Speaker 1: Pushkin. On the north bank of the estuary were assembled
Speaker 1: the English army, a little over two thousand knights, supported
Speaker 1: by five thousand archers. On the south bank the larger
Speaker 1: force of the French eight thousand knights and thousands of
Speaker 1: crossbowmen alongside them. The French army had been chasing the
Speaker 1: English for weeks, but wisely decided not to try to
Speaker 1: cross the salty marshes within range of those English archers. Instead,
Speaker 1: between the opposing armies, a single French knight, like a
Speaker 1: hero from Arthurian legend, galloped out towards the English, a
Speaker 1: tiny figure in the middle of the tidal flats, he
Speaker 1: shouted out his challenge. Following the traditions of courtly love.
Speaker 1: The French knight was carrying the token of some fair
Speaker 1: lady and wanted to prove that he was worthy of her.
Speaker 1: Did any Englishman dare thrice to joust with him? In
Speaker 1: full view of both armies. There was a moment of silence,
Speaker 1: broken only by the flapping of the pennants in the
Speaker 1: sea breeze, and then an English knight roared out his acceptance.
Speaker 1: The two men took up their position on the damp
Speaker 1: salty sands, in front of the cheering soldiers. They jousted
Speaker 1: once picked fresh lances, wheeled around, and jousted a second time.
Speaker 1: In the second exchange, the English Knight's shield was broken.
Speaker 1: To joust again would be to court defeat and death.
Speaker 1: Yet the English Knight seized another lance and prepared for battle.
Speaker 1: His French opponent instead dismounted and walked towards him, chivalrously,
Speaker 1: refusing to take advantage. The fight was over. The English
Speaker 1: Knight and the French Knight became lifelong friends. It's a
Speaker 1: charming story beloved by the chroniclers, and one which reminds
Speaker 1: us of the chivalric code of honor they loved to celebrate.
Speaker 1: Two days later, the armies would meet again. The result
Speaker 1: would be remembered for a very different reason. I'm Tim
Speaker 1: Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Nearly seven hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, the English King Edward the third and the
Speaker 1: French King Philip sixth were at war. It doesn't really
Speaker 1: matter why. All you need to know is that King
Speaker 1: Edward was claiming to be the rightful ruler not only
Speaker 1: of England but of France. His richer, larger, more powerful neighbor.
Speaker 1: He had destroyed King Philip's French navy. He had spent
Speaker 1: six weeks cutting a bloody sway the cross northern France,
Speaker 1: his soldiers raping, murdering, and pillaging their way through French cities,
Speaker 1: in a demonstration that the French King Philip wasn't much
Speaker 1: of a king at all if he couldn't protect his
Speaker 1: own subjects from the English invaders. It had taken time
Speaker 1: for King Philip to assemble his response, but eventually a
Speaker 1: mighty army of French knights was chasing Edward's smaller English
Speaker 1: force across France, gathering strength as they went. Philip's knights
Speaker 1: were terrifying shock troops, heavily armored men on powerful horses,
Speaker 1: able to charge en mass with crushing force while being
Speaker 1: impervious to all but the fiercest or most accurate blows.
Speaker 1: They were also rich, powerful men to afford the horse,
Speaker 1: the armor, and the support crew he had to be.
Speaker 1: The English archers weren't rich or powerful, and there was
Speaker 1: no tidal estuary to protect them from the French cavalry
Speaker 1: this time, just a long, steady, grassy slope stretching away
Speaker 1: beneath where they were sitting resting from digging themselves some
Speaker 1: fortifications and waiting for the French to show up. The
Speaker 1: view was even better from the windmill behind them, from
Speaker 1: where the English King Edward would survey the battlefield in
Speaker 1: between giving pep talks to his men. Those pep talks
Speaker 1: were sorely needed. They knew that when the French army
Speaker 1: caught up with them, the enemy would be thirsty for revenge.
Speaker 1: And although the English had picked the battle field, the
Speaker 1: French had home advantage, better equipment, and vastly superior numbers.
Speaker 1: Both sides had reason to be confident. For one of them,
Speaker 1: that confidence was utterly misplaced. I'm fascinated by the battle
Speaker 1: that was about to unfold. In some ways, it was
Speaker 1: very much of its time. In other ways, it offers
Speaker 1: us a very modern cautionary tale. Having crossed the river
Speaker 1: in pursuit of the retreating English army, King Philip sent
Speaker 1: out scouts to assess the situation. The scouts reported back
Speaker 1: the English had taken up position on a low ridge
Speaker 1: near the village of Cracy. The French, remember, had more
Speaker 1: than three times as many nights, the medieval equivalent of
Speaker 1: having three times as many tanks. The heavily armored French
Speaker 1: cavalry had been the dominant military force in Western Europe
Speaker 1: for the last five hundred years. The French also had
Speaker 1: several all thousand crossbowmen from Genoa. These were experienced mercenary troops.
Speaker 1: The Genoese were a deadly strike force, equipped not only
Speaker 1: with the murderously effective crossbow, but with large, specialized shields
Speaker 1: with spiked bottoms. The crossbow men would jam the spike
Speaker 1: into the ground, letting the shield serve as cover behind
Speaker 1: this portable wall. This unit of hired killers was a
Speaker 1: well equipped, well drilled machine. But despite his advantages, King
Speaker 1: Philip of France had reason to be wary. The English
Speaker 1: Knights were supported by five thousand well trained archers armed
Speaker 1: with longbows. The longbow was a simple weapon, but it
Speaker 1: took skill to make and skill to use. Longbows were
Speaker 1: crafted from a single piece of u with the strong
Speaker 1: golden heartwood facing the archer and the buttery, stretchy sapwood
Speaker 1: facing the enemy. Not as complex or as powerful as
Speaker 1: a crossbow, perhaps, but easy to carry and quick to draw,
Speaker 1: and the English archers had had all day to prepare
Speaker 1: the ground. Philip scouts reported that the archers were standing
Speaker 1: behind a line of spikes that would break up any
Speaker 1: cavalry charge. What's more, the French army was spread out,
Speaker 1: marching in a long column towards the English, with latecomers
Speaker 1: and supplies miles behind the special spikes. Shields for the
Speaker 1: Genoese crossbowmen, for example, were back with the baggage, and
Speaker 1: after marching all that long summer's day alongside rich French
Speaker 1: nobles relaxing on their horses, one could only speculate about
Speaker 1: the mood amongst the Genoese. So as his sprawling army
Speaker 1: continued its rapid march towards the battlefield, King Philip sought
Speaker 1: the advice of his most trusted counselor, Henrie Lemoyne. Your majesty,
Speaker 1: your soldiers have been on the road all day. Let
Speaker 1: us not now charge into the setting sun. We should
Speaker 1: halt and eat and rest. To morrow we shall attack
Speaker 1: in the name of God and Saint George. King Philip agreed.
Speaker 1: He gave the order to halt, and what followed was chaos.
Speaker 1: Here's a French author, Jean Froissart, writing a few years
Speaker 1: after the event. At this command, the front ranks halted,
Speaker 1: but those behind continued to advance, saying they would not
Speaker 1: stop until they had caught up with the leaders. And
Speaker 1: when the leaders saw the others coming, they went on also.
Speaker 1: So pride and vanity took charge of events. Each wanted
Speaker 1: to outshine his companions, regardless of the advice of the
Speaker 1: gallant Lamoine. Remember that joust, Remember the spirit of chivalry.
Speaker 1: No French knight wanted to get a reputation for cowardice.
Speaker 1: No French knight wanted to have his honor question because
Speaker 1: he had hung back while others had forged ahead. King
Speaker 1: Philip wanted his army to rest before the battle. The army, however,
Speaker 1: had its own ideas. Was the French army determined to
Speaker 1: ignore King Philip's orders? It certainly acted that way, but
Speaker 1: there was something more subtle going on. In the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties and seventies, the economist Thomas Shelling became fascinated by
Speaker 1: the connections between the motivations of individuals and the group
Speaker 1: dynamics that emerged from those motivations. He had been struck
Speaker 1: by a strange experience when he had been invited to
Speaker 1: give a prestigious lecture in front of a large audience.
Speaker 1: As he stood in the wings with a microphone being
Speaker 1: clipped to his lapel, he couldn't see a single person
Speaker 1: in the lecture theater. Row after row was empty. I
Speaker 1: was puzzled when my host walked on stage. No added
Speaker 1: to the rows of empty seats and went through the
Speaker 1: motions of introducing me. Resisting slightly, I was pushed gently
Speaker 1: out of the wings and toward the rostra. There were
Speaker 1: eight hundred people in the hall, densely packed from the
Speaker 1: thirteenth row to the distant rear. War Afterwards, I asked
Speaker 1: my hosts why they had arranged the seating that way.
