The Two Hundred Years War

Was the Hundred Years War actually a two-century long conflict? Matt Lewis sits down with Professor Michael Livingston to re-examine the traditional concept of the Hundred Years War between France and England. From the murder that sparked the initial conflict, to the collapse of French resistance up until the rise of Joan of Arc, crises on both sides of the channel framed these tumultuous centuries. MORE 1217: The Year That Forged England https://open.spotify.com/episode/68DvpSKUnxPybL8T4ilgtZ Henry V with Dan Jones https://open.spotify.com/episode/0qRYhiqBCU06i4uCdJG1nM Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, 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?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:40Matt 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 gob-smacking 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.

• 1:17Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Why do we label some parts of history the way that we do? Eleanor and I have wondered about this in a couple of episodes about the early and high medieval periods that you might like to dig out from the archive. But a good friend of History Hit and Gone Medieval has gone one step further and written a book to challenge one of those labels in particular: The Hundred Years' War. Professor Michael Livingston has visited us before and has a new series with History Hit on medieval rebels that takes in William Wallace, Owen Glyndua, and Simon de Montfort. Mike's new book, The Two Hundred Years' War, well, does what it says on the tin. It takes a different perspective on a conflict and offers a new view of its impact

• 2:01Matt Lewis?

  on medieval European history. And I'm delighted that Mike is joining us now to talk to us all about this fascinating new book.

• 2:13Matt Lewis?

  Mike, a very warm welcome back to Gone Medieval. You're becoming a firm friend of the podcast.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  You know, it's a podcast that you want to be a friend to. So thank you for having me. That's very gracious.

• 2:22Matt Lewis?

  Awesome. Lovely. The 10 quid for saying that is in the post.

• 2:29Matt Lewis?

  Your new book, The 200 Years War, is possibly a title that's going to have people frowning because we know all about the 100 Years War, maybe, but we don't know about this idea of the 200 Years War. And the book feels like a bit of an account of the creation, the emergence, the growing confidence of what we might consider to be a more modern French kingdom. Is that a reasonable way for me to look at it?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  I think it's absolutely a reasonable way to think about it. I didn't intend, when I first started thinking about this, I didn't intend to redefine a period of history. That was not like in the cards. I'm not that crazy.

• 3:04Matt Lewis?

  When was the last time you wrote a book that didn't redefine something, though, Mike? Come on.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Well, touche. Okay, fair. You got me there, Matt. Yeah, Dan Jones is to blame for this. So, I mean, not for this. Dan Jones had suggested I do a single volume history of the 100 Years War, which was like a crazy idea. I think when he said that, we were actually walking along the Somme. We were shooting a show for a history hit, for his Essex Dogs show. And we had just met and he knew my work, I knew his work, and he said, yeah, you should do 100 Years War like a single volume. And I laughed. I thought that's a hilarious joke. And he wasn't laughing. And he said, no, seriously, I think you could actually pull this off.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  So yeah, as I started putting it together, it became increasingly clear to me that this periodization didn't hold a lot of water. Like that the story I had been told wasn't really fitting together. And yeah, I guess that sounds like a lot of my work. But yeah, in this case, this label, you know, it didn't even exist until, you know, in the 19th century. And it wasn't really like. Scholarly defined, it was just sort of a label tossed off for a textbook. And we've nevertheless used it and it's got good coinage. But, but yeah, the more I looked at it, I'm like, this thing is longer than 116 years. The Hundred Years' War is actually 116 years as traditionally defined.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  But 116 year war doesn't roll off the tongue. So yeah, the more I started looking at it, the more it was, this needs to be longer on both ends. And actually broader too, that it needs to be broader. And that, yeah, I felt like it's more French driven than English driven, which is the received story I had was English driven. And it didn't turn out that way.

• 4:51Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's interesting sometimes how these things can have really kind of mushy, porous boundaries. We tend to give them a beginning date and an end date, which is convenient. It's a helpful way sometimes to box it up and look at it. But as soon as you start examining that, that beginning date, it's clear that it's really porous. And there is so much that's led to that beginning date that you need to know about as well. You can almost keep going backwards and keep going forwards because nothing, nothing begins and no one wakes up in the morning and says, right, we're going to start 116 years of war today.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's like the old joke, well, at least around, around our kind of people, right? You know, that get five manipulists in a room and you, you got 10 different definitions of the Middle Ages. Yeah, because nobody, nobody woke up one day and was like, wow, all right, Middle Ages, here we go. Nobody woke up and thought, oh, good, Middle Ages are over. It's the Renaissance or something like that. Doesn't happen. Yeah, there are always the periodization of history, as you said, is useful. I mean, it's really useful, but is also hugely problematic because there's, because it's all just something we're doing to it. It's not something that comes intrinsic with history itself. So I, I tried in the book to be honest about that, even as I was creating that very thing, right?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  But I was like, well, let me be transparent. Here's all my cards, right? You know, here's why I'm doing it this way. And, you know, if this makes sense to people, great. If it doesn't, at least hopefully there's a conversation about, well, okay, then what would make sense? Like what rationale would there be for an alternative? Because maybe there is a far better alternative than the one I've given here. But this is what made the most sense to me as a story. And as something that had a logical consistency to it, even though it it it meant sort of blowing up a lot of what I once thought. I have a lot of books about a hundred years war that that talk about the hundred years war. And here I'm like just kicking that to the curb. Oh, well, you know, that's that's how history works. You should be moving

• 6:50Speaker 01

  forward and not just sort of stuck on on tradition.

