Battle of Winchelsea with Dan Jones

Matt Lewis explores Edward III's daring naval gamble at the Battle of Winchelsea in 1350 with Dan Jones. Together they unravel the dramatic events of the Battle and the real history behind Edward III's desperate scheme against the Castilian fleet, all of which are covered in Dan's new novel 'Lionhearts'. Matt and Dan discuss the tumultuous alliances, the impact of the Black Death, and the gritty, life-or-death struggles faced by sailors and soldiers to offer a comprehensive look at a lesser-known yet crucial battle in the Hundred Years' War. MORE The Hundred Years War https://open.spotify.com/episode/3UQkEb0MTdJdwYmJB333RX Essex Dogs and the Crécy Campaign with Dan Jones https://open.spotify.com/episode/74J5w43gzbvrzjdXQMj2qL Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producers are Rob Weinberg and Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:49Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots, and murders to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:30Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The Hundred Years' War: plague, trouble around every corner, and to top it all, a spectacular naval battle. Dan Jones is giving us all this and more in Lion Hearts, the thrilling conclusion of his debut historical fiction trilogy that began with Essex Dogs. As you'd expect from Dan, the history behind the narrative is impeccably researched and retold. We're going to focus on a particular moment that you may or may not have heard of before. What was a medieval naval battle like? And how did the Battle of Winchelsea in 1350 set the tone for Anglo-French relations? Dan is on hand to reveal all.

• 3:22Matt Lewis?

  Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Dan. It's fantastic to have you with us again.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  Well, it's lovely to come back. I like being invited back. It means I probably did something right, or someone else dropped out.

• 3:32Matt Lewis?

  Or you need to come back and apologise.

• 3:35Speaker 04

  That's the other one, yeah.

• 3:37Matt Lewis?

  We're going to talk a little bit about Lion Hearts, which is the conclusion of your historical fiction trilogy. And we're going to talk about one of the key moments that takes place in the book as well. But I wondered if you could help catch us up with the Essex Dogs. What is going on at the opening of Lion Hearts? When are we and what is happening?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Right, so as you say, this is the third novel in the trilogy. The first took place at the Battle of Creasy, 1346. The second was set at the Siege of Calais, 1346 through September 1347. We pick up the story not quite a year later, in 1348, in a border ship just approaching the city of Bordeaux. This is a ship that's been sent down as part of a fleet by King Edward III, who's, you know, the king famous for launching the Hundred Years' War. And the ship is part of a fleet that's making arrangements for the king's daughter, Princess Joan, to marry a Castilian prince.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  That prince will one day go on to be known as Pedro the Cru when he becomes King of Castile.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Now, they're coming towards Bordeaux, but this being 1348, the Black Death, the plague that wiped out 60% of the population or thereabouts of Western Europe, all told, is heading in the other direction. So we start with this snapshot of several surviving members of the Essex Dogs from Books One and Two getting their first glimpse of the Black Death.

• 5:10Matt Lewis?

  Is the Black Death a spanner in the works that you couldn't avoid? It feels like something you wouldn't necessarily want to write into a rip-roaring historical fiction story of battles and everything else, but I guess you can't ignore it when you're writing in this period?

• 5:22Speaker 04

  I think the Black Death as spanner in the works is going to win the prize for 2025's understatement of the year, Matt. Yeah, Black Death, quite a spanner.

• 5:31Matt Lewis?

  It's just not a fun thing to write historical fiction about, is it?

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Well, I don't know. It presents certain challenges. I mean, one of my favourite works of recent historical fiction is James Meeks' Tuchelé in Ordinary Time, which is set right in the midst of the Black Death with three characters heading down to the south coast of England to go and join the garrison at Calais. And I found it an extraordinarily moving and inventive and creative book that was on the precipice of a world about to change very fundamentally. So I mean, there are great possibilities with the Black Death. It is not per se a cheerful subject, but it does, I think, allow possibility of,

• 6:14Speaker 04

  well firstly, pinging some memories that certain of us may have of a recent pandemic, although I don't try and overplay those too much. But I found writing a book in 2024/5 about the Black Death gave me some opportunities to have write little bits of fun. I mean, there's one character who presents very early on as what we might call a Black Death denier, thinks it's all been made up by the lords and the government. It really isn't too sure that they're being told the truth, and even when confronted with it, it's like, ah, it doesn't look too bad, looks like a standard plague. So you can have some fun. I don't think that it's the job necessarily of historical fiction writer to always try and

• 6:57Speaker 04

  make the past about the present, or indeed the historian. But the, you know, the Black Death presents the certain opportunities in that way. I was really interested, and I was interested in this right from, you know, when I conceived the trilogy, I knew there was going to be a third volume that was in or around the Black Death. And it was really just deciding whether it was set, all set during the pandemic, or whether it was a book about the world just after. And I came to the conclusion, when I really got into the weeds with Lionhearts, that I was very interested in the period just after the first wave of the Black Death, when the world is, you know, in COVID terms, reemerging from lockdowns such as it was. I mean, the things are not comparable, I stress.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  So this is, this is where the book picks up. We have this, this opening chapter illustrating the world of the Black Death and a sort of, you know, a snapshot suggests infinite horrors. And then we skip forward to the spring of 1350, so about 18 months forward. So implied between the prologue and the first chapter is the worst pandemic the world's ever seen. I mean, I didn't feel that I was going to gain a huge amount by describing that in kind of endless horrific detail. I thought that actually much easier to have people sort of poking their heads out of their front doors and going, wow, okay. Because, you know, the, the book itself is set after the really intense experiences that

• 8:25Speaker 04

  the characters have been through at the Battle of Crecy, at the Siege of Calais. And so I wanted this, this third volume to encapsulate a sort of, it's, it's happened, now what do we do with the rest of our lives kind of feel.

• 8:38Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and it is, I guess, another dimension that you can add to your characters, that this is an experience they've had to go through and endure, that, that adds another dimension to the way that they will confront any more problems that they're likely to come across in the book.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  I think so, yeah. And I think that actually one of the things that I was interested in was seeing how different characters reacted to the experience of the Black Death, of everything they'd been to in the first two books, in different ways. And so we have Love Day, the main character who's carried us through the first two books and has always been coming towards the end of his career, if you see what I mean. For him, this is slightly just one more thing. And just at the point that he thought he was able to sort of relax, you know, his part in fighting in the Hundred Years' War was over. He's kind of got a retirement plan. He's saved a little bit of silver from his adventures in France and now just wants to sit and own a tavern and relax.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Is now faced with a world that has spun on a sixpence, as it were. And he has to reevaluate absolutely everything in his life at a point where he thought everything was certain. There are younger characters in the books for whom the Black Death and the prospect of war beginning again seem tremendously, well, exciting in a way that actually to their normality as young people is catastrophic upheaval. And so they look upon the world with a fundamentally different attitude. And so there's this whole range in between. And I was also interested in this nexus of plague and war, in testing the characters

• 10:18Speaker 04

  and just seeing which one they felt affected their lives more. I mean, you'll know this very well, and from all the work you've done on the Middle Ages, that when you look particularly at the Black Death, one expects a sort of a massive moral and cultural panic of the sort that we lived through with Covid. And you often don't really see it. You know, you see the sort of immediate effects and the incredible mortality, but there is a sense that this is just the sort of thing that happens only slightly worse than normal.

• 10:48Matt Lewis?

  And I think because they had an explanation for it in a way that we don't, in that kind of God is clearly upset with us and we need to do something to put that right. It's almost like there's a way of rationalizing this terrible thing has happened and may eventually pass. And then it seems to me that probably we get less record of ordinary people's kind of grief and the impact that it has on them emotionally. And we can see a bit easier the impact that it has on their prospects of the creation of opportunity. That comes along and then which the government is quick to stamp on and all of the problems that that will cause leading up to like the peasants revolt maybe.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  I think you're absolutely right and I think I think you're you're spot on and pinpointing that worldview in which when bad things happen, it's part of a sort of cosmic plan and one can actually live expecting bad things to happen because this really is deep baked into the nature of the world. Like that whole worldview, particular as it is, you're so right, to the Middle Ages, is so alien to us now in a world in which science has has moved in and replaced religion and particularly sort of late stage 20th century, 21st century, kind of the very, very late stage of the Industrial Revolution into the new communications and and and information technology revolutions. There

• 12:06Speaker 04

  is this sense that mankind really ought to be able to solve any problem. We ought to be able to science our way out of it. And that, I think, was what was so shocking about about COVID-19, a relatively, if you you compare it to the Black Death, innocuous world pandemic in terms of of mortality, in terms of severity of the disease if you didn't die from it. And I'm comparing it like for like now with the Black Death. But it just didn't fit with our worldview in a way that the Black Death, you you you've hit the nail on the head, really does fit with that medieval worldview. So, you know, they these are interesting things for historians and I think they're also interesting things for for historical fiction writers because they just create these possibilities of throwing

• 12:48Speaker 04

  the reader into a world in which all the assumptions are just fundamentally different and you've got to kind of plunge into them and see the world through fresh new eyes.

• 12:57Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, you almost need to reprogram your your mind and stop thinking like a 21st century person. The Battle of the Winchelsea is one of the key moments in the book and I wondered if we could focus a little bit on that because I think it's one of those battles that that might go under the radar for a lot of people. It's not a particularly famous battle in the Hundred Years' War, but it holds a bit of interest, I guess. So can you tell us what leads up to the Battle of Winchelsea? What brings two fleets against each other?

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Well, the sort of medium term story, I suppose, is that the English and the French had both been pursuing an alliance with with Castile. As I've said already, in thirteen forty eight, Edward III thought he'd got there by marrying his daughter Princess Joan to the Castilians, to the heir to the Castilian throne, and then that was scuppered by the Black Death, and it really ended the possibility in the immediate term of an Anglo-Castilian alliance. And it's scuppered by the fact that Joan dies of the Black Death, doesn't she? That's quite right. Joan dies of the Black Death, and so the marriage is off, and that whole potential union between England and Castile, which was designed to be so fruitful

• 14:05Speaker 04

  in isolating France, and then, you know, and also in lending the considerable might of Castilian ships to the English side of the Hundred Years' War, that opportunity was lost, and the Castilians threw in with the French. And this is a very big problem for the English in the Hundred Years' War. I mean, even by the stage we're at in thirteen fifty with the Hundred Years' War, multiple fronts are now open in this war, and it's becoming extremely complicated for everybody involved. But then, so there are these shifting patchworks of alliance. But anyway, Castile at this time is an important, important power

• 14:46Speaker 04

  to be courted, not least because the Channel is such, is becoming more and more an important frontier of the Hundred Years' War. I mean, England have taken Calais, so there is a bridgehead on the French mainland, there is of course Bordeaux, Gascany, and everything in the southwest of France. But there's a sense that the war could also quite easily come to England in the form of raiding, the raiding of towns like Winchelsea, like, you know, like Portsmouth, like Southampton, like Hastings, you know, the sink ports, and then further along the coast to the west, these are all quite vulnerable to raids by,

• 15:26Speaker 04

  you could call them, they're not really navies, they're pirates as much as anything, but the French and Castilians are now taking aim at those towns. So England, having been the, in the late thirteen forties, very much the belligerent on the front foot.

• 15:46Speaker 04

  You're launching chevreche after chevreche into French territory, Normandy and Gascony, is now facing the possibility of of being quite vulnerable on the south coast. So Castilian alliance matters and it goes the way of the French. The Castilian fleet during the spring of thirteen fifty has really been menacing English shipping in the channel. There's been a lot of sort of, to borrow a term from the classic HBO series, The Wire. There's a lot of rip and run activity where they're boarding, robbing and sinking English mercantile ships at sea.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  That's a very bad problem when one of the key lines of English international trade is between England and Flanders, Roebel going out to to service the cloth trade in Flanders. Anyway, the Castilians have been up to no good in the channel throughout the spring of thirteen fifty. By the early summer of thirteen fifty, it transpires that there is a big Castilian fleet at port in Flanders, loaded up to the gunwales with stolen goods and cloth that's been purchased in Flanders. And at some point, that fleet is going to set sail back to Castile.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  It has to go before the autumn in order to divest all of this partially ill-gotten gain. Edward III, presiding over a realm now emerging from the shock of the Black Death, isn't going to stand for this and so orders as many ships as he can get together to mass in the ports of the southeast, principally Sandwich but also Winchelsea. And Really lurks there throughout the weeks of the high summer, waiting for the Castilians to make their move so that he can try and intercept them and take revenge on the Castilians

• 17:48Speaker 04

  for the damage they've done to his kingdom's economy and national pride.

• 17:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I guess we need to remember here that this is before England was quite the naval force that it will become. So it's easy to think of England having control of the seas, you know, policing the Channel.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 18:03Matt Lewis?

  But England just simply isn't a big naval superpower at the moment.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  No, it's not. And there have been sea battles sort of now and again. When it's been most effective up until 1350, this tends to be when English ships go and raid French ports and burn fleets sitting in port. That's kind of what had happened at the Battle of Schloss in 1340. And prior to that, if we think back to the reign of King John, you see some examples then. But no, by and large, you're right, Matt. The English are not a major naval power as they'll become certainly in the 16th century. When the king wants to

• 18:46Speaker 04

  assemble a navy for purposes of war, there are a few royal ships. And when I was researching Lionhearts, I had great fun down in the National Archives, looking at the records for the fitting out of ships like the Jerusalem, which is one of the, and the Cog Thomas, which are two particularly large ships within Edward III's core fleet, very luxuriously appointed. So they've got sort of feather beds on board and you can see all the entries for payment in the National Archives for these quite luxurious fittings for the ships, as well as the banners and streamers and the sort of pertinences of war. But largely, when

• 19:30Speaker 04

  the English king wants to assemble more than about a dozen ships, they have to be impressed from merchants and, yeah, sort of forcibly taken and, or either hired or forcibly taken and used for purposes of war, whether that's for transport or for fighting. So no, we're not a great naval power at this time.

• 19:48Matt Lewis?

  And that kind of royal need for ships is sort of the origin of the sink ports idea, isn't it? That this is, they have special privileges because the king can kind of go to them to secure shipping from merchants as and when they need it. And in return, the sink ports get, like I say, certain privileges.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. And if you look at a town like like Winchester, it's a it's a good example of what, you know, we could almost call a public private partnership if it were happening in in the 21st century, you know, this Winchester in particular had so there'd been there'd been another Winchester during the 13th, 12th, 11th, 12th, 13th century that had been washed away by the sea. And Edward the first had lent his backing to the building of a new Winchester, which is still the site where we see Winchester today. And it had been built with sort of two things in mind. Firstly, as somewhere that was going to be a sort of thriving little trading port. And secondly, somewhere

• 20:50Speaker 04

  that could be pressed into use as a military port as and when required. And it's just fascinating town. It's still a fascinating town today. Early on, when I was writing Lionhearts, I went, in fact, I had a lovely day with my eldest daughter. We went down one very sunny, early autumn day. And Winchester is a very picturesque town, still with a lot of the medieval buildings visible from, but also the, you can see Edward the first's plan. I mean, it is a grid system town, very, very carefully constructed. It's a I, this will mean more to, I suspect, to English listeners than it will to American or those outside of England. But I called it a medieval Milton Keynes, because it's

• 21:35Speaker 04

  built on a sort of perfect grid system. And underneath a lot of the older buildings, there are undercrofts, there are little sort of cellars, which again, dates to the the original building of the town in the Middle Ages. So it's a fascinating place. It's changed somewhat over the years because of the shifting shape of the coastline. But you can really, really get a sense there, particularly as you stand next to one of the old sort of medieval fortified gatehouses and look out to sea, you can really sense that this was somewhere that was that was essential to trade and handy for military activity as well.

• 22:14Matt Lewis?

  So we've got Edward III needing to regain a bit of control in the Channel, also needing to gain face. You know, he's had all his shipping raiding, looking like he can't protect his own merchants. Never a great look for a king. And presumably, you know, he needs to make sure that trade can get between Gascany and England effectively. So all of these things are causing disruption for Edward that he needs to sort out. As you say, he's there lurking, waiting for this Castilian fleet that he suspects is coming. Before we get on to what actually happens in the battle, do we have good sources for the Battle of Winchelsey?

• 22:50Speaker 04

  We've got a couple of great Chronicle accounts, which sort of rely on one another and add little bits of detail to each other. There's Jean Le Bel, Geoffrey Baker, and particularly Jean Prosser, who, as usual, sort of read everything and then jazzed it all up in his own account. But there are good Chronicle sources and it seems, so there are sort of cliffs outside Winchelsey from when the battle happened, Queen Philippa and other members of the royal court watched it all unfold. I mean, slightly think of Elizabeth I at Tilbury, although not quite. But there was a sort of spectators' gallery. And it does seem

• 23:33Speaker 04

  that the most detailed sources had access to, either were there or had access to people who'd been there. So there's quite vivid accounts of the progress of the battle. And lots of great incidental detail about what was happening on deck on the ships as well, and some really grisly accounts of the severe injuries that were sustained by people who took part in the battle, you know, coming back missing bits of themselves and bearing scars by which they would always remember having been there. So the sources are quite good. I say that with a note of slight hesitation, because over the course

• 24:15Speaker 04

  of writing this Essex Dogs trilogy, I mean, the first book deals with the Battle of Crissie, and we are, as you know- No, Matt, incredibly spoiled for great sources about the Battle of Crecy. Not just the Chronicle accounts, but the administrative accounts of Edward III's army on campaign, the kitchen diaries. You know, you can reconstruct what people ate every single day of the campaign and and using the same source exactly where they were. Loads of Chronicle accounts on both sides, tons and tons and tons of of information about recruiting to the army. There's not that same sort of material with the Battle of Windchill Sea.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  And putting my sort of historical fiction writer's hat on, that's partly a good thing and partly a bad thing. Writing a book about the Battle of Crecy was, in some senses, wonderfully easy because all you had to do was just follow the day by day. You knew exactly where they were and the detail was just sort of presented there. But it did mean there wasn't much wriggle room or wiggle room to do the thing that novelists are supposed to do, which is invent. The second book in the series, Wolves of Winter, was set at the Siege of Calais and the the sources for that are much patchier. And so I would say that writing Lionhearts was somewhat closer to writing Wolves of Winter in terms of the

• 25:38Speaker 04

  the availability of really detailed source material. What you do have, however, and this was true for all three books, is this incredible tableau de nuance. Well, suddenly I've slipped into Frenchified English, but you see what I mean. You have these amazingly vivid scenes that the novel drives towards. In Wolves of Winter, it was the famous image sculpted by Rodin of the Burgers of Calais coming out to beg for their lives with Edward and Queen Philippa interceding.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  In this book, Lionhearts, we have just this amazing battle and the scenes before the battle are incredibly sort of picturesque, as described by the chroniclers, and the action of the battle is totally deranged in many ways. So, you know, it's a really exciting feeling as a novelist as the plot is progressing, where you know that you've got this huge set piece to work towards.

• 26:34Matt Lewis?

  But did you enjoy having a bit more freedom than you had maybe in Essex Dogs?

• 26:38Speaker 04

  I think I did. I mean, I think that certainly the books came in the right order for my personal development as a novelist, in the sense that when I wrote Essex Dogs, I'd never written more than a short story in my life before. And so it was very handy to have a little sort of, you know, a narrative rope to pull myself along with in terms of the day by day detail of the sources for the crazy campaign. And I think by the time I got to Lionheart, so I was feeling a bit more confident. And so I was never very disheartened not to have, you know, not to know what happened for the entire month of June, or whatever it might be. And this book as well, I wanted to set in two realms in a way that I definitely hadn't done with, certainly with the first

• 27:23Speaker 04

  book with Essex Dogs. I wanted there to be a world of Winchelsea, where Love Day and some of the Essex Dogs are trying to deal with the aftermath of the Black Death, the sense that war is coming back to them, whether they like it or not. And then I also wanted really for the first time to look at the court of Ed III at home. And so there's a section of the book that's set in Windsor Castle around the April the 23 St. George's Day celebrations, such as they are, seen through the eyes of Romford, the youngest

• 28:03Speaker 04

  member, well, he was when the story started, of the Essex Dogs. So I didn't mind having the freedom to sort of flick flack between those two different worlds and to see, to sort of do the high low a little bit.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:30Speaker 01

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• 29:04Speaker 05

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• 29:49Matt Lewis?

  So if we get back to Winchelsea Sea then, what do we know about the two naval forces? Do we know how many ships they have? Do we know what kind of ships? Are they fairly evenly matched?

• 30:00Speaker 04

  Fairly evenly matched in terms of numbers, very unevenly matched in terms of quality and size of ships. There's a line by one of the chroniclers that says that when the fleets finally approached one another, and we're talking dozens of ships rather than hundreds, there's probably four dozen, fifty or so ships on either side, but the Castilians have far bigger, far better ships. The line from the chronicler says, "They towered over our ships like castles over cottages", and the difference in just the sheer height above the waterline of the Castilian ships to the English ships meant that the Castilians aboard the ships were able to just rain down

• 30:44Speaker 04

  projectiles, I mean, pretty basic stuff, rocks and iron bars and whatever. They were just much, much higher up than the English, which made fighting difficult.

• 30:54Matt Lewis?

  How did the two fleets approach each other? If Edward must have been aware that he's the underdog here, he can't just plough in and go toe to toe with the Castilian fleet, does he have a plan?

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Well, you sound like a sensible military strategist, but maybe people around Edward III were saying such things, but the advice fell on deaf ears. The plan, insofar as we can tell, was to sort of hang around and wait until someone saw the Castilians coming. And so the English have these ships in Sandwich and Winchelsea Sea in communication with each other, and they're waiting.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  It's quite boring to wait, in my experience, and I think in most people's experience. And one of the best ways to pass time while waiting, certainly in my experience, is to get drunk. And so that's what happens aboard some, certainly of the English ships and definitely aboard Edward III's ship. One of his pals, Sir John Shandos, has recently been to Germany and has come back with, it's a bit like, you know, in the sort of around the turn of the century, somebody going to Berlin and coming back with a whole bunch of white label techno records. Sir John Shandos has come back with like all the latest cool German songs and dance moves.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  And so a party breaks out aboard Edward III's ship. The king himself, we hear from the chronicles, was incredibly nattily dressed in, head to toe in black, despite it being, you know, the very last days of August. Black beaver skin cap on his head and a sort of velvet jerkin, really looking very dashing. And Sir John Shandos breaks out the German tunes and everybody's drinking. And Shandos is showing off the kind of dance moves and everyone's just really having a good time. It's, I suppose, like an Ibiza party boat, only with the prospect of impending war. And suddenly the cry goes up that, oh my God, guys, Castilians.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  And there's a sense that everyone's like, oh, yeah, crumbs, I'd forgotten about the old Castilians, who were having such a good time. So Edward gives the order that the English tactic in battle against these much larger ships is simply to sail into them.

• 33:09Matt Lewis?

  So he's just going to go toe to toe with a much stronger opponent?

• 33:12Speaker 04

  He's going to go toe to toe. He's just going to go kamikaze into the side of these Castilian ships. And I, well, I try and imagine the order going out in Lionheart. It's an extraordinary move from Edward III, who's...

• 33:32Speaker 04

  He's not, in my mind at any rate, this reckless usually. It's quite a calculated, level-headed, pragmatic, willing to take risks, certainly.

• 33:45Matt Lewis?

  But also willing to wait for the tactical advantage.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's kind of weird and, you know, I, I think this is one of these occasions where a great moving force in history is people being drunk. And I think Edward III is really drunk and it's like, okay, well, there they are. Here we are, let's go get them lads. And the techno music, the German music goes off and here we go. It's a huge gamble that nearly goes very, very wrong. The English ram raid the Castilians, punch big holes in the sides of some of the Castilian ships, but are then sort of locked together with these ships and out of control, some cases taking on water.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  The Black Prince's ship, the Bilbao, starts to sink and he has to be rescued from aboard his own ship. The Black Prince being Edward III's eldest son. And eh, the, the fighting is astonishingly vicious. And as I said, the Castilian ships being much bigger, once they've been sailed into, now really have the advantage of position because the, the English ships are kind of locked into them. And so the English are pelted relentlessly with all the missiles and projectiles that the Castilian can, Castilians can take aim with. There is a lot of bloodshed. However, Edward III's gamble pays off.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  And by and by, I think a lot of this, as usual with English armies in the Hundred Years' War is because the English have put a lot of longbow men aboard these ships. The battle turns in, in the, the favour of the English. I suppose it's worth saying, although I'm sure most listeners will know this, that a ship battle, a naval battle in the 14th century kind of resembles a land battle, only on ships. And not, I hope, being too facetious there, there are cannon at this point, cannon, primitive cannon had been deployed on the battlefield at Creasy in thirteen forty-six, but we're not talking about ships armed with kind of, you know, rows and rows and rows of cannons so that they can fight from, from far away. There's,

• 35:56Speaker 04

  it's longbows, crossbows, try and board the opponent's ship and then hand-to-hand fighting. And the, the longbowmen aboard Edward's ships, as so often happens, have the advantage over, over the Castilians. And we have accounts of them fighting, there, there are tables aboard the, these ships and benches which are turned over and used as barricades from behind which the, um, the archers shoot. And yeah, eventually they, they turn the tide in favour of the English managed to board the ships and then start hurling the Castilians overboard. And that's why this battle, as well as sometimes being

• 36:39Speaker 04

  known as the Battle of Winchelsea, is also known as the Battle of Espanyol Sur le Mer, the Battle of the Spanish in the Sea.

• 36:47Matt Lewis?

  Sounds like a very English way of christening a battle.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  Clue's in the name.

• 36:50Matt Lewis?

  What happened with the Spanish in the Sea? It's interesting though, isn't it, that, that by the time we're, we're in the middle of the 14th century, there, there doesn't seem to be recognisable naval battle tactics. Like you say, they, they simply take land battle tactics and put it on sea. It's almost like no one's sat down and thought, is there a better way to do this? Is that just because naval battles don't happen often enough for someone to be concerned about that? Or do they genuinely view these tactics as the best way to fight at sea?

• 37:17Speaker 04

  I think it's the best way to fight at sea in this, in this sea. I think if you go out the eastern Mediterranean and you, you read battles of the, you know, Crusader era naval clashes, if you've got Venetians, Byzantines, those powers of the eastern Mediterranean at this time, where you've got some much sort of slicker, slicker, more manoeuvrable galleys, where you've got Greek fire. Things look somewhat different, but what we're really seeing in, you know, in the English Channel, Bay of Biscay at this point, is merchant ships kind of tussling with each other. And the primary purpose of these seas is as an economic route for, you know, the

• 38:02Speaker 04

  various trades of this part of the world, of cloth, of wine, of salt, you know, so that there is, they're not really optimising for fighting lots of battles. So when one does come along, as I said earlier, it tends to be either one lot burn the other lot's ships while they're in port, or if they are to clash at sea, yeah, it's much more like a land battle.

• 38:27Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Do we have a sense of how long this battle lasts? Because if these ships are getting kind of knotted together and there is, you know, missiles flying around everywhere and then hand to hand fighting, it must have been pretty intense and frightening. Does this go on for a long time or is it a fairly quick affair?

• 38:43Speaker 04

  No, it's, it's, it's an all dayer really, and indeed an all nighter as well. And so that this is hours and hours and hours of sort of slow motion tussling, really. Eventually, kind of, yeah, about half of the Castilian fleet manages to limp away, but the English capture the other half. I mean, there's, there's a really heavy fallout on both sides. And the Castilians lose thousands of men and half their ships. But the English sustain some severe and in some senses self inflicted damage, both to their ships and to their troops as well. And as I mentioned earlier, there are these sort of really quite horrifying

• 39:28Speaker 04

  accounts of the, the injuries that people come back having sustained with their sort of ears hanging, noses hanging off and eyes gouged out and, you know, limbs and fingers and such missing. But it's presented, and here this is sort of slightly reminiscent of Shakespeare's Henry V. You know, it's presented in the Chronicles as well, you know, anyone who you see in years to come bearing these injuries, they can say they were there. They were at this sort of this massive tear up in the, in the channel, which in its day was, well, we can certainly say a good deal more famous than it is now. And this, I, I, I think it's worth.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Contextualizing it in Edward III's sort of run of astonishing victories. I mean, he was just unbeatable at this stage. And from arguably from Shloes, but certainly from Crecy onwards, this run of 10-plus years from Crecy through to Poitiers in 1356. He just couldn't lose. Eventually, that, I think, became self-sustaining, that idea that the English were on land or at sea, just too much for anybody who came up against them. And it was a massive part of Edward III building this golden reputation as, at that point, the greatest of all the medieval kings that England had had.

• 41:06Speaker 01

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• 41:40Speaker 02

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• 42:25Matt Lewis?

  So he's almost able to harness that kind of legend going before his armies that even before we face them, we're pretty sure we're going to lose, which then, as you say, becomes a kind of self fulfilling fear or prophecy that the French are sort of starting on the back foot all the time.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and this is also in some ways Edward Swanson as a military commander, because the last time that he and the Black Prince are in the field together, and after that, it's really his son, the Black Prince, and you know, and sons actually, because John of Gaunt gets involved towards the end of the reign as well, who take, take over the frontline leadership of English armies in the field.

• 43:04Matt Lewis?

  So we've got drunk Edward with stupid battle tactics, but somehow he wins, albeit with fairly heavy losses of life and limb on both sides too. Was it fun throwing the Essex Dogs into the middle of all of that absolute carnage?

• 43:21Speaker 04

  It's fun for me, not so much fun for them. Yeah, look, I've been in a position now where I first came up with, or started sketching these characters in like 2017, and this third book published 25, so it's, it's the guts of a 10 year project, and it's been incredibly good fun, for one thing, to see these campaigns and battles that I'd written about from a sort of historical perspective, often occupying the viewpoint of Edward or maybe the Black Prince or whatever.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  It's been incredibly fun, but also I think in some ways historically instructive to look at these. Big moments in the Hundred Years' War through the eyes of, quote unquote, "ordinary people." I mean, the Essex Dogs are fictionalised. They're not based on real individuals from the Hundred Years' War. I would have dearly loved, in non-fiction, to write a sort of Band of Brothers, Easy Company account of a campaign in the Hundred Years' War, but insofar as I can tell or I know, that's just not possible based on the evidence that's survived.

• 44:41Matt Lewis?

  Before we leave the Battle of Winchelsea altogether, I wondered if you could give us an idea of what you think is the legacy in the wider context of the Hundred Years' War of the Battle of Winchelsea, because I think it's one of those that you can, as you say, it's an English victory at a time when Edward is building up this huge head of steam and seems to be unstoppable, the last time that he and the Black Prince fight together. But it's also kind of a bit of a nothing victory, nothing really comes out of it. It doesn't really change anything. Is it important or is it easy to overestimate, or should we remember it better than we do?

• 45:15Speaker 04

  I think it's, you know, given that there's a strand that runs through English history of naval development and naval warfare, which, you know, runs from King John's reign, if not even earlier, from, you know, King Alfred or whatever, all the way through to, you know, the heyday of the English navy patrolling the world seas in the 18th and 19th centuries, and even up until the two world wars. It's a landmark along the way. It's an interesting battle. It has this kind of preposterous and amusing and kind of slightly scary set piece when

• 45:56Speaker 04

  the king's sort of drunk and dancing as the battle begins. I think that its legacy, which we've talked about somewhat in the Hundred Years' War, is it bolsters Edward's reputation. In terms of what are the immediate effects of the Battle of Winchelsea for the security of the Channel, actually, the very next year, the Castilians are still out there and still causing trouble and, well, as, you know, as we move through the 14th century, the English south coast is never really secure so long as the Hundred Years' War is going on. So it's not a sort of seismic game changer in the way that... Battle of Poitiers, where Jean II is captured, is in the way that the Battle of Agincourt,

• 46:39Speaker 04

  you know, which gives Henry V so much momentum to roll through those campaigns of the next four years in France and take the French crown is, is not in the same, not in the same league as the Battle of Castillon in 1453, where the English finally kicked out of France, you know. That being said, it's part of this incredibly important phase of these victories in the 1340s and 50s that set Edward III up and in some ways actually ensure that the Hundred Years' War is going to be the Hundred Years' War and not just the sort of 15 to 17 years' war, you know. So I think that it's place in that phase of the Hundred Years' War. It's apparent proof that Edward was unbeatable on sea as well as on land.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  And then it's it's kind of interesting role in the longer journey for of English naval power all make it a pretty interesting battle. But the thing is with writing fiction, it's not, that doesn't really matter. And Bernard Cornwell told me this years ago, he said, you know, when you're writing history, you have the big story and the little story. The big story are these kind of huge, you know, world-changing moments and the little sort of the lives of people are these kind of anecdotes that they just dangle off it, their colour, their incidental. When you're writing fiction, everything's flipped on its head. And the big story, the sort of the cosmic importance of the battle, its legacy historically is all that's background. It doesn't pertain to the lives really of the characters involved.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  Everything that matters in this story is what's there in front of these characters right now. And and things that would be utterly trivial in the grand scheme of history are the most important things in the world, these relationships, friendships, partnerships, brotherhood, survival, loss, hope, all of these things are the business of the novel. And that's, that's what makes writing history and fiction so different.

• 48:28Matt Lewis?

  Wonderful. And that's why people should go and read Lionheart.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  God bless you.

• 48:32Matt Lewis?

  Before I let you go, what are you working on next? Anything you can tell us about, any more fiction, any more non-fiction?

• 48:37Speaker 04

  I don't have another fiction book in the works at the moment, although I've got, hmm, two and a half ideas and I've got to decide between them. I am writing a non-fiction book about castles and it will go from the Bronze Age, the nuclear age. It's called The Castle and it's about the development of castles over, well, you know, we cast the lens very wide. It's almost 3,000 years, but the particular development, not just of the buildings, but of the mythology of the kind of the dream, the fantasy of the castle. So it goes from the Trojan War to kind of Disneyland. So I'm having an amazing time writing that at the moment and that's for

• 49:20Speaker 04

  next autumn, autumn 2026.

• 49:23Matt Lewis?

  That's something to look forward to. Is that just an excuse to go to Disneyland?

• 49:25Speaker 04

  No, how dare you. It's an excuse to go to, I was actually out at, I was actually out at Schliemann's archaeological site of Troy, Hisalik in Turkey, two or three weeks ago. Totally amazing. So it's not so much Disneyland that grabs me as there are, you know, I've seen a lot of castles, but there are one or two that I've had my eye on for a long time and this is a great reason to go and see them.

• 49:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. I saw that you were out investigating Troy and now I know why.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  Heard it here first.

• 49:58Matt Lewis?

  Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dan. It's been an absolute pleasure to catch up with you, to catch up with the Essex Dogs and to hear about their grand hurrah at the Battle of Winchelsea. And hopefully people will enjoy reading Lion Hearts. Thank you very much for joining us, Dan. If you want to find out more about the fate of the Essex Dogs, then Dan's latest novel, Lion Hearts, is out now, complete with their experiences of the Battle of Winchelsea. You can find Dan's previous visit to talk about the opening novel of the trilogy in our back catalogue, as well as some great episodes on the Hundred Years' War, including Jonathan Sumption's visit to the podcast to explain how it all ended. Dan was also here not too long ago to talk about his biography of Henry V. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday,

• 50:43Matt Lewis?

  so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free. Head to historyhit.com/subscribe. Go on, you know you want to. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes: a 2027 Jeep Cherokee, a Carnival Cruise vacation, gift cards from DoorDash, and Best Buy. Feel then play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag!

• 52:31Speaker 03

  No purchase necessary. 50 U.S. and D.C. Age 18+. See playatmcd.com for rules and playatmcd.com/amoe for info and playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd. Chance card game ends November 8th. Game ends November 22nd, 2026. See rules for prize details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro.