think throughout the hundred years war seems to draw down evidence of God's favor you know you win in you win in battle in the middle ages it's a form of trial I mean this is you're asking there's very few battles a fort in the middle ages for for the reason that there is enormous jeopardy in fighting a battle you find a battle you're basically asking God to judge your cause and that can go that can go badly wrong or it can go for you and at Crecy where Edward is by and large forced to fight wins this miraculous victory it looks a lot like God is smiling on his cause and it's uh it's a terrible humiliation for the French Edward then goes having won this victory and fights another very very difficult battle of a totally different sort this is a very this is a long winter siege um over the uh over the winter of 1346-7 um at Calais and so he besieges the coastal town of Calais obviously the nearest port between on the French coast to England um besieges it for almost a year in really difficult conditions but manages to break Calais as well and so comes away from this Crecy campaign with a bridgehead on the French coast and this kind of burgeoning reputation as the the coming man of western European politics he's proved himself against the odds and it's the beginning of a succession of victories throughout the 1350s then with the interruption of the Black Death in 1348 um obviously quite disruptive to campaign although they do campaign throughout the Black Death this is I say I say quite disruptive and I do mean quite disruptive because it doesn't shut there's not mass lockdowns of the way we think in COVID terms I mean people do get on with stuff in the Black Death albeit under somewhat difficult conditions um but you know so through the 1350s Edward was dominant and the more dominant he is the richer he gets you know because one of the um one of the things that happens if you win a lot of battles is you typically take a lot of prisoners valuable prisoners it's not the done thing to kill knights generally speaking on the battlefields you've taken prisoner and ransom there's a whole ransom market whole sort of secondary market in uh in ransom so you know you can mortgage people you can you know the third party ransom agents so there's a huge financial market in ransoms and you start to see across England places like Warwick Castle if you've ever been to Warwick Castle um it's a lovely day out these days but I mean the the grandeur of Warwick Castle owes a lot to the high points of the Hundred Years War where the earls of Warwick were big players in the Hundred Years War and just just came back you know laden with gold and uh the the massive influx of wealth into the country was also helped after the Battle of Poitiers in 1346 where the French King Jean II was taken prisoner himself and ransomed for millions millions and millions of gold equus and one thing that we haven't touched on is the technology because the English had superior technology didn't they and that's probably the most important thing that we haven't touched on the main reason why they won superior yes although it looks inferior so the longbow is the is the the critical weapon on the English side for most of the Hundred Years War Battle of Crecy 1346 you do actually see handguns on the field for the first probably for the first time in Europe so but very very crude handguns that then it's not much more than fireworks really it makes a lot of noise it scares the horses but it's it's not there's not Passchendaele do you know what I mean so the the battles like Crecy in particular later under Henry V Agincourt are won by English longbowmen now you look at a longbow it's a simple apparently simple piece of technology it's a long piece of you um with a taut string and it shoots arrows which it's not complicated um you sometimes hear described as the AK-47 of the middle ages which is it's completely wrong because an AK-47 this is the success of the Kalashnikov right is that any idiot can pick up an AK-47 firing it's pretty reliable just point and shoot almost nobody who hasn't well no nobody who has not trained for years can pick up a longbow and shoot it have you ever tried to shoot the longbow it's um you just can't do that I mean you unless you've trained a long time because the the longbows great advantages range and um it means it's very hard to draw so in order to draw you can't like muscle a long but you have to get right inside it and you have to have like extraordinarily strong back muscles in order to to get inside and fire this and sorry shoot this weapon effectively so under Edward III the English do something quite smart which is they make it mandatory for everybody on a Sunday to practice shooting a longbow so you have a whole population that's trained to use this simple and cheap weapon so when they go into the field in France for generation after generation they've got these these ranks upon ranks of cheap troops who can shoot a cheap weapon which is absolutely deadly it's got a longer range than a crossbow which is more expensive and more you know and more temperamental piece of technology because it's got more moving parts and deployed correctly ranks of longbowmen are very effective against a cavalry charge as well horses don't like charging into hail of longbow shot and you can keep a lot of a bigger range there's I mean all sorts of advantages but yeah there's the critical piece of technology for most of the 100 years war on the English side is the longbow and you see these victories all the way from 1346 crazy ashen course the famous one 1415 but even um even 1424 you've still got uh still got great longbow victories for the English and is is that the reason that the French don't just go oh longbow that looks good we'll do that because it takes a lot of training or is it ideological on their part because you know the knights chivalry you know charging down the plebs it sounds like fun it's a bit of both it's a bit of both I think there's there's an ideological uh preference for cavalry a bit on the French