Speaker 1: They hadn't. There were no seating arrangements and no ushers.
Speaker 1: The arrangement was voluntary and could only reflect the preferences
Speaker 1: of the audience. What were those preferences, Shelling could only guess.
Speaker 1: Perhaps people wanted to be seated as far as possible
Speaker 1: away from the stage, in which case the result was
Speaker 1: just fine. But more likely people didn't actually want to
Speaker 1: be so far away from the stage. They merely wanted
Speaker 1: to be closer than others to the exit so they
Speaker 1: could make a quick getaway, or fearing that Professor Shelling
Speaker 1: might start calling on audience members to answer questions, about
Speaker 1: economic theory. They simply preferred not to be conspicuously out
Speaker 1: in front of the crowd. In those cases, everyone would
Speaker 1: be happier if the rear twelve rows were roped off,
Speaker 1: forcing the entire audience closer to the stage. Shelling's point
Speaker 1: was not about the optimal seating arrangements for academic lectures.
Speaker 1: That was trivial. It was the realization that perfectly ordinary
Speaker 1: individual motives can lead to the emergence of quite unexpected
Speaker 1: group behavior. Nobody planned for Shelling to be speaking to
Speaker 1: his audience across a moat of empty seats, but that's
Speaker 1: what happened. So in what other circumstances might strange outcomes
Speaker 1: emerge from apparently innocuous individual decisions. This question was not
Speaker 1: a trivial one. Shelling served as a senior advisor to
Speaker 1: the US government, thinking hard about the problem of nuclear
Speaker 1: deterrance and all the ways in which deterrance could backfire,
Speaker 1: for example, when leaders lose control of events. Shelling's work
Speaker 1: had inspired Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy of Nuclear Armaged
Speaker 1: and Doctor Strangelove. Shelling had even spent an afternoon brainstorming
Speaker 1: with Kubrick about how a war might accidentally begin. If
Speaker 1: you've seen the film, you may recall that the trouble
Speaker 1: is started by a belligerent mid ranking officer, despite the
Speaker 1: best efforts of the leaders of the USA and Soviet
Speaker 1: Union to slow things down. The command structure of a
Speaker 1: cold war nuclear strike force is very different from the
Speaker 1: command structure of a fourteenth century feudal army, but still
Speaker 1: King Philip might have recognized the same energy. Tom Shelling
Speaker 1: eventually won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his ideas,
Speaker 1: which were collected in a book titled Micromotives and Macro Behavior.
Speaker 1: The links between micromotives and macro behavior can be complex,
Speaker 1: but it's a good idea to try to understand them
Speaker 1: if you want to lead an army. When the French
Speaker 1: chronicler Jean Froissar wrote his account of the chaotic French March,
Speaker 1: it could have come right out of Shelling's book. King
Speaker 1: Philip Recoll had ordered his army to stop and rest overnight,
Speaker 1: and the army had not stopped yet. Frassar didn't say
Speaker 1: that the French army wanted to fight at once. In fact,
Speaker 1: the army as a whole didn't have any coherent desire
Speaker 1: at all, Frassar instead focused on individuals. The rear ranks
Speaker 1: refused to stop until they had caught the leaders, while
Speaker 1: the leading ranks refused to be caught. Nobody wanted to
Speaker 1: charge unprepared at an entrenched enemy. They just didn't want
Speaker 1: to be vulnerable to the accusation of cowardice, of hanging
Speaker 1: back while their peers advanced. At Tom Shelling's lecture, nobody
Speaker 1: had wanted to sit at the front. This time, nobody
Speaker 1: wanted to stop at the back. Because of the individual
Speaker 1: behavior of French nights. The French army as a whole
Speaker 1: simply would not and could not stop. It ended up
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the hill, milling around in plain
Speaker 1: view of the bemused English archers. So King Philip decided
Speaker 1: he had no alternative to give the order to attack.
Speaker 1: As the summer afternoon began to cool, the English gazed
Speaker 1: down the hill at the French army, gradually assembling. With
Speaker 1: the French knights still gathering, King Philip sent forth his
Speaker 1: elite Genoese crossbowmen to soften up the English archers. The
Speaker 1: Genoese can't have been impressed. They'd been carrying their heavy
Speaker 1: crossbows all day, they hadn't had a chance to rest
Speaker 1: or eat, and now their employers, the French nobility, wanted
Speaker 1: them to wipe out the English long so that the
Speaker 1: French knights could get down to the real business of
Speaker 1: fighting the English knights. Worst of all, they hadn't had
Speaker 1: a chance to retrieve their shields from back in the
Speaker 1: French army's baggage wagons. As the English warily watched the
Speaker 1: Genoese approach, a sudden, spectacular summer shower passed across the battlefield.
Speaker 1: It was a bit of luck for the English archers,
Speaker 1: who could easily unstring and restring their simple longbows, keeping
Speaker 1: their bowstrings dry under their hats. The Genoese crossbows, far
Speaker 1: more complex tools, could not be so easily dismantled. Their
Speaker 1: strings got wet, loosening them and reducing their range. And
Speaker 1: as the Genoese continued their approach across the softened earth,
Speaker 1: the English archers must have been delighted when they noticed
Speaker 1: that the crossbowmen hadn't brought their shields. The English archers
Speaker 1: watched them halt and load their crossbows, perhaps because of
Speaker 1: the wet bowstring, or perhaps because the shieldless Genoese were
Speaker 1: slightly shy of getting too close. The crossbowmen stopped just
Speaker 1: a little too far away. The first volley of several
Speaker 1: clouds and crossbow bolts fell short of the English lines.
Speaker 1: There was no second volley. His froass off. The English
Speaker 1: archers took one pace forward and poured out their arrows
Speaker 1: on the Genoese so thickly and evenly that they fell
Speaker 1: like snow. When they felt those arrows piercing their arms,
Speaker 1: their heads, their faces. The Genoese, who had never met
Speaker 1: such archers before, were thrown into confusion. Many threw down
Speaker 1: their crossbows. They began to fall back. King Philip was enraged,
Speaker 1: although he only had himself to blame. He never took
Speaker 1: the crossbow men seriously, hadn't thought about how to use
Speaker 1: them effectively, and doesn't seem to have been surprised that
Speaker 1: they failed. He decided that it was time for the
Speaker 1: real fighting to start, which meant a cavalry charge. The
Speaker 1: contemptible crossbowmen had outlived their usefulness. Quick now kill all
Speaker 1: that rabble they're only getting in our way. Hundreds of
Speaker 1: the most eager French knights charged up the hill towards
Speaker 1: the English hacking their way through the retreating Genoese as
Speaker 1: they did, showing murderous scorn for their own allies. They
Speaker 1: got what they exerned. Their charge was slowed by the chaos,
Speaker 1: the rain soaked ground, the uphill slope, and foot deep
Speaker 1: potholes that the English soldiers had been digging all day,
Speaker 1: All the while five thousand English archers deluged with arrows.
Speaker 1: The armored Knights were fairly well protected that their horses
Speaker 1: were not. The charge faltered, then disintegrated just as it
Speaker 1: reached the English lines. The English knights, fighting on foot,
Speaker 1: drove the French back across the muddy battlefield, which was
Speaker 1: already littered with dying horses and helpless men. By now,
Speaker 1: the August sun was low in the sky. The English
Speaker 1: position was still perilous. They were on foreign soil and
Speaker 1: heavily outnumbered. It still wasn't too late for the French
Speaker 1: to withdraw, regroup and plan a fresh attack in the morning.
Speaker 1: But where was the glory in that forward road? King
Speaker 1: John of Bohemia, he was one of King Philip's great
Speaker 1: allies and a veteran of many battles. He was also
Speaker 1: fifty years old and an infection had taken away his
Speaker 1: eyesight more than a decade before. He wasn't going to
Speaker 1: let that stop him. Here's Jean Froissar's account of the
Speaker 1: great charge of the blind King of Bohemia. He said
Speaker 1: to them about him, I require you to bring me
Speaker 1: so far forward that I may strike one stroke with
Speaker 1: my sword. They said they would do his commandment, and
Speaker 1: to the intent that they should not lose him in
Speaker 1: the press, they tied all their reins of their bridles
Speaker 1: each to other, and so they went on their enemies.
Speaker 1: King John's doomed charge onto the blades of an enemy
Speaker 1: he couldn't even see it perfectly embodied both the courage
Speaker 1: and the stupidity of the entire French cavalry. His frossart again.
Speaker 1: The king was so far forward that he made many
Speaker 1: strokes with his sword and fought violantly. And his company
Speaker 1: ventured so far forward that they were there all slain.
Speaker 1: And the next day they were found in the place
Speaker 1: about the king, and all their horses tied to each other.
Speaker 1: The fighting had been ferocious on both sides, but the
Speaker 1: story had been the same. By the time the second
Speaker 1: French charge had been struck, with twenty or thirty thousand
Speaker 1: arrows and crossed the soft ground and the spikes and holes,
Speaker 1: and the fallen men and horses. The impetus had been
Speaker 1: completely lost. The English knights, fighting on foot around the
Speaker 1: King's son, the Black Prince, repelled what was left of
Speaker 1: the French. The French still had plenty of cavalry left.
Speaker 1: Much of the French army was still in the process
Speaker 1: of arriving on the battlefield, and in total the French
Speaker 1: had eight thousand knights while the English had just over
Speaker 1: two thousand. Each knight was eager for battle and glory,
Speaker 1: and so a fresh attack emerged from the chaos, with
Speaker 1: knights skillfully swinging their horses around at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the hill to charge once more up through the mud,
Speaker 1: over the bodies of the dying, and into the teeth
Speaker 1: of five thousand English archers. The result was no different
Speaker 1: to the first two charges, chaos, dead horses, armored then helpless,
Speaker 1: and the faltering French charge thrown back by the English knights.
Speaker 1: After some tough hand to hand fighting across the battlefield,
Speaker 1: unhorsed French knights slipped and floundered in the mud. Some
Speaker 1: drowned as the slime filled their helmets. The French kept
Speaker 1: ignoring the archers, partly because they were protected by pits
Speaker 1: and spikes, but partly because the rules of chivalry demanded
Speaker 1: that night fight with night. The first charge had failed,
Speaker 1: the second charge had failed, the third charge had failed.
Speaker 1: What next? King John of Bohemia may have perished, but
Speaker 1: his stubborn spirit lived on. The French knights charged again.
Speaker 1: In the historical graphic novel Crasy, one English archer sums
Speaker 1: up the madness in a short sentence, They're just not
Speaker 1: getting it. Six hundred and seventy two years after the
Speaker 1: Battle of Kracy, the Harvard Business Review twenty eighteen published
Speaker 1: a long article titled The Leader's Guide to Corporate Culture.
Speaker 1: In many ways, it's the kind of beige corporate speak
Speaker 1: you might expect with a two by two matrix, a
Speaker 1: list of the eight distinctive styles of corporate culture, and
Speaker 1: over eighty mentions of leader or leadership. It feels a
Speaker 1: long way from the mud and the blood, and the
Speaker 1: dead horses and the dead men on the battlefield of Cracy.
Speaker 1: But the management gurus in the Harvard Business Review actually
Speaker 1: pinpoint the French problem with uncanny accuracy. What is culture?
Speaker 1: They ask first, it's a group phenomenon. Culture is something
Speaker 1: you share with other people. Second, it's pervasive, it's all
Speaker 1: around you, like water is all around a fish. Third,
Speaker 1: it's enduring. Culture doesn't change quickly. And fourth, it's implicit.
Speaker 1: People say stuff and think stuff and do stuff without
Speaker 1: articulating why. The French and the English nobility had a
Speaker 1: common culture in many ways, just think of that celebrated
Speaker 1: chivalric joust. But the English were proving that given enough time,
Speaker 1: culture can change. For example, the English had once shared
Speaker 1: the French view that bows were the weapons of craven whimps.
Speaker 1: An old song mocked the archer as a coward who
Speaker 1: dare not come close to his foe, and the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church had condemned the murderous crossbow. The French had brought
Speaker 1: bowmen to the battle, but they didn't take them seriously.
Speaker 1: If they had, King Philip would never have sent them
Speaker 1: into battle without their special shields, and he would never
Speaker 1: have sent a cavalry charge right over the top of them.
Speaker 1: In contrast, King Edward the Third built his tactics at
Speaker 1: Kracy around the longbow, but that wasn't a decision made
Speaker 1: on the spur of the moment. He had long seen
Speaker 1: the longbow as his best chance to defeat France, a richer, larger,
Speaker 1: more populous neighbor, and to embrace the longbow meant reshaping
Speaker 1: the culture. Edward forgave the debts of the crafters who
Speaker 1: made the longbows and their arrows symbolically that was much
Speaker 1: more important than just paying them a bonus, and he
Speaker 1: commanded that all men over the age of twelve should
Speaker 1: practice archery for two hours after church each Sunday, on
Speaker 1: pain of death. King Edward made that law nine years
Speaker 1: before the Battle of Crazy. The French attitude to their
Speaker 1: crossbow men was one of contempt. The English attitude to
Speaker 1: their longbowmen was one of respect, but that respect had
Speaker 1: been carefully cultivated by the king. As I say, culture
Speaker 1: can change, but it takes time. The French nobility didn't
Speaker 1: have that time. After five centuries of proven success in
Speaker 1: which heavily armored charges had smashed enemy after enemy, they
Speaker 1: were suddenly having to rethink. That's not easy because the
Speaker 1: chivalric culture constrained the way the French nobles saw the
Speaker 1: situation and their reactions to what they saw. And like
Speaker 1: any culture, it was so deeply ingrained that it was
Speaker 1: hard even to perceive those constraints, let alone discuss them.
Speaker 1: They were focused on acts of individual valor, noble knight
Speaker 1: against noble knight, that didn't leave much room for deep
Speaker 1: with archers hiding behind spikes, or opponents who let their
Speaker 1: horses graze while they fought on foot, or even for
Speaker 1: a coordinated approach to combat. Nobody on the French side
Speaker 1: seems to have said, maybe we shouldn't keep charging up
Speaker 1: that mudslide. Nobody seems to have said, if they keep
Speaker 1: shooting the horses from under us, shouldn't we attack on foot.
Speaker 1: Nobody seems to have said, these guys are outnumbered and isolated.
Speaker 1: Times on our side, what's the hurry to attack at all?
Speaker 1: It wasn't that the French knights had the wrong answers.
Speaker 1: It was that they weren't even able to ask the
Speaker 1: right questions. The French tactics were disastrous, and it's natural
Speaker 1: to leap to the conclusion that the French culture of
Speaker 1: chivalry and feudalism that produced those tactics was a foolish culture.
Speaker 1: That's too easy. After all, French heavy cavalry had been
Speaker 1: dominant for hundreds of years. Until that moment, the entire
Speaker 1: feudal culture had grown up around the need to meet
Speaker 1: the cost of putting these expensively equipped warriors in the field.
Speaker 1: If your shock troops are also the nobleman, the richest
Speaker 1: members of your society, you need a way to motivate
Speaker 1: them to put themselves in harm's way. Hence the chivalric
Speaker 1: code of honor and French knights who would quite literally
Speaker 1: rather die than lose their reputation. In the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: the historian Lynn White Junior famously argued that the entire
Speaker 1: edifice of feudalism rested on the appearance of the stirrup,
Speaker 1: a technology which made cavalry more effective. You don't need
Speaker 1: to go quite that far to see that the French
Speaker 1: culture of chivalry was bound up with a French reliance
Speaker 1: on heavily armored knights, and that for five hundred years,
Speaker 1: that culture and that reliance had delivered success after success.
Speaker 1: It didn't because, as the Harvard Business Review could tell you,
Speaker 1: the thing about culture is that it isn't easy to change.
Speaker 1: It's tempting to think that this story is only relevant
Speaker 1: to a bunch of stupid, rich French nobles seven centuries ago,
Speaker 1: but is it? In twenty eighteen, I attended a barn
Speaker 1: storming lecture given by a fellow journalist, the then editor
Speaker 1: in chief of the Washington Post, Marty Baron. I write
Speaker 1: for another great old newspaper, the Financial Times, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to hear what mister Baron would say about the
Speaker 1: challenges newspapers were facing. Those challenges were immense. New technology
Speaker 1: had changed everything. New rivals, who didn't have to pay
Speaker 1: for the old print infrastructure, were offering cheap viral news.
Speaker 1: Online advertising revenues critical for any newspaper, and especially for
Speaker 1: a newspaper with a strong local had been cannibalized by Craigslist, Google,
Speaker 1: and Facebook. Cranks and extremists could find a large and
Speaker 1: profitable audience armed only with the social media platform, and
Speaker 1: many of the public had lost faith in the mainstream media.
Speaker 1: Nearly half of American voters thought the news media fabricated
Speaker 1: stories about the then president. A substantial minority opposed the
Speaker 1: freedom of the press and considered accurate but unwelcome stories
Speaker 1: to be fake news, just like the French Nights in
Speaker 1: thirteen forty six. Newspapers were facing new competitors using new
Speaker 1: technologies and new tactics. So what did mister Barons suggest? Simple,
Speaker 1: he said, just do our job. He cited The Washington
Speaker 1: Post's core principles, principles which date back to the nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties when the present incarnation of the newspaper was launched.
Speaker 1: As I sat there, I was genuinely moved, absolutely back
Speaker 1: to basics. Charge once again. But then I was part
Speaker 1: of the same culture. It was only after I took
Speaker 1: some time to think that I realized mister Baron had
Speaker 1: simply said, in the face of disasters, let's keep doing
Speaker 1: exactly what we're doing. And I, a fellow newspaper journalist,
Speaker 1: had thought this to be an inspirational message. The flower
Speaker 1: of the French nobility would have been proud of us both.
Speaker 1: But culture, remember, is pervasive, shared and implicit. No wander,
Speaker 1: it's slow to change. When they encountered the English Longbow,
Speaker 1: the French discovered, over the course of a disastrous summer evening,
Speaker 1: that their basic military approach had become obsolete. It was
Speaker 1: time for an instant rethink. But our own culture couldn't
Speaker 1: change that quickly, why would dairs? As twilight deepened over
Speaker 1: the battlefield, the French knights charged again and again and again,
Speaker 1: fifteen times in total. Each attempt was more hopeless than
Speaker 1: the last. When darkness fell, King Edward set fire to
Speaker 1: the windmill that had served as his observation post. As
Speaker 1: the building burned, the English archers pulled out long daggers
Speaker 1: and roamed the battlefield in the flickering orange light, slipping
Speaker 1: the blades into the vulnerable armpits or islets of fallen nights.
Speaker 1: When they found any in difficulty, whether they were counts, barons, knights,
Speaker 1: or squires, they killed them without mercy. Because of this,
Speaker 1: many were slaughtered that evening, regardless of their rank. At cracy,
Speaker 1: a glimpse of a ruthless, impersonal future, fought a glimpse
Speaker 1: of a heroic, mythical past, and left it bleeding out
Speaker 1: into the mud. Thousands of French soldiers died. Then the
Speaker 1: day after the battle, the English army killed another four
Speaker 1: thousand French, many of who may have been civilians who
Speaker 1: got too close to the battlefield or presumed that the
Speaker 1: victorious soldiers were French not English. From the ranks of
Speaker 1: eight thousand French knights, fifteen hundred noblemen were slain, nine
Speaker 1: of them princes. All over France noble families began murderous
Speaker 1: squabbles over succession. The English are generally reckoned to have
Speaker 1: lost fewer than a hundred men. The scale of their
Speaker 1: victory and of the French defeat was so colossal, so total,
Speaker 1: that they could hardly comprehend it. They set off to
Speaker 1: conquer the port of Calais, which they were to hold
Speaker 1: for the next two hundred and twelve years. King Philip
Speaker 1: himself fled the battlefield, wounded in the jaw by an arrow,
Speaker 1: and appalled at the disaster. Accompanied by just five knights,
Speaker 1: he knocked on the door of Labrory Castle a few
Speaker 1: miles away. Open your gate quickly, it is the unfortunate
Speaker 1: King of France. Unfortunate. Indeed, King Philip's reputation did not recover.
Speaker 1: Three years later. He was dead, and the French nobility
Speaker 1: did not much miss him. But they should have blamed
Speaker 1: themselves for the catastrophe. The French knights were no angels,
Speaker 1: just as the Genoese crossbowmen the Allies. They act down,
Speaker 1: but their culture emphasized valor and courage. Five hundred years
Speaker 1: of success had led them to forget that the chief
Speaker 1: aim of battle isn't honor its victory. Their English opponents
Speaker 1: brought new technology and new tactics, and the French Knights
Speaker 1: just couldn't adapt in time. For a list of our sources,
Speaker 1: please see the show notes at Tim Harford dot com.
Speaker 1: Portionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino
Speaker 1: and Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is
Speaker 1: the work of Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents
Speaker 1: of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright.
Speaker 1: The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
Speaker 1: of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John schnars, Julia Barton,
Speaker 1: Kylie mcgliori, Eric Sandler, Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano,
Speaker 1: Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production
Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember
Speaker 1: to share, rate and review, tell a friend, tell two friends,
Speaker 1: and if you want to hear the show, adds free
Speaker 1: and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts. Then sign
Speaker 1: up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple Podcast,
Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus,