How to Survive the 14th Century

Matt Lewis dives into the dramatic and transformative 14th century with historian Helen Carr, from the drama of the Peasants' Revolt, where commoners breached the mighty Tower of London and terrified a young King Richard II to the chaos of the Black Death and its surprising aftermath—an age of opportunity and change. From Edward II's controversial reign to Richard II's downfall, Matt and Helen uncover the gripping stories and seismic shifts of the 14th century to discover how resilience and upheaval forged modern Britain. MORE Peasants' Revolt https://open.spotify.com/episode/793WPDhg8myDcHJLk2jw2t The Black Death https://open.spotify.com/episode/0rfU8b4CEDUQZ9YOpH8X4o Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. 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://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK 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.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Most AI knows data. Toast IQ knows restaurants. It helps turn Detroit 75's numbers, plus what works across thousands of restaurants, into insights we can actually use. That's AI that's worked a double without a lunch break. Visit toastapp.com to learn more. Pay testimonial from an actual Toast customer.

• 1:03Matt 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.

• 1:41Matt Lewis?

  Travel back with me to the 14th century, a time when England was anything but the blessed plot Shakespeare described. More like a place of drama, disaster, upheaval, and resilience. Take for example June 1381, when London was gripped by chaos as thousands of rebels, peasants, artisans, and labourers stormed the city furious over crippling taxes and broken promises. In a dramatic twist, the unthinkable happened. The mighty Tower of London, long-considered impregnable, was breached not by an army, but by commoners.

• 2:27Matt Lewis?

  Inside, the terrified fourteen-year-old King Richard II and his household hid as the rebels seized control, executed top officials, and demanded justice. Yet, even as their hopes were dashed and their leaders slain, the rebels' courage and resilience echoed through history, challenging the foundations of medieval power and sparking demands for change. So what was it really like to live through famine, civil war, and plague? The centuries' crises shaped not just monarchs, but the lives of ordinary people, especially women, whose voices we can find in rarely-used petitions and court records.

• 3:11Matt Lewis?

  One particularly gripping story we'll explore is the mysterious case of Maude de Burgh, who claimed to be pregnant for nearly three years after her husband's death. Was this a calculated bid for power, or the tragic result of trauma and a misunderstood medical condition? From the death of Edward I to the turbulent rise of Henry IV, Helen Carr's new book, Sceptred Isle, explores the reigns of three pivotal kings, the devastation of the Black Death, and the seismic peasants' revolt. I'm delighted that Helen, a good friend of Gone Medieval, joins me today, and I want to ask her how we reconstruct the truth from biased chronicles and dry parliamentary

• 3:54Matt Lewis?

  roles, and find out about the detective work needed to read between the lines, question assumptions, and give agency to those too long overlooked. So today, we're going to immerse you in the sights, sounds, and struggles of a century that shaped modern Britain. Expect intrigue, heartbreak, and humanity, as we ask: was the 14th century truly the worst time to be alive? Or was it a crucible for resilience and change?

• 4:30Matt Lewis?

  Welcome back to Gone Medieval Helen. It's fantastic to have you join us again.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  No, it's really great to be here. It's nice to see you, Matt.

• 4:36Matt Lewis?

  And back to talk about your brilliant shiny new book, Septed Isle. I wonder if you could start off just by telling us what Septed Isle is about?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  So Septed Isle is a new history of the 14th century. So it starts with the death of Edward I, the accession of Edward II, and it ends with the deposition of Richard II in 1399, so 1307 all the way through to 1399, and covering some of the, hopefully most of the major events of the 14th century. So you have these three major kings, Edward III, Richard II, but then within that space of rulership, you've also got the Great Famine, the civil war in England with Edward II and Thomas Earl of Lancaster. You have the Black Death, famously right in the middle, 1348, the Hundred Years' War,

• 5:29Speaker 02

  you know, big famous battles like the Battle of Creasy, and then you also have the Peasants' Revolt, and it's jam-packed, full of dramas, as you're already getting a sense of. And then right to the end, you have the deposition of Richard and the rise of the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV.

• 5:48Matt Lewis?

  It certainly is a jam-packed century of not always very good stuff going on. Was there a particular reason that you wanted to try and tackle this whole century? Is it important for us to view what happens in context of what's happening around it?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, so I've always been very interested in characters and personalities in human beings. My first book was the biography of John of Gaunt, The Red Prince. And when I was telling that story, and the story of Gaunt's life, I sort of felt so constrained, as you are when you're writing biography, and I couldn't sort of go on these tangents into everything else that was going on around him. And I was fascinated with the first part of the century, you know, the 50 years before he was born. And I was also fascinated with some of the things that were going on during his lifetime, but that he had no real interaction with. So. What was so interesting to me was how he was shaped as a person by the events that were going on around him and as a magnate.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  But that applies also to the leaders and the kings and the people who were existing around him at that time as well. And as I said before, I wanted to tell that first part of the century. I felt like kings like Edward the Second hadn't really been given a huge amount of attention. And there hadn't really been much of a, an in-depth analysis as to his character. And his, his famous queen, Isabella of France, notoriously called a she-wolf. It felt like a, an important story to tell. And of course, right in the middle with the Black Death. That was the most appalling circumstance that reshaped humanity going forward into the rest of the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. So I felt like it was incredibly important to cover that too.