side and I think that going back to what we talked about with you know with the king of kings of France still being in this phase where they're trying to extend their authority directly over their own realm it's actually it's much harder for them to institute policies that in England you can institute quite um directly with if the king says and if the king says I want everyone to train with a longbow in England on a Sunday and pass a parliamentary statute that gets done the the the power concentrated in English Kings hands at this point and mediated through Parliament a national gathering um is is considerable and so there's a higher degree I suppose of a centralized centralised authority in England relative to France that's really interesting and so far be for me to be skeptical of God's involvement in all of this but you mentioned that in that moment in that time it would have been a huge part of how people perceived the successes that Edward III is having on the field absolutely um other than God's involvement and the longbow are there other reasons why in that phase the English are as successful as they are as you said against the odds um but Rob or is it just those two just God and the longbow that's all that's all what else do you need right um there's uh connected to this this centralized authority the English have also probably better at um taxing the realm so So the relatively early development of Parliament in England in the Middle Ages stemming from the 13th century out of Magna Carta through the reforms of the middle of Henry III's reign in the 1250s and 1260s create a relationship in which there's a kind of a negotiation mechanism between the whole realm and the king. Which are these irregularly called parliaments where the king, when things are functioning well, says, okay, I want to fight a war, calls a parliament, sets out the case for war, parliaments effectively appropriates the funds, they're quite efficiently collected, and the king has easier access to the wealth of his own kingdom. So it becomes, I mean, of course, every time there's a war, everyone's constantly complaining about the tax. In fact, every time there's any tax of any sort, everyone's constantly complaining. Of course they are, except when people are winning. So if you look at, say, Henry V, who had a very successful time of the Hundred Years' War in his reign, early 15th century, England is probably under the highest tax burden it ever is in the Middle Ages, I can think. But Henry just keeps winning and winning and winning and winning, so people are generally happier to pay for a war when they're winning. But in answer to your question, yeah. I mean, English. The kings have a somewhat better access to their own tax base. And, you know, there are also fewer things to think about, in a sense, because there's something that pertains to the physical geography, I think, that also really matters. And this is a much bigger point about English and British history, you know, from the Middle Ages onwards. There are so many advantages. Specifically where this big island and archipelago lies. The defensibility, you know, the relative, you know, the few borders. The dominance of the English, by and large, over their neighbours, with the exception of the Scots, who are typically alive with the French. But even in that case, England is heavily dominant. You never see Scotland until, you know, James VI comes along. You never see Scotland conquering. You never see Scotland conquering England. So, whereas France has, I mean, the French have much more to think about than just the English. I think this is also, to return to your joke at the beginning, the French kind of live rent-free in the English heads in a way that I don't. How dare you? It's not necessarily the same the other way around. Because, you know, let's just take one example. Well, they have the Germans next to them. They have the Germans next to them. I mean, there's the question of what's going on. And they're talking about the French. Like, what's the relationship with the papacy and where should, you know, at the same time as the Hundred Years' War, you've got this debate about whether the papacy should be in Rome or in Avignon, not technically in France, but basically in France. You've got questions about sovereignty in Flanders. There's a ton of stuff going on for French kings to think about in which the English are only one. I think, you know, maybe we talked about this when we talked about the Crusades. There's something analogous there, which is, you know, in the Crusaders' mind. Going out and conquering the Kingdom of Jerusalem and kicking the Muslims out and doing them over is like, that's the number one thing. Sort of, the Muslims in the Middle East are like, yeah, okay. But we're quite busy fighting the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia here. And it's like way more to think about than just you lot. So, perhaps something similar is going on. All right. So, the English have this structural advantage in terms of centralized power, taxation. They've got the technological advantage with the longbow. God clearly is on England's side, as we've established. Until he's not. And this is where I'm going with this. How do the wheels come off the bandwagon? You've got these, you've got Edward III, brilliant. The son is a badass by all accounts, the Black Prince. How does the whole thing turn? Because ultimately, the Hundred Years' War is not a success for the English, right? No, and ultimately, the Hundred Years' War is a massive failure. The Hundred Years' War shakes out so that the English are completely kicked out of France, with the exception of Calais. But it depends where you stop the tape, you know. So, Edward III, up until you have these. Victories we've talked about. Crecy, Poitiers, and others. 1360, there's a settlement, Treaty of Bretigny. From that point on, the French start chipping away at the Bretigny settlement. Edward III is succeeded in 1377, not by his badass son, the Black Prince, who dies shortly before him of an illness picked up on campaign in Spain, but by his grandson, Richard II, who has no interest in fighting the French War. Whatsoever. And is perfectly happy to, you know, if you asked him, he'd have resigned away everything that England had ever won. It's just not his cup of tea at all. He's deposed in 1399. Henry IV, his cousin, picks things up. Henry V, then, launches a kind of really retro campaign, modelled in large part on Edward III's great victories, although strategically. Strategically somewhat different. And wins a startling succession of victories between 1415, the Agincourt campaign, and his own sudden death in 1422. Henry V is taking advantage of a civil war in France between two factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs, who are at war because the French king has gone mad, Charles VI. So Henry VI kind of inserts the English into this war, teams up eventually with the Burgundians, destroys French armies, conquers Normandy, gets all the way to the walls of Paris, and forces in 1420 a treaty on the French, called the Treaty of Troyes, by which Henry V of England becomes, quote, "heir and regent to the crown of France." When mad, Charles VI dies. Henry V is going to be not only king of England, but king of France as well. Sort of like he's beaten the ultimate boss. Then Henry V dies at the age of 35 of dysentery and leaving, an infant son, not even one year old, as his successor. So that's 1422. Now, things don't go immediately wrong for the English, which is remarkable, really. In fact, they stay pretty okay until 1429, when Joan of Arc comes along. But at the moment Joan of Arc rises in 1429, the English, with Burgundian support, have sort of conquered everything in France down to the River Loire. And it's not unthinkable, the Siege of Orléans, that if they take Orléans, they're going to enter southern France, and the full conquest of France is on the cards. However, in 1435, the Burgundians switch up on them, and France reunites under the king, who Joan of Arc had helped, Charles VII. And from that point on, England is increasingly at a disadvantage, partly because, and largely because, the king of England, Henry VI, Henry V's son, who'd been an infant in 1422, has grown up to be absolutely uninterested in war, absolutely incapable of domestic or foreign government, and shell-shocked in the face of the reality of power. Completely hopeless. England dissolves into a sort of leaderless crisis of its own, and the French start to chip, chip, chip away at all the English possessions in France, in Normandy in particular. They take Maine back. Until in 1453, at the Battle of Castillon, not only have they won back Normandy, they also have shrunk Gascony, that bit in the southwest, down to almost nothing, destroyed the English in Gascony, take Bordeaux, and it's all over. There's nothing left except for Calais by 1453. And that then sparks in England the Wars of the Roses. The Civil War, the dynastic wars between what becomes known as the House of Lancaster and the House of York. And from that point on, there's vanishingly little possibility of the English doing anything whatsoever except defending Calais. There's this late-stage hurrah in 1475 under Edward IV, Yorkist king, who tries to do a little bit of Henry V cosplay, raises a big army of 13,000 men, takes it over to France. But as soon as he gets there, he realizes, "I'm not really into this. I'd rather be at home, kind of, squiring wenches and eating cakes, basically." And so, signs a deal with the French where they agree to pay the English to just go off and leave them alone. Treaty of Peking of 1475. The claim to the Kingdom of France is not dropped. So, Henry VIII, early in his reign, 1413, he's a young man, comes to the throne, decides he's going to do his own Henry V cosplay, but again, it comes to nothing, with the benefit of hindsight, 1453 is the end. Once the English have been kicked out, they're really not coming back in any meaningful sense. The fact you're listening to an in-depth discussion like this one tells us you're exactly the kind of listener who'd enjoy a show built entirely around that level of detail. That is exactly the audience a show called "Unpacking Israeli History" is built for. It's hosted by Dr. Noam Weissman, an educator who spent his entire career studying and teaching Israeli history. Each episode walks through the people, events, and decisions that shaped modern Israel from the earliest roots of Zionism through to today. What makes it work is that Weizmann isn't trying to tell you what to think. He digs into where the narratives actually differ, and he brings on guests who don't all agree with each other or with him, from journalist Haviv Retek-Gur to Palestinian activist Ahmed Fouad Al-Khatib. We all know podcasts can go either way. This one held our attention. It doesn't rush the story to get to a neat conclusion, and that's rarer than it should be. Search Unpacking Israeli History on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts, or click the link in the description to start listening. You know how at the beginning of every year, people say, this is a year things change. Then by February, everything looks the same. 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If you want to grow, you need to invest in your brand. is pushing further and further and further into what remains of french-held france and then suddenly this you know peasant girl from from this weird bit of eastern france turns up you know waving waving the flag and saying you know i god's spoken to me i'm going to leave the dauphin to his coronation at Rome and we're going to take back France and then it actually happened and I well not not only does it happen but she plays an active role she plays an active role she's never been trained as a knight goes into combat leads men into battle I mean is there an ex I I ask this question genuinely is there an explanation that does not include the divine that actually can tell us what happened yes I mean I don't know how much sports from a sports fan you are but this idea of momentum and belief like we talk about this in sports all the time that something will galvanize a team and that's that sure but but isn't what happened a little bit more like me turning up persuading pep guardiola that i should play up front and then he sticks me up front and we start smashing them in isn't it a bit more like that no because joan joan wasn't smashing them in you see it's it's like um it's like having this in a manner of speaking i'm sure you would be uh it's like having this incredible kind of mascot this just suddenly but but you can't disentangle it from the divine i know that you want to i'm not i i don't want to i'm asking if it's even possible uh no i don't think you can you can't disentangle joan of arc's effect on the french uh and for a little while thereafter from the medieval worldview that god is uh is active in the world and through people at times you you just can't and she she whatever you know there's a whole set of language that that is a modern language that we could use to described Joan of Arc and some of it would come from the the language of mental illness and some of it would come from a sort of you could you could use the language of sort of the like the woo-woo realm of or sports psychology or any of those things I've just picked the sports psychology one and tried that out and you ineffectively as it turned out and it's no good you have to use the terms of the time and the terms of the time are like there was this moment when God intervened that's how it was understood by everybody at the time and so that's that's the best explanation it didn't last very long because because god's intervention uh was time limited through joan she she outlived her usefulness and at the end of her story is a tragedy really i mean discarded by the french um and then treated pretty appallingly and in just basic human terms by the Burgundians and subsequently the English and um but then revived later you know her revival is as much of a part of her story as what actually happened at the time and this this 19th 20th century revival of Joan of Arc as a symbol of Frenchness and of of the kind of um the miraculous, the providential within the French character is important. And, you know, you introduced her with a comment about feminism. That's a part of Joan as well. You know, she's now, she drifts through different types of being an icon. of modern French nationalism. She's a palimpsest. You can write your own story onto her and she still looks good standing there with a helmet on and a flag in her. So what you're saying is she's Claudio Ranieri in Leicester City. I knew that that was what I was looking for. She's Claudio. And now we've reduced the number of people who get the references down to about three. Well, at least three. At least three. But from a historian's perspective, in a practical sense, do you believe that the turnaround in French fortune happens if Joan of Arc doesn't come along when she does? Ooh, what a great counterfactual. Probably eventually. Really? Probably. How much further could the English have pushed realistically? I mean, behind the scenes, Henry VI, by this stage, was coming on for his eighth birthday. within five years it'd be pretty clear that this was not going to be a military leader of any sort whatsoever so the i mean the english willingness to finance effectively a civil war in france which is what the english so the english kings up until the treaty of 1420 when henry v signs this treaty that says i'm the heir and regent to the crown of france it's the war from the english taxpayers If you want to grow, you need to invest in your brand. of a structuralist than a great man but deep down you wouldn't the english would not have had a If you want to grow, you need to invest in your brand. the king was growing up to be absolutely uninterested in war the english taxpayer would probably not have stomached much more of this. Making the French pay for their own conquest was difficult. At some point, something had to give and probably would have. But Joan is this, she's the spark, right? She's the spark and she gives the French the belief, momentarily, that they can win this critical siege at Orléans and then the momentum shifts. There you go, you believe in the great man of history unless it's a woman. - I believe in the great woman. I believe in the great woman. - I'm just messing with you. - The more I read about history, particularly English history, the more I realize it's really dependent on the king. Edward II, terrible, England was in the doldrums. I know this is a simplistic view of it. Edward III, great king, England rose again and you look at for instance the Black Prince who I think he developed dropsy didn't he yeah and you think how different would England have been if he hadn't have got sick and he could have ruled for as a longer period of time as Edward III and maybe that would have deferred Richard II coming to the throne who made a complete what's it of it yeah this is this is right I mean the quote-unquote great man theory of history goes in and out of fashion right when I was growing up when I was studying it was well out of fashion and everything was structuralist and the whole belief was really this concentration on the character of leaders is for the birds it doesn't really make much difference that the history is is is the product of grander forces than this and here we are at the in the sort of early 2020 I think that you'd be a fool right you know we're living in an age where the personalities of the rulers of their superpowers are critical to the state of the world and and and this historical pivot points which we seem to be living if you take take Xi and China I mean his conception of Chinese history his personal belief about how China should be and what it looks like vitally important to Chinese policy Trump in the U.S his disinterest in in most of history his kind of personal peccadilloes and and notions of how things should be absolutely critical to America's development super Putin and Russia and so on and so on so to take that back to the you know the the kings and queens of England yeah it does matter that Richard II was a sort of um petulant kind of uh pacifist with a narcissistic anti-disorder that's a that's a material importance to English history to your counterfactual what if the Black Prince had not gotten sick at an era and had um had succeeded as Edward IV things yet things could have looked different I mean that doesn't necessarily mean better of course it could be a different kind of bad um the Black Prince was a fantastic general um buddy you know probably lacked some of the kind of easy flexibility the the the the sort of diplomatic kind of smarts that his father had he's a more rigid kind of militaristic leader that's that could or couldn't have been the best thing at that time another good counterfactual is what if Henry V hadn't died at the age of 35 in 1422 you know what if Henry the sixth had had an apprenticeship Henry V's great advantage was that he became King at 26 or one of his great advantages King at 26 after a long difficult 13-year apprenticeship where he was fighting where he was standing in for his father when he was ruling as Regent effectively when his father was ill he came to the throne like a complete politician Henry VI came to the throne at nine months old and and had to grow up as King there's a you you see a rough pattern across English history of of Kings who've become Kings children having a really difficult time they never have this opportunity to make mistakes they're growing up way too close to to power so yes there are all these all these counterfactuals we can run um but I think that to your point yeah really it does matter who these who exactly these people are and there are there are some advantages in this period to having uh hereditary monarchy based on homogeniture um in theory it cuts down the the likelihood of a gigantic Civil War every time you need to change King because the rule is the rule is the rule but it also introduces this massive genetic lottery to uh to government like who have we got next oh Christ oh or who've we got next yay the by chance I've always wondered about this Dan though because you know there is a saying the apple doesn't fall far from the tree like I'm not exactly like my dad but I've inherited quite a bit from him I'm sure the same will be with my son but but what the story you tell it's almost like you know the son is Nigel Farage the father is Zach Polanski and you just you go from Trump to Biden within one family how does that happen well we've all seen this happen in families it depends you know that that um it sounds like you've you know you admire your father from that from that sure somewhat in some ways yeah um and but there are you know we often see these cases where the the child wants to become the opposite of the parent right or uh or the child takes after the other parent or you know whatever it might be you know we don't create these identikits of our of our children and then and you know you also have the spoiled brat phenomenon it's like the kid who grows up not going to struggle uh this is a sort of trope a mainstay of history I'm not just talking about Kings and Queens but um I can't remember who someone's written about this you know one of those oldie timey Malcolm Gladwell type people you know they wrote just a John Ronson or someone wrote to study of you know kids of successful people they don't have to or very seldom do they have to really struggle themselves and sometimes it's the struggle that makes you so I mean all sorts of reasons why oh you know all the if you take Edward II as an example well he was the younger kid he was the baby of the family he was like the 14th or 16th kid to be born right and we were supposed to have King Alfonso his elder brother Henry VIII it was supposed to be King Arthur and then King Arthur was no more and it was it was the younger son who's sort of the spare who's thrust into the into the limelight having grown up preparing for something totally different um so I mean this is this what makes it fascinating and I'm I'm glad to slightly rehearse an earlier point I'm glad that we're back in this age which people are taking personality and history seriously because it just makes it more approachable and meaningful and and this this this faceless era of total structuralism within history I found sort of quite depressing I like the people in the historian's eye and looking at our society and our civilization there's been a lot of talk about you know the West is in decline all of that kind of stuff from your perspective what do you see then do you think we are in a lull in a bit of a dip or do you see it as being terminal is the West in decline no I don't I mean I think these these sort of grand arguments are really attractive right we love to talk in epic terms the idea that's and and increasingly and this is a sort of sidebar but increasingly with the the hybridization of human thinking and machine thinking um we like to think in binaries as well it's this or it's this we're in decline or we're in ascendancy well history don't want too much like that but it seems fairly likely that right now we're living at an inflection point and that the future because of the technological Revolution we're living through um which is being applied across the board from warfare to employment to I mean you know almost every facet of life is is undergoing rapid change that this is an era of opportunity and I think in some ways it's being thought about at a leadership level more seriously in the East than in the West um I think you know I mentioned she earlier on I think he may not be right in his analysis of history or his um his assessment of Chinese likely Superiority I don't know that he is completely right in that and I don't think that his assessment of American weakness is is accurate totally accurate either but certainly thinking seriously about the historical moment um I think that in the West there's a recognition that oh something's up but it's not being necessarily gripped hard by anyone at the moment um in government I think it's been gripped pretty hard by people at the the top of the tech industry and there's a strong argument to say that the people at the top of the big tech companies at the moment are the effective rulers of the world in many ways by proxy um and I I think that we will certainly look back on this period um mining it for all sorts of clues about how the world that we that will ever I say 2050 comes to look like but this talk of is the you know is the Western terminal decline it's very tempting but it's things don't really work well you added the terminal part I think the terminal is where the the that's where it becomes a bit of a tenuous claim yeah but I think if you were to look at the civilizations that you outlined and their relative positions and directions of travel. You can hardly look at Europe in particular and say this is Western Europe. And this is a. Oh, there are a lot of metrics that are very worrying. Of course there are. Birth rate, the growing inequality gaps, the basic ability of young people to find a stake in the essential bits of society, you know, as a matter of course. The grand problem of the size of the state that now afflicts so many Western countries that, you know, the basic unaffordability of what's been set up and the lack of a seriously, clearly stated alternative for the post-war settlement. That's the part of the story of our times, you know. What are we now? June, we're talking in the UK in a period where, you know, the prime minister is a sort of lame duck. There's no, you know, political arithmetic that should allow for this, but has completely failed to articulate any policy vision of how this country should move into the future. Has just sort of said, well, we'll just kind of see what happens. And there's a clear awareness among, you know, you don't have to be a student of politics. You can just be any. Gaze down the pub. It's good to say, well, where are we going what are we doing what what what did what are we going to do about all of these obvious problems which are you know the failure seriously to tackle the social dislocations of immigration the as i say you know the uh the employment opportunities of young people coming into the workplace what are we doing about it so there's a there's a decline in the quality of leadership and there are some pretty worrying metrics out there well this is what i was going to say is if we take your comments about the great man of history theory it sort of feels like we've got you know 10 duds in a row yeah basically well yes i agree i do agree um there's not a lack of people with ideas out there not a lot of them want to go into frontline politics for reasons we can um we can discuss something else that's happened in the uk not so much in america well possibly in the states as well that does have a medieval analogy and i promise that i don't believe everything has a medieval analogy but this does in the wars of the roses which is that english civil war i mentioned which follows on from the hundred years war which we've been discussing after about a generation of polarized politics as we'd call it of like factionalism and of the the decay of central authority and growing lawlessness and and social dislocation and economic drift the smart analyses of the time all tended to say what's happened is that we've introduced what they call variance into our politics which is to say there's a continuity in the political process which is the irreconcilability of factions which is the bitter quality of politics which is the negativity that's that in itself is the problem and the constant churn of leaders is in itself the problem i think if you look at british politics over the last 10 years uh let's say or even let's say yeah certainly 10 years since brexit but maybe going back to uh 2008 i don't know i don't know i don't know you could say that the problem in itself is now the kind of the the writhing and the the disaffection that that self-perpetuates and the moment that you you know we're looking at ditching the prime minister because as the chant goes keir starmer's a wanker like you know that's like everyone thinks that uh but then the next reaction to that is well off and get someone else right that and and as soon as that person hits a stick in the face and they're like oh my god i'm going to be a wanker i'm going to get someone they become the one they become the one and and and the reaction to the wanker is to ditch them straight away and so what you then have is a politics that on a on a sort of pragmatic level can go nowhere because it's it's never gets beyond like its first trimester or whatever you know like the government can't develop grow institute policies have people in charge of departments that can do the really sensible boring stuff and kind of turn departments around you think about the success stories in british politics over the time we're talking about it they tend to be where someone's stuck around for a bit in a job you know michael gove was in charge of education you know there was there was there was the possibility of serious reform and slow reform but what we're about to see in the uk is you change change the i mean already the health secretary where street and quit having actually started to make slow progress on on the big problems of the nhs and then quit because of factional politics within the party and so now someone else would come in and say well you know we're not going to do that we're not going to do that we're not going to do that and then it all starts again so so this constant restarting the variance that's in the politics is a is now a central part of the problem and it shouldn't be at the moment because in the uk you have a government which was elected with a gigantic parliamentary majority fume is a flavored air device designed to help people quit vaping and smoking by 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700 000 people take steps towards better habits use code trig to get a free gift with your journey pack head to try fume.com and use code trig that site again is t-r-y-f-u-m.com and use code trig to claim your free gift today yeah i'm too i'm in two minds about all of those points because on the last point yes it's true they got a massive majority but they only got it because reform destroyed the conservative party my subjective opinion and then on on the other stuff i mean the toxicity of politics is something that i think everyone is really concerned about but i also think i imagine someone else sitting here making the opposite argument and saying the toxicity of politics is the consequence of the fact of where the country is at and then of course you add the technological piece on top of that which is we now i mean i've given this example a thousand times but i really do think it's it just explains everything i on youtube i was many years ago sitting later than i watching youtube because i didn't have kids i could are you still be doing that be watching what i was watching was william haig and john prescott having a parliamentary debate when they were both deputy to the leader and it's a game it's a it's a it's a playful game because the social media isn't there they're not trying to get a hit on tv yet quite so william haig takes the piss out of john prescott basically not being able to speak properly and john prescott doesn't say look at these snobby tories take a look at these snobby tories and he's not abusing the the hard work and working classes he says on this side of the house we may get the words wrong but we get the judgment right in other words it's a game that's played according to a set of respectful rules even if the parties are they're not enemies they're opponents right and then you have technology like we have now we changes that completely and now everyone stands up in parliament so that they get a clip on twitter or on on whatever um and i think that's why it's i i hear and agree with people when they say politics is toxic but then i i kind of go well a you've got the technological piece and then the country is kind of and you have to unfuck it for people to become untoxic i think we'd probably agree i mean i i think that the part of the toxicity of politics is that it's now optimizing for a different set of media yeah and just as i mean haig and prescott in the example you give them were probably somewhat somewhere maybe optimizing for the parliamentary sketch writers up in the gallery that's right and maybe maybe a bit on the news but who knows um whereas now they would all have been thinking about optimizing for a totally different media which rewards a totally different style of it and the the obsession that obsession with uh with optimizing for social media for all sorts of reasons one of which is it gives you like definable metrics which you know it's jobs worthiness and that's part of the poison in in in or part of the reason why it's incredibly hard for anyone to actually do anything in politics because all the frontline politicians are just thinking about how this is going to clip up for Instagram. You have behind the scenes, the blob, as it's often called, but a civil service which is dominated by a completely different set of thinking and knows it can just dig its heels in and not be bid and can run a completely different set of policies. And then you plug in the lack of appeal of a political career to really elite, forceful thinkers. I mean, there are tons of problems with politics at the moment. And to sort of plug this into the great man theory, one of the superficially appealing, but I think probably troubling trends that I hear a lot is people saying, well, what we need is a benign dictator because they're so disillusioned. They're so disillusioned with the failure of political process that they want an easy answer. They want, okay, well, give me a great man. Give me somebody who's going to come in and just ride roughshod over process. That's part of the appeal of Trump. This outsider who rides into politics. And it's part of the appeal of Farage as well. He said, I'm outside all this. I don't deal with all this. I just come in and speak straight sense and we get on with it. Well, yes, to an extent. But, um. That is exactly the audience a show called Unpacking Israeli History is built for. It's hosted by Dr. What makes it work is that Weissman isn't trying to tell you what to think. He digs into where the narratives actually differ. And he brings on guests who don't all agree with each other or with him. From journalist Haviv Retik-Gur to Palestinian activist Ahmed Fouad al-Khatib. It doesn't rush the story to get to a neat conclusion. And that's rarer than it should be. Search Unpacking Israeli History on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts or click the link in the description to start listening. Do we even need to rehearse the danger? Of creating dictatorship? Maybe we do. Maybe that's another part of what we're grappling with at the moment is the receding out-of-living memory of the 1930s and 40s. And the 20s, for that matter. The sort of disappearance into sort of abstraction of what was the world like last time that there was, you know, that all the international. all the international kind of institutions were sort of discarded. And, you know, the falling into spheres of interest became the way that politics were. What was it actually like? What happened? That's now something that's in the history books to which most people, let's be honest, don't pay attention. My grandma died earlier this year at nearly the age of 100. And when my mum was clearing out her house, she found the handwritten war memories of my grandfather, right? Who'd been 15 or 16 years. 15 years old when he went to sea with the Merchant Navy in Second World War, the outbreak of Second World War. 12 or 14 pages. And it's his memories of sailing around the Atlantic. I mean, he sailed around the whole world in the Merchant Navy, being pursued by U-boats, blown up in the Thames by German mines, survived that. You know, all sorts of adventures. And I remember him telling. not telling many of those stories, but I remember him. I remember him as being somebody who still. and my grandmother, both my grandmothers spoke about the Second World War. And it was within. it was not within my memory. It was not within my parents' memory, but it was in our family's memory. Everybody knew somebody who'd served or been affected by the Second World War. Who'd been affected by this set of disastrous political unravelings. That the whole of the post-war settlement was designed to mitigate against happening again. And now all of that. vanishingly, if you bet. Veterans left, and most nobody knows one. So all of that has receded, and it's like. that settlement is clearly, you know, looking pretty tatty, and there needs to be a new one for a new world with new technologies and new modes of thought. However, to lean back on things that. were tried and tested to destruction in the 30s and 40s is. No, I definitely agree with you. That that sentiment is rising. I'm not sure I quite agree that Farage is, you know, attempting to be a dictator. No, I don't agree with that either. But I agree that part of his appeal is. No, I don't think. Being the outsider. Let me be really clear. I don't think Farage has those dictatorial instincts. In fact, I think he actually doesn't. Quite the opposite. I agree. But I think that his appeal is that he seems to be, you know. If I go down the. Not many people talk about reform policies. But they know Nigel. Like Nigel. It's Nigel. And it's this idea that there's a guy out there who gets it. Put him in charge. That'll do. Now, I don't know that it will do. We'll find out. We will probably find out. We'll probably find out. Sorry, were you going to jump in? No, because I was going to say that. Reading your book about the Plantagenets, it just opens up a whole new world. It's opened my eyes to strong and weak leadership. Yeah. And I look at Keir Starmer. Yeah. And what's happening with the West Streetings of the world and his ministers. And it just reminds me of Edward II and the nobles. Let's hope he doesn't end up the same way. The way that read was quite brutal. I've never thought about. For all that Keir Starmer is a wanker, I've never thought about him as Edward II. But I'll say this. The effective leader. The effective leaders are the Edward III's who understand how to bring people with them and who are able to galvanise and empower people around them. I don't necessarily think that that's the leadership that we've got at the moment. And the key to whoever is the leader that stands a chance of really delivering some meaningful change in this country will be somebody who has the ability to do that. will be somebody who has the ability to do that. And it's the strength of character to bring a strong team along with them. And if not to do the serious thinking themselves, to have that among them. I know you're going to talk to my old pal David Starkey soon enough, and that's some of the thinking he's doing right at the moment. You know, the awareness that it's quite likely that the next but one leader of this country or next but two or whatever after the next general election will be Nigel Farage. After the next general election will be Nigel Farage. Not unimaginable at all. The work has to be in place for that. There's a moral responsibility for the work to be in place to make that a serious government. A serious government with serious thought running through and a serious analysis and a clear, clearly explained and defined set of policies that go beyond the personality. Because it's, yeah, the strong leadership thing, a lot of that is vested in personality, but personality is just not enough. Personality has to come along with and be able to be a vehicle to articulate policy. Yeah, no, that's completely true. And from your lips to God's ears, and frankly, whoever is elected, I would hope that is all true, right? Whether it's Czach Polanski or Nigel Farage. Final question is always the same. What's the one thing that we're not talking about? We really shouldn't be. What's the one thing we're not talking about? Castles. Castles. I genuinely love a castle. I'm glad you love a castle. I love a castle as well. And we were talking before we came on that there was a piece of YouGov research done in 2024 that said 70% of, no, 77% of people think castles are the best thing in the whole of the Middle Ages. And I would count myself among them. So, yeah. You've written a book about it. Written a book about them. This is, I mean, it's castles in the biggest, broadest sense. 3,000 years of history goes from the Bronze Age, you know, the origins of castles. Castles in the kind of, I mean, it starts with Troy. You know, the Citadel, Siege of the Wars, not only the birth of what becomes castles, but the birth of Western literature. It charts its way all the way through to nuclear bunkers. So it's like, it's the big, it's the big history of, it's the history of structures, but it also asks a kind of deeper question, which is how do we protect the things that we love and care about? Wonderful. Well, I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I definitely look forward to it. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming back on. Pleasure. Head on over to TriggerPod.com. TriggerPod.com.uk, where Dan's going to answer your questions. How much were common soldiers paid? If you're a longbowman in the English army, let's say, how much would you be paid? Or was the promise of loot your only reward? We'll be right back. when you're building a company you learn that trust is what closes deals you may have the best product but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure especially if it has ai vanta gets you compliant fast with sock 2 iso 27001 and more and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring hyperbound a yc backed startup used vanta to unlock the fortune 100 in under a year snowfire got audit ready in a month and closed a multi-million dollar deal trust matters get