Guy Windsor
I’m here today with Dr. Rachael Whitbread, who is a historian and author. Her PhD from York University was on tournaments, jousts and duels. She is the co-author with Graham Callister of Battle: Understanding Conflict from Hastings to Helmand, and is currently working on a book called Duel: Single Combat in Medieval England for Pen and Sword Press, which sounds just up our streets. So without further ado, Rachael, welcome to the show.
Rachael Whitbread
Hi, thank you so much for having me on.
Guy Windsor
It’s very nice to meet you, at last. So whereabouts in the world are you?
Rachael Whitbread
I’m up in North Yorkshire at the moment. It’s home for me. So I’ve had a really nice kind of quiet week at home getting ready for the holidays. Yeah, it’s been nice and chill.
Guy Windsor
Lovely. I’m actually going to be in York in a couple of weeks’ time because my daughter and I are going on a road trip taking in my mom and a couple of university towns that she may be thinking about applying to. York is nice, right?
Rachael Whitbread
Oh, York is beautiful. Yeah, I am frequently astounded that I get to call it my home rather than just popping in for a day or something. Yeah, it’s a lovely city. It’s a great student city. We’ve got a couple of great universities, loads of student life, but it’s also a kind of safe city, I like to think, you know, I grew up quite nearby. I was a student here myself. I had no qualms walking around by myself in the evenings. It’s very friendly. The people are lovely. So yeah, it’s a fab place. Everyone should come to York.
Guy Windsor
Okay, this is completely different to what, oh, my God, I’m blanking on her name. I’m an idiot. Living history, absolute Goddess of living history.
Rachael Whitbread
Ruth Goodman?
Guy Windsor
Ruth Goodman, there we go. Okay. In my defence, I got back from two week trip to America on Wednesday morning. So my brain hasn’t fully engaged yet. So Ruth, absolutely lovely guest. When I asked her whereabouts she was, she was like, I’m in Wales. And I was like, do you want to be more specific. She was like, no, because it’s absolutely lovely. And if I tell you how lovely it is and where exactly everyone will come here and they’ll ruin it.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, I’m not sponsored by the Yorkshire tourist board. But I am very pro York and pro Yorkshire. It’s a great place,
Guy Windsor
Okay, so the reason I came across you, when I was sort of looking around for podcast guests, was your PhD is like as perfectly on topic for the medievalists who listen to this show as it is possible to be. So the title is Tournaments, Jousts and Duels, Formal Combat in England and France, circa 1380 to 1440, which is also slap bang in my medievalist period, with medieval combat from theory, for example. Right. So my question is, what can you tell us about tournaments jousts and duels in England and France from 1380 to 1440.
Rachael Whitbread
Okay, how long have you got? So, yeah, I mean, this topic began, really as a kind of interest topic. I did some undergrad work on Edward III, I did some Master’s work on the continuation of chivalric policy up until about 1410. And I kept coming across these events. And my first challenge when I sat down to think about the PhD, and in fact, the first conversation I had, with my supervisor, Prof. Craig Taylor, at the University of York, was, what were tournaments and what were jousts and what were duels because that itself is an enormous question that we haven’t really got to grips with, I don’t think. I don’t think medieval writers had got to grips with that terminology and that distinction and that format of event. Overlaps hugely, and they changed. You know, a tournament in 1250 looks vastly different to an event called a tournament in 1450. So my first challenge was, what are these?
Guy Windsor
Right, so can you just tell us what’s the difference between the 1250 tournament and the 1450 tournament? That’s a great place to start.
Rachael Whitbread
Sure. So tournaments really start as roving battles where the participants may or may not be trying to kill each other. They take place over a large area of land, we’re talking acres, potentially square miles of land. There are two teams, those teams are not exactly the same size all the time. And the participants of those two teams are galloping around on horseback, over this extended area of land, trying to thwack one another. And in some tournaments, they’re trying to thwack one another, to unhorse one another, or to inflict minor injury, or sometimes they don’t really have any rules at all, and thwacking may lead to death. So those are the tournaments that are in England, they’re in multiple other European countries as well, until the start of the 14th century. Really, the vast scale of those events is over by the start of the 14th century in England, and they’re starting to shrink, and they’re starting to be regulated, because surprise, surprise the people of England don’t particularly like the fact that their fields, crops, buildings are being trampled by these guys trying to bash one another on horseback. So they are increasingly regulated. And by the end of the 14th century, into the 15th century, they have become incredibly formalized. Generally speaking, rather than two indeterminately numbered teams trying to bash one another, they’ve boiled down to one on one. They don’t have to be fought on horseback anymore, they often, in fact, feature a combination of horseback and foot combat, they have developing rules, and officials and oversight, and they have become really very closely controlled in England by the English royalty. The monarch is very keen to control these events, because they are so dangerous when unregulated.
Guy Windsor
Is it analogous to how football used to be this village and that village used to, like, play a kind of football, which is not really football at all. And then during the 19th century, it got regulated and formalised. And by the beginning of the 20th century, you have basically the modern football game, where the pitch is determined, all the rules that determine the number of players, all that sort of stuff. Is that a reasonable analogy?
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, I think that analogy works really well. And really, they’re regularising it for some of the same reasons, you know, it’s generally bad to have people in your country dying, because they are playing around with one another with no rules and no regulation. And they keep using these events to secretly kill one another, which happens reasonably regularly.
Guy Windsor
If they have a grudge or something you can, “It was an accident, I didn’t mean to stick my lance through his face.”
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes, you know, they’re fighting with swords and axes, and sometimes the foot combat feature daggers and wrestling as well later on. So there were loads of opportunities to kill someone you don’t particularly like and pass it off as just something that happens. So those are the basic differences. We’re thinking generally smaller in scale, and more regulated as the centuries go on. And that is an English theme. The same thing is not happening in the same way on the continent, particularly in the Low Countries. They continue these massed tournaments or mele tournaments much later. In England that more or less dies out and it becomes an individualised sport a lot more by the 15th century.
Guy Windsor
Okay. And this is distinct from jousts, how?
Rachael Whitbread
Jousts have long been a component of tournaments. Jousts are two men. There can be teams of men but they will joust individually. Two men running at one another with lances and this had long been a component of tournaments. It had long been a component of many battles. But as the 14th century progresses, particularly under Edward III, he really loves jousts. These jousts start happening as individual events. Two guys will run at each other with lances for a set number of attempts to hit one another with their lances, unhorse one another, sometimes commit injury sometimes it’s almost purely for show and for spectacle.
Guy Windsor
They have different kinds of tips on their lances, right? The tip that’s supposed to go through the armour and the tip that’s supposed to not go through the armour.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, that’s right. So if the two guys are trying to hurt one another, that’s a combat a l’outrance. And they often have a kind of sharp pointy spike on the end of their lance. Not always, they can joust at a plaisance with more blunted weapons, but an a l’outrance combat that the intention is to hurt your rival. Jousts or combats a plaisance are the ones where you’re not trying to hurt them, you’re maybe trying to hit them on a specific part of their body to score some points, or you’re trying to make a really glorious spectacle. So yeah, there are two quite distinct types.
Guy Windsor
You must be familiar with Fiore dei Liberi. Good. Not every historian I have on the show is familiar with Fiore. Because he makes the same distinction in his introduction in Italian, of course, not using the French terms, but the Italian is alla ol’transa, same word. I literally just re-translated it a few weeks ago, but I have gotten the word he uses. I’ll stick it in the show notes for the a plaisier. Enjoy for leisure.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. Okay.