• 7:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and it's great, I think, to put all of the things in sequence, in context. You could get a book just about the Black Death. But this allows you to place all of those things in the context of, of the politics and the economics that's happening around all of the characters as well and the people. So it's, it's a really great way to approach what are seismic events in the 14th century. I wondered, before we get into some of the detail of the story as well, if you could tell us a little bit about the sources that are available for you to construct the 14th century. It's sort of, we're still in the medieval period, sources aren't always that, that good.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's, it's a lovely question. I love talking about sources. I get to really nerd out when I get asked this question because obviously you have the brilliant chronicle accounts of the period. And you have these wonderful characters. You have the Vita, the life of Edward the Second, and then in the Kings After. And you have brilliant French chroniclers like Jean de Vienne, you have Jean Poissard famously. And then, you know, you have the brilliant, scathing Thomas Walsingham, who just is cross with everyone. And he likes to be rude about all of the leading magnates at the time. But obviously, chronicle accounts are inevitably flawed. They are always taken from a personal reading. They're often written to appease their patron. They want to give a version of events that is going to be biased towards one side.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  As everything in history is written by Those terms, but also they're often from secondhand accounts. They're often written from the confines of a monastery. So it's very difficult for these authors, these historians of their time to really deliver a very accurate account. And often with these accounts read multiply. So when you have one account corroborating another. So for example, with the peasant revolt, we know a lot of what went on because you have multiple accounts corroborating what the other one's saying. So the anonymous chronicler who might have been there was also saying the same thing as Thomas Walstingham. He was getting a, you know, an eyewitness version of what had been going on. So they can be incredibly useful on those terms and you do get a sense of truth and reality through that.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  But you have to layer this with what is available in the records. So you go into the archive where a lot of things are actually brilliantly have been digitised and are available online through all sorts of different projects and things which are such a great source. I mean, there's so many of them, if you actually manage to delve into what's available. But I love going into the archives and most of the things I need are in the National Archives, which is incredibly helpful. And you're looking at, you're looking at things like King's Bench records, so core records. You're looking at parliament roles. So everything is like minutes, right? So it's like documented as to what is happening and being said during the course of parliament, which all being well, takes place twice a year. And so you'll get a really good detail of what's going on with all of these different accounts.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  And I really love working on petitions, which are a source that's not really used all that often, but I use them for my academic work. And petitions are a wonderful way to access what is going on for the people who are at the frontline. You know, they are experiencing the world as they are seeing it and they're writing to the king, to government and saying, I need help with X. So and so has taken illegally this portion of land. I need help through this. And you can sort of track the way these petitions make their way through the governmental systems. But what is also wonderful about them is it's one of the few sources available that we get a sense of direct voice from women. So these petitions, they're not.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Being written personally by women, they're being erated to clerks and you get this wonderful sense when you're reading them of almost performative action. So you can almost see the way that women are moving their bodies, the way that they're expressing themselves. And it's just such a valuable source to me. And I tried to incorporate these within the book, particularly in relation to the ongoing war with Scotland and the women living in those borderlands.

• 11:25Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, because I guess the issue is you've got that section of the chronicles, which, as you say, you know, they're quite often biased, they're quite often a bit snarky. They've got a message that they're trying to convey. And then against that, you've got the slightly drier governmental paperwork, which gives you numbers and dates and who was going where, but doesn't necessarily why, doesn't give you much motivation for why things are happening. So I guess it's trying to feed those together to shuffle the deck and come up with a fuller picture. But it sounds like petitions are kind of a good halfway house. You've got some court paperwork, but it's actually coming from an ordinary person who's explaining their issue with the world that they're living in.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I think that something I do a lot as well is I spend ages just sort of, even with parliament roles, like reading the detail very carefully and going back and reading it again. And as historians, like one of the major things we do is we ask questions of the source and you can draw out more from these records than might necessarily just even you might think that's what's available to you on the page. So for example, it totally depends on the way you are reading it. I'm reading it from the perspective of a woman. I'm looking at it through, you know, a young woman, a woman who's a mother, I've had children. So I'm going to empathise and feel differently when these sorts of cases about women and childbirth and children come up in the record.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  And you see things through a different lens. And often, particularly in relation to talking about women or more marginalised people, the court records are phenomenally biased because they're written from the perspective of the privileged. And so you have to use that brilliant tool of reading against the grain. So you're sort of reading against what it's saying. And you're questioning, is this truth or why is this person? And being spoken to by these terms, why are they being referred to by these terms? What is that actually telling us? So it's kind of like reading this very small source. You might have three lines and you're looking at it again and again and saying, this doesn't, hang on. If they're talking about this person by these terms, does that not mean X? Or could that mean Y?

• 13:29Speaker 02

  An example of this, which I found in the course of researching this book, was the case of Maud de Berg, who we might go into looking at the De Clare sisters later on in the podcast. But Maud de Berg was the wife of the recently deceased M Earl of Gloucester, who was killed at the Battle of Banockburn. And after the death of her, of her husband Gilbert, she claimed she was with child, she was pregnant. And what's so fascinating about this case is it's quite a famous one. That Hugh despense the younger couldn't get her lands, the Clare sisters couldn't claim their rightful inheritance. Because they had, there was this potential heir coming, right? So Gilbert's sisters, who would have been the next in line to inherit the property, had to wait, everyone was waiting, is this baby, what is, what's going on?

• 14:13Speaker 02

  She claimed to be pregnant for almost three years and we know that is biologically impossible. And previously, this has always been assumed that she was lying. And when I was reading through the, the case and I was looking at the record and what was said about her, there was an instance that inspectors had gone to look at her. And importantly as well, people within her vicinity had seen her to be with child. The meaning of this was she looked like she was pregnant. She appeared to be pregnant, she was investigated for pregnancy. So with all of this in mind, that seems like a very elaborate lie. And when you think about the experience that she'd been having, the trauma of losing her husband, the stress of the expectation,

• 14:56Speaker 02

  the knowledge that a widow without a child, without a son to protect her is in a more vulnerable position. It seemed rational to me that Maud might be experiencing what is not an uncommon condition, which is pseudocyesis, which is a false pregnancy. So in fact, contrary to what has previously been assumed from, from a very male historical gaze, that she was lying, I actually don't think she was, I think she was unwell.

• 15:26Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And I guess, you know, between the stress and the desire, the desire to be pregnant, all of that is feeding into creating the situation in which, yes, it's easy for us to look back and say she was just lying to drag things out. But as you say, thinking about it from a slightly different angle, there's potentially so much more to that story than just a fib to try and get an inheritance.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It seems like, it seems like quite an elaborate one, you know, I think she was actually probably deeply vulnerable, probably incredibly confused. And was, was really appallingly victimised and treated thereafter.

• 16:03Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. So you mentioned that at the start, the book deals with three kings. And even that's not simple for you, is it? Because we've got two that are deposed, one that rules for kind of half the century, two that are considered amongst the worst medieval kings of England. One that's considered potentially the best medieval king of England. So you've got kind of all kinds of extremes going on in there. How did you find that Edward the Second, Edward the Third and Richard the Second approached kingship? What were the differences in the ways that they got it right and got it wrong?

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. And I think these three kings are a fantastic example of medieval kingship in the sense that they do it so differently. You know, they are example of how to do it right and how to do it wrong and the mistakes that they make, what they value, what's deemed important as a leader and as a king. And what people around you value. And also what historians in the future have valued and people in the future have valued, you know? Do we value a king who doesn't really have as much interest in war and just wants to focus on the realm and his image, you know, how he's represented? Or do we value a king who wants to take armies into France and conquer and be victorious? But in the process of that, also ending the lives of a lot of innocent people.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  So it also begs the question is, how do we think about kingship? And these kings do do it very differently. I think a lot of this comes down to power and how they use it. And you're with Edward the Second. He is an interesting case study of kingship in that he is actually going into his rule as an incredibly vulnerable man. His father was a bully. I mean, it's no doubt that Edward, Hammer of the Scots, Edward the First, Edward Longshanks was a fearsome man. He was scary, he was intimidating, and he made no secret of the fact that he would punish his son when he didn't stand up to what he valued as his heir. He was treated quite aggressively in his youth. And so when he comes to the throne, he needs the support of people around him.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  He's not coming to it feeling buoyed up by a sense of his own importance and a duty to do right by the realm and come on, let's get going, let's go to war with the Scots and sort them out, just like my father was. He was somebody who didn't really know what to do. And what he looked for was strong minded, strong willed individuals to tell him, don't worry, Edward, I've got your hand, let's do this together. And what he did by doing that was he destabilised the traditional hierarchy of power in the Middle Ages. You have the king, think of your GCSE feudal pyramid. You've got the king right at the top, then you have the nobility, the immediate nobility with, you know, that royal blood pulsing through their veins beneath them. And then you have the serfs all the way down at the bottom.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  And what Edward did by prioritising favourites like Piers Gaverstone is he took somebody who was just your average squire, who wasn't even English. He was from Gaskiny, he was a Gaskin knight. He brought him up, elevated him, created him Earl of Cornwall, which is putting him power wise and land ownership on the same level as as people like the Earl of Lancaster, who was Edward's cousin. This is a grandson of Henry the Third. He's putting him on that pedestal and that's going to really irk the nobility. It's going to make them cross. They're saying, hang on a minute, this is really confusing. We're supposed to be supporting you, we're supposed to be, you know, never questioning your judgment and your kingship, but you're sharing your power. And you're relying on guy.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And the power and the support of this person who we consider beneath us. And so Edward continued to keep making that mistake. He kept pushing his favourites, he kept destabilising that very accepted structure of authority that worked, that had been proven to work. And that was his greatest mistake.

• 19:48Matt Lewis?

  It sounds like what Edward the Second is doing then is he's taking that feudal pyramid that we all know so well, whether it's real or not. But the point of the feudal pyramid is it has that broad base that provides support to the top. And what he's doing is narrowing it at the top, is almost putting a spire on top of it, which makes it precarious. A spire can blow over in the wind. You know, so he's, he's making that stable structure much less stable, which means that he has to be so much better to keep it all together, which he doesn't quite seem to manage to do.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  No, he doesn't manage to do it. And it doesn't help that he is not a military strategist. He's unable to win battles. I mean, the Battle of Banockburn was the worst military disaster of the Middle Ages. It's been compared to the Battle of Courtrou in France, which was, you know, Battle of the Golden Spurs, which is claimed that it was the entire destruction of the flower of French nobility. And the same happened with the Battle of Banockburn. It completely rendered the northern frontier, the northern borderlands vulnerable to attack. And Robert Bruce, after that, was able to completely take over the north of England, demanding tribute payments. He made an extraordinary amount of money from people on those northern borderlands

• 21:00Speaker 02

  just by demanding tribute payment from them, millions by today's standards, by people just saying, look, I'll pay you, just don't raid me. And that's how he was so successful, because Edward was completely unable to defend the northern border because he had lost at the Battle of Banockburn so many of those important northern lords who were, who were supposed to be using their power and their strength, their money to protect those lands. And they were just, they were wiped out.

• 21:27Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And I think I was struck by, if you deal with those three kings, Edward the Second, Edward the Third, Richard the Second. There's not much of an element of any of the three of them being particularly nurtured to be good kings, and yet you get two bad ones and one good one. None of them really have that training. You said Edward the first, not a great dad, big old bully. Edward the third is following Edward the second, who is deposed for being an awful king. Richard the second comes to the throne as a child and his education as a king is largely ignored. So it suggests that there's a strong element of nature about being a good or bad king, rather than nurture.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  I totally agree. And I think this is the thing. When we think about kings, it's always this idea of, oh, they're a king, therefore they must behave and act in this way and be this sort of person. And actually, they're not. They're individuals, they're human beings. And they will come to the role with very different prerogatives. It's interesting that you say the idea that Edward the third, going on from Edward the second, he wasn't really trained. I think to an extent, he was, but not by his father, but by his mother. Some of the major characteristics that you see in the reign of Edward the third, I think, are taken from his mother, Isabella of France. For example, his desire to emulate and recast himself in the image of King Arthur, which was very clever political device in order

• 22:43Speaker 02

  to get the masses on board and really get his nobility behind him, creating this sort of fraternity of noble lords. It was absolutely genius. But I think he got that from his mother, who was known to enjoy the Arthurian legends. She and Roger Mortimer used to dress up as Arthur and Guinevere and, you know, have their sort of courtly romances played out in their evenings together. And I think that Edward, he saw all of this. And I think he used that side of his mother's very skillful way of presenting herself through legend, through dress. So for example, when she went over to France and refused to come back, she started to wear black because she claimed that she was a widow because of this pharisee

• 23:26Speaker 02

  who had come between her and her husband. Her marriage was effectively ended. And so she treated it as if she was in mourning for her marriage. It was very, very clever. And I think that Edward, he took all of that on board. But I think also, he was bright and he watched everything that went wrong in his father's reign. And he saw how important It was to keep your nobles on side and he knew that the nobility made the country, the realm strong. The nobility supported the king. And so what he did is he created the Order of the Gato, which was initially called the Order of the Round Table. And he had all of his nobles, his friends around him, the people that he wanted also to give him money to fund his wars in France.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  And he made them part of something. And there's something very clever in that. That's a very human instinct to want to be part of something and feel like you're important. And he knew that and he did that very successfully. In regards to Richard, I think what's fascinating about Richard is he absolutely had no training for kingship. He was never supposed to be king, supposed to be his father or his brother, but with both of them dead, it fell to him. But Richard was so coddled and cosseted. It's like he's wrapped in cotton wool. He was told from a very early age how important he was, how godly he was, you know, he was born on the Feast of Epiphany, the sixth of January. This is a sign, this is a portent symbol, you are divine. And so it's no surprise really that he sort of carried that on to him into his reign.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  And where he came up against conflict was because he was there trying to be like, I want to rule, I want to show that I can rule. But he had no idea how to rule. He was tyrannical and he was petulant. It was this, it was like having this sort of gung ho teenager who wants to take your car out for a spin without a driving licence. And that's what it was like trying to contain Richard in his late teens. So it's no wonder really that this young man, he has such a buffed up sense of ego and importance, turns out to be how the tyrant that he did.

• 25:21Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I mean, I always think with Richard the second that most teenagers think they know better than everybody else and that they're special. And the world revolves around them. But you add to that the fact that he's actually been told that for the whole of his life by everybody. And that he has the, at least theoretically, he has the power and authority of a king, even if he's not always allowed to wield it. And it's kind of a recipe for disaster, isn't it? It's reinforcing every bad thought that he has.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:45Matt Lewis?

  And then launching him onto the political stage as the most powerful figure in the country and wondering why it goes wrong.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Totally. And you can imagine that moment in the peasants revolt where he rides up to the, to the rebels and he's like, I'm your king. And they're all like, oh, yeah, amazing, Rich. You can imagine all the nobles like gone up in Scotland being like.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Because it's just not helping, you know, this idea that like, oh no, but my realm, my people love me. Yeah, he's a funny one. He's a fascinating character, Richard. I find of all the kings, actually, for me, Edward and Richard are sort of psychologically the more interesting figures.

• 26:18Matt Lewis?

  And I do, you know, I say quite often, I think we're still trapped in a slightly 19th century Whiggish view of what makes a good and a bad medieval king in that, you know, if you go to war with France and you're successful, you're a great king. If you start to build the institutions of government that Victorian England, you know, love to revel in, you're a good king. If you don't contribute anything to that, you're naturally bad without too much exploration of any alternative around them. So it's, it's good, I think, to see Edward the second and Richard the second place kind of either side of Edward the third and their, their lives considered more fully than just being the bad king that came before and after the great Edward the third.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:56Matt Lewis?

  You touched on Isabella of France a bit there. I did want to talk about the queens that are alongside these kings because they're fascinating characters in themselves as well. And I guess the one thing I'm struck by when we're talking about particularly Edward the second and Richard the second, two kings that end up getting deposed, is that the real moments of crises come for them when their wives are gone for differing reasons, but it's Isabella abandoning Edward the second that really causes him the final catastrophe. And Richard the second seems to change, I think, after the death of Anne of Bohemia as well, almost like she was a calming influence on him. So I wondered what you felt about the influence that the, the queens had throughout that century too.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's, Isabella and Edward's relationship is very interesting because through the popular lens, it's this idea that it was a terrible marriage. They never got on. He was always kind of with his men and she was having affairs left, right and centre. And it really didn't look like that. Early on, when they were first married, she was a child. She was very young. She's, you know, years away from being able to conceive children, but they still spent time together. They still, you know, they seemed to get on. He gave her lots of nice gifts and he, you know, he acted on her behalf. He asked her advice. And also, I think.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  He seemed to respect her. He respected her as a princess of France. He revered her position and Isabella also had a very strong sense of her own legality and who she was and her own importance as well. It all sort of seemed to go very well for a long period of time. I mean, they had children. There's this famous example of when they were at her father's court in Paris. Their room or the room they were sharing one night in a pavilion actually was set alight. And there was this fire and Edward, naked, carried Isabella out of the fire. They were both completely naked because they'd been having like passion together. And she had burns on her arm and this is corroborated in her wardrobe accounts. You see her paying for an apothecary to go and sort of get the materials to heal her arm wound.

• 29:09Matt Lewis?

  This time of year can easily just feel a bit off. The days get shorter, the routines change and honestly, you might just find yourself feeling irritable, perhaps a little less motivated or a bit more tired. Just getting through things feels like more of a slog than normal. It might feel easier to just push through it or even try and ignore how you're feeling and just blame the season. But if it's starting to affect your day to day life, talking to a therapist can help you to better understand why you're feeling like this and can genuinely help. That's where Ruler comes in. Ruler makes it easier to find a licensed therapist who meets your needs and importantly, takes your insurance.

• 29:52Matt Lewis?

  You don't have to spend weeks searching or sitting on a waitlist. They partner with over 120 insurance plans and the average copay for Ruler patients is just $15 a session. Ruler helps you pick a therapist based on your goals, preferences and needs, with appointments available as soon as tomorrow. Getting support shouldn't add another layer of stress. So let Ruler lighten the mental load. If this time of year has you feeling less like yourself, talking to someone can be a good place to start. Visit ruler.com forward slash medieval to get started. That's R U L A dot com forward slash medieval.

• 30:35Matt Lewis?

  You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  There are two types of business owners, those who are busy and those who want to be busy. Toast is designed for both with tools to keep you humming and help turn grind into growth. That's how you turn busy into business. Toast, built for busy.

• 31:00Matt Lewis?

  Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

• 31:58Matt Lewis?

  And that's also something that you might find out in a romantic fiction novel and think this is a bit extreme, you know, the heir to the realm, or the king carrying his wife out naked from a pavilion that's on fire. It is a strikingly romantic moment in their relationship.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Totally. And, you know, there's a, in the same, on the same trip, Edward was late for a meeting with her father because he overslept with Isabella because they'd been sort of, you know, having a great night the night before. It all really went wrong much later on and quite quickly. Even in the time of Piers Gaveston, Isabella and Gaveston spent time together. She seemed to quite like Gaveston. She didn't really have much of a problem with him. The real issue came with Hugh Despenser. Hugh Despenser, the younger. See, before Dispenser and in the early years of Dispenser, Isabella was on Edward's council. She was aware. She acted as a queen with aplomb. She did all the right things. She would intercede. Interceding for people was a major part of queenship, where she would go to her husband and say, this person has requested extra me.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Please would you consider this as my personal plea on behalf of X? And she also, there was that amazing moment with the siege of Leeds Castle. Isabella was in on this plot to try and capture the Baddlesmears as traitors and really managed to sort of pin the Earl of Lancaster down as a traitor, which all, you know, climax with the Battle of Borough Bridge. Isabella was a major part of that. So she was very eager to step in as Edward's queen and act with authority, with leadership, even military skill. Like, she was fascinating, but it all went wrong after the Battle of Borough Bridge. And Edward started to get very paranoid. Hugh Dispenser was, he really was a character dripping poison in the ear of the king.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  And Dispenser was also incredibly greedy. He targeted the widows of the Battle of Borough Bridge for their lands. You know, these are women who were left, their husbands, who were major landowners in England, killed as traitors. And he went after their lands. He's like, I want their lands, I want to be richer and richer and richer. And the opportunity arose for Dispenser to start targeting Isabella when her husband, when Edward had a fallout with her brother, the King of France. And I won't go into that too much because it gets very dull and again, it's just all over homage and gaskony and yada yada. But she, in a nutshell, Edward starts to punish Isabella basically for being French. So he removes all of the French members of her court, her household, he has many of them arrested. And then he also strips Isabella of her lands in the Earldom of Cornwall, which is the lands

• 34:27Speaker 02

  she had in Cornwall, which were incredibly valuable to her, not because they necessarily generated a huge amount of money. Edward gave her an allowance. I don't think it was so much about the money, it was about her agency and her individuality and her ability to rule in her own, by her own terms, to manage land. It's freedom, effectively, it's a woman's freedom. And he took them away. And so she went off to France on behalf of Edward on a diplomatic mission. And I think something shifted there. But really, it was that moment where he stripped her of her lands and she saw Hugh Dispenser is more important to my husband than I am. And he's a dangerous man and he's not on my side. And she writes from France when the Pope is intervening and also the Treasurer,

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Walter Stapleton, she writes from France that she is too scared to return for fear of the, of what would happen to her. She fears that Dispenser is so vile that he would kill her, he would do something awful to her. And I think, I think that's real. I don't think that's her being dramatic as it might have been depicted in the past. I think this is a woman genuinely afraid of the avarice and the rapaciousness and the true villainy of a very dangerous man. And I think she was aware of it.

• 35:40Matt Lewis?

  For me, Isabella seems a really good, she gets cast as this she-wolf of France later on. But for me, she's a really, really good example of how a queen can leverage her power. She's saying, I'm too scared to come home. What she's saying is my husband can't protect me. That's, that's casting shade at Edward in a big way. Wearing black that you mentioned earlier and portraying herself as having been widowed because her husband is, these are all kind of challenges to Edward in a way that people recognise her, almost challenging his authority in an acceptable way, which is a hard thing for a queen to do.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think her relationship with Roger Mortimer is interesting on these terms as well. She never made it secret that they were, you know, in cahoots. And, and I believe, you know, there's some, there's some questioning whether they were, how in a sexual relationship. I mean, I think they, they were. But, because Edward in effect say so later on. But what is interesting is she's not hiding it. And she's actually showing that Mortimer is with her. They are now 18, whatever that looks like. That is some sort of adultery. But by medieval terms, by her making this an obvious thing, she's shaming Edward because traditionally, by medieval standards, it was often a man that was punished for the adultery of his wife because he couldn't

• 36:59Speaker 02

  care for his wife. He couldn't be in charge of her enough that she wouldn't go off and be adulterous. And I think that she's using that kind of, um, demasculinating rhetoric against Edward. She's making him look weaker by exposing. Her and Mortimer as something that is a more powerful cohesive unit.

• 37:20Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and I guess with Edward III, you see Philippa of Hanult acting as kind of almost an ideal queen. She is beside him, working as a team throughout his reign. They seem like a really successful couple.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Victorians loved Philippa of Hanult because she basically just did as she was told and had lots of babies.

• 37:37Matt Lewis?

  Stayed quiet and did as she was told, yeah.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  No, she was great and she's a wonderful example of intercession as well at the Siege of Calais in thirteen forty six. So you have that incredible vignette of the Burgers of Calais coming out with the ropes around their neck. And famously, it's the heavily pregnant Philippa who begs her husband to spare the lives of these men. And so intercession is a really important part of queenship. And you see Anne of Bohemia doing that later with Richard the Second as well. But Philippa was a deeply loved queen. She was loved by her people. She took the role of queenship very seriously. She wanted, she invested very much in trade and helping things like the wool trade develop and helping people, helping factories grow and emerge. So people, the people in England could start creating

• 38:23Speaker 02

  their own cloth. She was very invested in that sort of economic development and also academic development in the founding of colleges. And so I think she was a much beloved queen. And I think Edward III really did, I think he really caved in actually when she died. You know, you saw a different side to Edward after the death of Philippa. It was like he'd always given up a bit. He had this very successful martial king that was so strong, just sort of reduced to the sort of slightly decaying older man, really, who's just staring from his throne, isolated with his mistress, sort of being the only point of interest for him by that point. And Richard, after the death of Anne of Bohemia is also interesting.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  I think Anne was a very levelling presence in Richard's life. I think they got on very well. They were very, they were close. I think they were very good friends. I think she was gentle with him. And I think she listened to him. And I think that she, she didn't push him. I think she had a very similar space for him as his mother had, Joan of Kent. And I think that Joan of Kent was a, again, a very, very good mediating figure. She was calming. You know, these medieval queens, if only the world was run by them, right? Wouldn't have all, wouldn't it have been a much better space?

• 39:43Matt Lewis?

  I think I'm with you on that because I just, I do think, you know, when Anne of Bohemia dies, you do see a switch. I mean, it's interesting that you mentioned it. It's when Isabella abandons Edward the second that things really changed for him. Edward the third, you know, almost becomes an old man overnight when he loses Philippa and Richard's vindictiveness reaches its pinnacle when Anne is no longer there to kind of restrain him, whether that's with with soft restraints, you know, that she she understands him a little bit.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  It is soft power. These queens are brilliant at exercising soft power and it's very effective.

• 40:17Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. We talked a little bit about it earlier with the petitions, but I wondered how easy it is to get at some of the stories of more ordinary people, kind of outside of royalty and the nobility, and why it's important to try and do so as well.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think that was the danger with Septile Isle, that I didn't want it to end up being a series of potted biographies. I wanted it to feel as if my reader is getting a sense of what the world looked like as well. And I think that I did this through covering some of the more social events of the time, the major sort of social upheavals. So the right at the beginning, you have the Great Famine, and then you have obviously the Black Death in the middle, and then increasing sort of episodes of war, et cetera, coming through in the in the second part of the 14th century. So for the first part, so just covering the famine and the Black Death, there are some great examples in the record. I mean, on more dull terms, and frankly, I mean, I'm sure that I

• 41:14Speaker 02

  will get some economic historians kind of, you know, getting cross when he's saying this, but I did look at the manorial accounts and manorial records and so dull, but it does give you a sense as to sort of what the layman is experiencing in terms of very basic means of sustenance and existence for people in the first part of the 14th century was living off the land. And when you have a famine or you have a moraine of cattle, which is for basically first, it was just years of rain. It just didn't stop raining. People were unable to bring in the harvest. And so you can look at what the impact of that was, and then that was followed by a moraine of cattle. So you, a lot of cattle and livestock died from like a Effectively a plague on livestock. And so what that caused was famine.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  And you do read more apocalyptic accounts from the chronicles about people eating like, you know, unclean things, as they call it. But I can imagine it pushed the point of starvation. People did, but did do some, some strange things. And um, I think looking at the, the impact of these major environmental disasters, how do people respond to that? It's very difficult always to get to the individual. But what you can do is take a more macro look on what these sorts of disasters and how they impact societies as a whole and communities as a whole. So you can look at the way that villages might be abandoned, people moving to more urban areas. What does that mean? You see that a lot after the Black Death.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  The Black Death, fortunately, as the historian writing now, has been very well documented. There are wonderful collections of source, the primary source material that have been collaborated in order to make my life a lot easier. So I can't say that I was there sort of scanning the archive myself, finding all these wonderful little new bits of information about the Black Death. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants when it comes to that. You know, Rosemary Horrocks, the famous collection of her edited volume of all of the Black Death material. I have about two copies, I think, on my bookshelf. It's just a fantastic source. I also found it was very interesting for me in relation to the Black Death to look at it on a more global perspective. So I was reading accounts from Syria to see how, how it spread.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  I was looking at more of the epidemiological accounts. So historians like Monica Green writes a lot about it. You know, it's, we write this historians now and it's like, it's not all, it's fine. We do our own research as well from primary, from primary material. But a lot of it is, as I say, standing on the shoulders of giants and reading the work of fantastic historians that have been working over the last 50 years and sometimes even beyond. So in regard to understanding more social histories, it's a real case of, yeah, trawling through the record and finding these little nuggets of information that just stand out. They jump out at you, don't they, sort of off the page? And I remember when I was working on the Black Death, one of the sources

• 44:02Speaker 02

  That I like to look at just completely between me and the original source was wills. So I did look at a lot of wills and how people responded. Oh, I tended to look at mostly from thirteen forty nine onwards because we may as well not bother with thirteen forty eight. It's not, that's not enough time has been spent really. So in the thirteen fifty s, you start to see a kind of pattern of behaviour, what people are doing, how people are giving away their things that they value, the things they treasure, the material culture of the period. And there were wonderful examples of humanity, actually, and love and care and real consideration for one's community and parish, in which these spaces were so important to people in this period.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  And then later on, after that, to access the voice of of more of the masses, I was very interested in the culture. So looking at artistic movements as we kind of move, not quite to the Renaissance, but closer. Uh, so the way that people were depicting death and grief and how they considered their immortality, I found very interesting. And it does, you know, art gives a sense as to what society is experiencing. It's a mirror image of lots of different things, of politics, of societal norms of the time, of of what's going on in the world around us. And so, yeah, I think as a historian of the Middle Ages, you have to look at multiple different sources to get a sense of what people were experiencing.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  And as a historian of emotions, I do work on emotions. One of the ways that we access emotions is treating it as like a, as like a mirror image. So you look at a source, but you have to treat the source like a mirror. What's that source sort of reflecting back? And I think that when you're thinking about your layman and the average person, that's a very helpful way of looking at things. So, yeah, I think, you know, altarpieces, wall paintings, you can still go and see some amazing medieval wall paintings that were painted around this time. And it does give you a sense of what the world that people were existing in and and what they felt about it.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Most AI knows data. Toast IQ knows restaurants. It helps turn Detroit 75's numbers, plus what works across thousands of restaurants, into insights we can actually use. That's AI that's worked a double, without a lunch break. Visit toastapp.com to learn more. Pay testimonial from an actual Toast customer.

• 46:38Matt Lewis?

  Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week.

• 47:35Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, fascinating. Do you have a favourite person from the century, from the book, who sticks out for you?

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have a favourite king and I have a favourite person. I think I'm really interested in Elizabeth de Bourgh. I think she's fascinating. She wrote this brilliant scathing protest against the dispensers, which I went to see and read. And she's just, there's this wonderful self-defence against her, who she is. They have treated her so badly, where she's been so maligned by her uncle the king. And I think she was very strong and just an incredible woman. I mean, this is a woman who... Was expected to go to bed with a man who is not the father of the baby she had birthed six weeks earlier because her uncle told her to. And I just think that there's a lot more to look into as to the role of noble women in that respect. And I know that's done on more

• 48:24Speaker 02

  academic spheres, but as a more public historian, I think they often are quite marginalized, these women. So I love Elizabeth de Berg, she's fascinating. Love Edward the Second. I just think he's, he's really interesting. I think actually he's got this terrible reputation, thanks to Mel Gibson and Braveheart, but he was just this sort of fop, that he was, you know, only, there's this wonderful scene, isn't there, Braveheart, where he's carrying a mirror, or a mirror's being carried around Westminster Palace, and he's there sort of, you know, carry on, and kind of draped in furs and ermine. And for me, that's not the Edward that actually is, was. He was a man who, he really loved his people, he was fascinated with, he loved going, watching people dig ditches,

• 49:06Speaker 02

  he loved rowing, he was very active, he was incredibly generous, he was sporty, he was good looking, he was fun, he was really funny. Like, he and Piers Gaveston, you could imagine them just laughing and really just taking the piss out of the nobility. Gaveston had all these wonderful nicknames for the nobility. He called, you know, the Earl of Warwick a burst belly, he called Lancaster a churl, which is effectively like calling him a peasant. And he just, I found actually another nickname, when I was looking at the accounts in the record, I found that he called one of his valets, he called him Richard Whiteface, that's effectively same as calling him pasty face. So he was just, they were just quite funny, they would laugh together. And I think there's a side to Edward that's been definitely misunderstood. And I think he's a

• 49:51Speaker 02

  very complex and nuanced man. So yeah, I think of the, of the two characters of the book, amongst many, I think those two initially are the ones that's a jump out to me when you ask me that question.

• 50:04Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And, and anyone who's a History Hit subscriber can find out a little bit more about Edward the Second from you in a brand new film that's out the same day as this podcast. So hopefully they can tune into this and then tune into that.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  All right, I'm doing like a History Hit takeover.

• 50:17Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  On the 29th, on the 29th of May, clearly.

• 50:21Matt Lewis?

  Helen Carr Day.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:25Matt Lewis?

  Do you have a favourite kind of moment in the 14th century, an event or something that was happening that really stood out and you thought that was great, I'd love to have been there for that?

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, I don't know if I'd have wanted to be.

• 50:39Matt Lewis?

  I mean amidst a terrible century, there's so many things you wouldn't want to be there for.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, do you know what, there is, I think to be in the court of Edward III in the 1350s, 1360s would have been pretty cool. Like, you know, this is him throwing parties where he's dressed as a pheasant. This is these incredible jousts and tournaments, you know, they were a spectacle. He knew how to throw a party. And one of the brilliant sources that I looked at in regards to Edward's hedonism and his wife's hedonism, Philip's hedonism as well, was called these jousting letters, which you can, they're not really, they're up in Edinburgh, they're hard to access to go and see, but they're just amazing. And

• 51:25Speaker 02

  they are these wonderful make-believe scenes of queens basically telling all of the men who are entering the joust and sponsoring them and being like, I'm going to enter this man and I'm going to enter that man. And they're sort of quite flirtatious, they're quite, there's a lot of sexual innuendo, but it gives a sense of all of the opulence and how women were very much involved in this pageantry and this court mythology. There was this fine line between reality and make-believe. And it was just such a wonderful, I think, fascinating a space to exist in. So yeah, if I was going to be there, I'd be at one of these jousts.

• 52:07Matt Lewis?

  They seem like the medieval equivalent of, you know, going to a massive rock concert where it's, you know, what's the light show going to be like? What's a pyrotechnics going to be like?

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:15Matt Lewis?

  It's that kind of, of, you know, how far is Edward going to go in trying to one up his last tournaments?

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think actually everyone always talks about, and I always, I always bring this up because I think it's just, I think A, because it's been given such a bad rap, but I think in Knight's Tale, everyone talks about how anachronistic it is and how incorrect and everything. And it's like, yeah, of course. But what I think it completely nails is the vibe. Of the period, and I think it totally nails the mood, the idea of, you know, this is just total, everything's going well, we have a great king, chivalry, yay for chivalry, yay for jousting. It's just this wonderful time of just fun, with the backdrop of appalling war, of course. But yeah, it was just a lot of fun, I think.

• 53:00Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. You will never hear criticism of A Knight's Tale on Gone Medieval. Definitely not from Eleanor and I at least. One of the greatest films ever, ever made.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 53:09Matt Lewis?

  Amidst all of the terrible moments, is there a worst moment? If there was one that you really, really would want to avoid, what would that be?

• 53:17Speaker 02

  I would want to avoid encountering the Black Death, obviously, but I think I'd want to avoid Hugh Despenser the younger, because I think what he did was shocking, even by today's, by today's standards was so appalling, his treatment of women. I don't think I had ever encountered that before. And these are women who had nothing to do with him, they weren't, they weren't family, within his family, but he had women physically abused to try and coerce them to hand over their land. One woman in the record, and this could be exaggerated, but he was either threatened or had, had her arms and legs broken. He was a deeply, deeply vicious individual, and I would have wanted to avoid him as much as I'd want to avoid the plague.

• 54:00Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, avoid him like the plague. Yeah, he always strikes me as someone who, it's almost universal, with the exception of Edward II, everyone absolutely despises him, and almost to the point where I feel like I would quite like maybe 10 minutes in a room with him, just to get a sense of the man. And I feel like maybe after two minutes, you'd be like, oh yeah, I get it, I'm off now. You are just a vile, vile person. But it's rare to find someone that is so universally despised by absolutely everybody, that he was just clearly, you know, we always try, I think as historians, to look for balance in people, that there aren't necessarily just good and bad people out there, you don't divide people that way. But it's hard to find a redeeming feature for Hugh Despenser the younger.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  Totally. And I think that's the difference. He's often sort of placed in the same kind of bucket as Gaveston. I think they're very, very different beasts. Gaveston was a bit feckless and he was a bit arrogant and, you know, he rubbed people up the wrong way and he's a bit rude. But Dispenser was an absolute opportunist. He was cutthroat. He would be sort of, you know, heading up something like, you know, one of the big investment companies in, uh, he's like Wolf of Wall Street sort of vibe. He was like, I don't care. I'm gonna walk all over you. I'm gonna do what I wanna do. He was just not, he was not, uh, he was not, there was no decent bone in, in Hugh Dispenser's body.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  But Matt, he did get his comeuppance, didn't he? Let's say, I don't wanna ruin, I don't wanna ruin the book, but he probably died one of the worst deaths that, that somebody could in the Middle Ages.

• 55:30Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's a pretty gruesome episode.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, this weather.

• 55:34Matt Lewis?

  And it's hard to say he didn't deserve it. So if you had to give us a kind of a sales pitch for the 14th century, how critical was the 14th century in, in the evolution of England? It's a century full of catastrophes and setbacks and problems, but do they actually move England forward in a weird way?

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, what the Black Death necessitated was a period of, yeah, it's been called by some historians as a golden age after Black Death. Other historians are saying that obviously it wasn't a golden age, but I think good evidence suggests there is an element of golden age about it. In that what it necessitated was human innovation, the ability to advance technology to better oneself. There was no, there was no longer this sort of fatalistic sentiment that you were born as a serf, you lived as a serf and you died as a serf. People were moving into apprenticeships. People were generating more money. There was more trade. Everything was sort of, things were becoming more global. There was certainly a huge advancement following the Black Death.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  And then later on into the period, of course, you have the development of the vernacular. So the court language moved from being French to being English. And you start to get some of the, some English texts being created. Geoffrey Chaucer, obviously, the most famous. I think that this century really is accountable for that and to blame for that. So you have this huge movement in development of technology and industry, but you also have a huge cultural boom, which really ties into what was happening on the continent as well with the, with the Renaissance, which was starting to appear in the 1380s, 90s over in Italy.

• 57:08Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. I think the book does an incredible job of bringing all of that together and explaining the impact that all of those things had on each other, that the great famine leads to social and economic developments and problems. The Black Death is horrific, but creates opportunity in a weird way. And you get the government's difficult reaction to all of that opportunity for people as well. And I think what I took away from the book was this kind of resilience of the institution of the crown. Two kings are deposed, but the crown keeps going. And you've got this increasing self-confidence of Parliament is being viewed as the place where you have to go to depose a king. And by the end of the century, with Henry IV, to create a new king, that has to be done in Parliament.

• 57:52Matt Lewis?

  And Parliament is still such a core part of the nation today. You see that really beginning to grow in the 14th century. And I think in a more feudal sense, you see the nobles desperately trying to reinforce that pyramid that we talked about, that the load has to be shared beneath the king for a strong foundation to exist, to support the king and to be supported by what's below it. So I took away that this is a kind of a critical century in the development of what will become England and the United Kingdom, even though it's a fairly horrendous time to live.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  I think it's a really, really good point about Parliament. And actually, I'm really glad that you took that away, because the themes within the book are human beings and power and the way power moves, and also humanity and how we can understand people as humans, not just caricatures. And but one of the early sort of pictures of the book and one of the aims that I was going for was this, a development of nationhood. And that was a theme I hoped had carried through. So I'm really glad that you picked up on that, because you're so right. It's a really good point about Parliament. I mean, it was Edward III that created the Lords and the Commons. You know, that's something that happened in the 14th century that has pervaded into the modern day. There's lots of ideas of nationality and nationalism that have, we were kind of, the seed was planted in

• 59:09Speaker 02

  the 14th century and have come through to the modern day, the Order of the Garter, St George. You know, you still see football fans walking around with the flags of St George. And so, so ill, so naive to the fact that St George is actually not English. No, but the point is, there are so many wonderful things and good and bad from this period. And you, yeah, you're completely right that it's a development of nationalism. I think you see that a lot with Richard as well, like he had no interest in war. It very much became Anglo centric. And it's just, yeah, I mean, I'm always going to be thing the praises of the 14th century, not so much. And it was such a wonderful time to be alive. It was quite an extraordinary time to be alive, if you made it through.

• 59:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Well, you've heard the podcast, you can now go and watch the documentary on Edward the second, and then you can go and read the book and learn all about the 14th century from the wonderful, wonderful Helen Carr. Thank you so much for joining us, Helen. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you again.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Oh, thanks so much, Matt. It's always a pleasure to chat to you.

• 1:00:10Matt Lewis?

  Thank you. Helen's new book, Septed Isle, A New History of the 14th Century, is out now, if you'd like to get an even better grip on this fascinating period and the people who enjoyed it. Helen's brand new documentary about Edward the second is also available on History Hit right now, if you're a subscriber too. And if you're not, what better reason to give it a go. You can listen to Helen's previous visit to Gone Medieval to talk about her biography of John of Gaunt, the Red Prince, in our back catalogue. If you haven't already had your fill of the 14th century, then you can also find several past episodes covering the Hundred Years' War, the Black Death, Helen Castor's visit to talk about Richard the second and Henry the fourth, and a special series that we did recently on the crises

• 1:00:54Matt Lewis?

  of Edward the second's reign. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please do 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 right now.

• 1:01:29Matt Lewis?

  And if you're still here, I'd like to take just another moment of your time. Some of you may be aware that my wife recently passed away. This is the first episode of Gone Medieval to go out since I began recording again. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank the incredible team behind Gone Medieval, Anne-Marie, Rob, Joseph, Amy and Eleanor, who have offered a huge amount of support, as have the rest of the audio team and everybody at History Hit. I consider myself blessed to work with such fine people. I'd like to say thank you to you, the listeners of Gone Medieval. It's an immense pleasure to work on this podcast. The feedback I get from you is always encouraging and positive.

• 1:02:14Matt Lewis?

  Seeing the audience grow and hearing that long-time listeners continue to enjoy the episode is hugely rewarding. Finally, I'd like to thank my wife. I'll keep it brief, but this could last for hours and still barely do her justice. I'm only here because of the love and support and encouragement that she always gave me to pursue my passions. I know because she told me that she was very proud of what I've achieved. I told her in turn that none of my achievements are mine, every single one of them is ours.

• 1:02:50Matt Lewis?

  My world has changed beyond my comprehension and I'm struggling to work out how I fit into it, but I remain grateful for Gone Medieval to each and every one of you who listens, to the team that makes it happen and for all that it meant to my wife.

• 1:03:07Matt Lewis?

  Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.