Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised.
Speaker 1: I'm very excited to be joined for this very special
Speaker 1: episode by my friend, amazing historian Dan Jones, who's joining
Speaker 1: us via via seamless internet technology from across the pond
Speaker 1: in England. Damn, thank you for joining me. It's absolutely
Speaker 1: my pleasure. We like was so good at technology that
Speaker 1: this was set up. We didn't was the easiest thing.
Speaker 1: We knew how to do. Our headphones, our microphones. Both
Speaker 1: of us just nailed it immediately first try. I definitely
Speaker 1: had the microphone thing lockdown? Did you my end? Contrary
Speaker 1: to what people are saying, my microphone was on the
Speaker 1: entire time. It was fully, fully turned on. That wasn't
Speaker 1: the mistake I was making. You were brought back on
Speaker 1: this podcast by popular demand, that the people demanded you,
Speaker 1: and so we had to bring you back. But you
Speaker 1: were the Charles the second of podcast guests. Thank you
Speaker 1: very much. That's probably my favorite Charles of all the three.
Speaker 1: Of all the three. So I was I was asking
Speaker 1: you before we started, how how is the new king
Speaker 1: over there? Well? I think that you guys are thinking
Speaker 1: about it a little bit more than we are. We
Speaker 1: we did, we had quite a lot of it last year,
Speaker 1: and now we're just The coronation will be along in
Speaker 1: a few months time, and I think we'll have another
Speaker 1: that'll go at it then. But by and large, no
Speaker 1: one's playing it that much attention. I think. I think
Speaker 1: of the two of us, I am the only one
Speaker 1: who read Prince Harry's book. Is that true? That is true,
Speaker 1: assuming you did read it. I didn't read it. I
Speaker 1: have no reason to doubt you. And it's the sort
Speaker 1: of thing you would do that like professionally or actually curious.
Speaker 1: They sent me a copy, so this is full disclosure.
Speaker 1: As I got a copy for free, I don't know
Speaker 1: if I would have like shelled out for it. And
Speaker 1: then I was just curious as a document. I was
Speaker 1: just like, so, what is this guy really saying? Did
Speaker 1: you find out? By the end of the book. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think he's past off, isn't it. He's really mad
Speaker 1: and I think he had a very sad family life.
Speaker 1: I felt bad for him by the end of it.
Speaker 1: I was like, it must have been really lonely. Your
Speaker 1: dad never hugging you like that would have been awful,
Speaker 1: But I do kind of think he's mad about the
Speaker 1: wrong things a little bit, like he's holding these family
Speaker 1: grudges and I feel sorry for him, but it also
Speaker 1: feels like, I don't know if he realizes it's not
Speaker 1: that's not like the main problem with the monarchy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it does seem to be quite um. He does seem
Speaker 1: to have misconstrued and misconceived quite a lot of things
Speaker 1: that you would have thought like by the time you
Speaker 1: get to around the age of forty. He's a little
Speaker 1: bit younger than me, but you know, by the age
Speaker 1: of forty ish, you're supposed to have just started to
Speaker 1: work out certain things about your life situation. And he
Speaker 1: seems to have got some of them wrong, and the
Speaker 1: ones that he hasn't got wrong, he's reacted to in
Speaker 1: a really bad way. It does seem as though he's
Speaker 1: the only one in this family who's gotten therapy, and
Speaker 1: so clearly a therapist is like it would have been
Speaker 1: nice if your dad hugged you, and then he's like yes,
Speaker 1: and then really decided to write a book about it.
Speaker 1: But was this a specialist therapist? Because I think it's
Speaker 1: like a certain you need a special like one that
Speaker 1: just does royals really like, basically you I could do it.
Speaker 1: You seem you seem like you should be in the
Speaker 1: person that would do therapy, because you'd probably think about
Speaker 1: this more than than a normal therapist. It's true of
Speaker 1: the category of case. Do you know the most deranged
Speaker 1: thing that I've ever said out loud in my life
Speaker 1: to my husband? I said, I said the words, and
Speaker 1: I meant it is there's the really messed up part.
Speaker 1: I said, if I had married into the royal family,
Speaker 1: I would have been able to hack it. Like I
Speaker 1: would have been able to do it. I can follow
Speaker 1: rules really well. I would wear that right now, polished colors.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't read the news. I would just like curtsy
Speaker 1: the right way. I would follow all the rules. But
Speaker 1: you've also done your research, like this is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I don't. I would have known when I was getting
Speaker 1: into I think, so do you? What do you wanted
Speaker 1: to do it? I mean absolutely think yourskin seems great,
Speaker 1: and like I'm not sure you harry a fit or whatever,
Speaker 1: But like, would you in in the abstract have wanted
Speaker 1: that job at any level? No, it's to me that
Speaker 1: the job of being a royal. It seems like you
Speaker 1: are quietly drinking all day with people I don't know
Speaker 1: if I would like, I'm not a big drinker. And
Speaker 1: also you have to go to a lot of like
Speaker 1: ceremonial hospital openings. It feels like you're going to like
Speaker 1: three graduation ceremonies a day, and your kid is never graduating. Right,
Speaker 1: the job seems boring. I totally agree, And yet there
Speaker 1: is a small, like distinct subset category of people who well,
Speaker 1: there's two on there. There's there's the people who are
Speaker 1: born into it and like totally deal with it, Like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: this is like a like I could have definitely been
Speaker 1: born into a much worse era in history or social position.
Speaker 1: I'm going to just accept that the cost of having
Speaker 1: all this great stuff is like a super boring job,
Speaker 1: even more boring than like being a square john in
Speaker 1: an office. Yeah, at least a square john in an office.
Speaker 1: You get to go have your fun without people making
Speaker 1: fun of you. Well yeah, so, but there was more
Speaker 1: of a royals who are like, yo, I'm going to
Speaker 1: take this. I'll take this deal. It's not a perfect deal,
Speaker 1: but I sense there are other worst deals and the
Speaker 1: possible so that I can sort of sort of get
Speaker 1: my head of. The ones that definitely are unusual are
Speaker 1: the sort of K. Middlesen type people who look at
Speaker 1: that and think it through, so they do the thing
Speaker 1: you've done that possibly making didn't do, and then go,
Speaker 1: oh no, no, that is actually what I want. That's
Speaker 1: the weird thing, and then doesn't seem to have any
Speaker 1: regret or or remorse, like, was right, that was what
Speaker 1: you want. She's very good at at what she has
Speaker 1: to do, which is being conventionally attractive and thin and
Speaker 1: wear clothing in public. Would you go to Mars if
Speaker 1: someone offered your ticket? Absolutely not. Now wants I want
Speaker 1: somebody and I don't care if his evil musk. I
Speaker 1: just I don't care who it is. I want a
Speaker 1: human being to go to Mars. But if you ask me,
Speaker 1: would I be that? Yeah? But would you do that?
Speaker 1: I would say no. I would say I would be
Speaker 1: like the person to go to Mars. Yeah, Okay, after
Speaker 1: they do it for a while, I wonder is it
Speaker 1: the safety that you're worried about with Mars? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: it just seems, um, I don't know what I would
Speaker 1: be getting out of it. Yeah, the safety and and
Speaker 1: for what reward. I'm not a rock scientist. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I would be the best person to put there.
Speaker 1: I could see you as a rock scientist, that you've
Speaker 1: got science in your locker, haven't you? That's true? Could
Speaker 1: would you wouldn't go to Mars? Why wouldn't you go
Speaker 1: to Mars? The safety so that I saw the Martian
Speaker 1: with mc damon and growing potatoes that tie us into Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looked It's just just just the length of the journey.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm a little I don't think it would
Speaker 1: be for me the length of the journey, you know, Dan,
Speaker 1: But people, I think a lot of people would say
Speaker 1: that being a historian would be boring. You've had to
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time reading very old books. You
Speaker 1: don't find you don't find that barring. No, I don't.
Speaker 1: Actually I quite like it. Yeah, but I don't know
Speaker 1: a lot of m Are there a lot of people
Speaker 1: who looked at his story and when I think that's
Speaker 1: going to be boring? Because I think the case that
Speaker 1: we've been talking about is people who think something is
Speaker 1: going to be better than it is. I was pretty
Speaker 1: sure about what being his stor you didn't think it
Speaker 1: was going to be like Indiana Jones. Now that's an archeologist,
Speaker 1: but he's sort of in the same it's the same academic.
Speaker 1: He's a professor. Oh, he's a he's a professor. That
Speaker 1: but that I wouldn't have done. I'm not a professor.
Speaker 1: I could never ever have been a professor. And that's
Speaker 1: actually important. So when I graduated from my degree in
Speaker 1: two two, I was going he went to Cambridge. He's
Speaker 1: not going to mention, but he went to Cambridge. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't. I like other people to bring it up
Speaker 1: for me. And it's the real one as well, not
Speaker 1: there like proxy one in Massachusetts. When I graduated and
Speaker 1: I was thinking, only should I do like loads to
Speaker 1: more degrees and stay at Cambridge? Sort of everyone that
Speaker 1: had taught me and knew me was like, I don't
Speaker 1: think you'll like that. I don't think you're like any
Speaker 1: aspect of that's whatsoever. And so the life that I've
Speaker 1: chosen is distinctly not that of an institutionalized profess. So
Speaker 1: it's the life where I just sort of do my
Speaker 1: own thing and read what I want to read, and
Speaker 1: write what I want to write, and sit in my
Speaker 1: little office in my pajamas. Now, this is an audio medium,
Speaker 1: but I do want people listening to this to know
Speaker 1: that Dan is in a very nice set of pajamas,
Speaker 1: sole set of pajamas, like he's in like notting Hill
Speaker 1: or something. I've never seen anyone in like a full
Speaker 1: set of pajamas. And it's not that late that we're recording,
Speaker 1: but he got ready for bed. Yeah, but I knew
Speaker 1: that after we finished it would be about my bed time.
Speaker 1: And then I just thought I'd just be ready. I
Speaker 1: could just die straight into bed and just worm my
Speaker 1: way and I have a little you know sleep. Well,
Speaker 1: if we're talking about diving straight in, you're here because
Speaker 1: you have a novel that's coming out in the United
Speaker 1: States in paperback? Is it coming out in paperback or
Speaker 1: hard hard back? Over here? Hardcover hardcover of course, yes,
Speaker 1: the real deal. I think we'd go hard yeah, hardcover, Yeah,
Speaker 1: hardcover of people that's right here, Yeah, yeah, that's us.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh. And he's drinking wine. He just pulled
Speaker 1: a goblet of wine out from behind the behind the camera.
Speaker 1: It's almost it is. It's quite a large one glass,
Speaker 1: but with not much wine in it. So yeah, it
Speaker 1: does have a sort of goblet vibe to it's Monday night.
Speaker 1: I would not drink heavily on a Monday night. Of course.
Speaker 1: Well we are here to talk, of course, about his
Speaker 1: wonderful novel Essex Dogs, which I had the privilege of reading.
Speaker 1: It's just a it's a wonderful novel. If you like
Speaker 1: this podcast because you like interesting stories from history well told.
Speaker 1: Obviously A Sex Dogs is a fictionalization, but it is
Speaker 1: based on a very true story. And that's what I
Speaker 1: would like to talk to you about. Oh, that would
Speaker 1: be fun. Let's do it. So tell me the story.
Speaker 1: And my achilles heel is French pronunciation because my Eastern
Speaker 1: European tongue doesn't curl the right way. But the say
Speaker 1: the name of the campaign to save me from myself here,
Speaker 1: so as it's still is set in the Cressy campaign.
Speaker 1: Oh Cressy, that's I could have done that. You can say,
Speaker 1: reci Yeah, there's a little there's an accent that throughout
Speaker 1: the house made me near Chrissy. But but Cressy is fine. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's one of the first major campaigns of the
Speaker 1: Hundred Years War, which took place in the summer of
Speaker 1: the year thirty and forty six, which is right at
Speaker 1: the start of the Hundred Years War. With Hundred Years
Speaker 1: War from thirty thirty seven through fifty three were loaded
Speaker 1: at the beginning with the Third Reign. I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna interrupt before before we dive in for people who
Speaker 1: are just listening and and have heard probably the term
Speaker 1: Hundred Years War, but don't know exactly what it is.
Speaker 1: Can you set up a bit about what this conflict
Speaker 1: was and why they were fighting it for so long? Yeah? Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and that is very very cool. The Hundred Years War
Speaker 1: is a dispute in the Late Middle Ages in the
Speaker 1: fourteenth and fifteenth century between the two royal rival houses
Speaker 1: of the Kingdoms of England on the one hand and
Speaker 1: France on the other. And at the very core of
Speaker 1: the dispute is who should be the King of France.
Speaker 1: Starts with the with the third who claims that he
Speaker 1: should be the rifle King of France because he has
Speaker 1: a claim through his mother and his cousin Philippa, who
Speaker 1: is the King of France. Philip six, at the outset
Speaker 1: Hundreds War says, well, I beg to differ. I am
Speaker 1: actually the King of France and I have a claim
Speaker 1: through my father and my father the king of Brands.
Speaker 1: It's rather wasn't the King of France. But so there's
Speaker 1: a but he's he's got I think inarguably a better
Speaker 1: claim than Edward. However, there are other reasons for them
Speaker 1: disputing who's going to be the King of France, rather
Speaker 1: than they both want to be the King of France.
Speaker 1: One of them is that you have an anomalous, weird
Speaker 1: position by the time he gets to the fourteenth century,
Speaker 1: which goes all the way back to the normal conquest
Speaker 1: of ten sixty six, whereby kings of England have lands
Speaker 1: in France, and sometimes that's Normandy and it's great s
Speaker 1: extent on the Henry. Second it's Normandy, Aquitaine and Gumain
Speaker 1: Brittany each other an like this, the huge sway either
Speaker 1: almost a third of the current territorial land mass of
Speaker 1: France is at some point held by English kings technically
Speaker 1: as nobles of France. And that's a weird situation and
Speaker 1: changes and evolves throughout the plantation years. But by the
Speaker 1: time you get to end of the third there's still
Speaker 1: have a small amount of land Gascony, and the French
Speaker 1: kings aren't very happy about that, sterrritating to have another
Speaker 1: king as one of your lord's vassals Vassels. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: part of the reason for for this dispute over the
Speaker 1: crown of France is a kind of nuclear escalation of
Speaker 1: this argument. End of the third sees that one of
Speaker 1: the best ways to counter phillips claim to kick him
Speaker 1: out of Gascony is to say, you can't kick me
Speaker 1: out of Gascony because actually I'm the King of France.
