Subject to Change
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Subject to Change
How England Nearly Conquered France & Why They Failed
The Hundred Years' War shaped medieval Europe's political landscape for over a century—but what really caused this epic conflict between England and France? In this illuminating conversation, former UK Supreme Court Justice and acclaimed medieval historian Lord Jonathan Sumption cuts through myths and misconceptions to reveal the war's true origins.
Contrary to popular belief, the war didn't begin as a simple grab for the French crown. Instead, it stemmed from a complex constitutional crisis when French kings began centralizing power over previously semi-independent territories held by English monarchs. As Lord Sumption explains, "The kings of England decided that the only way they could retain their independence as dukes of Aquitaine was to cast off the sovereignty of the French crown."
The discussion explores how England, despite being smaller and less wealthy, repeatedly triumphed on the battlefield through technological advantages like the deadly longbow and tactical innovations such as dismounted combat. We examine Parliament's crucial role in war financing and how devastating chevauchées (mounted raids) terrorized the French countryside for decades.
Perhaps most fascinating is Lord Sumption's analysis of Joan of Arc's extraordinary impact. Through "an insane degree of courage," this remarkable figure transformed French morale and fulfilled a prophecy about France's redemption by a spotless virgin. Her push for Charles VII's coronation at Reims proved pivotal in convincing French subjects of his divine right to rule.
The war's conclusion came not through a single decisive battle but through French administrative reorganization, standing armies, and Burgundy's crucial defection from the English alliance. As Lord Sumption observes, even exceptional leaders like Henry V ultimately could not overcome resource disparities—reminding us that in warfare, available resources ultimately determine outcomes.
Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, russell Hogg. My guest today is Lord Jonathan Sumption. Lord Sumption is best known as one of the UK's leading judges. He was a member of the Supreme Court, from which he retired in 2018, but he started his career as an historian specialising in medieval history, and it's history we're going to be talking about today, and, in particular, the Hundred Years' War, and that's because Lord Sumption is the author of a quite simply magnificent five-volume history of that war, and it is really quite a staggering achievement.
Russell:It is a full and detailed narrative of the war and it tells a compelling story, but it pays close, close attention to the details, and my sense is that other books on the subject can give you an overview, but these books tell you what actually happened. So if you're seriously interested in this period, then I think these books are simply unmissable. I don't think there's anything else available of this scope and quality. Anyway, welcome, Lord Sumption, to the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. So I thought we would start at the start and look at the cause of the war, and for me it was really quite confusing, because it all seems to be tied up in whether Edward III holds his lands in France in his capacity as King of England or as a vassal of the King of France, and I must admit I found it all fantastically complicated. So can you give us your take on what were the causes of the war?
Jonathan Sumption:I think that I can explain this quite simply. In France, there were a large number of principalities which were semi-independent of the french government, the french crown. They were owned and administered by senior princes belonging to well-established dynasties. One of these princes was the Dukes of Anjou, who became kings of England in the middle of the 12th century. This meant that the English kings had two capacities they were kings in England and they were peers of France in France. In that capacity, they owned a very large chunk of southwestern France, extending from just south of the Loire to the Pyrenees and inland for quite a long way. In the 13th century, a big change in the constitutional arrangements of France occurred. The French kings started centralizing their kingdom, and their lawyers devised theories which gave the kings a great deal of direct authority over the hitherto quasi-independent principalities of which France was composed.
Jonathan Sumption:The kings of England as dukes of Aquitaine were the largest and most important of these princes, who suddenly found themselves facing an ambitious and centralizing monarchy. That made it extremely difficult for them to continue as Dukes of Aquitaine, and there were geographical geopolitical rivalries between France and England, which made the southwestern domains of the kings of England very vulnerable to confiscation. So that was the basic problem. In the 1330s, when the Hundred Years' War broke out, the kings of England decided that the only way that they could retain their independence as dukes of Aquitaine was to cast off the sovereignty of the French crown. That, in summary, is how it began.
Jonathan Sumption:Now there is a widespread view it's reflected, for example, in the plays of Shakespeare that the kings of England went to war in order to make themselves kings of France as well. I don't buy that idea. It seems to me that the kings of England were, at least until the 15th century, realistic enough to understand that they were never likely to make themselves kings of France. Their allies within France, who needed that cover because otherwise they would have been described as tracers to the government of France. But whenever there were serious negotiations to bring an end to the war, the English kings were prepared to abandon their claim to the crown in return for large territorial concessions and a degree of independence from the French monarchy. That changed in the 15th century because, as a result of a major French civil war, it suddenly did become realistic for the kings of England to become kings of France, and so a completely new chapter opened in the time of Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt. Now that's a thumbnail summary of a complicated issue, but I hope it explains what happened.
Russell:You talked about the efforts to make peace again and again throughout the war and I guess the war is very much an on-and-off affair. Could you just say a bit about the role of the papacy, because it seems to be an extraordinary institution of medieval Europe in that it's this body that can actually help to broker peace.
Jonathan Sumption:Well, the papacy was the only supranational authority in medieval Europe, and it was therefore the only body which really had much standing to act as a mediator between two sovereign states. Unfortunately for the popes, their power had been much diminished in the course of the 13th century, when the Western European kings, and particularly the kings of England and France, started asserting control over their national churches and keeping out the influence of the papacy, so the prestige of the papacy had suffered. In addition, at the beginning of the 14th century the papacy moved to Avignon as a result of estates of war that had broken out in Italy, and Avignon was not part of the Kingdom of France, but it was on the border with France and very much subject to French domination. So the papacy suffered from two problems One was its declining prestige, and the other was that it was widely regarded as being in the pocket of the French kings, as a result of which the English kings never really trusted them.
Russell:And also eventually, I think, the papacy. There's the papal schism which, I guess, completely undermines the papacy's ability to do anything very much.
Jonathan Sumption:Yes, that affected the position between 1378 and the second decade of the 15th century.
Russell:Another question I have is that how difficult it was for everybody but the English perhaps well, I don't know, you can tell me, but the English in particular was how difficult it was for them to maintain the war purely from a financial point of view and this seems to be, you know, be a major theme of your book trying to raise taxes. And I was really surprised by this period in our history, english history, just how important Parliament was in all this because they really could, and sometimes did, refuse to grant the taxes needed.
Jonathan Sumption:Yes. Well, you have to remember that medieval societies had a very thin surplus of production over consumption. That meant that the amount of wealth available to be appropriated by the state was really quite small. In addition, medieval states lacked the extensive investigatory and police powers that the modern state uses to enforce the collection of taxes, so that a large measure of consent was absolutely indispensable.
Jonathan Sumption:The main difference between England and France in this area was that England had a highly developed parliament, whereas France never succeeded in creating representative institutions with unquestioned authority to grant taxes.
Jonathan Sumption:Now you might think that parliament was an impediment to the connection of taxes rather than a support to the monarchy, but you'd be wrong about that, because the crucial thing was to have an assembly whose authority to grant taxes would be immediately accepted without question and that made the taxes in practice collectible. The English Parliament did occasionally refuse to grant taxes, but it recognised that the people of England had a duty to support the king in his wars, provided that the interests of England were affected. They weren't so keen on supporting the English kings in their capacity as dukes of Aquitaine or claimant kings of France, but many shrewd French observers of the time realized that Parliament was a big source of English strength. It enabled the English kings to extract wealth from their own smaller country, roughly equal, for most of the 14th century, to the wealth that the French kings were able to establish from a country two or three times as rich.
Russell:And to what extent once the English victories start to happen? To what extent was the thing self-financing through ransoms and looting on a major scale?
Jonathan Sumption:Not at all, because ransoms and looting went into the pockets of the soldiers and not into the pockets of the state. The king did have a rather indistinct right to claim particularly valuable prisoners for ransom, but basically the king did not draw anything like as much money out of loot and ransoms as his soldiers did.
Russell:Another question I wanted to ask about. I was speaking to I think it was Professor Ed Watts, and we were talking about Byzantine history and we were talking about the Plague of Justinian. And he was saying, well, he didn't think the Plague of Justinian was terrible, but it wasn't as bad as people perhaps suggest. And he compared it to the Black Death. And he says look, during the Plague of Justinian, society carries on. You know armies continue to march up and down. You know things do carry on. But he says it wasn't like that with the Black Death. But then when I read the history of the Hundred Years' War, they seem to just take it on the chin and the war carries on. So I just wondered what your take was on what the effect of the Black Death was on the affair.
Jonathan Sumption:Well, it had a very limited effect. By significantly reducing the population of both England and France, it produced a situation in which labor became very expensive and aristocratic incomes, which depended in most cases on agricultural labor, were reduced. That made noblemen more dependent on wages that they received by serving in the king's armies. It also made them extremely sensitive to social movements. The direct effect on armies was very limited, because you have to remember that the Black Death wasn't just a single epidemic. That started in 1348.
Jonathan Sumption:That was the first great epidemic, but there was a series of these epidemics at intervals right up to the 17th century and in the 14th and 15th centuries. These epidemics did not take exactly the same form in each case. They were all examples of bubonic or pneumonic plague, but the different strands affected different kinds of people differently. For example, in the first great plague it's clear that the main victims were the young and the old and therefore not the sort of people who fought in the armies. That was different in some of the later outbreaks, where the epidemic attacked people of military age. But the later epidemics were nothing like as devastating as the first one. The first one is estimated to have killed about a third of the population of both England and France, and that one, as I've said, did not have a significant effect on people of military age. The later ones did, but they were a lot less lethal.
Russell:Huh, and how come the English are so successful at winning battles? I mean, I appreciate that over a war of well over 100 years, there aren't, year by year there aren't that many big battles, but right until the end, you know, the English do win a series of really crushing victories. I mean, there's Crecy, there's Poitiers, is it Nigeria, and so on. But the French, they're richer, they're more numerous, they don't lack courage, they don't lack military skill. So how does England manage to win? Is it luck, or is there something else?
Jonathan Sumption:Well, all wars are affected by a large element of luck which randomly affects both sides. The English had a considerable technological advantage. At any rate, until the early 15th century, the longbow was the weapon of choice of the English infantry. Its advantage at the outset was that it outranged crossbows, which were the weapon used by the French and their Italian allies. That advantage was lost in the course of the late 14th and early 15th century because crossbows were improved by substituting for a bow made of laminated wood a bow made of flexible steel, which greatly increased the range of the crossbow. The great advantage of the longbow was that you could loose off a lot of arrows in a very short time and therefore the immediate impact could be absolutely devastating. In order to reload a crossbow, you had to put the head of the crossbow on the ground, put your foot into a stirrup at the end of the bow, lever the cord back, put a bolt in and then fire it. Now, in the time it took to do that, a longbowman would have loosed off quite a few volleys of arrows. The crossbow had that considerable disadvantage throughout. Eventually, the technological advantage conferred by the crossbow diminished by the longbow forgive me, diminished because armour became a lot more effective that was, in fact, the main reason and crossbows became more effective as well effective as well.
Jonathan Sumption:So the last great battle of the Hundred Years' War in which Longbowmen played a decisive part was really Agincourt, and there were another 40 years after Agincourt during which the English were on the retreat for much of the time. The English had one other difference from the French, which was that they fought dismounted, whereas the traditional way in which French noblemen had fought was on horseback. Infantry has an immense defensive power, and the French found, from the beginning of the 14th century onwards, that they were unable to break the careful formations of English infantry, especially when they took the initiative by attacking, something that they eventually learned not to do. This also was a relatively short-lived advantage. The French started copying the tactics of the English, even their battle formations, and eventually improvements in armour and improvements in the design of lances gave the French cavalry an advantage which they hadn't previously had, which enabled them to triumph over English armies in the way that they hadn't been able to do earlier.
Russell:But they weren't able to do that until after Agincourt, so that's quite a long way in.
Jonathan Sumption:That's right. The first major French victory in battle of the Hundred Years' War was the Battle of Berger in 1421, at the end of the reign of Henry V. That victory was won, in fact by the Scots. That victory was won in fact by the Scots, who comprised virtually the whole of the French army at that stage was a Scottish contract army, and the Scots had learnt from the unequal battles, because the French armies were much larger, much more professional by then, much more disciplined and much better armed.
Russell:When the war breaks out, the fact that the English are able to apply this superior technology and superior tactics, that's in the future. I'm still amazed that they had the confidence to take the project on in the first place. It just seems, you know, astonishingly presumptuous. But is their position? Well, if we lose, we just go back to England? I don't know. Well, they took some years to perfect the system.
Jonathan Sumption:They took some years to perfect the system, and you also have to bear in mind that battles were a relatively minor part and strategically perhaps the least important part of the technique of fighting the wars In the 14th century. The English techniques of warfare can broadly be described as a sort of terrorism. What they did was to land somewhere in France and to conduct what were called chevauchées. These are huge, mounted raids which basically were designed to inflict the maximum of casualties and damage on the French population, in the belief that that would intimidate the French government into conceding English demands. That never worked.
Jonathan Sumption:The problem that the English had in the 14th century was that, however often they smashed up large parts of the French countryside, they eventually had to go away again because the money, the supplies and so on ran out, and so they went back, having achieved remarkably little.
Jonathan Sumption:The problem that they had was that they didn't have the financial resources or the manpower to occupy territory. The big change that happened, that happened under Henry V at the beginning of the 15th century, was that the English realized that in order to prevail, they would actually have to occupy large parts of France, if not the whole of it. Well, they never succeeded in occupying the whole of it, but they did succeed in occupying, in addition to Aquitaine, a large part of north-western France, namely Normandy, much of Picardy and their surrounding provinces. That was an enormously expensive undertaking. It was facilitated by the fact that they were able to levy taxes in the provinces that they'd occupied. But they were never able to levy enough taxes to meet the enormous costs and the cost of a permanent occupation in Normandy involving some 50 or so garrisoned castles, in addition to the occasional field army, drained the English exchequer of money year after year and proved to be unsustainable in the long term.
Russell:Can we shift for a minute away from the land war and just say a bit about the war at sea? And I must admit when I first started reading about the Hundred Years' War I was a bit naive, because I couldn't see how you could fight a battle at sea without guns and broadsides. So can you just explain for listeners what it was like to fight in one of these battles and give people an idea of how pleasant or unpleasant the whole thing was?
Jonathan Sumption:There were very few significant sea battles and most of those occurred in the 14th century.
Jonathan Sumption:The English didn't need a navy once they had occupied Normandy and much of Picardy and were allied to Flanders because they controlled both sides of the Channel. But in the 14th century they did need one and sea battles were fought really very like land battles, fought really very like land battles. The basic weapons in use were grappling irons, boarding parties and bowmen crossbows on the French side, longbows on the English side so that you basically maneuvered yourself against an opposing ship, threw out grappling irons to bring it to join your two ships together and fought across the gap into the other man's ship. That was how it was. It was very murderous because people were facing enemy arrow fire while confined into a very cramped space and they were sufficiently crowded together to make it quite difficult to miss them. It was a very murderous business. The casualties were extremely high. In the major battle of the whole war, battle of Sluis in 1340, the French suffered horrendous casualties which prevented them for many years from reassembling another fleet.
Russell:As I understand it, once you'd lost the battle, ship to ship, nobody was spared. They weren't taken for ransom, they were chucked overboard or killed. Then and there.
Jonathan Sumption:as I understand it, yes, well, sea fighting, that's true. Sea fighting was a less aristocratic activity, and it was aristocrats who spared their enemy, not out of humanitarian sympathy, but because they wanted the ransoms.
Russell:I was wondering is this just a veneer, is it just propaganda? Because I was very taken by a quote from Frossar where he says something like and so we come to the epic of Brittany and to the great adventures and fine feats of arms which happened there and which will light up the pages of my book, and I just don't know what to make of this, what to make of Frossard, given the reality of the war and what he saw at first hand. So how true was chivalry? To what extent was it applied and to what extent is it just a facade?
Jonathan Sumption:Frossard was an enthusiast for noble warfare, of which the ethics of chivalry were an important part. But you don't have to read very far into Frossard in order to see the uglier side of war as well. There were. Theoretically, war was humanized by rules as to who you could legitimately attack and kill. You couldn't attack women and children. You couldn't attack clergymen and kill. You couldn't attack women and children. You couldn't attack clergymen and monks. Certain property, like property of the church, was supposed to be immune. None of that had any reality. This was a pie-in-the-sky moral lectures that nobody paid any attention to. The other humanizing factor was that the taking of ransoms meant that people who could be killed were generally spared for their ransoms. But my own view is that chivalry was, as you put it, a veneer. I think that, apart from the taking of ransoms, which essentially was a brutish commercial transaction, was a British commercial transaction. Civilry was a purely decorative series or formulae, and you can discover that as much from Froissart as from any other chronicler.
Russell:And you mentioned Agincourt. Well, we talked about Agincourt anyway. It feels like that's a huge change in the war. It's as you say, it's the last really big battle and it's the moment where England does you know, win the war.
Jonathan Sumption:Well, I'm not sure about that.
Russell:But do they not end up taking Paris? Not as a result of?
Jonathan Sumption:Agincourt. Oh, agincourt was fought in 1415. It was fought while Henry V, having captured Hafler, was trying to make his way to Calais in order to re-embark for England. So basically, henry V was trying to leave France when the Battle of Agincourt was fought, and he fought it because the French were in the way and he would otherwise have been trapped.
Jonathan Sumption:But Agincourt achieved nothing of any strategic significance at all. It discredited the French monarchy, which lost a great deal of prestige. It killed very large numbers of prominent noblemen, but the actual long-term effects of Agincourt were zero. The main significance of Agincourt was that Henry V had the imagination and intelligence to realize that and he returned to England and he did not come back to France until 1417. And when he came back in 1417, he came back with a completely different strategy. He was now going to fight battles if they were necessary, but his main object was to occupy territory, to seize castles, to garrison them and to take over the government of whole provinces of Western France. That was a completely revolutionary approach to the conduct of the war and in my view it was a direct response to the fact that Agincourt had been, at one and the same time, a spectacular victory and a strategic non-event.
Russell:And so how close do the English come to winning the war and getting their king, their man, on the throne of France and getting recognition for that? They?
Jonathan Sumption:only ever succeeded in getting anywhere politically. In alliance with powerful figures within France, they took advantage of French civil wars. The major civil war of the 15th century was the civil war between the Dukes of Burgundy and the Kings of France, which were begun as a result of the Duke of Burgundy's murder of the king's brother and effective ruler of France, Louis Duke of Orléans. That was in 1407. Now the civil war became even more venomous after 1419, when the Dauphin, or the Dauphin's ministers, with his consent, murdered the Duke of Burgundage on the fearless at a peace conference held on the bridge over the Seine at Montereau.
Russell:And just for the benefit of the listeners when you say the Dauphin, what is the Dauphin?
Jonathan Sumption:The Dauphin is the heir of the King of France. The King of France at this stage was mad Charles VI, and the French government was divided between John, the Fearless Duke of Burgundy, and Charles VI's only surviving son, the Dauphin Charles, who became Charles VII. In 1419, the Duke of Burgundy was murdered by the Dauphin's ministers, and the next Duke of Burgundy, his successor, responded by making an alliance with the English king, henry V, and promising that he would be made King of France. Duke of Burgundy was in a position to do that because he controlled Paris and, in particular, he controlled the person of the mad King of France, charles VI, in addition to the person of Charles VI's queen. Now, many Frenchmen took the view that, because the English, in alliance with the Burgundians, appeared to be much stronger than the Dauphins, the only way to end the war was to accept an English victory V, the heir of Charles VI, as King of France, and provided that he was to become regent of France straight away and remain regent until Charles VI eventually died. Now, it was widely believed that that, basically, would bring an end to the war, and that's why a very large number of Frenchmen, particularly in the northern provinces, approved of the treaty. Indeed, the Estates General of northern France ratified the treaty.
Jonathan Sumption:Now, two things then happened. The first was that Henry V died very unexpectedly and very prematurely. He was only in his mid-thirties and he had been the brains, as well as the brawn, behind the English war effort and had achieved a position where he was very highly respected by many Frenchmen. His armies were more disciplined than theirs. His administration of justice was regarded as more efficient and fairer. There were plenty of people, especially in provinces like Normandy, efficient and fairer. There were plenty of people, especially in provinces like Normandy, which were under English occupation, who were perfectly happy with English rule. So Henry V's death and his replacement by a very young baby was a disaster. The next disaster that happened was that a particularly brilliant generation of French civil servants, at a time when the English and the Burgundians were occupying virtually all of France north of the Loire, a particularly brilliant generation of civil servants created exact replicas of all the major government institutions in Paris, which they installed in dual capitals, at Boitier and Bourges. That's why the Dauphin's part of France was known as the Kingdom of Bourges, and that meant that the Dauphin was able to assert effective administrative control over about half of France administrative control over about half of France.
Jonathan Sumption:Once that became clear, it was obvious that the war was not going to end and that making the English kings kings of France as well was not going to be the solution. In the end. Enough Frenchmen realized that to join the Dauphin's cause, and the English were progressively driven into retreat. It didn't happen straight away. For most of the 1420s the English continued to succeed, but they were never able to effectively cross the Loire with their armies. In 1429, the English attempted to cross the Loire with their armies by besieging Orléans, and that was the occasion which produced the extraordinary phenomenon of Joan of Arc, and her significance was that she persuaded the French that they could win. She transformed their morale and after many years of consistent defeats, the scales were reversed. Napoleon observed that morale is three quarters of the business of war and brute force only another quarter. There's a lot to be said for that view.
Russell:And what do you make of Joan of Arc? Is she I mean, it's a character Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of Kent? There seems to be these line of sort of female visionaries or prophetesses. Is she part of that or is she completely sui generis?
Jonathan Sumption:Well, she was sui generis in the sense that she actually participated in the fighting of armies. I'll expand a little on that in a moment. Elizabeth Barton wasn't a female soldier. She wasn't concerned with the morale of armies. She had a much more limited political agenda.
Jonathan Sumption:Joan of Arc she fought with armies, but not as part of them. She had a number of swords, but she never. She claimed, and there's no reason to doubt this in her trial, that she had never killed a man, and indeed she would hold her famous banner in her right hand, precisely so that she could not wield a sword. She transformed the morale of French armies by basically an insane degree of courage, believing that God would protect her in all eventualities. She was first up the ladder in besieged castles and she exposed herself to instant death. Time after time. People were stunned by this and they threw themselves into the breach after her. She was a prophetess, but what you have to remember is that there had been many other prophetesses and there was a legend going about that there had been many other prophetesses and there was a legend going about, and had been going about for quite some time, that the defeats of France were due to the sinfulness of the French and that the solution was the redemption of France by a spotless virgin. Now we know that Joan of Arc was aware of this legend. We know that because the posthumous inquiry into her life, which very many witnesses from her childhood onwards gave evidence. They gave evidence that she had repeated this particular legend. I think it's reasonably clear that as time went on, joan of Arc not only persuaded herself that she was the spotless virgin in question, but she modelled herself on the person in this legend. So when she turned up at the Dauphin's court at the beginning of 1429, the ground was in a sense prepared, because a lot of people, including some of the priests around Charles VII, former dofer, knew about this legend and believed in it enough to accept that Joan of Arc certainly needed to be taken seriously, at any rate initially. So she was in many ways a dreadful strategist and a very incompetent politician, but she got away with a lot by sheer bluff, I mean. I think that Orléans would probably have been relieved anyway.
Jonathan Sumption:The great achievement of Joan of Arc was to push Charles VII into invading Champagne and making for Reims so that he could be crowned. This was pure bluff. The French had no siege train. They had no supply train, they couldn't have spent any time besieging a town, and Champagne was full of garrisoned English and Burgundian towns, because they would have run out of food in no time at all. But Joan of Arc's reputation had preceded her, and when she commanded the citizens of the towns on her path to open their gates and surrender, they forced the garrisons to do so. The coronation of Charles VII at Reims was an epoch-making event. It persuaded much of the population of France that Charles VII was God's anointed and the true king. It had an enormous moral impact, as witnessed the fact that the English were obliged to stage their own rather poor relation of the coronation by bringing the young king over the channel and crowning him not at Reims, which they didn't possess by then, but in Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Russell:And is Reims the place where French kings are traditionally crowned, then yes, so Joan of Arc, she's captured, I think, by the Burgundians in fact, and she's put on trial. But what can she be put on trial for? Because soldiers aren't put on trial for fighting for the French. So why is she put on trial?
Jonathan Sumption:She was put on trial for heresy and sorcery. It was common ground, ironically, that she achieved what she did through miraculous powers. The English accepted that. The question was whether these powers were derived from God or from the devil Right. It was necessary to the English to have a big trial at which they could establish that Joan of Arc's achievements were brought about by Satan, because that explained in a manner satisfactory to English claims why it was that she had succeeded. And in fact after her death, which was brought about really by decision of an ecclesiastical court and remember that the church was the one French institution that transcended the divisions of France Many people on the Charles VII side of the war were persuaded that there might be something in the charges against her. And it's notable that French propaganda dropped Joan of Arc like a hot brick after her condemnation. And she wasn't really rehabilitated until after the French had won the wars and it was necessary to invent some new legends to explain why they had been virtuous to do so.
Russell:She almost gets away, though, doesn't she? Because she decides genuinely, or whatever, but she decides to recant, and by recanting, as I understand it, they have to let you go if it's an ecclesiastical court.
Jonathan Sumption:They don't have to let you go, but they can't execute you. She was then sentenced to life imprisonment on bread and water. Not many people survived that experience. The rule was that you could only recant once. If you went back to your heresy, then you were liable to be burnt.
Jonathan Sumption:It's the circumstances in which she was found to have gone back on her confession are a bit obscure. She started wearing male dress again, which was regarded as part of her heretical views, and there's a theory, which may well be true, that the English acted as agent provocateur, taking her clothes away and leaving her only with male clothes to wear. But it's also clear that Joan of Arc actually regretted recanting. In the first place she hadn't really appreciated that. The result was that, although she would be spared burning, she would be imprisoned for life in English prison, moment in which she felt she had betrayed the saint's voices which had guided her. She fear-felt since her first appearance at the Dauphin's court and that made her intensely guilty, so that she, I think, intended to recant and knew what the consequence would be Intended to recant the second time, that is.
Russell:I mean this business of her wearing men's clothing. I mean it seems bizarre that this was considered to be such a crime against God.
Jonathan Sumption:Well, it's part of the Deuteronomic litany of offences against the faith. It has quite ancient roots, and it is clear that French, loyal French theologians did have some difficulty with this particular aspect of Joan's adventures. But they decided that she couldn't possibly have succeeded as well as she did without having some kind of divine endorsement. So the Lord must have been satisfied with her clothing. But one does have to remember that Joan of Arc not only had admirers on the Charles VII side of the war, she had critics as well, and they included some of the leading ministers of Charles VII. They thought that she was a damn nuisance.
Jonathan Sumption:She kept on making strategic decisions that they regarded as completely crazy, like attacking the enemy at the strongest point instead of the weakest one so as to demonstrate the power of God's will. They were fed up with the fact that at a time when they were trying to win back the alliance of the Dukes of Burgundy, joan's attitude was that he was a sinner and needed to be smitten. So she was a diplomatically most inconvenient prophetess, and certainly at least one senior minister said that he thought that she'd simply become vain and just too cocky. By the time she was captured she had been more or less abandoned to do her own thing by Charles VII and his ministers for quite a few months by Charles VII and his ministers for quite a few months, obviously as a woman fighting in the war.
Russell:the question I have is did she have any lovers?
Jonathan Sumption:Was she admired as a woman or was she some sort of regarded by all sides as in some ways sexless? That's a question that was frequently posed in the posthumous inquiry into her life in the 1450s, and the answer seems to be no. She did not have lovers. She was genuinely convinced of her divine mission and she was determined to live up to the reputation of the spotless virgin who would save France. Did the French have lustful thoughts? Well, the evidence of those who had seen her getting undressed, for example, was that they didn't have lustful thoughts, although they thought that she was very beautiful. That seems to be the position. In summary, one does not know how sincere these statements were.
Russell:So I guess we're getting to the stage where we have to accept that the English are being defeated. So what is the key? Is it that the Burgundians defect? And if it is, why do they defect? Because it seems like can they really trust the kings of France to look after them if they move away from the English, if they move away from the English.
Jonathan Sumption:They defected because the war was continuing and was causing very great damage to their possessions, especially in the Duchy of Burgundy itself the cost to the Burgundian treasury of having to defend themselves. They quickly withdrew from the offensive side of the English wars, but they couldn't withdraw from the defensive side when they were being attacked by Charles VII's armies, and that was a very expensive and damaging business. By the early 1430s they had decided that there was nothing in the war for them. For a long time they were restrained by the fact that the dukes had sworn oaths to support the English alliance. But eventually they gave the English what amounted to an ultimatum that unless they made peace on terms which seemed to them to be reasonable, to the Burgundian dukes to be reasonable, terms which seemed to them to be reasonable, to the Burgundian dukes to be reasonable the Burgundians would defect. And that's what happened after the Treaty of Arras in 1435.
Jonathan Sumption:That was a disaster for the English.
Jonathan Sumption:In the first place they had only got as far as they had in alliance with the dukes of Burgundy.
Jonathan Sumption:Within a year of the Burgundians defecting, paris had been lost and along with Paris much of the area around, in fact the whole of the area west of Paris had already been lost.
Jonathan Sumption:So militarily it was a disaster. It was also a disaster for another reason. So militarily it was a disaster, it was also a disaster for another reason, which was that the Dukes of Burgundy controlled the whole of the Low Countries, from the southern border of Flanders right up to Northern Holland, that was, the sea coast of the North Sea, opposite England. So the effect of the defection of the Dukes of Burgundy was that a significant naval power which had previously been on their side was now against them, and the naval war which they'd been able to forget about since the alliance with the Dukes of Burgundy, because the French were left with virtually none of the French Atlantic coast to operate from, left, with virtually none of the French Atlantic coast to operate from, now suddenly became a reality again. The strain on the English war budget, which was already considerable before the defection of the Dukes of Burgundy, now doubled, and it was only a matter of time before they were expelled from France.
Russell:So can we just describe how the war is brought to an end? And I'm thinking about the Battle of Castillon, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. And it seemed particularly ironic, as it seemed to me the English were making exactly the same mistakes as the French had made at Poitiers, crecy and Agincourt. So do you just want to tell us about the Battle of Castillon?
Jonathan Sumption:Well, looking at it more generally, the whole of the English positions in France, apart from Calais, were wound up in a course of about six years, between 1448 and 1454. And that was achieved because the French completely reorganized their armies. They created a system of standing armies with permanent military reserves. They armed them better, they paid them better and for the first time, they had armies which were incomparably better equipped and more numerous than the English had ever succeeded in achieving. At the same time, the English bankruptcy for that's what it effectively was made it increasingly difficult for them to garrison their castles and continue the occupation of Normandy, and Gascony for that matter. So the whole of Normandy, the English positions in Normandy, collapsed in a matter of months. It had to wait a few years longer to happen in Aquitaine, but that also followed for really exactly the same reasons. Once people realised that the English were on their way out, they basically realised that they needed to change sides promptly in order to save their skins and their property. So it was an accelerating process.
Jonathan Sumption:The Battle of Castillon wasn't quite the mistake that the French had made at Agincourt and Poitiers. It was basically due to Talbot, the English commander's rashness. He had been a great soldier because of his boldness and skill at improvisation, but he was getting on a bit by the time the Battle of Castile was fought in 1453, and he was no longer as physically agile as he had been. His intelligence, which had previously been rather a strong point of his, his field intelligence, was very weak and what he did basically was to attack a fortified French encampment without properly reconnoitering it, so that he underestimated the strength of the French troops inside the encampment, he underestimated the extent of their field fortifications and he failed to organise his army in a way which would enable him to penetrate the camp. In addition, he rode ahead of his infantry and archers, who were left behind and therefore took no part in the battle. So there were a number of fairly basic mistakes. It was not a classic attempt by cavalry to break the traditional English forms. It wasn't like Poitiers in reverse.
Russell:I suppose what I meant was that the English were attacking instead of defending, I see, and they were attacking without waiting to get ready to get their reinforcements. That's absolutely right.
Jonathan Sumption:And the French also had learned not to attack themselves. The French also had learned not to attack themselves. At that stage, talbot was trying to reconquer the areas of Aquitaine which had been lost 18 months earlier. He couldn't simply sit there and wait for the French to attack him. He had to win a victory in order to succeed. So he was actually put in a position where he either had to give up or defeat the French in the field. The French declined to attack first, and they fortified themselves inside this vast armed camp which the English were basically made to attack. The numbers involved were roughly even on both sides. The result of the battle was almost entirely due to classic mistakes by a general who had lost his skills.
Russell:Okay, well, I think that's probably as good a place to end. On the history of the war. I sort of had some questions I wanted to ask you which I couldn't quite think where to fit in, so I'll just hit you with the questions and be as long or as short as you like with them. There was a visit by Manuel, the emperor of the Byzantine Empire, the emperor of the Byzantines, to France in 1400. And I just wondered, without the war, might he have gotten a bit more help from the French, and indeed from the English?
Jonathan Sumption:Well, it's possible. In 1400, of course, the war was not being fought, there was a truce. It was being fought at sea but not on land. So the French could still have helped, and indeed they had, only four years earlier, sent a very large army into Eastern Europe, which was defeated by the Turks at the Battle of Nicopolis. So the French were not averse at all to helping the Byzantines. But the reality was that the Byzantines were beyond salvation by then. They had lost pretty well all of their territory other than the city of Constantinople itself. They therefore did not have the resources of population and agricultural riches to sustain themselves.
Russell:Okay, so next question is is there any aspect of the Hundred Years' War which you think your fellow historians get badly wrong? Is there any aspect of the Hundred Years' War which you think your fellow historians get badly wrong? Is there anywhere where you are an outlier, do you think?
Jonathan Sumption:Historians have a variety of views on most aspects of the war and it's very rare to find something on which they're all wrong. It's very rare to find something on which they're all wrong, but you know, picking through incomplete sources which are sometimes ambiguous, there's always plenty of scope for disagreement. All I can really say is that I have studied substantially all the available sources. This is probably the last period when it's possible for one person to do that. The available sources.
Jonathan Sumption:This is probably the last period when it's possible for one person to do that, and I've resolved the difficulties, at least to my own satisfaction and, I hope, to that of my readers.
Russell:And what's your view on the great man theory of history. And you can define what we mean by the great man theory of history as you like, but is somebody like Henry V, resources and the ability of a man?
Jonathan Sumption:however, great to overcome a significant inferiority of resources is pretty limited. Henry V was, I think, the most remarkable ruler on either side in the course of the Hundred Years' War. He benefited from a great deal of luck as well as from his own talents. He was lucky that the Dover's ministers decided to murder John the Fearless, a crass and stupid act which did them very great damage. Stupid at which did them very great damage.
Jonathan Sumption:He was lucky in his timing. He was unlucky in the fact that he became ill, possibly of dysentery, at a young age and died before his task had been completed. And he was unlucky to leave behind him a young child. If he had not had that child, he would have been succeeded by John Duke of Bedford, his brother, and John Duke of Bedford was a very formidable person who would have had as good a chance as anyone of continuing his legacy. But even he could not struggle against the deficiency of resources, which is ultimately what decides the outcome of wars.
Russell:Okay, and somebody was asking me the other day about what historical writers there are to admire. I think they were asking this on Twitter and my answer was that we're in an absolute golden age, because I've just finished Stephen Platt on the Opium War, I've been reading Helen Castor on Richard II and, just everywhere you look, brilliant history just seems to be pouring out and I just wondered if you agree with that.
Jonathan Sumption:I think what has happened is that professional historians, academic historians which is basically what I am, I mean, I may have spent much of my time practicing law, but I've never really lost the habits of mind and the methods of research which are characteristic of academic historians, like I once was. What has, I think, changed is that academic historians have realized that they need to write not just for each other but for a wider public, and the great ideal which most academic historians nurse, but not all of them achieve, is to produce something which is accepted and admired by their fellow professionals, but which the general reader will also enjoy. That's what I have tried to do, and I think it's the secret of the success of distinguished academic or former academic historians like, for example, helen castor and then speaking about fiction.
Russell:So you know, bernard cornwall has some very stirring stories of the Hundred Years' War and I just wondered if you were thinking you might try to compete with that genre.
Jonathan Sumption:Not on your life. I don't like reading historical novels, and so it goes without saying that I'm not going to like writing them either. I'm very happy to leave that to people like Bernard Corwell who are extremely skilled at it. I have on a number of occasions helped by answering his questions and supplying him with draft chapters of my book, so I have a high regard for him, but it's horses for courses and not for me.
Russell:I'm sorry to hear you say that about historical novels. My own favourite is the Siege of Krishnapur, which is set in the time of the Indian mutiny, and I think that's a wonderful novel.
Jonathan Sumption:Well in keeping with my general views on the subject, I haven't read it.
Russell:Okay, well, I assure you it's terribly good. Okay so, finally, finally, and I was surprised that one of England's most distinguished judges and a man who has written a five-part history of the Hundred Years' War couldn't make it onto the governing body of the National Trust and I did my bit. I voted for you and you got many, many more votes than any other candidate, except for those that were elected through the quick vote system, and I was surprised. I mean, is quick vote even legal? I mean, what are your thoughts on this?
Jonathan Sumption:I think it's legal, but it's the kind of device which countries like North Korea like to use. It's guided voting and it's unworthy of a distinguished organization like the National Trust.
Russell:Okay, well, I think we better close it there. Lord Sumption, thank you so much. Thank you you.