• 6:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And I definitely want to come back to a bit more of a chat about periodization and the the difficulties and the problems and the benefits of that a little bit later on. But I'd also like to get into the the meat of some of the the story that the book does tell. The the 200 years war, as you framed it, begins in 1292. Why is that a good place to start it? Because again, you've got to pick a year to begin, I guess. But what is happening in France around that time? Why is that a good point to kick off this story?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully, it's a good point. You know, as I kind of started working backwards, right, to sort of find where is that that starting point? I was like, well, the traditional is 1337 to 1453. And one of my initial concerns there was if 1337 is the beginning, well, 1453 isn't the end of that story. And sort of vice versa, they're kind of like about different things. So trying to find something cohesive and whole. Yeah, it kept kind of like marching back. And I I say in the book, the whole first chapter is like all the history that you got to get even to 1292. And I even say, like, like, you could even count this as some of the same conflict, right? And you end up with a much bigger war. But

• 8:04Matt Lewis?

  Is that the sequel of 300 years war?

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:07Matt Lewis?

  And if this call for it, there might be a 400 years war.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, try and stop me now. What was, I mean, you know, part of it, you know, in all honesty with anything like this is you're also like thinking about word count, too. You know, you're like, well, I could start the story with, you know, the breaking up of Pangaea, but, you know, word count's not going to let me do that. So so yet in 1292, what is what has happened is there was a preexisting conflict, the Angevin Empire conflict. All of that had resolved in the middle of the 13th century. And we have a new treaty, Treaty of Paris, a new status quo. Everything's basically settled in theory. And then suddenly in 1292, it all blows up. What happens, and I didn't, again, it's like weird when these things, I didn't intend for this

• 8:54Speaker 01

  to actually be exactly two centuries. They would end in 1492 of all dates. It was just simply in doing the research, like, oh, man, this is it. In 1292, two ships meet at an island that nobody listening to this probably will have ever heard of, the island of Cumanus, which is off the archipelago off the tip of Brittany, out in the middle of the Atlantic. Two ships meet. One is, we'll kind of say French allied and one is English allied. That's ish, all right? They both want to draw water. There's a fight that breaks out over who's going to draw water first, and a man is killed.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  We actually do not know, and probably will never know, which side that guy was on, because our sources have it both ways. And in its sense, it sort of doesn't matter. What it results in is a kind of quid pro quo, like reciprocity killings. And it escalates rapidly to what's often called a pirate war. But it's sort of not a pirate war in the sense that both sides are saying that the other side is sponsoring this. So the English are saying the French king is making this happen. The French are saying the English king's making this happen. Probably neither king is making it happen, but people are popularly conceiving of it

• 10:18Speaker 01

  that way, and as they're ratcheting it up. And it really quickly becomes open warfare. And we get an actual fight. The very thing that people talk about starts the Hundred Years' War, where the French king says the English king can no longer hold lands in France. That happens as well as on 1292. So it's not noticed by a lot of people, but this actually happened before Edward III. It happened back with Edward I in this pirate war and what results from that. So it's a situation where you have, the conditions are right and the personnel are right. Edward I is not the kind of guy to roll over. And on the flip

• 11:00Speaker 01

  side, the French king is of absolute force of nature, Philippe IV. And he's deeply invested in solidifying power within the state of France and defining what the state of France is. And the English are afoul of all that. And so this is a great opportunity to like, let's have it out. And that really establishes the playing ground and the motivations for the entire story moving forward. And again, it really doesn't resolve until the piece of a top in 1492, which happens to be two centuries later. So yeah, it is a much bigger

• 11:45Speaker 01

  story and much more French driven than certainly the story I was taught, which was always kind of, this is all about England. It's about England, of course, but, but I think France is the one that ratchets this up. Philippe is the one who could have put a stop to it in the immediacy of 1292 and instead is like.

• 12:03Matt Lewis?

  And it's interesting that it, it kind of begins as a, almost a proxy war that you've got these kind of ships and a pirate war and no one is immediately saying, right, that's it. We're France and England are at war. It's almost like they're testing the waters a little bit because Edward I is, is happy to go and have a fight. Philippe IV is happy to go and have a fight. You've got there two kings, neither of whom are going to back down. And it's almost like they're both dipping a toe in the water and seeing how this goes. And it very quickly blows up into an international conflict.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, and you know, as I was writing this and putting it together, I remember this moment of thinking. There's no way just like one murder could result in something this big. And I was like, well, yeah, well, World War I, you know, Archduke Ferdinand was why would that result in that, you know, like, like it seems so improbable. And yet that's in fact, exactly what happened, right? You know, I mean, that, and it's not like Archduke Ferdinand was the prince of one of these main, you know, conflict states or whatever. It's just like that took this and it's a domino effect that that gets bigger and bigger and results in this enormous conflict. That's exactly what happens here.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  And it's, as you say, like, nobody in the immediacy of it is like, okay, well, here we go. But also nobody's backing down as each side ratchets it up a little bit. And to the point where again, the, the French king says, you know, well, you're in forfeit of, of your lands, get out and we're sitting in the army, which is exactly, of course, what we get then with Edward III, more famously. It's, it's the same story. It's the same things that are happening. And whether or not they are sort of as familiar to us is a bit immaterial, you know, in the end.

• 13:49Matt Lewis?

  So then does, as we move into the 14th century, does the build up to 1337, where we generally think of the Hundred Years' War beginning, does that take on a slightly different perspective when you look at it in this, as this longer conflict in that it seems like for a generation earlier, there was this desire for the French king to take away the English king's land and for the English king to be at war. It's almost like, you know, they were waiting for conditions to be right and they're both to be in the mood and 1337, like 1292 is maybe just one of those moments where everything aligns and, and it's back to all out war.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's exactly right. And, you know, yes, you have these periods and you have these, by the way, even if we kind of stick with the traditional, it's 1337 to 1453, that is not a period of continuous conflict. There are hot moments of hot war, but then there's Cold War. The whole thing is at least theoretically, one big war, but it is, yeah, in and out of the bloodshed. What's causing those lulls? There's lots of different reasons. Obviously, in the middle of it all is the Black Death. That puts a bit of a damper on the fighting for a bit. It's not many people to be around to fight. But there's also like economic reasons that that there'll be a lull. There's political reasons there'll be a lull from one side or the other. But it doesn't change the fact that they are still.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  The motivations are also there and they're still actively working to the disadvantage of the other side, whether it's economically or politically. Even when we're not militarily in the field, we're still engaged in this attempt from the French side, as I perceive it here, to establish a boundary of France that is consistent with what they believe France should be. And that I start the story going all the way back to Clovis and the coronation of Clovis as like, that's the memory they're going back to. It's Clovis, it's Charlemagne, like this is what France should be. And the English are in the way of that. And we have to get rid of them one way or the other. And it it takes two centuries to get that done.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  But with the piece of a top, the France has now defined itself and sort of modern France as we would understand it. And Calais is still in in English hands, but there's no, there's no sort of questioning whose land that is. It's an occupation. All of that is sort of like legally codified now as to as to what the borders are and what that means. And it took a lot, a lot of blood to get there. And that's, that's the reason for the book.

• 16:26Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And as we work our way through the the 14th century, when we're, you know, the middle of the 14th century is probably what we think of as the peak of the the Hundred Years' War, although it's it's early on in the Hundred Years' War that we we normally think of.

• 16:39Matt Lewis?

  How does that story move France along? And also, what are some of the key moments for you during that period that perhaps we've missed or not given enough emphasis to by looking at 100 years' war rather than looking at a, and probably looking at it generally in an Anglocentric way? Instead of looking at it as this longer period that is a French project about defining France, does that sort of alter your perception of what are the key moments?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I think it does. And this isn't to say that those moments we all know are unimportant, right? The Battle of Creuse, Agincourt, these are enormously important events. And I spend a lot of time in the book talking about them. But we're also missing a lot of peripheral events that are just as important for this conflict, in some cases more so. What's happening in the Low Countries, for instance, when we now think of as Belgium and the Netherlands, is utterly vital to every action from the beginning because both sides are well aware of how important the Low Countries are to England.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  The English economy, the backbone, is sheep, it's wool. Well, that wool becomes money when you ship it to the Low Countries and the textile industry's there. That may not be as sexy as talking about a battle, but it's kind of essential to it because you can't have a war without money. You've got to fund this whole thing. And both sides know it. So the French are doing everything they can to wrestle control of that region. The English are doing everything they can to push the French out of that region. It's a proxy war zone throughout this conflict.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  And if you're simply kind of thinking about the English king versus French king in kind of like a direct conflict way, you miss that. You miss the bigger picture here. We miss all the internal dynamics of what's happening on the French side. The French are not monolithic, any more really than the English are. Both of these sides are in the process of figuring out who the heck they are. And this story is, in some respects, the story of that. Invention, a discovery of a national identity. What does it mean to be English? What does it mean to be French? You know, for the English, one of the possible definitions would be a land-based definitions.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Well, that's got to change when you lose all these lands, which were at one point very, very extensive, like half of France. You can't say English were are from the island of England if they're in Bordeaux. So like, what is the mix of English? Is it then language? Is that what does it? Like, that is a process that is, of course, enormous ramifications for us today about how we define ourselves. And it's something that occurs in this story. And I think to really recognize it, you have, I can have to move off of the scale of just this is like a fight between kings in this little window. And it's these kings.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  I think you've got to take the bigger picture of what's happening in Europe and on the continent that that certainly I was never taught. And so I, and I think most people probably don't really kind of have that. And so really trying to get that to people was a major part of the book. And in large part because I needed to figure it out, like in order to write the dang thing.

• 20:17Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And when you view it the way that you do in the book, it starts to feel a lot more like both an existential fight for, as you described, what is it to be English? What is England? What is it to be French and what is France? So it becomes a much more existential thing than just fighting for, for money and land and battle and glory and battle. But then you also have to make it much more of a, an international kind of Western European war, rather than just England and France fighting and everybody sitting on the sidelines, you know, crossing their arms, waiting for these idiots to, to finish bashing each other. Because actually, everybody else around it is all involved in one way or another, either

• 20:59Matt Lewis?

  economically or politically, or they have a vested interest in one side winning or the other side losing.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Exactly so. Exactly so. I mean, you know, we, just as now, no, no state stands alone.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, some of them might want them to, but they just don't. That's not reality. So yeah, France exists in relationship to other states. England exists in relationship to other states. Some of those relationships are, again, political, economic, cultural. There's lots of different things that are going on, but they're not in a vacuum. And that makes what can look like separate fights, right? The fight that the English are having against the Welsh in 1400 with the Onglandor rebellion. I know you just recently did a podcast on that.

• 21:45Matt Lewis?

  To back up your wonderful film about it.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Let's all just compliment each other.

• 21:49Matt Lewis?

  Pat each other on the back for a while.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Cheers. So like that fight is not unconnected to the 200 years of war. It is integrally part of that war. You know, there's a reason that a French army shows up in support of Onglandor and marches into England, even though most people don't know about that. Like, there's a rationale.

• 22:08Matt Lewis?

  And who does Onglandor write to when he wants help?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, who does he write to? He writes to the French.

• 22:11Matt Lewis?

  He sends a letter to France.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  What are the Scots doing? Like, what the heck? How can the French help us? Because it's part of the same conflict. And that extends out, right, to the Holy Roman Empire plays a role in this. Like, obviously, all the Low Countries do. The Papal States play a major role in this because it ends up metastasizing into a almost quasi-holy war. When we got two popes running around and each side supports a different pope, because of course they do, so we can make it religious. In what we now think of as Spain, modern Spain, and in Portugal, the states there become proxy war zones. So it is a, yeah, a European conflict. I mean, as I say in the book, like, there is no state that survives this unscathed.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  They, everybody is changed by this. The map is literally changed by this. Like, the map of Europe we have today, here it is. Like, this is where that is coming from. It is from this fight. And that is a much bigger landscape, much harder book to write, honestly, but is more reality than thinking about these things in like vacuumed silos. You know, that exists independent of stuff, right? The story of Agincourt, like, to tell that story without the French side of it, and what's going on in the quarter of France? And why it is that only half of France shows up? Despite whatever the English propaganda is, you've only really fought half the other

• 23:39Speaker 01

  side because they're in the middle of a civil war. Oh, that makes a difference. That's a pretty integral part of all this. So yeah, throughout, really working hard to reconsider and reconfigure everything I'm seeing on what feels like a more appropriate level to the historical facts.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned, but Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 25:02Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and you mentioned Agincourt then, I wanted to move into the, particularly the first, say, third of the 15th century, because this is a point when the view of the conflict tends to be really Anglocentury, because you've got Agincourt, you've got those successes of Henry V, which drive him to the verge of the throne of France, and it feels like huge victory. And obviously, the English are celebrating that an awful lot. And that's the view that I think we have tended to take away. But what does this period mean when you consider the French view? What is this doing for this project of crafting France, that they are seeming to lose an awful lot of ground very quickly there?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Well, this is the period in which France is on the ropes. France has been split up into competing factions. And so Henry's not having to fight a unified France, which is enormously useful. Good show. I'm not trying to take anything away from Henry. In fact, I'm like, what a brilliant move. Like any, anytime you can attack your enemy and they're only half engaged is a good time to attack. Well done, buddy. But at the same time, what's happening as a result of Henry's successes is you are forcing the other side to coalesce its definition and response.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  In response to those losses, you are also kind of creating the space for the creation of a new ideology. And it really is the darkest moments of those days that plant the seeds for what we now think of as like the French monarchy and kind of all its sort of proverbial glory that's going to come out of this. That, that mentality, like, you know, son, king mentality kind of stuff to take it to its most extreme form in the coming centuries. Like that, that comes out of this and it comes out of these darkest years for France when it looked like for a hot minute that it was game over.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Like it could actually run, run out and England would take over. I honestly don't think that probably could have happened. I don't think that was possible, but certainly, you know, Henry V's death put that on life support and Joan of Arc showing up, it unplugged it. Like it was, you know, before Joan of Arc, there was a chance maybe that England could actually win this. After Joan, there's no chance. There's no chance. It's a done deal. It's just going to take a while to work out, but the math is, is too against them at that point, against the English. So yeah, it is, it is this period that again, as you said, we think of. As Anglo centric, we think of the Band of Brothers speech, we think of, we think of

• 27:55Speaker 01

  that. And then we're like, and that's kind of the end of the story. No, it's not. As I say, I'm, I've, I've made this joke before that at some point, I'm, I'm half worried that I'm going to get not allowed into, to England or something. Cause I say things like, y'all lost the war. Like you didn't win the hundred years war.

• 28:11Matt Lewis?

  I constantly say to everyone that we, the English are terrible at remembering Cressy and Poitier and Agincourt and forgetting that we lost the whole thing. We had a few really good moments in there, but we fought for a hundred years, 116 years and we lost.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And you lost. Yeah. And that, and look, that's okay. You didn't lose. It was back then they did. But yeah, it is so, the glory of those events, those, those three most in particular, but Agincourt especially, the not only kind of the historical reality of what a win that is, but the cultural weight of it, you know, with Shakespeare, with Olivier, with like, is this juggernaut that is so hard to get past. And it's hard for me to get past it. And I'm, I'm a bloody American, like, and I have trouble getting past that. I'm like, I'm like, yeah, man, once more into the breach. Like, all right. Like, oh,

• 29:06Speaker 01

  that, that never happened. Oh, shoot. Because it's such a good, a good story. And it, it means so much.

• 29:14Matt Lewis?

  You, you kind of almost need it to be true, even if it's not.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:17Matt Lewis?

  But it's striking that that, that kind of 15 year period or so from, from Agincourt to Joan of Arc's successes. Henry the fifth's initial success there creates again, that kind of idea of an existential crisis for France, that they are on the brink of being destroyed. And the, the problem, I guess, oh, I'm in danger of looking at it from an English point of view again here.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  That's all right.

• 29:39Matt Lewis?

  But the, the danger of it is that in crushing your enemies, or so nearly crushing your enemies like that, you galvanize them and you force them to ask questions about, do we want France to be torn apart and destroyed? If France is, is riven by faction, but if those factions start to think, if we don't come together, we don't have a country. Henry's success is almost driving the French project further forward accidentally?

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, exactly. So, I mean, this, the civil conflict in France.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  It's not like this sort of like overnight flicks a switch by no means, but it has planted the seeds for the solution, which is a more authoritative centralized state, a modern monarchy and a modern administrative state, a modern army, the modern taxation practices you need and all the administration for that. Like those things that we almost kind of like by default, think of as being in existence, right? That, you know, you have a, the government maintains an army and maintains taxes to support the army and to support its own state. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's birthed here.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Like this is when this happens. It's not to mention all the other things like gunpowder and everything else that happens in this fight. But that is, is a result of that darkness. As you quite rightly put it there, that you have by measure of your, your victory and the conditions of that really left the enemy with not a lot of choices. And it's again, not by any intention. And there's, and there's no way that Henry V could have possibly sort of processed that this was the way things were going to go. I mean, like, and that's not because I think he was not smart or something like that. You just, how could you actually kind of process that even today? Much less in a medieval mindset.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  But from the perspective of 2025, looking back, you know, you can, all right, I can see how this happened. And what a remarkable impact that had then on our world today. And the things that we hold dear and the definitions we hold of who we are, all taking place in this remarkable here with these remarkable cast of characters. Henry V is. Like him or not, utterly remarkable. Joan of Arc, utterly remarkable. Edward, remarkable. Like, it's just full of these, of this cast that, you know, the book

• 32:22Speaker 01

  needs to be five times as long to really give them all space, which is the reason why I laughed when, when Dan said you should write a one volume. Cause like, that's insane. How do you get all this in there? Cause they really are a remarkable cast and doing remarkable things. And it all has an impact. I just love this period.

• 32:41Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. As you've mentioned a couple of times, the book ends in 1492, exactly 200 years after it starts. And I want to get to 1492 and why that year in a moment. But we, we've traditionally ended the Hundred Years' War at the Battle of Castillon in 1453 with a French victory. The French win the war. Let's just remember that. So what happens kind of from, from Castillon to 1492? What is going on in that sort of 40 year period? That you still consider that the continuation of that war? Why hasn't it ended?

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Because nobody has said it ended. Now, to be fair, nobody really said it began. So this is a war that, that nobody declared, but nobody has declared it done. After Castillon, the English now have the War of the Roses. Like, you just go right off the cliff into that. And England's sort of dark days. And that is preventing sort of, you know, hot warfare, right? We're, we're not able to field an army to go into France because we're busy fielding an army to deal with people in England. But it doesn't mean that it's, that, that the motivations, the desire, the aim to everything is still not in play. I mean, you know, multiple times, as soon as somebody feels like they've got

• 33:58Speaker 01

  things settled, like for the moment, it's like, all right, let's go back to France. Like, let's raise an army and go back. And then things will fall apart and they can't quite do it. But the desire is still there. And there are in fact, a few occasionally do manage it and they do manage to go back and have an invasion. And 1492 is the, the last of these kind of big invasions where it's settled at what's called a piece of a top, where everybody signs off on effectively ending the conflict. And what has been transpiring in the intervening years is England having been sort of pushed off the immediate horizon, right? As, you know, the King of France, I don't

• 34:40Speaker 01

  have to immediately deal with the English because they're not here right now. Do they want to come back? Yeah, they want to come back. Are they probably going to come back? Yeah, they're probably going to come back. But I don't got to deal with them right now. So that means I can deal with these people right here. And France is now able to settle a lot of these internal disputes, like what is the place of Burgundy within, is it within France? And how is that going to function? What is the place of Brittany? Is it within France? How is that going to function? What is like, all of those fights now have to get settled. And once that's all done, we have essentially modern France. And then

• 35:23Speaker 01

  we get the piece of a top, which is like, England signs off on all that. So England, which had been using Burgundy and been using Brittany and been like, all these proxy fights that they've been engaged in. England says, no, all right, we're cool, man. Not going to do it. We're done. The English, to be fair, still hold a nominal claim to the, the King of France. That isn't officially abandoned until there was actually a post Napoleon.

• 35:51Matt Lewis?

  There is no King of France.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no King of France. That's finally when it's like, all right, all right, we'll stop making that claim.

• 35:57Matt Lewis?

  We're chopping the heads off the Kings of France. Anyone want to lay a claim? No, no, you're okay. We'll, we'll set that aside now.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  We'll set it aside. But, you know, even early on, I mean, Henry VIII, I, I end the book actually with this, with the Field of Cloth of Gold, which is an amazing event in any case. But, you know, this, this wonderful exchange where Henry VIII and the King of France are being sort of introduced. And by tradition, the King of France, or the King of England is Henry VIII is said to be the King of France, you know, King of England and of France. And Henry immediately like stops the proceedings and turns to the King of France and laughs about it and says, don't worry about it, man. Like, it's just a title we use and it doesn't mean anything. That's a really telling difference from where we started, or where we were in the middle, I should say, not where we started. But we're,

• 36:46Speaker 01

  you know, Edward III is like, no, no, this is serious. So yeah, the, this 1492 Is the end of the story of France defining itself? And therefore, England's sort of standing in the way of that. And therefore, this continental conflict, as it had been ongoing, is really kind of ended at this point. It doesn't mean England and France are now like jolly with each other. I think we all know that some stuff happened after 1492. Like, that continues, but now it has to kind of move to other landscapes. Right? It moves to my neck of the woods, right? It moves to the New World.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  It moves, it moves beyond and begins a process of imperialism and colonialism and all that that has wrought in our, in our history. So it is a, again, when I was like, oh, well, what's, okay, the piece of a top, that's pretty much it. And then it was like, oh, wow, that's, that's exactly 200 years. That's really cool. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I was like, mm, perfect. Couldn't have planned that better. But it wasn't, yeah, that wasn't, it wasn't like, oh, what, what happens in 1492 that I could pin all this on? It was kind of the other way around, but it, yeah, it worked out great.

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• 38:54Speaker 02

  After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned, but Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipscombe and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty. From Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:39Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I'm fascinated by that element of the story of the second half of the 15th century. So, you know, the Wars of the Roses is where I'm really at home in history. And again, there is a danger of thinking of that as an exclusively English affair. But actually, when you think about it, part of my reading of the second half of the 15th century is France turning the tables and where England has been almost continually attacking and invading and inserting itself into France. You begin to see this resurgent, newly confident France turning the tables and inserting itself into English politics. So when you think about the re-adoption, when Edward IV is kicked off the throne and Henry VI put back, who makes that happen?

• 40:21Matt Lewis?

  Louis XI of France makes that happen and supplies men to invade England and change who is on the throne of England. Edward IV will invade France in 1475, but it doesn't really get him anywhere except to get some a bunch of money. When Richard III comes to the throne in 1483, he's immediately building this alliance with Isabella in Spain, trying to drag in the Holy Roman Emperor and the Burgundians in a huge aggressive alliance against France. And what is France's reaction to this? They sponsor Henry Tudor's invasion of England in 1485 and they change who is on the throne of England.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, beautiful masterstroke.

• 41:00Matt Lewis?

  The King of France isn't claiming to be King of England, but what he is beginning to do is insert himself into English politics and have a say and an effect on who is on the throne of England. And, you know, 1492, why is Henry VII invading France? He's invading France because they're sheltering Perkyn Warbeck, who is claiming to be a rival to the English.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  You're right to kind of like that big scape, right? And the flip of that, because the dark days for France were when their king was mad. You had a mad king in France, and that absolutely crippled the kingdom. At the end of all this, you essentially have a mad king in England that cripples the kingdom. Yeah, and cracks everything, right? Yeah, the French king's grandson. Yeah, bizarre. I mean, and since it's not bizarre, they're actually, they're related by blood. And so it's, you could probably sort of like figure out the odds of this happening. We're, we're, we're pretty good. But, you know, the, the fact that the, that it has flipped that directly, you know, the mad king and then invasion and breaks everything, right? And the side has to pick up the pieces.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Everything is flipped now. Yeah, France is absolutely on top and England has to redefine itself to take account of that. Like, and it's bloody. It's not a state redefining itself is never, at least that I can think of in history, clean and, and everybody's just like shake hands and we're all good. It tends to be disastrously, tragically bloody. But hopefully, on the other side, things come out, I don't want to say better or whatever, but like, like that act is done now and now you have a, a restabilized state that can deal with whatever crisis it was. And which, again, I would say is what happens in England as well.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  It takes time and I have to sort of leave that story untold because I'm like, well, I'm telling the story of, of this conflict and that's over. The conflict that is now born in England will continue, obviously, and not be settled for quite some time. Fascinating though it is, I mean, obviously, you know, the War of the Roses and as you know more than anyone, is an incredible period of time. So, uh, yeah, well, I would have loved to spend more time there to do that. But even as it was, I had to cut. Something like 50,000 words out of this book to to have it that the publisher would actually publish publish it. So a lot of things had to had to hit the cutting room floor, unfortunately.

• 43:31Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and it's it's interesting to to think in 1492, it's potentially one of the smartest things that Henry VII does to to launch that kind of sharp invasion of France that leads to the piece of a tarpaulin, because maybe he, more than anyone else, having having benefited from French backing to take the English throne, can see that the the tables have turned, and now is the time to put an end to all of this, to sign the bit of paper, have some peace, set those boundaries before France do it to England again.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  And yeah, and get and get a lot of money in the process, right? You know, like, get get paid off, too, which is nice and needed. I I think that that moment is not been studied enough. I think it gets it gets lost, and it and it gets lost. The same thing, you know, going back to where we started, 1292, the pirate war. I think those are absolutely vital moments in history, but they get lost because they're overshadowed by the stuff around it. 1492 gets overshadowed, well, it gets overshadowed by, yeah, this Columbus guy does something, of course. But even on the kind of English historical scale, yeah, who who really writes about that, right? You you're now, you're you're involved in this other stuff that's going on. That's where the headlines are. That's where the

• 44:47Speaker 01

  neon lights are. And yet, it's not a small thing. It's not like he showed up in France with like 20 dudes. Like, it's a it's massive, really massive, and has tremendous outcomes. And yeah, we don't, we don't study enough. It gets sidelined. You know, I can't keep saying like, among the things I try to do in the book, but trying to sort of think about this wider story that that we haven't told, and bits of it that are incredibly important, we haven't told, because we've been too caught up on this traditional narrative and traditional definitions and periodization of things that I don't, I don't think really

• 45:30Speaker 01

  reflect reality and are costing us something of understanding ourselves as a result.

• 45:37Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I mean, you have very nicely and very professionally brought me directly back around to the the conversation that I wanted to end on about periodization. And I wanted to, I wanted to to ask what you think about Whether it's helpful to divide history up the way that we do, or whether we need to be a little bit more flexible, do we lose a kind of a macro view when we don't have a wide enough lens and we focus in on these narrow things? Or do we need, as historians and as humans, do we need these stories broken up into manageable bite sized pieces? Otherwise, it just becomes too much.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  I think honestly, both are true, right? You can't, as I just said, you know, like physically, this book has to exist, which physically means it needs to be X number of pages, which physically means like, like, so the story is somewhat defined by the need to produce something, just as, you know, like this podcast here, this episode, like it's got a definition to it so that we can actually have this conversation. We need that. We have to have that. But I think it's utterly vital that we are self-aware that what we're doing is kind of false, right? Not that it doesn't have value, but that if we think that those definitions

• 46:56Speaker 01

  are those, you know, like the starting and end timing of this conversation, that that somehow carries definitional weight in the world, that is bad. And that is not like, that means that we don't see the bigger picture. Just as I would say, in one day of the week, maybe I'm writing a very highly specialized academic article or essay or book or something that is very siloed, right? And I am like, talking to an audience of, I don't know, 25 people or whatever, like it's very siloed in what it's doing, very specialized in what it's doing. There's enormous value to that. But also, it's enormously limited. And it's

• 47:39Speaker 01

  limited not only in the scope of what it reaches, but also in the scope of its study, because it's getting into those really kind of fine details. And something is lost if that's all we had. Well, how does that connect to this other thing? Oh, I don't know. That's something else. We need to have both. We have to have this sense of the porousness, to go back to a word used earlier, the porousness of these labels, that they are convenient, they're useful. I mean, I'm a medievalist. Okay. Like, well, what the hell is medieval? I don't know. But it's useful to be like, well, but I'm not modern, you know, and like, okay, well, what's modern? Oh, well, come on now, like. All of these labels have a kind of nebulousness to it. Have use, that's great, that's awesome, but let's be honest about what we're doing.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  It was one of the tensions I actually felt in writing the book was here, I'm sort of pulling out the rug from underneath labels in order to produce a label. Like there's just kind of a central like, well, what am I doing? But I tried to explain certainly in the introduction, then come back to it at the end. Yeah. I also want to be transparent about what I'm doing. This is why I've used these definitions. This is why I've done it this way. And here's what I think we gain by using this kind of of labeling. But understand that all labels are not about the things themselves. They're about our relationship to it. It's us pushing things back onto the past. And that's always been the case and always will be the case.

• 49:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And I think what you mentioned about being self-aware when we apply these labels is perhaps the more of the most important things. It struck me as I was reading that, you know, when you traditionally box up the Hundred Years' War, it becomes about England's attempt to take the throne of France. When you look at it as a 200-year war that you have, it becomes about France's effort to define itself and make itself a functioning kingdom that can survive in the world without being attacked and invaded. So as soon as you put a frame around any kind of period, you're necessarily viewing it from a very specific angle. You know, you put a frame on it and hang it on the wall, you're looking straight at it, you can't see the sides anymore and you can't see what's behind it.

• 49:51Matt Lewis?

  So as soon as we do it, it becomes useful and it gives us a section, a manageable chunk to look at, but we need to be aware that we're getting a very particular view of it, which is quite often one-sided. You know, the Hundred Years' War can become a very Anglo-centric thing. The 200 Years' War is quite a Franco-centric thing. And as long as we're aware that we're doing that, it's fine. But if we lose our awareness, then we begin to skew our view of some of the history.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, this really is, I think at one point, I even toyed with calling it the 200 years wars. Because I wanted to sort of try and emphasize that this isn't, you know, there's no singular entity to it. You know, and even if you, when you read the book, you see how often I try to go back to primary sources as much as possible and quote them as much as possible. Like, okay, this is where this is coming from. And that that's not contained either, right? You know, I'm not looking at English sources or only at French sources or only, I'm like, who was there? I don't like, what side were they on is, is obviously relevant. But is not how I'm defining who I'm listening to.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  I'm listening to human beings who were engaged in this continental conflict. From all sides, from all backgrounds, like who has a voice? Let me hear them and let me bring those voices to, to people so they can hear them too. And if, you know, if in the end you walk away and say, well, yeah, I don't really buy a 200 years war. But also, yeah, the hundred years war kind of doesn't make sense. Okay, cool, great. I think it's that, it's that sense of kind of, again, breaking down those limitations that is most important to me. Whether they're periodization of time, chronology, or of, you know, definitions of linguistics or nationality. Like that, these are all just human beings and they were dealing with their world as human beings, just as we're dealing with ours.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  And we should approach them as such.

• 51:48Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and part of the danger, I think it feels like, is that if we think we have a settled view of the periodization of history, like there is a hundred years war. And you can't mess with that label. Well, actually you can, because you can just view it in a different way. And you can have the 200 years war as well as the 100 years war. They're just simply different ways of looking at a similar period in time that give you a different perspective on it. So they can all coexist together. And perhaps that what we need to take away is, is that we can be flexible about that periodization. It's not about putting one in the bin so that we can have a new one. It's about having them all lined up against each other and understanding the benefits and the limitations of each one.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I think exactly so. Well said, sir.

• 52:27Matt Lewis?

  Wonderful. I mean, that seems like a good place to end then. I'll end on a well said. Thank you so much for joining us again, Mike. It's been an absolute pleasure to chat to you again. And everyone who subscribes to History Hit can carry on enjoying your brilliant documentaries on medieval rebels and the Gone Medieval episodes that are supporting those as well. And I look forward to your next book and what that might challenge about what we think about history. But thank you so much for joining us, Mike. It's been an absolute pleasure as always.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Pleasure's all mine. Thank you, Matt.

• 52:56Matt Lewis?

  Mike's book, The 200 Years War, is out now if you'd like a fresh take on the conflict between England and France. You can also find Mike's previous visits to Gone Medieval to talk about the Battle of Cressy and the Battle of Agincourt in our back catalogue, along with others about the Hundred Years' War, including Jonathan Sumption talking about the end of the conflict. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday or Friday, so please come back to 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

• 53:35Matt Lewis?

  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 better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just Gone Medieval with History Hit.