Speaker 1: And you know what, let's have a really long war
Speaker 1: about whether or not this is the case, and it
Speaker 1: goes generated a hundred years is underplaying. It just goes
Speaker 1: on for six notes, not quite a hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: hundred and seventeen something. Once one of my favorite tidbits,
Speaker 1: I think from one of your books, the book on
Speaker 1: the Ward the Roses, is when fast forwarding obviously you know,
Speaker 1: a hundred years from this event, when I hope I'm
Speaker 1: doing this right, because it is from your book. Henry
Speaker 1: the sixth is trying to establish his claim in France
Speaker 1: and they're distributing propaganda posters, trying to trace his lineage
Speaker 1: back to St. Louis to be like, no, no, he's
Speaker 1: he's right. Look at the poster that we made. They
Speaker 1: get right into it and it opens up this enormous
Speaker 1: kind of worms which which you then start seeing the
Speaker 1: domestic politics of England and France as well of people say, oh,
Speaker 1: no way, I should be the king because x y Z.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's what underpins the wars of the
Speaker 1: Roses in England the fifteenth century. Your Plancaster quote unquote
Speaker 1: conflict for the crown is really some of the principles
Speaker 1: established in the Hundred As War, which are like I've
Speaker 1: not a better claim to the ground than you, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to fight you with my now enormous armies
Speaker 1: and improving siege weaponry and so on and so forth. Anyway,
Speaker 1: said back to the Hundred Years War as well as
Speaker 1: a dynastic dispute for the quote unquote dynastic dispute for
Speaker 1: the crown of France, it's such a draw in more
Speaker 1: and more and more competence around Europe. So you have
Speaker 1: the Scots fighting the English, you have Castile drawn into
Speaker 1: this eventually, have sort of kingdoms of Portugal drawn into it.
Speaker 1: You have Flanders is an enormously important sort of theater
Speaker 1: of hot and Cold War. You have the sort of
Speaker 1: German states in the pressing campaign. You have the Battle
Speaker 1: of Crescy, as we hopefully get to, you have five
Speaker 1: different kings on the battle. So this, this apparent sort
Speaker 1: of neighborly dispute between England and France, in fact spills
Speaker 1: out into basically the whole of Western Europe fighting each
Speaker 1: other in various combinations for generations. So now explain what
Speaker 1: the Cressy campaign is. We have King Edward the Third
Speaker 1: in England trying to retain his claim in France, and
Speaker 1: what happens. So at this point, which is thirty six,
Speaker 1: the war is young. War is less than nine less
Speaker 1: and ten years old, and there have been already different
Speaker 1: spheres of operation open up. There's fighting going on down
Speaker 1: a gascony. There's been a great sea Battle of Choice there,
Speaker 1: which is sort of a modern Netherlands. But this is
Speaker 1: the first big invasion by one side of the other.
Speaker 1: So in July six d of the Third Lands approximately
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand troops on one of the Normandy beaches. And
Speaker 1: whant to say Normandy beaches You probably think D Day
Speaker 1: World War two, and you're right to, because it is
Speaker 1: a beach on the cutting Tampa Peninsula of Normandy slightly
Speaker 1: up from what in the Second Worldar was called Utah
Speaker 1: Beach should a place called some Valo where Edwards put
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand men onto a beach, and you can sort
Speaker 1: of imagine this as a medieval saving Private Ryan. In fact,
Speaker 1: the idea of a medieval saving Private Ryan, you know,
Speaker 1: medieval d Day was the first picture I had in
Speaker 1: my head the sparks what became the novel of Esex Dogs,
Speaker 1: because I felt like I'd never seen a kind of
Speaker 1: band of brothers saving Private Ryan, an American hard boiled
Speaker 1: version of a medieval amphibious invasion. But that's how the
Speaker 1: Cressy campaign starts. Edward the third says, you know what
Speaker 1: I'm after, France, and I'm gonna well, that is he
Speaker 1: actually going to try and take Philip's throne in Paris.
Speaker 1: Possibly He's certainly going to cause as much trouble for
Speaker 1: Philip the sixth of France as possible in northern France
Speaker 1: in order to discomfort him so much that possibly his
Speaker 1: nobles are rebelled against him and the people will start
Speaker 1: to abandon their their fealty to him. So that's what Edwards,
Speaker 1: Edward sets about twelfth of July, he lands his huge army,
Speaker 1: probably over the course of the next few days. They
Speaker 1: DeCamp onto the beach. They are opposed by local militias,
Speaker 1: but the local militias who are opposing them soon see
Speaker 1: that this is an enormous, enormous army, I mean a
Speaker 1: gigantic invasion army. This is the biggest army that has
Speaker 1: ever been taken from England to France, and they're going
Speaker 1: to do some some serious damage. So they would say
Speaker 1: the small militia who were on the coast, because Edwards
Speaker 1: kept his invasion plans or the location of his invasion
Speaker 1: at least secret spies of in in London for months
Speaker 1: and months, they knew an invasion was coming, but they
Speaker 1: had no idea where that parallels with d Day in
Speaker 1: are striking um, there's there's not much opposition and they
Speaker 1: start falling back and so Edward really has them the
Speaker 1: run of the Gotta Tupe Peninsula, this bit of Normandy
Speaker 1: that sticks out going up to subar So between Normandy
Speaker 1: and Calais. So it's hard without drawing you a map,
Speaker 1: but there's a sort of pointy bit that's not Brittany
Speaker 1: Franz that's the bit of Normandy we're talking about. So
Speaker 1: and they come in right at the tip of it.
Speaker 1: And the French strategy for the first couple of weeks
Speaker 1: is essentially a Fabian one. Is to fall back, try
Speaker 1: and delay the English advances as much as possible by
Speaker 1: breaking bridges, by burning things, by but not by engaging.
Speaker 1: And so the English do what will become a standard
Speaker 1: tactic of the Hundred Years War, and they sort of
Speaker 1: launched it in Earnest in thirteen forty six, and it's
Speaker 1: called the Cheval shape. So they set their army out
Speaker 1: essentially into the field to just burn and plunder and
Speaker 1: cause as much terror and mayhem as possible. It is
Speaker 1: to carve a path through the landscape, a path of terror.
Speaker 1: Now I wrote Essex Dogs. When I finished writing, I
Speaker 1: finished writing it's through March, shortly before the Russian invasion
Speaker 1: of Ukraine. But if you can cast your mind back
Speaker 1: to Russian tactics at the beginning of the war in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: which was to burn and plunder and rape and kill
Speaker 1: and cause as much mayhem and terror as possible. That's
Speaker 1: borrowed directly from a long military playbook. And of the
Speaker 1: third did not invent the chevrochet. The Mongols have done
Speaker 1: it before. I'm sure you know in the Bronze Agent
Speaker 1: has happened. You know, we can go back probably as
Speaker 1: far as human history and mounted warriors anyway, go to
Speaker 1: see examples of similar tactics. It wo, but this is
Speaker 1: like Edward really master the English master the chevrochet in war.
Speaker 1: And so the first sort of or probably half of
Speaker 1: the Gressive campaign is effectively one big, long, just campaign
Speaker 1: of absolute terror, as the English pushed through the Norman
Speaker 1: countryside through the sort of kas and all the stuff.
Speaker 1: You again, if you know you're saving private Ryan or
Speaker 1: band of brothers, you know these little lanes and head
Speaker 1: English just burn a sway through it, heading for the
Speaker 1: major towns of Normandy, which will lead them to the
Speaker 1: same valley, and then they can go up river towards Paris.
Speaker 1: And so in your fictional version, we're joined by ten
Speaker 1: men in Essex, Doug. The story is ten men who
Speaker 1: are sort of more loyal to each other than any crown. Right.
Speaker 1: So this story of the Christic campaign has been told
Speaker 1: in history and in fiction many times, but it struck
Speaker 1: me when I was thinking about it, or thinking more
Speaker 1: generally about the realities of warfare in this period, which
Speaker 1: is something I've written a reasonable amount about in my
Speaker 1: history books. Struck me that we very seldom see medieval
Speaker 1: warfare through the eyes of what in the World War
Speaker 1: two film you'd call the ordinary grunts, right, just the
Speaker 1: rank and file. The Chrissy Campaign is really famous in
Speaker 1: medieval history for things that aristocrats and nobles do. There's
Speaker 1: there are lots of little famous sort of vignettes to
Speaker 1: set pieces. When end of the Third land on the
Speaker 1: beach of sam Lug, for example, he he trips over
Speaker 1: in the surf, bangs his nose into the sand and
Speaker 1: gets a nose bleed, and he has the quick wit
Speaker 1: to say, ah, this just shows the land wants me
Speaker 1: because I was worried this might be you know moment.
Speaker 1: When we get to later in the campaign, at the
Speaker 1: Battle of Chrissy, the Black Prince supposedly performs great heroics.
Speaker 1: He's in danger. His father refuses to come to his aid,
Speaker 1: so the story goes, this hasn't led him win his spurs,
Speaker 1: and this is you know, at sixteen years old, this
Speaker 1: is the Black Prince kind of magnificent emergence as a
Speaker 1: chivalric warrior, anyway, Chris, he throws up lots of these
Speaker 1: vignettes through the writings of chronicles like Jean Froissart and
Speaker 1: various others of that type, but we don't often hear
Speaker 1: anything at all in this campaign about what it was
Speaker 1: like for ordinary people. Now, if we consider that in
Speaker 1: a medieval army of about fifteen thousand, somewhere between ten
Speaker 1: and would be what would call nobles and knights, that
Speaker 1: still that leads the vast majority of the army as
Speaker 1: not nobles and knights. And what I wanted to do
Speaker 1: was somehow or other capture the experience of one small
Speaker 1: group of warriors on this campaign who were ordinary people.
Speaker 1: And so I created this little platoon really called the
Speaker 1: Essets Dogs, who are quite typical of what we know
Speaker 1: of the rank and file of medieval armies in this period,
Speaker 1: in that they're not professional soldiers, because there are no
Speaker 1: professional armies in this point. They are sort of just
Speaker 1: you call immerce and mercenary freebooters. Chances, you know, in
Speaker 1: in war time they will seek out military contracts and
Speaker 1: go fight for whoever is paying, and in peace time
Speaker 1: they'll use exactly the same skills for whatever jobs require
Speaker 1: them and that tends to be sort of thieving piracy.
Speaker 1: If you need someone beating up poojical, you know they did.
Speaker 1: So there are a group of violent of men pH
Speaker 1: violence is their profession, but not all of them are
Speaker 1: violent men. And so within this group you have some
Speaker 1: people who are unthinkingly committed to the profession of fighting
Speaker 1: and causing mayhem, and there are some who are new
Speaker 1: to it and don't really know what they've gotten themselves into.
Speaker 1: And there are some most or best epitomized by their
Speaker 1: leader Loveday, who was into a birth, starting to have
Speaker 1: second thoughts. And so you what we see unfold across
Speaker 1: their adventures within the Crazy Campaign is the dissolving of
Speaker 1: the bond between that group q as they all Osten's.
Speaker 1: We try and keep the group to get you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're committed. They're all verbally and in some sense
Speaker 1: mentally committed to one another to keeping this this band together.
Speaker 1: But actually it's it's all going to ship inside the
Speaker 1: end of the Beatles. You know, everyone wants this thing
Speaker 1: to continue, but it's it's you know, it has to
Speaker 1: be has to finish. Although by the end of Crescy
Speaker 1: and the Siege of Calais. It's a victory for the English,
Speaker 1: isn't it? At this point. That's the thing about the
Speaker 1: Creasy campaign. You have this Chevrochet, you have several big
Speaker 1: sort of dramatic scenes in Norman towns. At Saalo con Rouen,
Speaker 1: you have drama dramatic crossings of two rivers, the River
Speaker 1: Seine and the north of that, the River So and
Speaker 1: then you have this enormous battle at Cressy at the
Speaker 1: end of August six, which is a seemingly miraculous victory
Speaker 1: for the English. Subsequent to that they go off to Calais,
Speaker 1: beseach Calais. That's the topic of the book I'm writing
Speaker 1: at the moment, which is a sequel Dresserslves the Wolves
Speaker 1: of Winter. Sorry to spoil the ending. Wikipedia would do
Speaker 1: the job just as well. So of spoiling, I mean,
Speaker 1: not a not a wristing a novel. No, but AI
Speaker 1: might be might be close behind, and I think GBT
Speaker 1: four might have and I like to say five for
Speaker 1: the actually four that's going to catch me, I think,
Speaker 1: so yeah. And then well then you have the Siege
Speaker 1: of Calais which follows, which is a very different cattle fish.
Speaker 1: If the Cresty campaign lasts roughly seven weeks. The Calais
Speaker 1: campaign is an eleven month siege which ends with them
Speaker 1: starving the people out of Calais. But yeah, the the
Speaker 1: end fronduct of the of the Crest Cambais is they
Speaker 1: take Calais and that's in English hands. Until Mary Tudors right,
Speaker 1: it is wild to consider starving a city out as
Speaker 1: a victory. Yeah, but that's that's the tactic in medieval siegecraft,
Speaker 1: by and large, just hang around until someone gets bored
Speaker 1: and gives up, or gets hungry and gives up, and
Speaker 1: the victory is that Calais falls into English hands. And
Speaker 1: this is not just why we took a city military terms,
Speaker 1: there's an enormous economic component to this warfare. Now in
Speaker 1: Essex Dogs, when I try and show really really up
Speaker 1: with the camera locked to this very small group of men,
Speaker 1: is what does the war look like from this in
Speaker 1: this claustrophobic environment of the single military platoon. What I'm
Speaker 1: trying to do with the siege of Calais in Wolves
Speaker 1: of Winter is to show actually one of the other
Speaker 1: interests in this war, because we've all heard the cliche
Speaker 1: talking about British and American an Allied activity in the
Speaker 1: Middle East over the course of our lifetimes. Ah, it's
Speaker 1: all about the oil. It's just all about money. Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of people say that because there's a
Speaker 1: lot big part of that. That's true. It's also true
Speaker 1: in the Middle Ages that it's about the economy. And
Speaker 1: Calais is an enormously important strategic town halfway between between
Speaker 1: France and Flanders. It controls are very narrow, the narrowest
Speaker 1: bit of the English Channel. It's in easy reach of
Speaker 1: the most economically prosperous sports towns in southern England, and
Speaker 1: it's the sinc Ports. It's been a haven for pirates
Speaker 1: for years and years and years who can pray on
Speaker 1: passing shipping. It's both a menace and an incredibly it
Speaker 1: will be a bridge head for any further English military operation.
Speaker 1: But fundamentally, once the siege of Catwan's Calais falls in
Speaker 1: thirty seven, Edward the Third clears out everyone who lives
Speaker 1: in Calais invites in the richest merchants from England to
Speaker 1: take over this town and run it as an economic
Speaker 1: contropoe on the continent. Again not new thinking, this was
Speaker 1: exactly what had happened in the Holy Land during the Crusades.
Speaker 1: The same thing had happened the Crusades. Yes, they had
Speaker 1: a big religious purpose to go to Jerusalem. But then
Speaker 1: there was the thing that kept every and interested was
Speaker 1: the economic viability of the port. Tack. Well, this is
Speaker 1: the sort of the same in the hundred Years ward.
Speaker 1: That's there's a massive financial imperative to doing this, And
Speaker 1: the only reason that these wars are possible is because
Speaker 1: people are prepared to lend ed with the third astonishing
Speaker 1: amounts of money. Astonishing amount of He bankrupts bank, he
Speaker 1: bankrupts the body bank, He almost bankrupts the Fresco Baldi.
Speaker 1: He he's running up these gigantic debts to syndicates of
Speaker 1: merchants from the richest towns in England to continue paying
Speaker 1: for this war. And they're all very happy to continue
Speaker 1: financing the war because war is fantastic for business. The
Speaker 1: more money they lend him, he mortgages. It actually creates
Speaker 1: a mortgage to pay for these wars. He says, give
Speaker 1: me the money now, and you can take over to
Speaker 1: the tax revenues of all these different rich ports around England.
Speaker 1: So the whole merchants take over the ports, all the
Speaker 1: Yarmouth merchants take over the tax of the ports of Yarmouth,
Speaker 1: the London merchants in London, and some of the Dover
Speaker 1: and so so once you really start getting under the
Speaker 1: skin of this war, which looks like if you read
Speaker 1: Quassa Nights and nobles doing heroic deeds, that's just all like,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the icing. This is really just about
Speaker 1: merchants and pirates struggling financial dominance and poor grunts dying
Speaker 1: because of it. If we're talking, you know, chivalric deeds.
Speaker 1: I feel like the legend of Edward the Black Prince,
Speaker 1: who is the son of King Edward the third. Obviously
Speaker 1: Edward dies and never takes the throne, you know, leads
Speaker 1: to challenges in the world the roses. But he's in
Speaker 1: my understanding in British culture, very much seen as a
Speaker 1: gallant hero. How did you portray him in your book,
Speaker 1: she answered, in a non leading question. How nice, she
Speaker 1: to asked, Yeah, it was it was the Black Print's
Speaker 1: eldest son of Edward third, does have this this grand
Speaker 1: reputation as the sort of paragonal of chivalry. It's it's him,
Speaker 1: It's Henry the fifth after him, and it's leverage of
Speaker 1: the line art before him. I don't think he would
Speaker 1: have wanted to run into any of those three. Ah.
Speaker 1: Actually I was concerned a dark alley, but anywhere ever, well,
Speaker 1: I would I I'm very charming in a lady. They
Speaker 1: would be very nice to me. They wouldn't. That's learns
Speaker 1: the horrible thing that they really, absolutely massively would. None
Speaker 1: of those three men would be nice to you at all.
Speaker 1: They would be ghastly to you, and there would be
Speaker 1: ghastly to me as well, because I would be a
Speaker 1: sort of Welsh peasant person. So um. But it is
Speaker 1: the Blackfrint. He has this great reputation. I think. Is
Speaker 1: it's great that he never became king, because the reputation
Speaker 1: will have evaporated. He was, by no means as subtle
Speaker 1: as his father. He was in later life an extraordinarily
Speaker 1: effective war lords medieval military tactician, if not a strategist.
Speaker 1: He was being brute, absolutely like Henry the Fit, absolutely
Speaker 1: brutal in an age which demanded that labine large of
Speaker 1: its military leaders in the Kressy campaign. He's often romanticized
Speaker 1: as having been this kind of sixteen year old is
Speaker 1: first time on campaign, and so the story goes based
Speaker 1: on very very thin evidence. He quits himself immensely. Well, well,
Speaker 1: what do we mean he quits himself. Well, he sort
Speaker 1: of doesn't really do anything for the whole of the
Speaker 1: campaign because he's been babysat by the Marshal of the Army,
Speaker 1: Thomas Beecham, Earl of Warwick, and the Constable of the Army,
Speaker 1: William to Boone, Earl Northampton. When he does sort of
Speaker 1: have an opportunity to do anything, the first thing he
Speaker 1: does of real note during the campaign is sack a monastery.
Speaker 1: Then he allows then a bit later, once his father
Speaker 1: has issued instructions they're on the run from Phillip's army.
Speaker 1: At this point between the sen and Song, on no
Speaker 1: account are we stopping to sack monasteries. He lets his
Speaker 1: then sack another monastery, for which twenty of his men
Speaker 1: are hanged summarily by his father. And then when we
Speaker 1: get to the Battle of Crescy well Edward, the Black
Speaker 1: Prince comports himself in quite a strange way. He's placed
Speaker 1: he sort of front and center of the action, but
Speaker 1: he doesn't really obey orders or seem to understand the
Speaker 1: tactics of the battle very well, and he allows himself
Speaker 1: to be pulled out of the English lines and effectively
Speaker 1: captured and his standard face and this is a big
Speaker 1: disaster in the in the heat of the battle for
Speaker 1: the English. Now, the legend goes that he had been
Speaker 1: seen around it and his father was who was commanding
Speaker 1: the battle from the rear, up on a windmill so
Speaker 1: he could see across the whole battlefield. His father was
Speaker 1: informed that he was in trouble and said, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: let it, let him win. His spurs had improved himself
Speaker 1: a man. But none of that in point of historical fact.
Speaker 1: And it's been some amazing research on crazy. Historical research
Speaker 1: on crazy recently by Michael Livingstone, which has revised the
Speaker 1: location of the battlefield and everything basically happened on the
Speaker 1: battlefield says that that's really not what happened at all.
Speaker 1: He was captured and he was enormously lucky to be
Speaker 1: rescued m hm um and his father was extremely annoyed
Speaker 1: with him after the battle. Anyway, So in my not
Speaker 1: knowing all this, as I'm trying to write the Black
Speaker 1: Prince into the story of Essex Dogs, I also asked myself. Well, firstly,
Speaker 1: you say, well, people can change out their career. And
Speaker 1: I asked myself, what would a sixteen year old placed
Speaker 1: in charge of an army when his dad's also the king,
Speaker 1: actually be like? And my answer was not so. Well,
Speaker 1: there's a degree of petulance, which, to go back to
Speaker 1: the beginning of our conversation, one does see sometimes in
Speaker 1: princes of the royal blood there's an enormal carmanorum. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you, enormous amon of arrogance. There's a total irresponsibility.
Speaker 1: And since I was trying to write a fun novel
Speaker 1: and there's almost nothing that's known in reality about the
Speaker 1: Black Prince's character from this time, it's not written afterwards
Speaker 1: by people just seeking to lionize him, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: let's make him a drunk, Let's make him a sufficious
Speaker 1: little swine, but also a guy who has beat And
Speaker 1: then here's Harry again, has had to deal with the
Speaker 1: fact of a father as a king. His father has
Speaker 1: been king since he was fifty. His father is not
Speaker 1: deemed to all his school plays. Let's say he's he's
Speaker 1: a horrible little shit because he's lonely, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: excuse his atrocious behavior. Throughout Essex songs, and that we
Speaker 1: have a mirror character among the Essex songs is called Romford,
Speaker 1: who's also sixteen, but who's a sort of street kid
Speaker 1: from London who has been found his way into this
Speaker 1: group of theirs. Told of the last minute, literally as
Speaker 1: they're getting on the boat to leave France. He's trying
Speaker 1: to run away from England and succeeds. He and the
Speaker 1: Prince cross paths with for Romford emotionally disastrous consequences and
Speaker 1: for the Prince absolutely no consequences whatsoever. He learns nothing,
Speaker 1: he sees nothing, he's he's completely untouched by the gentle
Speaker 1: suffering of his his little acolyte. And so there's a
Speaker 1: kind of it's not quite a romance between them at all,
Speaker 1: but there is a collision of these two sixteen year
Speaker 1: olds in war that I found quite interesting to write.