Guy Windsor
So duels. It’s a big subject.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah. So duelling. And you know, this, this question has chased me for 20 years, and will continue to chase me for many more, I’m sure. Duelling as a concept. You know, when you hear the word duel, I think most people quite rightly think of an early modern or modern pistols at dawn, maybe swords at dawn. I think that they see that sort of early modern conception. Duels have obviously been around a lot longer. There are different types. Probably the most well-known of the medieval duels is the judicial duel, which takes place within a trial by combat. So for certain crimes, or certain civil cases, particularly property ownership, a judicial duel could be threatened, organised, fought over an issue of law between the two complainants, the two parties. And that kind of trial by combat judicial duel continues. Its use over property eventually declines, it becomes something used over matters that at the time, they called the matters of honour, it could be anything from who owns a particular coat of arms to who committed an act of cowardice or treachery. So those kinds of judicially overseen legally weighted duels are probably the most famous conception of a duel in in the medieval world but medieval England in particular, but they use the word duel for loads of other events as well. So one particular type of duel that I am fascinated by other duels that are fought between champions or representatives of armies, when they rock up on a battlefield. You’ve got these two big armies standing there looking at one another, they can see one another. And at some point in the preceding formality, before a battle, a challenge is thrown across the space between the two armies, someone answers it, and those two people have a duel in between the two armies before the main battle gets underway. One of the best examples of this is Halidon Hill, 1333, where a representative of the Scottish army challenges a representative of the English army to a duel, and the two of them fight between the two on looking armies. And these events to me are just fascinating for two reasons. Number one, you know, what does it tell us about medieval warfare and medieval battle that these two armies numbering in the 1000s can stop and can wait while two guys have a bash at one another between them? And the second thing is, you know, how are these duels then being used by writers of battle to reflect the wider themes of the battle being fought around them? So yeah, the duels themselves are a huge topic. And this is why the PhD focused on a tiny, tiny little period, because there’s just so much to write and so much to read.
Guy Windsor
So the duel that takes place before the battle between armies that dates back to classical antiquity. Achilles famously fought one. They put it in the movie. Actually, that was a fantastically good fight. It was so quick, beautifully done. So the outcome of the duel did not in any way determine the outcome of the battle. But you can imagine that if your champion has just killed their champion, your army gets a massive morale boost. But it’s not like it’s not like they duelled instead of having the battle. Am I correct?
Rachael Whitbread
Sometimes duels, or fights, have a limited number of men were offered instead of battle. English kings, in the 100 Years War have a sort of real preference to offer single combat to the French king or the French Dauphin, before they take an army over the channel to France, kind of their way of flagging to the French, that they’ve got a score to settle. And it’s a way to make themselves look really good to their men, I will save your lives by going and fighting one on one. They had no real intention of following through with these challenges. You know, they knew the French would say no, let’s not.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so it’s a safe way of gaining a bit of face.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, venting your opposition and making it look like you’ve got a legal quarrel, because you’re using something that were seen as a legal outlet for that intention.
Guy Windsor
Legitimises your invasion.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely, it legitimises your cause. And it’s another way that you can say, you know, we are in the right, the law and God are on our side. Before battles, there’s not that same role for the leaders. I mean, Robert Bruce, fights one on one before battle, but normally the participants in these pre battle duels are knights, relatively low ranking household knights is the kind of formula that the English use.
Guy Windsor
But a great way to become a famous knight.
Rachael Whitbread
Oh, yes. So Halidon Hill that the English night who participates in that duel is Robert Benhale. He’s a household knight of King Edward. And you know, all the chroniclers that write about this battle, have a little line about Benhale.
Guy Windsor
And the only reason you know his name is because he did that.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. And the only reason that the chroniclers write one night name next to their account of the Battle of Halidon Hill, and it’s that guy, and if they don’t name him by name, they still make a reference to it. So people, you know, hearing that chronicle or reading that chronicle will be thinking, you know, I’ve heard that somewhere else. Someone at court mentioned that a year ago that this guy did this great thing. But they were also used as these kind of microcosms of the bigger battle, which I think casts some doubt over the accuracy of the narratives of these duels. So this fuel before Halidon Hill, the Scotsman who participates that we know far less about, than the Englishman is described as this great giant, this massive guy. He’s called Turnbull, I think because he’s literally described as being able to flip a bull, right, this is a big man. And the English guy is described as being much smaller. But of course then when the English guy wins by firstly chopping this Scotsman’s dog in half. The dog was in the battle, big black, probably kind of a mastiff type dog. Dogs were taken into battle occasionally, that itself entirely possibly happened. But the dog gets to the English knight first and Benhale swings his sword and chops the dog in half. And then the Scotsman gets to him and meets with a similar fate. And of course, then this is painted as a great battle of David versus Goliath. You know, the little guy beats the giant Scotsman in the same way eventually that the smaller English army beats the giant Scottish army. So these events were used as microcosms of a battle or microcosms of a struggle between two sides I think a bit at the time.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. Okay, now I do have a specific sort of jousty duelly thing in mind. You must be familiar with Lady Agnes Hottot. So, if I remember the story correctly, and I should because I based a character deck in my card game on her. Her father and the neighbour were odds over a plot of land. They agreed to joust on the land and whoever won that just kept the land, which seems perfectly reasonable way of settling land disputes to me. And then, on the day of the joust, her father was laid up with gout. And so she armoured up, went out, defeated the neighbor, and then took off her helmet and revealed that he had been beaten by the daughter. Which, if that is true, prove beyond reasonable doubt that she trained a lot. I’ve had a go at jousting, and also jousting skills development stuff, you have to be a superb rider, which I’m not. And you have to have amazing weapons control, which I’m better at that than I am at the riding. But even then, that’s a far cry from actually being able to knock somebody off their horse. So what are your thoughts on that particular encounter?
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, I mean, the role of women in these duels is a really hotly debated topic. But there’s so much research still to be done. Because there are loads of these duels. There are 1000s of these judicial duels happening in England, not necessarily jousts, but you know, foot combats and duels with cudgels, and so forth. And, on the one hand, it’s incredibly unlikely that a woman in medieval England would have access to the level of training required to joust. I mean, as you say, it’s an incredibly high skill sport. It’s also an incredibly physical sport that depends a huge amount on physical personal strength.
Guy Windsor
Hang on. I have interviewed jousters on this show. And I mean, women can certainly train to that level. There’s no question about it.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, no, absolutely. As I say, some women absolutely can attain that level of fitness and that level of strength. Whether they would be allowed to train to the point where they could access those levels of fitness and strength in jousting, which was generally a sport of the gentry and the nobility is unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely, because the women who moved in gentry and noble circles were not expected to perform that role. They had other expected roles that they were expected to perform. Whether women participated in judicial duels that did not involve jousts but that involved cudgels, for example, and small shields, bucklers that were the regular weapons of a judicial duel. That is more likely, in fact, there are instruction manuals with pictures of how a man and a woman can fight a duel against one another. And, you know, I think it’s Talhoffer has the man stood in a hole to somehow make the difference between presumably the man and woman’s heights.
Guy Windsor
Also they have different weapons. The man is in the hole and he has a club and the woman is out of the hole, and she has a rock in a veil. And if he comes out of the hole, he loses. If she goes into the hole, she loses. And if one of them beats the other one to death, they lose.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, indications are that they’re writing rules for that to happen. And that is absolutely feasible for a judicial duel. Whether women had the ability, not physical ability, but the ability in time and training to dedicate to learning to joust is doubtful.
Guy Windsor
Okay, so I’m what I’m getting from you is, you have a suspicion that lady Agnes Hottot did not actually duel with her neighbour.
Rachael Whitbread
I think that’s my suspicion.
Guy Windsor
I’m not pleased with this. I do not want to hear this. There’s chronicles! I mean, you must have read the original sources, right? So what is going on? If it didn’t happen, what did happen?
Rachael Whitbread
Well, there’s a number of ways that chronicles can get their information. And this is one of the problems of using Chronicles, which of course, we all have to because they are one of the main sources of information on what happened in the medieval period. But chronicles themselves have a lot of problems with where they are accessing their information. Many chronicles were not written at the time of the event they described, many rely on effectively gossip. Some do rely on much more trustworthy sources. They rely on official newsletters. They rely on eyewitnesses, but they’re also narrating gossip that they hear from travellers, from people in the street, from people who happen to visit a monastery or wherever the chronicle itself is being written. So the places that chroniclers access their information is problematic when we’re trying to work out what they’re narrating that’s accurate. And what they’re narrating that reflects a different version of reality. So when they give us an account of a woman jousting, or of a guy slicing a dog in half with a single stroke.
Guy Windsor
That’s not hard to do actually, that’s perfectly doable. I’ve not done it. The RSPCA you do not have to come knocking down my door. But I have cut similar targets with a similar type of sword, similar resistance targets. And you need to be quite good with a sword to do it. But it’s not a particularly remarkable feat in terms of just getting the sword through the body.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, I mean, as one would expect from a knight in active service, he would have the ability to do that. But whether it happened in that way, whether the English guy really was half the size of the Scotsman or not, we have to ask ourselves, is this trying to tell us truth? Or is this trying to tell us a version of truth that medieval writers and chroniclers want us to understand? So for the case of a woman jousting, this may have happened, it may have been such a phenomenal one off that chroniclers all wrote about it, because it happened exactly as they say.
Guy Windsor
It can’t happen exactly as they say, because in the Chronicle I read, she pulls off her breastplate to reveal her boobs, and simply anyone who has worn armour, regardless of the boob factor. Anyone who has worn armour knows you can’t just pull off your breastplate. It takes time and effort to get that damn thing off. And even then you’re wearing clothes underneath it.
Rachael Whitbread
So you’re not wanting that that metal right up against you, no absolutely not, I can’t imagine anything, anything worse. But, are they telling us something that that genuinely happened? Or are they not? And if they’re not telling us something that genuinely happened, why are they telling it that way? Are they telling it to us because they want to give us a good story. You know, chronicle is sometimes just like a really good story. And a woman fighting in a joust and then dramatically revealing herself with the kind of, I am no man. That’s a great story. We love Lord of the Rings. And they would have loved that story too. Or is it because perhaps they’ve just confused their information. Maybe they heard about someone participating in a joust on behalf of a woman and just missed out the “on behalf of” factor. Did they confuse her role because women certainly had roles at jousts and tournaments and formal combats. Are they just confusing her role?
Guy Windsor
What role would that have had?
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah. So I think there’s a there’s a whole series of stuff to unpack when we’re dealing with chronicle narratives and chronicle accounts. And it’s rarely just as cut and thrust as they tell us it is, I think,
Guy Windsor
So what roles women have had at tournaments or jousts?
Rachael Whitbread
Obviously, they can in judicial duels be one of the complainants. They can be one of the parties involved in the legal debates, legal issue, and they would have normally a champion fight on their behalf. Later on in more ceremonial court based events, they could act as gift givers, they would award the prizes to the victors at the end of the event. They could act as judges, they would be asked to name the knight who has performed best in the event, who’s jousted the best, who’s performed in foot combat the best. And they often played a role in the ceremonial surrounding particularly later, formal combats. So the procession of participants to the jousting area or the lists. The bestowing of favours. They would often sort of play a role in that ceremonial. And then of course, these events weren’t standalone, they would be feasting, often hosted by women afterwards, there would be dancing in which the women often competed. So you get the echo of the men competing in the joust or the fighting. And then the women competing in the dancing so they had a kind of role in the ceremony and the events surrounding these events.
Guy Windsor
Okay, I am going to choose to believe that Lady Agnes did actually do that joust. And there isn’t any definitive evidence that she didn’t. It’s just rather unlikely, which maybe it’s so unlikely that’s how the story was kept. Because it’s rare.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Is this just an amazing one off and therefore it gets written by everyone? Or is this a bit of mistaken confused artistic license?
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Yeah. In the absence of definitive evidence, either way, I’m going to have to go with the one that serves my political goals the best.
Rachael Whitbread
I think that’s absolutely fine, you know, I think it’s a really good story. And that’s what I love about so many of these events, and so much of this period is it’s just a damn good story. And that’s just a great, joyous way of exploring history, I think.
Guy Windsor
Okay, speaking of damn good stories. What is the Order of the Round Table, really?
Rachael Whitbread
Oh, gosh, okay, so we traveled back to January 1344. For this one, Edward III has just held three days of jousting at Windsor. And he has participated himself, he gets named the winner, on one of the days of some of the jousts. I mean, obviously he does because he’s the king. And he announces after these three days of general merriment, that he is going to found an Order of the Round Table. And he announces it again, according to chroniclers, who we obviously believe word for word, he announced specifically to be in the same manner and condition as King Arthur, he wants to recreate Arthur’s round table. And he does this to try and recruit 300 knights to this Order of the Round Table. This is not a small thing. He goes big. He says that he’s going to build a home for them at Windsor. And he stands up and he wears a crown for this announcement, he wears fantastic robes that the main chronicle narrative is Adam Murraymouth who talks about this. And he is writing just afterwards, possibly from some eyewitness testimony. And he describes the way Edward stands up in this fantastic regalia with a crown that he’s actually just got back from it being pawned. This is not a king dripping in wealth, but he wants to appear wealthy, he wants to appear spectacular. And he says, we’re going to found this amazing Order of the Round Table, just like my ancestor, King Arthur did. And he declares that their first meeting will be in May. So five months later, he says that he’ll build them a home at Windsor. And that’s it. And for a long time, it was kind of presumed or suspected that that literally was it, you know, a couple of years later, he’s going off for Crécy, a couple of years after that he creates the Order of the Garter, very different kettle of fish when it comes to a chivalric order. And we really didn’t know what happened to the Order of the Round Table. And then there was some archaeological work at Windsor, where they found the possible foundations of a very large, round structure. It was huge. It would have probably sat 300 guys, and their ladies because they were included in this thing as well. So 600 people,
Guy Windsor
For some dinner parties.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, for this building. That is a hell of a dinner party. That’s a big order on the menu for that day. So they don’t think this building was finished. They think it was abandoned probably when the Order of the Round Table was abandoned, because Edward changed what he wanted the Order of the Round Table to give. He created this thing, he sets up this thing to reflect his own glory, with the kind of whole nobility of England around him, rocking up for these presumably annual festivities in May every year, meeting in this giant building, Edward at the center of that. But the Arthurian kind of conception of knighthood is also a really individualised conception of knighthood. You know, while Edward puts himself at the centre, he’s also encouraging his men to, to read tales of individual knights going to get individual glory, you know, the quest for the Holy Grail,
Guy Windsor
They do tend to go off and do stuff on their own, like Galahad, and Percy or whatever.
Rachael Whitbread
And in 1344, Edward maybe likes that idea. He certainly likes the idea of the whole nobility unifying around him, because he’s, already kicked things off with France. He’s perhaps considering at this point, military action, he’s thinking to himself, how can I get the nobles of England on board with a kind of military quest? And he thinks, oh, who else do I know who got his knights on board with some military quests? Arthur gives me a really great model to use here. And Edward was also kind of really interested in Arthur. He liked his history. He owned some books, which in this period was a big deal. He has a couple of copies of the books. He was familiar with Arthurian romance, he had a real interest in the nine worthies. These kind of nine figures of chivalry, of which Arthur was one. And I think he kind of has a real interest personally, as well as a political tool of what the Order of the Round Table can do. Fast forward four years to the Order of the Garter and things have changed. He has now obviously won at Crécy. He has made a chivalric military name for himself. And he doesn’t necessarily need the whole nobility to meet every year to celebrate him, and Arthurian kinship and military spectacle or glory. Because he’s now kind of created his own myth, he is the victor against the French. So instead, he creates the Garter, which is much, much smaller, the King, the Crown Prince, 24 guys, it’s a much smaller, close knit group of people who’ve supported Edward in the creation of that military myth. And it’s very select, and it’s all about who Edward personally favoured and rewarded. And so his needs change. And so his model for an order of chivalry changes, and I think that, sadly, for us is where the Order of the Round Table went, because just one meeting of this thing would have been incredible.
Guy Windsor
But it would cost a fortune. It is literally 20 times more expensive.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. And you’re going to have the spectacle and events around just that meeting. Probably because they didn’t meet at the Order of the Round Table, we don’t know what Edward envisaged happening at this meeting. But, you know, we can maybe extrapolate from meetings of the Garter and then scale that up to 300 knights. We’re probably looking at jousting, because it’s announced at three day jousting event. We’re talking feasting, we’re talking processions and pageantry, you know, the cost of this thing would have been absolutely enormous.
Guy Windsor
Like our recent coronation. It was outrageously expensive.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah. And I think that may well have played a role in the scaling back of these plans as well. This is a guy who’s just got back from campaign, he doesn’t need this anymore. He doesn’t need to spend the money on this anymore. And he’s got bigger things to spend money on. So marginalizes it.
Guy Windsor
Okay, you mentioned the nine worthies. For listeners who don’t know what they are, could you just tell us?
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, sure. So the nine worthies were these nine paragons of chivalric virtue. There were three classical, three Christian, and three non-Christian figures. Arthur is one of the Christian figures. They were seen as being the absolute height of chivalric values and virtues. And so from that we can kind of extrapolate a little bit perhaps on what the virtues of chivalry were. Great leadership, importance in battle, fighting ability. Some, obviously non-Christian, which is interesting when we think about conceptualized Christianity and chivalry. But there was a kind of emphasis, certainly for Arthur, on his Christian values. and they were they were kind of embraced as these paragons of chivalry a huge amount at the time.
Guy Windsor
Do you recall who they were?
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, I can just pull up my little list here.
Guy Windsor
I didn’t mean to put you on the spot, it’s just this goes into interesting places.
Rachael Whitbread
No, absolutely. So the classical were Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.
Guy Windsor
Interesting. I wouldn’t have been associated Alexander or Julius with being knightly at all.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, yeah. They see different values in each of them, I think. Then you’ve got Joshua, David and Judah Maccabee. They are, obviously, three from the Jewish tradition. And then the Christians are Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon. And they were certainly kind of held up in a huge amount of esteem under Edward III. He has a huge interest in them. His wife buys him, I think it was a vase or a jug of some kind, decorated with images of the nine worthies as a personal gift. Yeah, this is something he has a real personal interest in.
Guy Windsor
Did that survive?
Rachael Whitbread
That’s a great question. I am not sure. I know we’ve got an account that demonstrates she gifted it, I’m not sure if it’s still around or we know where that’s gone.
Guy Windsor
Maybe King Charles uses it for something in Windsor.
Rachael Whitbread
Wouldn’t that be lovely, his water jug. Yeah, this absolutely glorious piece of decorative wear. Yeah, so they are reflected in literature. Their prominence goes right the way through to the Renaissance period. They feature in Tudor masks right the way through up to Shakespeare. He references that I think it’s in one of the Henry IVs he references some bravery and fighting by Falstaff that he says he’s ten times better than the nine worthies, which kind of indicates that they’re still known. They’re still talked about. They’re still seen as this ideal.
Guy Windsor
And they don’t need explaining in the text. Because Shakespeare is very good at explaining stuff. He says things twice quite a lot. If everyone is expected to know who the nine worthies are, then there’s no need to explain them.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he compares him to you know, Hector of Troy, and he compares Falstaff to Agamemnon, and he says he’s as great as the nine worthies. Presumably, then, if you didn’t know who they were, you could infer who these guys were. But yeah, it’s used as a mask theme, not just in England, this goes across Europe as well.
Guy Windsor
Okay. So I mean, things have changed a little bit in terms of military leadership. And you wrote a book about understanding conflict from Hastings to Helmand. I must confess, I have not actually read it. If I had to read every book written by every guest, I would literally spend my entire waking life reading books by guests, which would be a great way to spend my life. But I have, unfortunately, other responsibilities. So can you just sort of summarise, I hate it when people do this to me, right? You’ve written this book, okay. It took you like four years to do. Could you please just summarise it in the next ten minutes? But there we go. Okay. So, please, please summarize how things have changed.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, no problem. So yeah, I co-wrote the book with Dr. Graham Callister at the York St. John University, who is a Napoleonic scholar, French revolutionary Napoleonic scholar. And we did our doctorates together at York. And we both work on military history. Me tangentially, I guess, with my background in in duelling and tournaments, Graham much more explicitly with foreign policy during the Napoleonic and Revolutionary Wars. And we were both teaching at the time, Graham, obviously undergraduates at university and Master’s students on the war course at St. John’s, and me A level and IB students in sixth form. And we both really wanted a book that we could give our students that would cover some themes of battle over the last millennium. We didn’t want just a history of battle, you know, a chapter on early medieval, and then a chapter on 19th century, we wanted to address this thematically. So if students were interested, or were writing about, say, leadership in battle, they had a place to go where they could read a chapter on some themes of leadership, over 1000 years of history. Now, that is a pretty big challenge. We put some parameters in place for our own sanity, and also just it to mean that we could draw some kind of conclusion that was in any way meaningful. So we focused on the European world. We focussed, in fact, almost entirely on Europe. We venture over to North America a little bit, but we focus as much on Europe as anything. We look at land battles, we would love to have done something on naval warfare and bring in aerial warfare but we focused on land battles, because we both work on land war in one guise or another. So we wanted to work on that. And we picked some themes that we thought would make really fascinating studies of battle, specifically over the past millennium. So things like strategy and tactics, the role of leadership, the role of weapons, but also some things that we really wanted to unpick a little bit more. So we’ve got a chapter on society, how does the society that soldiers come from impact the battlefield and the battle itself? How do non-combatants play a role in?
Guy Windsor
Okay, everyone’s expecting me to go straight to the weapons. But what you just said about how society impacts, so how does the society they come from impact the actual battle itself?
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah. So I mean, it really acts, I think, as a massive informer on the way that an army is organized, the way that an army is recruited, the quality and experience of the soldiery. And then when you get into the battle itself, the fighting, it impacts things like what actions are allowed and prohibited by the soldiers.
Guy Windsor
That’s why I was thinking, it’s like, in this society, you kill prisoners in that society, you don’t kill prisoners, that that sort of thing would change. I mean, I wouldn’t imagine there’s a huge amount of variation in Europe alone. But when European armies met, for example, Asian armies there was all sorts of “Hang on, they’re not playing by the rules.” Well, in fact, they were, they were just playing by different rules.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. And even within Europe, you know, the Black Prince is a divisive enough figure within European contexts, you know, is the execution of civilians acceptable? Is the execution of prisoners of war acceptable? At Agincourt, I think it was, Henry the V was put on a sort of trial for war crimes at some point by a court in America in about 2000 because of the execution of prisoners of war.
Guy Windsor
Well, that will teach him a lesson. He’s been dead for 500 years. Well, we better make sure that he learns his lesson. How frantically pointless.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, we found all of these kind of interesting little nuggets where societies are reflected by the army that is recruited from them. So the health of soldiers at the start of the 20th century, was something that Graham in particular flagged up. The fact that when they were recruiting for the Boer War and World War One, they were finding that so many men from working class backgrounds were malnourished, and were hugely underweight and had horrific shortages of really important things that they needed. And so that idea that you know, the recruitment for war is a straightforward process of the army needs some men, it’s going to issue some propaganda to make war look glorious. Men sign up and they go off to war. Actually the distinction between society and the armies that are recruited from them is much more nuanced and much more fascinating, I think. And then just the value placed on things like medical support and access to water. We were thinking particularly about the crusades, and obviously there you’ve got a clash of societies and a clash of cultures. But you’ve also got Frankish commanders making decisions to miss waterholes because the final goal is more important than the welfare of the men. So you know that you’ve got all sorts of other distinctions that I think go beyond the kind of basic ideas of different societies have different values. Actually, within societies there are a lot of different values reflected here.
Guy Windsor
Now, my listeners will not forgive me if I don’t ask about the weapons.
Rachael Whitbread
Sure. I mean, the development of weapons, obviously, has meant that war and battles are capable of killing more people more quickly. But there are also real similarities in some of the challenges that weapons present armies. I mean, an army obviously cannot fight a battle if it doesn’t have enough weapons to do it. And the logistical challenges of getting weapons to a battlefield ready to be used, and having men trained to use them, are challenges that have not decreased over the past 1000 years. Some of the great work by Ann Curry and others onto the archers’ role in the English campaigns of the 100 Years War, is this half hour arrow shooting volley fire? Is that likely? Could that ever have happened? Well, if you’ve got an unlimited supply of arrows, sure, but given that they didn’t have an unlimited supply of arrows, the role of arrows in that battle is going to be different, they’re not shooting indiscriminately for half an hour, and having to use them much more judiciously. So, you know, the idea that as weapons have developed in complexity, they’ve also gained more challenges in supply and logistical support. Sure, I mean, that is true. The tail modern weapons is enormous. But there’s been a logistical tail.
Guy Windsor
One of the battles in I think it was the first Zulu war, the British Army had the wrong bullets for their guns, and so they all got slaughtered. I’m thinking it’s Isandlwana. Is that the that the battle?
Rachael Whitbread
It could well be Isandlwana. Yes.
Guy Windsor
Just send them the right fucking bullets.
Rachael Whitbread
Absolutely. And then you get, you know, just a little while later, you’ve got the Russian army turning up on the front in World War One, without any guns, and their commanding officers are saying, you know, don’t worry. In a couple of hours, some guys will die. And you can use theirs. That’s not a great approach to weaponising your army. So, yeah, these problems are kind of age old, I think.
Guy Windsor
Yeah, we think of like, archers as carrying a quiver full of arrows. But I mean, arrows were delivered to the English army at Agincourt in barrels. And a barrel will hold an awful lot of arrows.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But, there’s also considerations of okay, transporting those arrows down. When the English keep doing these campaigns and chevauchées, they don’t hold the territory behind them. So any supply line has to try and negotiate enemy actors to get to the English army. And then you’ve got the manufacturer of these things as a raw product takes time, and it takes resources and it takes expertise. Before you’ve tried to get them to the army. So the logistical tail has always been there. I think it’s just in much more modern warfare, that logistical tail is far longer. And far more people have to have a very high level of technical expertise as well.
Guy Windsor
Right. Yeah. I’m thinking of American production during the Second World War. I mean, they were they were producing planes at an astonishing rate. And it was that as much as anything else I think that probably tipped the war in that direction.
Rachael Whitbread
Yes, absolutely. I think the country that can make more weapons, but then get those weapons to where they’re needed and then use them effectively is normally going to be the army that wins but there are lots of pieces to match up in that line. When it works, it is decisive but it doesn’t always work.
Guy Windsor
Yeah. Okay. Now I do have to ask, if we can just go back a few 100 years. What did the seven Frenchman do with the seven Englishmen in 1402?
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, okay, so, oh gosh. So 1402 there is a kind of miniature mele formal combat. Formal combat, by the way, is my solution to the terminological problem of what do we call these jousts, duels, tournaments. This is two teams, seven men on each team, fighting on foot simultaneously. So this isn’t one versus one. This is at the same time seven vs. seven. The French men were the challengers, they’d sent a challenge to the English in 1398, early 1399 to fight in an encounter at l’outrance. So this is going to be a violent one. This is going to be, we’re trying to hurt one another here. Stuff happens in England. Let’s put it that way. 1399, you’ve got the usurpation of Henry Bolingbrook, who becomes Henry IV. The English have bigger things to worry about for a couple of years. But finally they managed to arrange this combat in May 1402, near Bordeaux at Montendre between these two teams, these two groups. The two sets of men represented two households. So the seven French participants were all from the Duke of Orleans household. And the English participants were all from the Earl of Rutland. Edward Plantagenet’s household, so he’s the grandson of Edward III. And he was the royal lieutenant in Aquitaine. So he’s a kind of local power. They’re members of his household who are who are going to fight this fight. And they turn up, the Frenchman spend a long time apparently mouthing off against the English. The main narratives for this are French. And in particular, there’s a narrative by Christine de Pisa. She writes how the French were to defend the honour of France. They were to fight the dishonorable, slovenly English. A different writer says that the English spent the night before the combat getting pissed. Whereas French were in prayer, you know, you’ve got this real sort of almost propagandising presentation of these two.
Guy Windsor
To be fair, if I was going to fight to the death the next day, I would much rather spend the night drinking and whoring than praying, honestly.
Rachael Whitbread
I guess you’ve just got to hit that sweet spot where the hangover hasn’t hit by the time the fighting happens. Be a little bit drunk still. A little bit of extra courage will go a long way, I think. So they turn up. There’s all sorts of political background to this of why it’s happening. So the Duke of Orleans, the French participants were in his household. He has been in conflict with the Burgundians, the Duke of Burgundy and his followers. He sees the Duke of Burgundy and England as being a little bit cozy. He’s worried about that relationship. He describes the peace treaty in 1389 signed between England and France as a Burgundian peace. He also feels a bit isolated. He is very worried about England returning Richard II’s wife, Isabella Valois to France. He’s been mouthing off about the fact that English have deposed Richard II but won’t return his wife to the French. Since 1399 he organizes jousts in York in 1400, sends a couple of his men to fight those, under the sort of pretext of checking on Isabella of Valois and seeing what’s happening to her. So the Duke of Orleans is the kind of chief Anglophobe in France at this point and organizes this duels to express some of those concerns and those frustrations. So the 14 guys meet up. Most of them are knights, or kind of household squires. There is one particularly surprising participant. And this guy is identified just as Champagne in the narrative accounts of the event. Now Jean Bernard Fevre, has identified him as probably Guillaume de la Champagne, who was a Chamberlain of the Duke of Orleans. And he is a wrestler. He’s never been to war before. He was not a noble. He has to get special permission to participate from the Duke of Orleans, because he has no experience of fighting knights, he has no nobility, but he’s a great wrestler.
Guy Windsor
Which is what you want in armour.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, he’s probably there. Because accounts of the combat suggest his role was to wrestle the Englishman to the ground while his teammates come up and stab at them. So this is a really violent, physical, grisly affair. This is wrapped up in things of nicety, but it’s not nice.
Guy Windsor
The French put a ringer in there. Because that is not normal to have a non-knightly person who just happens to be a superb wrestler, slap some armor on him, send them in just for the take. I mean, that is gamesmanship.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. And we can tell that this is unusual, because they have to get special permission to use him. So this is forethought and careful planning by the French. They are going into this to fight, not fight dirty because it’s allowed, they have legal permission for it. But you know that they’re fighting with real intent to inflict some damage here. And, in fact, they do. One of the Englishman, Richard Scales, is killed, and the fight is stopped at that point because someone has died. So this was a pretty grisly, pretty violent affair. But this is not the only time that this group of Frenchmen get together to go and fight as a little team. So 1405, 1406, the same French team prepared to undertake a similar encounter against champions from the house of Burgundy. So there is a suggestion, although it’s really limited, that this was a professional outfit. These were men who trained and were prepared and strategised to fight together in these events.
Guy Windsor
Any kind of team against team, it is the teamwork that wins. I’m guessing that the English knights probably didn’t spend a lot of time working on that teamwork.
Rachael Whitbread
I’m guessing they maybe spent a little bit too much time in the pub rather than strategising as a group. They were from the Earl of Rutland’s household. They did know each other. They had fought alongside each other, but not as a group, not as an organized team.
Guy Windsor
And it’s interesting that the combat was stopped the moment somebody died. As opposed to last people standing win. One person has did, that’s it, we stop. It’s quite civilized.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah. Well, yeah. They obviously had officers and an overseer of the field. There has been some suggestion that that was the Earl of Rutland as lieutenant in Aquitaine. As a local authority there has been some suggestion he was the overseer for this encounter. So they had someone not fighting giving the rules, giving the order, making an intervention. But yeah, I think the death of one opponent was enough of a bit of an okay we need to stop this now before the Earl of Rutland loses seven of his household to what was clearly a really organized group of Frenchman. They saw themselves as a group, they wore a little badge of a diamond from when they issued the challenge to when the challenge was met, sort of as a little team logo, a promise to one another and to God and to their country that they were going to fulfill this challenge. And they were very organised. They were very prepared and they massively whupped the English.
Guy Windsor
Then 13 years later, Agincourt, so we’re alright. So, again, I’m guessing that quite a lot of the listeners have no idea, and you can probably tell from the list of questions that I went through your CV and I did a little bit of research and like, Oh my God, that’s interesting. So sure, what is the Garter King of Arms?
Rachael Whitbread
Okay. The Garter King of Arms was created, I mean, this is still a thing, this is still around. But it was created around 1415, either just before or just after the Agincourt campaign, by Henry V. And the Garter King of Arms, was created really as the king of arms for the Order of the Garter. The Garter King of Arms is a chief herald. So they take responsibility for three main things. So the first thing that they take responsibility for, from their creation, is serving in a ceremonial and a practical sense, a chivalric order. So obviously, the Garter King of Arms looks after the Order of the Garter. So he oversees the ceremonial. He’s there on meetings of the Garter. He carries the insignia of the Garter, he oversees some of the jousting for the Order of the Garter. He’s not a Knight. He generally has a Gentry background. He’s not knighted. But he has a crown. He’s a king of arms. So he wears a little king of arms crown, and he is in charge of these ceremonial events. He’s also in charge of the practicalities behind these events. So he carries messages on behalf of the Order of the Garter. When men are promoted to the Order of the Garter, he’s the one who delivers their robes to reflect their new position. So he’s got kind of a dual role. And these dual roles still exist in the heralds and kings of arms that England has today. So at the funeral of her late Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, and the coronation, obviously, of King Charles, the Heralds and the kings of arms were very much in evidence, they were proud of their processions they were stood around near the catafalque, when the Queen passed away, they were stood at the front in the coronation ceremony, they still play this kind of dual role of ceremonial official, but then practical, and in Scotland’s heraldic tradition, legal authority, so they look after grants of coats of arms. In Scotland, they’re known as the court of the Lord Lyon. And they actually have a legal ability to enforce the use of coats of arms. So you know, if you get a random company giving itself a coat of arms in Scotland, the court of the Lord Lyon will go and say, actually, you’re not allowed to do that, there’s a process by which outs of arms are given out. In England, they designed coats of arms and grant them when arms are granted to people. So they have this kind of dual role practical and ceremonial. Now, Henry V, when he creates Garter King of Arms, he has a couple of other things that he has in mind for garter as well. The first one is that he’s created as the principal Herald in England. So he is the boss of this group of men, and now women, responsible for giving coats of arms, organising ceremonial, all that kind of practical admin of coats of arms in England. And he’s created as a bit of a recorder for the Order of the Garter. So he’s expected to make a record of their meetings, a record of their membership, and kind of keep those up to date and passed on. So when one Garter King of Arms retires, that information is passed to his successor, who then updates it.
Guy Windsor
What did they do for 70 years in the Order of the Garter before they had a King of Arms?
Rachael Whitbread
So this is a really interesting thing. So it has been seen in the past. I think that Henry Garter King of Arms, probably because of you know, the whole Agincourt thing seen as a big deal. He does a lot for chivalry in England, right? He’s seen as almost reinventing the Order of the Garter. He creates Garter King of Arms, he’s seen as organising and officialising it significantly. Actually he gives a name to something that has existed for a while. So all of those duties that I’ve just described had been done. And before, right, so the principle herald in England had been Chandos Herald from the 1370s. So he had been the head of this group. Other record keeping had happened for the Order of the Garter. That’s why we know a bit about what it’s doing from its creation in 1348. They draw a list of the coats of arms of knight members, known as Willamot’s role from the mid-1390s, which gives a kind of pictorial representation of the founding members of the Order of the Garter, going from Edward III, in precedents, through the dukes and earls, the barons, and the knights who are members. So this record keeping had also happened, it just hadn’t been given to one guy with a special name, who’s told it is your job to do that. So that’s what Henry V does that that is a bit unusual. But yeah, the basic functions had been around for a while.
Guy Windsor
Now you’re clearly mad about medieval combat. So I do have to ask, do you actually train any medieval combat?
Rachael Whitbread
No, I did some. I did some fencing when I was in school.
Guy Windsor
Because I can see there’s a helmet on your shelf behind you. It looks like it’s been used.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, that it looks like it’s because I have deliberately left it alone. It’s a reproduction. It’s super shiny. It looked too shiny. I mean, I know knights to bloody good care of their armour, it would have been in really good condition, particularly tournament armour, because that was the big showy armour. But when I had it sitting on my desk, my students would kind of see it and they’d think it’s too modern. So I left it to get this lovely, kind of rusty patina on it. So this is Boucicaut, named after the nickname of John le Maingre. Who was a French knight.
Guy Windsor
Marshall of France. Whose son was also Marshall of France and he was defeated by Galeazzo de Mantova, Fiore’s student. Very important for us Fiorists to mention that every time Bouciaut’s name comes up.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And Boucicaut has a little link to my local area. So he’s captured at Agincourt. He’s brought back to Yorkshire. He’s imprisoned in Richmond castle. And he dies here. So he’s got a history in the north of England. So yeah, I am fascinated by this stuff. I’ve done a little bit about it before. I’ve done some riding, very poorly. I’ve done some fencing, even more poorly. But I like reading about the guys who were doing this 600, 700 years ago and what their mentality was and what their background was, and why they were doing this. Were they putting their lives on the line? Because even a pleasant joust, a training joust can kill you.
Guy Windsor
So can going cross country hacking on a horse. People fall off horses all the time.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah. I mean, it’s a scale of risk, right. But why? Why did these guys put themselves at such huge risk? Was it the fame? Was it the money? Was it the social prestige? Was it the honour, something much more intrinsic and inherent to them? Was it that they saw it as some kind of Christian duty? Was there a religious aspect to this? What was it so that they could get a nice castle and retire with some money rather than going to war? Or was it to practice for, you know, what’s the relationship?
Guy Windsor
All of the above?
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. All of the above, all at the same time, and sometimes all the same guy.
Guy Windsor
But, I think we should train you up to the point where you could comfortably, if the occasion demanded it, cut a dog in half?
Rachael Whitbread
I don’t think I’d be able to do that, emotionally.
Guy Windsor
You wouldn’t actually have to cut a dog in half. So your cutting skills are sufficient that, that if you were in a position where cutting a dog in half was a reasonable thing to do, you would have technical skills there. I think that is a reasonably accomplishable goal in a reasonably short timeframe.
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah. Well, I would absolutely love that. I really would.
Guy Windsor
Well, see me after class, and we will sort you out. Now you do have a book coming out and it’s the sacred duty of every podcast host to invite the guests to talk about their forthcoming book. So the floor is yours. Duel: Single Combat in Medieval England. What’s it about?
Rachael Whitbread
So I mean, it’s basically about a lot of our chat today. It tries to look at duelling. Again, the first challenge I’ve got is what was a duel? Because medieval writers use the word for a whole host of events. So I started from the point of okay, well, when they said duel, what did they mean? Did they mean the same thing? So these are events, I’ve narrowed them down. So there are two combatants fighting one another. There are a series of agreed rules, those rules can be incredibly vague. You know, it can just be both agreeing how it’s going to end, or both agreeing that no one else will interfere, or they can be incredibly prescriptive. By the time we get to the late 14th, 15th century, we’ve got very, very prescriptive rules on duelling in England that they’re trying to follow. So I have a look at you know, how much did they follow those? And then fighting about something so I have an exploration of okay, what are they fighting duels about? Obviously, you’ve got the legal side of things, have a bit of an explore of that. But what else are they fighting these events about? So looking into the motivations a little bit as well. And I talk about duels before battle. I talk about judicial duels, I talk about accusations of treason and cowardice, and why they’re fighting duels for that. And then I go right the way up to the massive court spectacle duels that are pulling 1000s of people to come and watch them that take years to organise, that cost an absolute fortune, and that are written about by everyone who’s kind of writing what’s going on at the time. You know, the chroniclers, the diarists, the letter writers, tracing the echoes of these things through the royal accounts through private letters that are being written. So really, I’m trying to explore the whole history of these events in medieval England and focusing in on England, because things are very different in other countries. And I wanted to look at how is this stuff being done just in England.
Guy Windsor
Well, I mean, the first rule of writing a book, The first rule is, narrow your focus to the point where you have something that could be covered in the scope of a single book. That’s like the first rule.
Rachael Whitbread
And you know what, even then, we are glossing over some areas between more or less the Norman Conquest, I do go back a little bit, look at the tradition of duelling, what’s happening in England pre conquest, what’s happening on the continent pre conquest, how the duel then gets brought over to England as a judicial deal. It’s brought over by the Normans, and how it’s then integrated into the English legal system. And I go right the way up to the early Tudor period. So what is happening in the Wars of the Roses? Are they still doing these things? What’s Henry VI doing with these things? How does it change in the very late 15th and just into the early 16th century? And then, I kind of leave it open ended because the amount with the Tudors that goes on with this stuff.
Guy Windsor
There aren’t enough trees in the world to print a book big enough.
Rachael Whitbread
No. And my poor editor, I mean, bless her. She’s already got a draft that was meant to be I think, 80,000 words, and it’s a little bit longer than that now. So yeah, I think I’d be hanged, drawn and quartered, if I tried to present 160,000 words, which might just about do some of this justice. But yeah, there’s so much and so much of it is a fascinating story.
Guy Windsor
So tell me how far along in the book production are you?
Rachael Whitbread
So I have finished the first manuscript. It’s winging its way over to my editor at Pen and Sword books. It is hopefully coming out in 2024. Haven’t got a release date for it quite yet, but I’m suspecting it’ll be end of summer 2024.
Guy Windsor
Okay, as soon as you have a release date and an ability to preorder it, you send it to me and I’ll send it to the listeners and they will rush they will rush off and buy it. If I know my people at all, that’s the book that they want to read.
Rachael Whitbread
No, thanks very much. I really hope it is. This stuff kind of writes itself in terms of entertaining quality. I mean, you can’t write about these events, without I think, making them exciting because they were and you echo the voices of the chroniclers and you echo the voices of the participants who were themselves excited, fascinated, awed by some of these spectacles and so for anyone interested in medieval history, I hope it captures a little bit of that excitement and that spectacle and that awe, just a tiny fraction would be good.
Guy Windsor
Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get there. I will certainly be picking up a copy. I might even get around to reading your first book.
Rachael Whitbread
Just the medieval bits.
Guy Windsor
Well, no, I have quite a broad interest. My weapons interests go back to sword and buckler in the 14th century, all the way up to smallsword in the 18th. I start to lose interest when sword stopped being carried. Okay, so there’s a couple of questions I asked all my guests, slightly modified because you’re not a historical swordsmanship practitioner. But first one is what is the best idea you haven’t acted on yet?
Rachael Whitbread
Oh, so this is going to be, you know, when Duel is put to bed and it’s safely with the editor. I really am excited to write a book on the Battle of Myton, September 1319, not a battle that many people have heard of, because it’s just not a well known battle. It’s not a major battle. It’s not in itself, a massive turning point, a nation changing turning point. But it is fascinating, and it is important in what’s happening between England and Scotland at the start of the 14th century. So Battle of Myton, September 1319. It is a battle between some raiders from Scotland. I mean to call them raiders makes it sound a bit kind of hit and miss. They were organised, they were skilled and they were very experienced soldiers who invaded England and raided into Yorkshire as a distraction while the English were besieging Berwick, so they’re doing pull some of the army away from Berwick, distract Edward’s attention and try and keep that split. So they come down to York, probably because they have heard a rumor that Queen Isabella is in York and she was at this period, she’d come with the Army up to York, the rest of the army had gone up to Berwick, she’d stayed in the city. And this group of Scotsmen are probably trying to get to York to attempt a kidnap of the Queen, which would be a pretty game changing thing in Anglo Scottish relations. They don’t manage it. Isabella escapes. This group of Scotsman are left in the middle of Yorkshire. They obviously do some ransacking, some pillaging, the English army is debating whether to leave Berwick to come and answer this or not. The Southerners in the army want to continue the siege of Berwick. The Northerners are really worried that their land is next from this marauding group of Scots. So they want to leave Berwick and come and save their land. And meanwhile this group of Scotsman is ransacking the countryside to the north and the west of York. And then they look like they’re kind of turning around and gradually heading back home, when the Archbishop of York, William Melton and York’s mayor, Nicholas Fleming, lead an army of probably a few 1000 citizens and clergy of York. This is an army made up of regular York folk, you know, you’ve got your butchers, your craftspeople, they’ve grabbed weapons, whatever they can find, they are led by their mayor. All the soldiers are up at Berwick. So York has very, very few garrisoned soldiers left. They are joined by the Archbishop of York and a significant number of clerics and monks from York’s monasteries. York was a big monastic city, it’s got several monasteries and religious houses. They send a significant number of clerics with the Army up to the crossing of the river Swale at Myton where they come across the Scots and they fight a battle which is, I mean, it’s not a David and Goliath story this one. The English are massacred by a properly armed, with some experience Scots.
Guy Windsor
I’m not sure why I’m laughing because that isn’t funny. But basically a bunch of people without armor, without military training, without the proper weapons, they go charging off when they meet a basically a bunch of professional soldiers and they get slaughtered. I was hoping you were going to say they drove those perfidious Scots to route but no. Up to that point, I was thinking this would make a brilliant film. But no, I mean, you can’t make a film out of that. The wrong people won.
Rachael Whitbread
No Hollywood ending here. It’s a horrific but glorious end to this attempt of the people of York to, I mean, they’re not even defending the city at this point. The Scots have left York they are seemingly heading northward. But the people of York are probably, I think, a combination of getting some comeuppance because these Scotsman have pillaged and ransacked a lot of land near the city. They are also I think, trying to prevent the need of the English army to abandon Berwick. They’re doing this to either buy time for someone to get to them from Berwick or prevent the need for anyone to leave the siege of Berwick which is clearly a bigger priority, certainly for Edward and the southern nobles. And yeah, they get slaughtered, and they get slaughtered in a pretty straightforward strategic battle. They cross a bridge, they’re then cut off behind them so they can’t retreat over the bridge. The Scots destroy the bridge, so no one is escaping and they are slaughtered. It’s known as the White Battle. Because so many monks and clerics in their white robes are killed. And a lot try and escape back over the river. The bridge is gone. So they’re trying to wade or swim. River is decently deep at this point. So a lot of them drown.
Guy Windsor
Robes and armour are not good for swimming in.
Rachael Whitbread
No, absolutely not. No, get very, very waterlogged. So it’s not a great moment for the people of York or the people of Northern England. But what really fascinates me about this, number one is what is making William Melton, Archbishop of York who wasn’t a kind of ivory tower Archbishop, this is a guy who has seen a bit of the world, he has seen a little bit of military campaigning before. He’s with the Archbishop of Ely, who himself has seen combat in Ireland. These are not guys who have never left their monastery, charging idealistically off at some experienced Scotsman. So given that and given I’m presuming they’re not idiots, what makes them do this? What are they doing it for? Why are they chasing the Scots? And why do they meet them in battle? And then you know that the stories of the people who join in the fighting from York, the Lord mayor, Nicholas Fleming is killed. Melton the archbishop escapes, Nicholas Fleming is killed. We’ve got documents, from his widow asking for money because the income from the family has disappeared. So you know what’s making him go and fight this battle? Because it certainly appears from Fleming the Mayor’s view he’s in the fighting, he’s not standing on a little hill at a distance commanding things, he’s in the fighting. What made them think they stood a chance and what are they trying to achieve? And then what role does this play in Anglo Scottish relations at the time, I mean, I prefaced it kind of shooting myself in my foot by saying this wasn’t a nation-changing battle, as so many famous ones tend to be, but this was an event that influences policy. Edwards army eventually does split apart at Berwick, the northern nobles, led by Lancaster, leave Berwick and try and hunt down this group of Scotsman who ransacked the North. The siege then eventually has to be abandoned because Edward can’t keep the siege going with the force that is left. It feeds into the these kind of movements and complaints about Edward as a king and about his military leadership. But it’s not really been studied in any depth. It’s always a paragraph or two in histories of Anglo Scottish border relations. But there’s more to this story, I think, that that just needs to be told.
Guy Windsor
Am I right in thinking that you’re going to write the book to find out the answers. You don’t have the answers and are now going to write them up in a book?
Rachael Whitbread
Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to be kind of learning this one as I write, we are fortunate for this one in that we’ve got quite a lot of primary documentation. We’ve got the Archbishop’s registers, we’ve got quite a lot of financial documentation for the campaign. But also I want to get the Scottish side of things. Go up to Edinburgh have a look at their archives, have a look at what the what the Scots’ orders were. James Douglas, Thomas, Earl of Murray were the leaders. What are they trying to do? Is there any evidence they’re trying a sort of tactical assault to kidnap the queen? What did they hope to achieve? So yeah, I’m very much looking forward to exploring this. It’s going to be I think, a year or two’s project, at least, but I’m really excited about it. So that’s the big thing that I haven’t acted on yet. But you know, watch this space. I’m looking forward to exploring that.
Guy Windsor
As soon as you do, you’ll come back on the show and tell us all about it.
Rachael Whitbread
No problem at all.
Guy Windsor
Excellent. So my last question, somebody gives you a million dollars or gold coins in a oak chest to spend improving the understanding of history worldwide. How would you spend the money?
Rachael Whitbread
This one is a really tricky one, because first of all, it’s the word “understanding”. Understanding and knowing are very different things. And I think if we really want to understand history, we want to get in the minds of the people who were there, we want to try and work out motivations, thoughts, details, we have to go back and look at the record they’ve left us. When I was a teacher the one questions my students got absolutely sick of hearing me spout on about was how do we know? How do we know this was the case, how do we know that this was like this? And the answer to that was almost always, we’ve been left clues. There’s never an easy answer to what happened in the past. That’s why historians all still have jobs. It’s hard. There are different answers, depending on what information you look at. For me the biggest thing about understanding history is getting back to the documents. And this is a roundabout way of saying I think that the study and the understanding of history has changed hugely by the opening of documentation. The access.
Guy Windsor
Scan it, put it online.
Rachael Whitbread
Absolutely. The access to this information. I finished my doctorate nearly a decade ago. At that time it was just starting to open up online. But really if you wanted to do a doctorate using these primary resources, using the rolls, using the chivalry books, the herald’s books, all of that. You had to go to London and you had to stay in London for a while. And you want to go to Kew and you wanted to go to regional archives. The cost added up. It’s huge. It prevents a lot of people from being able to do it and I think it dissuades a lot of people from thinking they can access that information and do that study. So I would spend my money on digitizing and making accessible as much primary information as I can. Because I think that gets more people involved, it gets more people theorizing and exploring and seeking to understand history. And I think you get people from different backgrounds exploring history in a different way. I think that is probably the best way to open up this discipline that we love to many more people in a more financially achievable way.
Guy Windsor
I could not agree more. There’s a lot of gatekeeping goes on as to who gets to go and see the originals. One of the reasons I thought a PhD would be a useful thing to have was that it opened certain doors in certain institutions that might let me actually see the manuscripts I want to look at, for instance. Not every has the necessary support structures to enable them to go and get a PhD and thus get this access. But if everything is digitized and stuck online, at the very least you can make sure that if you are going to go and look at the originals, it’s going to be worth your time. So you know exactly what to go and look for, exactly what questions to ask when you get there, like this particular manuscript, if you can just read it from the scan, then fine, but if there’s any ambiguity about when it might be written or whatever, and you need to really have a look at the original. There’s no substitute for looking at the original, but then you know what to spend your time on. It just saves so much time.
Rachael Whitbread
Absolutely. Of course in an ideal world, I would use my million pounds to just pay for everyone’s travel to London whenever they wanted. Whatever archive whenever they wanted, Italy or America.
Guy Windsor
But it’s not enough money.
Rachael Whitbread
It’s not enough money. There will never be enough money for that.
Guy Windsor
Also, not everyone has the leisure to go and spend two weeks in London. You might have small children at home so you can’t go anywhere, or you might have a sick relative you’re looking after but you still want to do your research. If you just pull it off the internet, it’s why the Wiktenauer project is so fabulous. You must have heard of it. I remember in the 90s we were working off really dodgy 5th generation or 10th generation photocopies and you could barely make out what the text was and you could barely make out what the images were and it was awful. I mean, it was great, because we had not seen these things before and a 5th generation photocopy is an awful lot better than nothing at all. But these days you can download 800dpi scans or manuscripts and you can see where an ink line has been scraped away and lines replaced with swords on one side or the other. Oh my God, the children today, they don’t know they’re bored. Some of them complain that it’s difficult. No, fucking hell! You can actually read the damn thing.
Rachael Whitbread
I know, right? That revolution is underway now. It’s just understandably it’s slow. People have to scan this stuff by hand. That takes weeks, years. Time and money. And you’re absolutely right, there is no substitute for looking at the original. But for most people, a. the original might not be needed for my purposes, they can use a scan just as well, and b. as you say, you then know what you need the original for. Rather than two weeks transcribing a document, you can spend a day looking at the document and transcribe it before you even get there. So you can look at a few things. You can look at the material it’s written on, you can look at the handwriting, you can check that there aren’t beautiful, fascinating things that have been erased on the back side.
Guy Windsor
Or even the collation, which tells you pages which might be missing. Have you heard of HEMA Bookshelf? Michael Chidester’s project. He reproduces the collation. SO his facsimiles are hand stitched in the same coir structure as the originals. That is next level fabulous.
Rachael Whitbread
I’ve got one on my shelf just up there. Hang on, I’ll grab it. It’s Il Fior.
Guy Windsor
That’s mine. Oh well done. That facsimile is my facsimile of the Getty manuscript, which is cheap. It is actually cheaper than taking the scans to your local copy shop and having it stuck in a plastic comb binder. You can throw it in a fencing bag and not worry about it. Michael’s, let me grab it.
Rachael Whitbread
I’m sure I’ve got one somewhere.
Guy Windsor
I’m super pleased you’ve got something I produced in your house, that’s really nice. So the one that you just showed me, my one, is modern production, it’s a glued spine so it’s cheap to produce, so if you do trash it you can buy another one and it’s no big deal. This one, is handstitched, hand bound glorious thing of gorgeousness. This is the one with the collation which is accurate. It’s actually too accurate, because very annoyingly it’s obviously had a page bound in in the wrong place. It’s a section on dagger and it’s bound between poleaxe and spear, and it belongs in the dagger section, and it’s obviously a late binding error, or a late re-binding error, and he’s gone and left it in the place where it is in the current manuscript order, rather than correcting it, which is the one thing I disagreed with Michael on in the production of this particular manuscript. I have spent the last 25 years waiting for a facsimile of this quality. So you do have one of these?
Rachael Whitbread
I do, yeah. There’s a real place for people using the original, but actually that book, your book, the versions of this, the scans online. They can reach a whole lot of people a lot quicker and a lot more cheaply, often.
Guy Windsor
Also it protects the manuscripts from the unnecessary handling. If you need to see it, absolutely fine, but if you’ve got the scans. I have never actually handled any of the original Fiore manuscripts. I have spent the last 25 years studying Fiore and have written 5 or 6 books on the man and his works. I don’t need it. I would love to do it, but I’m not a tourist. And if I don’t actually have a research question that only handling the original can answer. If someone offered me the opportunity to look at one of these things, I wouldn’t say no. But I’m not going to subject the manuscript to additional handling unless there’s a research question that can only be answered that way. These things don’t last forever.
Rachael Whitbread
No, and the more that we can encourage people to facilitate the use of these documents, the better history comes out of it. History is debate, history is not finding an absolute answer, it’s debate and in order for debate to happen, more than one person has to have access to the information from which you draw your conclusions. So that would be what I spent my million on, if I had it.
Guy Windsor
I would gladly give it to you if I had it. Well thank you so much for joining me today Rachael, it’s been lovely to meet you.
Rachael Whitbread
No, it’s been really lovely to meet you Guy, and thank you so much for having me on.