Speaker 1: I was going to ask, I don't want to do
Speaker 1: another too much about leaving question, but there is a
Speaker 1: little interesting thing you play with around sexuality, and can
Speaker 1: you talk a little bit about the fluidity maybe of
Speaker 1: sexuality in the th hundreds that maybe modern audiences don't
Speaker 1: understand necessarily or want to think about. Yeah, there's look
Speaker 1: at this quite a lot of really respectable authors and
Speaker 1: I can't possibly include myself in that bracket, but you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's proper writers writing about the Middle Ages
Speaker 1: at the moment. The temptation, of course, for modern novelists
Speaker 1: approaching the Middle Ages is to just dump twenty one
Speaker 1: century priorities onto this canvas because it's like it's a
Speaker 1: cool mash up and I get it, it's heynani no,
Speaker 1: but guess what, we're all sort of gender fluid or
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. Because some of these novels are
Speaker 1: great in their way, but I found it like, not
Speaker 1: that satisfying a thing for me to do, to go
Speaker 1: to go and do that. And what I tried to
Speaker 1: draw out in Essex Dogs, particularly in this story I've
Speaker 1: alluded to between Romford and the Black Prince, is something
Speaker 1: about what sexuality was like in the Middle Ages, which
Speaker 1: is not so categorized, let's say, as it is now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have in the tw first century a weirdly nineteen
Speaker 1: century pseudo scientifical scientific sort of approach that we've we've
Speaker 1: put into gender and sexuality that were we to see
Speaker 1: it in terms of ethnicity and like the shapes of
Speaker 1: heads and ship. You go, oh my god, that's the
Speaker 1: wackiest end of the wackiest, wackiest end of nineteenth century pseudoscience.
Speaker 1: But we've we've sort of got a version of that
Speaker 1: around section in the Middle Age. You don't have any
Speaker 1: of that. You've got lots of really wacky, weird nonsense science,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't seem to have been applied to categorizing sexuality.
Speaker 1: So the love between men, which we would probably categorize
Speaker 1: as homosexual, isn't really thought of in that way. As
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages. There are distinct categories of sexual in misconduct. Well,
Speaker 1: there's really one which is buggery. That's how to make
Speaker 1: anything that as we were telling me, yeah, son of yeah,
Speaker 1: there's that, and then there's everything else, or rather there's
Speaker 1: there's what's a legit in the church law in terms
Speaker 1: of sexual conduct, which is very strictly by this stage
Speaker 1: defined as sex between one man and one woman for
Speaker 1: the purposes of procreation. And then there's everything else, which
Speaker 1: is pretty my guinet, which could be gathered about. Now
Speaker 1: that's a very strict church definition and it's not very
Speaker 1: well policed, and I don't think it's very well observed
Speaker 1: or eBay if that is definitely not very well observed
Speaker 1: or obeyed by ordinary people. But as regards you know,
Speaker 1: the sort of versions of same sex attraction, which in
Speaker 1: the twenty fi century we would be extremely keen to
Speaker 1: categorize and delineate and make sort of names for and
Speaker 1: acronyms and hashtags and stuff like. That's that's us. They
Speaker 1: just don't do that. I'm not like passing judgment, really,
Speaker 1: I'm just saying that that's not how it works in
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages. When you try and make the Middle
Speaker 1: Ages do that, it doesn't ring very true. So what
Speaker 1: I try to do, as it stokes, it's just play
Speaker 1: with this idea that there is an attraction certainly from
Speaker 1: Romford side. Yes, that came across as as a reader. Yeah,
Speaker 1: older men are attracted to Romford. Robert doesn't really know
Speaker 1: what he's about because he's just like a fiend and
Speaker 1: a drifter. He quite likes the Prince, but he doesn't
Speaker 1: it doesn't sort of torture himself by asking what that
Speaker 1: makes him. He just has this kind of attraction towards
Speaker 1: the Prince, which is in some sense sexual, but it's
Speaker 1: also in that is sexual attraction is indistinguishable from a
Speaker 1: role that Romford is given as a squire, as a
Speaker 1: sort of social inferior to the prince. So he's sort
Speaker 1: of he looks at him with this kind of daunted
Speaker 1: admiration which spills over into sexual attraction. But that's so
Speaker 1: much of that is part of his feeling, like the
Speaker 1: social difference between them, and you can't unpick in the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages that the difference for me between social longing
Speaker 1: and sexual longing. They're bound up in the same thing.
Speaker 1: And so the love story such as is between them
Speaker 1: is quite subtle. I think it's certainly in its resolution, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and doesn't push it into the psychological component of romance
Speaker 1: that we are familiar. And that that really something I've
Speaker 1: tried to do throughout Essex Dogs Is is showing you
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages with as little twenty one century psychological
Speaker 1: intrusion as is possible without making it just totally confusing
Speaker 1: and weird. So they do in order to make it comprehensible,
Speaker 1: they speak in a sort of form of modern idium,
Speaker 1: but they don't do things. Even the sympathetic characters don't
Speaker 1: aren't really sympathetic in ways that are we would find
Speaker 1: sympathetic in a novel set in contemporary time. I find
Speaker 1: that challenge so relatable. I wrote a book and another
Speaker 1: book coming out in February that takes place in the
Speaker 1: early eight hundreds, and I tried to keep everything as
Speaker 1: heldable for a modern audience as I could, while still
Speaker 1: maintaining the feel of, you know, the regency period, pre
Speaker 1: regid spirit in this sense. But my copy had a
Speaker 1: her and I went back and forth a lot because
Speaker 1: I wanted to have characters say okay, and she was like,
Speaker 1: you can't, and I was like, I know it's not
Speaker 1: historically accurate, but to me, it conveys sort of a
Speaker 1: youthfulness and a teenage, you know, conversationality that a younger
Speaker 1: character would do. That I kept them. So it's like
Speaker 1: even the mistakes that I mistakes, I put an air
Speaker 1: quotes I made. I think I tried to make us
Speaker 1: deliberate choices for the text. As you know, I absolutely
Speaker 1: loved Nat, Thank you very much. Cannot wait through immortality,
Speaker 1: and I I think you're brilliant. And I just I
Speaker 1: read that that first boview was in like one. I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't put him up to this. You absolutely didn't.
Speaker 1: You absolutely didn't felt it barely knew when I bought
Speaker 1: it and I read it in one go and I
Speaker 1: was transfixed by I remember as I was reading, I
Speaker 1: was send your message, say this is just such like
Speaker 1: I was transported to that to Edinburgh at that time,
Speaker 1: and I thought that you just handled all of the
Speaker 1: stuff that I've been agonized I was agonizing over as
Speaker 1: I was writing Essex Stalks at the time. I was
Speaker 1: reading that just like it just felt and I'm sure
Speaker 1: effortless it's not the right word, because no, no, I
Speaker 1: I agonized when those lists too. You have to make
Speaker 1: those the sort of choices, but as a result that
Speaker 1: you end up with feels just you know, once the
Speaker 1: reader falls under your spell in anatomy, you know they're
Speaker 1: just they're they're in that world and it just everything
Speaker 1: feels right. And I think you've got to You've got
Speaker 1: to earn that. And don't know, I think you know,
Speaker 1: as you know, I thought you you earned it magnificently
Speaker 1: in that book. But I think any writer has you
Speaker 1: have to earn the right to do things that aren't
Speaker 1: period accurate within a period book. Then that means getting
Speaker 1: an awful lot of stuff right or close to right.
Speaker 1: So that you're then you you then say okay, well
Speaker 1: you earn the reader's trust and they're going to go
Speaker 1: with you even when it is clear that you're doing
Speaker 1: things that are not possible in that period. So in essence, dogs,
Speaker 1: you know you've said, you have people saying okay, I
Speaker 1: I really struggled with I'm writing a book about men
Speaker 1: in an army. How am I going to have them
Speaker 1: speak to one another? Because they's got to be somewhat profane.
Speaker 1: But the profanity of the Middle Ages is blasphemy for
Speaker 1: the fundamentally, our profanity is schatology and and it's and
Speaker 1: it's sexual. That's how we swear. But so I had
Speaker 1: a lot of trouble about am I going to use
Speaker 1: the F word in this? And eventually yeah, I use
Speaker 1: fairly liberally to punctuate military speech to because you have
Speaker 1: to translate dialogue from communicate it to a modern audience
Speaker 1: what you need to convey. It's part of the Tiffany
Speaker 1: for oublem, right, the Tiffany problem. Yeah, it's a So
Speaker 1: it's that's just sort of the colloquial name for it.
Speaker 1: The fact that like if someone hears the name Tiffany,
Speaker 1: they're they're like, oh, let's go to the mall. But
Speaker 1: Tiffany is a name that existed in the Middle Ages
Speaker 1: and the him you know, and for for years and
Speaker 1: hundreds of years. But if you wrote a historical fiction
Speaker 1: book and made your main character named Tiffany, it would
Speaker 1: seem wrong even if it's right. And so the typically
Speaker 1: problem is a is a colloquial version that someone told
Speaker 1: to me when I was writing anatomy, where sometimes you
Speaker 1: have to make things a little wrong so they feel right.
Speaker 1: To monorn readers, do you know what I love that?
Speaker 1: I've never heard it describes the Tiffany problem before, But
Speaker 1: it's that's that says that says everything. I always think.
Speaker 1: It's like castles, you know, I like Headed Castle a
Speaker 1: famous watch watch Dan Jans Walk Your Castles on Netflix.
Speaker 1: Please please squander your life in this pursuit. But they're
Speaker 1: the wrong cut, you know, you see them now. They're
Speaker 1: so bland. All medieval churches that's just devoid almost there
Speaker 1: the usually devoid of wall paintings and color and no
Speaker 1: with whitewash. If I went down the Windsor Castle Runch
Speaker 1: is about five miles down the road from my house
Speaker 1: with my tin of whitewash, and I just whitewash one
Speaker 1: of the towers. I reckonized, I reckon trees and laws
Speaker 1: would be dusted off. But they in the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: it would not be unusual to have a sort of
Speaker 1: a bright new colored castle. But we just think so
Speaker 1: even if you saw it on ILM, you'd say that's
Speaker 1: absolutely non to These people don't know anything about the
Speaker 1: Middle Age, So you're right. This is a version of
Speaker 1: the Tiffany. I call it the white washing windsor castle
Speaker 1: white washing winter castle problem, copyrighted Dan Jones. Another thing
Speaker 1: I also think, I mean, I I loved ethex Dogs,
Speaker 1: I like I thought it was just I felt like
Speaker 1: I was learning. This was a period of history I
Speaker 1: didn't know much about, and it made a battle feel
Speaker 1: so immediate and personal when I tend to be so
Speaker 1: bored by military history. It was so brilliantly done. Your
Speaker 1: characters are so well sketched, and I think that your
Speaker 1: use of violence and gore is so well placed. You
Speaker 1: don't use it gratuitously, but you convey how brutal these
Speaker 1: battles were. Well. Thank you. And there's I don't read
Speaker 1: a lot of military fiction, and I don't write. I
Speaker 1: mean I sort of some of them the books. In
Speaker 1: books like The Crusade, you can't get away from it,
Speaker 1: but the political as well as military, and it's not
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not a battle nerd, really, but I
Speaker 1: am a kind of people. And if one of the
Speaker 1: techniques that I tried, or the main technique I tried
Speaker 1: to use an Essex Dogs in order not to have
Speaker 1: very sort of either cliche or just like gratuitously unpleasant
Speaker 1: battle scenes, was just a lock focus, super super tight
Speaker 1: with one character and you follow mainly two characters. You
Speaker 1: follow the group of characters, but you're locked with a
Speaker 1: couple of viewpoints love Day and Romford through most of
Speaker 1: Essex Dogs, and not as much as you. But I
Speaker 1: have worked in TV as well as in writing, and
Speaker 1: one of the directors I worked with on a show
Speaker 1: a few years ago gave me a very good piece
Speaker 1: of advice, which is, if you're having trouble writing your
Speaker 1: way through a scene, just lock that camera on one
Speaker 1: person's shoulder. I found that the more I did that
Speaker 1: in Essex Dogs, the more the battles sort of gained
Speaker 1: very similitude. And there's one which is the one I
Speaker 1: suppose it's really is a crescy where for part of
Speaker 1: it where with Romford and he's just on the floor,
Speaker 1: just on the floor, and we could see his feet
Speaker 1: have been kicking it. But then it's really but he
Speaker 1: can't get a real can't get up, and you don't
Speaker 1: see anything out like flashes, you see other stuff that
Speaker 1: also I found, like, firstly, it freed me from having
Speaker 1: to write endless, endlessly long boring battle scene, so you've
Speaker 1: just got this like confused chaotic vision through one person's eyes.
Speaker 1: But I found also enabled me to make jokes because
Speaker 1: anyone who knows is invested in the history of the
Speaker 1: Crescent Campaign will come to us themselves and we'll be
Speaker 1: able to see where there are there's little easter eggs
Speaker 1: for the homeboys, right, like if you know that the
Speaker 1: Black Prince, if you if you heard about the Black Princes, go, well,
Speaker 1: it wasn't actually true that the Black Prince wore black armor.
Speaker 1: That's a Victorian myth. Right, let's st get this. Then
Speaker 1: there's a there's a joke for you about why how
Speaker 1: he gets that name and the way he acts when
Speaker 1: someone offers to give him some black armor is like
Speaker 1: it's but if you don't know. It doesn't marry says
Speaker 1: in character, but the picking viewpoints that are attached closely
Speaker 1: to one character, you know, usually a lonely part of
Speaker 1: the of the social hierarchy. I just found I had
Speaker 1: much been a ways of having jokes and subverting history
Speaker 1: and messing around with it, and and I enjoyed myself
Speaker 1: doing that a great deal. But then look, i'd have
Speaker 1: written a novel before. It was all new to me,
Speaker 1: and now you're doing another. There's a sequel coming out.
Speaker 1: I believe it's part of a trilogy. It's number two
Speaker 1: of a trilogy. Yeah, and I've gotta I gotta really
Speaker 1: finished writing that thing. Yeah, get on it so that
Speaker 1: I can have you back on and we can talk
Speaker 1: about it again. Siege craft is different. Siege craft is very,
Speaker 1: very different. Narrative challenge. I'm finally writing a the story
Speaker 1: of a siege to the story of a campaign, a
Speaker 1: military campaign. Is it's pretty easy? Like, oh, of course, yeah,
Speaker 1: famously easy. All of us are thinking that. But what
Speaker 1: you do, what you have built into it is narrative imperative.
Speaker 1: It goes forward because the army is moving and all
Speaker 1: you've got to well not all you've got to do.
Speaker 1: But that the thing you've got to actually a thing
Speaker 1: you've got to do with the battle campaign that's difficult
Speaker 1: is not make it inevitable the way they go in,
Speaker 1: and you've got to throw red herring after red herring
Speaker 1: in and give them different diversion so that it's not
Speaker 1: just that, well, they're on a train and the trains
Speaker 1: go into the station. Stop them here. Yeah, the difference
Speaker 1: of the siege is, man, this train isn't going anywhere
Speaker 1: the Strangers station. It's going to be at the station
Speaker 1: and delivering gets off. So it's very, very rich in
Speaker 1: textural opportunity. Unless it a very teenage girl and a
Speaker 1: horse who thinks she talks to God. It shows up.
Speaker 1: That's good for your siege. You know that you said
Speaker 1: about the trol with Calli's trouble with Keli. The trouble
Speaker 1: is it's not or Lane no true what you do
Speaker 1: have just in the same way, Elier, you've got Joan
Speaker 1: of Arc and the White Horse and every you know
Speaker 1: instantly when you say that, everyone knows what you're thinking
Speaker 1: if they listen to this podcast. Anyway, I haven't done
Speaker 1: a Joan of Arc episode, but I will. Well, you
Speaker 1: gotta get Helen Caster to come and do it. She
Speaker 1: is brilliant. Yeah, she's she's she's the best. Put that aside. Cali,
Speaker 1: you have a very very very very very fam us
Speaker 1: end to the siege. So if you've been to Calais,
Speaker 1: there's a row down sculpture in Calais of the six
Speaker 1: Burghers of Calais, and they're coming out with the nooses
Speaker 1: around the next to offer their lives to Edward to
Speaker 1: buy the freedom of everyone who's left in the city,
Speaker 1: who's survived baiting, rats and horse leather and whatever, whatever, whatever.
Speaker 1: And it's a really famous, really famous scene. And then
Speaker 1: you have cause Edward says, no, you hang you all,
Speaker 1: and his wife Siliver, oh please through that? Okay that
Speaker 1: I won't. It's a bit more dramatic than that, more
Speaker 1: paces in it than that impression suggested. But there are
Speaker 1: things in Cali to write towards that. They're there from
Speaker 1: the history, and so I've that's helpful. I love this.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about this. There's so much history, Dan,
Speaker 1: That's the lesson of history, isn't it. There's there's tons
Speaker 1: of it. Every time I think you've you've got to
Speaker 1: handle on it there's some more comes along. I've been
Speaker 1: reading nonstub history for a few years, doing this podcast constantly,
Speaker 1: and I've never heard about these burgers coming out with
Speaker 1: nooses or on their necks. The Rodance. Just doing google
Speaker 1: the Rodan sculpture, because the Rodand sculpture, there's two of them.
Speaker 1: There's another one, I think in London. Maybe I've not
Speaker 1: long to make somewhere else. I made a couple of
Speaker 1: films that like the Real History of Essence Dogs and
Speaker 1: made them in the summer last year, and we went
Speaker 1: to Calais and I said and looked at that Rodand sculpture,
Speaker 1: and it's just I mean, obviously it's it's not fourteenth century,
Speaker 1: it's Rodin, it's modern, but it's a sensational piece of
Speaker 1: sculpture which each of these six Burgers has a different
Speaker 1: form of grief conveyed by their mannerisms in their face,
Speaker 1: and they are what's amazing about it is that he
Speaker 1: has given them individual character. And when we think about
Speaker 1: so many of these set pieces from medieval history, if
Speaker 1: it's not the king or someone like near the level
Speaker 1: of the King, or Joan of Arc or whatever, they're
Speaker 1: just sort of generic noble or generic knight or generic
Speaker 1: peasant or generic archer or whatever. And what road Down
Speaker 1: does so brilliantly in that sculpture is say, these were
Speaker 1: real people, each one individual at each with a different
Speaker 1: reaction to this what we now see as a sort
Speaker 1: of a fixed historical tableau. And row Down is in
Speaker 1: a measurably greater artist than I will ever be, obviously,
Speaker 1: but the I don't know, he never owned as sex dogs. Well,
Speaker 1: but the aim is to capture some of that, is
Speaker 1: to say, like an army of fifteen thousand is fifteen individuals,
Speaker 1: and each one of them with their own take on
Speaker 1: the thing that they're experiencing. And when we think of
Speaker 1: medieval archer, yeah, okay, that's like that's a type. That's
Speaker 1: somebody who shoots a pretty similar bow with a similar
Speaker 1: arrow out of a similar bow and a similar place.
Speaker 1: But each one of those people was an individual, and
Speaker 1: and in the realm of fiction at least, that gives
Speaker 1: you such rich opportunity to do things with the past
Speaker 1: that nonfiction doesn't always allowed to do. So that's for
Speaker 1: me why I've enjoyed my little gap here. Fiction brilliantly said,
Speaker 1: A six dogs comes out in America February fourteen. I
Speaker 1: believe makes a great balance and take the week before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a pregame to immortality. Are I'm I'm twenty eight,
Speaker 1: two weeks before. It's okay, but plenty of time to
Speaker 1: read it and get ready for immortality. Your February could
Speaker 1: be sensationally good fiction wise, couldn't right? Get a good
Speaker 1: Valentine's Day gift for the medieval history lover in your life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then get a get book after that. Yeah, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for joining me. Uh, clearly when you're
Speaker 1: ready to go to bed. This is this is what
Speaker 1: I planned. Fire sell roll from straight into vice slumber.
Speaker 1: And next time I'm in London, will you take me
Speaker 1: on another tour? Can we go do something? Yeah? What
Speaker 1: you want to say? I'm coming this summer, are you? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm leading at tore to Cornwall, but I'm going to
Speaker 1: be in London for a bit. Okay. So we went
Speaker 1: to Westminster Abbey last time, didn't we? Yeah? I got
Speaker 1: a personal tour from Dan Jones in Westminster Abbey. Not
Speaker 1: to brag, but it was. It was wonderful. We had
Speaker 1: to queue up. I've never done that before. It was.
Speaker 1: I know. He was like, he's like, you're on TV.
Speaker 1: You don't have to wait line. Well, what don't we
Speaker 1: go to the Tower of London. Done, I'm there, let's
Speaker 1: do it. Tower of London is good. Yeah, we'll do that. Great.
Speaker 1: I'll see you this summer, and I'll see you even
Speaker 1: sooner because we're talking about your book again for your launch.
Speaker 1: Oh and then I'm coming to l a al, I'm
Speaker 1: coming to see Iggy Pop. You're going to get so tired.
Speaker 1: I'll see you so much. This is good. I know,
Speaker 1: this is fantastic. Great, order Dan's book. Dan, I'll see
Speaker 1: you so soon. Noble Blood is a production of Art
Speaker 1: Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron