Hundred Years' War:
Disaster in Britanny 1344: "We have Henri de Malestroit, a former member of Philip the Sixth’s household. He couldn't be executed because he was a priest, having taken the sacrament of Holy Orders. He was sentenced by the church, church court to life imprisonment, but his sentencing was done publicly in front of Notre Dame Cathedral and arrangements had been made so that a mob, as soon as he was sentenced, overpowered the guards and just simply lynched him"
Edward III March on Paris 1346: "The South Bank was guarded by a heavily fortified Barbican whose defenders taunted the English as they wrote up and reading this it gives me a flashback to Monty Python and the Holy Grail with the Knights taunting Arthur. Well, stung by the insults the English attempted a disorganized assault and were then driven back with several leading men at arms seriously wounded by crossbow bolts. So it didn't work any better than the the gigantic rabbit. Upstream from Helene [sp?] French troops and stood on the edge of the water laughing and varing their backsides to the English as they marched by"
Plague Truce Part 1: "France is one of the places that suffered the most. But before the plague outbreak, there is a witch hunt in France. They're hunting for all kinds of witches and things like that. But they also murder, kill every cat they can find, believing that the cat was a minion of the devil because it was not, it's an animal not listed in the Bible. And so France goes through this period where they kill every cat that they can find. It's actually considered to be good luck to take a dead cat and wrap it up and stick it in the area where you’re, the door jamb, where your door is located. That's supposed to be good luck on your house. Well, of course the cats are one of the greatest hunters on the face of the earth. If you don't believe that go to Istanbul. There's a city where there's food everywhere and I didn't see a rat. You don't see mice but they have cats everywhere. Places that have lots of cats have very few mice and rats. And so the rat population explodes after this time period. You know, you have the story of, the children's story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin"
Plague Truce Part 2: "There are two extremes of groups that come out during this early plague. One of them is referred to as the Luciferian. These are people who believed that Satan was getting even for being cheated out of control of the world. And so that these, so you have devil worshippers. Because obviously the priests are dying and prayers don't do any good and anywhere else. If you go to Venice, most of the churches that are in Venice that aren't St. Mark’s are churches that were built after plague outbreaks to thank God for stopping the plague. But the most famous one are the flagellants. These are people who believe that God was punishing man for their sins. So you would have people that would gather in groups, they would dress sometimes in sackcloth, sometimes in just regular clothing and they would whip themselves, flagellate themselves. Sometimes with a rope, sometimes with a chain, sometimes with a rope that had or a whip that had metal ends so that it would cut you and you would bleed. And this is, the hope was you get enough people together and they march around asking for forgiveness and God will change his mind. Now what they basically do is end up spreading the plague to other places"
Edward III Prepare to Invade France: "John the Second addressed a florid plea to the prelates, barons, magnates and nobility of the community of the realm of Scotland and urged them to stand by the alliance with France and the fight the common enemy. The messengers who carry these letter to Scotland added their own exhortation, but there's no evidence that they had any impact. The most that King John could promise by way of help was a comfortable exile in France for those who were defeated on August the Eighth 1352."
John II Financial Problems 1355: "It was in 1355, that Nicholas Oresme, master of the College of Navarre in Paris had produced his famous treatise on money, one of the most influential works on the subject ever written. Nicholas challenged the whole judicial basis on which the crown controlled coinage, asserting that it was the common property of the people and not of the ruler. But Nicholas was not a populist. He was a skillful pamphleteer, writing in the interest of the church and the landed aristocracy. As he pointed out, debasement of the coinage could be positively beneficial to peasants and urban wage earners who rarely used coin as a store of value and did not depend upon the revenues fixed in nominal money. The victims were the best classes of the community, in particularly the landed community which lived on agricultural rents and supplied most of the taxpayers and warriors on which the state depended and its mores"
***
English Civil Wars
James I Part 1 The Early Years: "At this time, it was customary for the Catholic priest to spit into the child mouth. Well Mary refused to allow the Archbishop of St Andrews to do that. And then afterwards, the entertainment was devised by a Frenchman named Bastiane Pageat [sp?]. And it featured men dressed as satyrs and sporting tails that ran among throughout the crowd, which caused the English guests great offense because it looked like paganism"
Death of King James I:
"As far as his legacy, James was indeed widely mourned, because for all his flaws he had largely retained the affection of his people who had on the one hand enjoyed uninterrupted peace and comparatively low taxation during the Jacobean era. He lived in peace, remarked the Earl of Kelly, so he died in peace, and I pray God our King Charles the First may follow him. The Earl prayed in vain. Once in power, Charles and Buckingham sanctioned a series of reckless military expeditions that ended in humiliating failure. James had often neglected the business of government for leisure pastimes, such as the hunt. His later dependence on favorites and a scandal-ridden court undermine the respected image of monarchy that had been so carefully constructed by Queen Elizabeth.
Under James, plantation of Ulster by English, Scot Protestants began and the English colonization of North America started its course with the foundation of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. And of course Cuppers’ Cove in Newfoundland in 1610. During the next 150 years England would fight with Spain, the Netherlands and France for control of the continent while religious division in Ireland between Protestant and Catholic has lasted for 400 years. By actively pursuing more than just a personal union of his realms, he laid the foundation for the British state.
According to a tradition originating with the anti Stuart historians in the mid 17th century, James's taste for political absolutism, his financial irresponsibility, and his cultivation of unpopular figures established the foundations of the English Civil War. James bequeathed Charles a fatal belief in divine right of kings, combined with a disdain for Parliament, which culminated of course in the execution of Charles the First and the abolition of the monarchy. Over the last 300 years king’s reputation has suffered from the acid description of him by Sir Anthony Weldon who James had sacked and who wrote treatises on James in 1650. Other influential anti James historian, wrote during the 1650s included Sir Edward Payton's Divine Catastrophe of the Kingly Family of the House of Stuart that came out in 1652, Arthur Wilson's history of Great Britain, Being the Life and Reign of James the First, 1658, Francis Osborne's Historical Memoirs of the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James 1658, Dennis Harris Wilson, a biography which continued this, much of this hostility, that was written in 1956. Wilson's book is described as an astonishing spectacle of a work whose every page proclaimed its author increasingly hatred for his subject, but the stability of James's government in Scotland and in the early part of his English reign, as well as his relatively enlightened views on religion and war have now earned him a reevaluation by many historians who have rescued his reputation from this tradition of criticism.
So we have a King who had some people who didn't like him and they wrote all about it and his dislike, and this is not, this is absolutely typical. And I'll give you an example in English history. One of the greatest Knights in the Middle Ages is William Marshall. Now William Marshall lived at the time of Henry the Second, Richard the Lionhearted and King John. Now he was a regular knight, he rose through the ranks, He trained Richard the Lionhearted and he trained John the Second. He went on the Crusades, he did all sorts of things. He was a literally undefeated knight in combat. Only man to defeat Richard the Lionhearted in combat because Richard ambushed his dad on one occasion, and the only bodyguards that Henry had with him was Marshall and two other men and Marshall rode right at Richard. With the first lance killed his horse, with the second with his sword, took his helmet off. Could have killed him and got him to apologize and move on. Later on after the death of King John who by the way, King John accused him of stealing money and William Marshall challenged him to Trial by Combat, and no one at the court would take up the gauntlet of a man who is almost 70 years old. And then after John's death is Marshall who led the English barons in a successful campaign that saved England from being over, taken over by Philip Augustus of France. And yet 100 years later, they wrote all of this anti William Marshall stuff. That he was a proud man, that he was doing everything for himself and all of these things.
That we usually call in history revisionist history, no matter what happens 50 years later, people start saying all that was all wrong. This is the way we look at it. And even though you have the original documents they just wish to ignore it and then another 50 years or 100 years go by and everybody goes, those people were idiots. Let's go back to the original one. And so you will see this particularly in the English Civil War, because we have characters that people like and don't like. Cromwell. Poor old Charles the First. We've got James here, we've got other characters that will come into play. People who are responsible for the death of King Charles and how they're hunted down and brought back, dealt with when the Restoration comes in. So we have a lot of that. It's where I'm actually as a French historian more used to what happens during the French Revolution, you have the reign of terror. And then after it's over with you have the White Terror where everybody who lost somebody is getting even. So it's, it's just a strange situation that we find in history."
Charle's Spanish Fiasco: "The French Alliance had been formed in hope of drawing Louis the 13th into a war against Spain. But it was soon apparent that Louis the 13th was in no rush. Charles and Buckingham were offended at the coyness of their ally, and Buckingham took to unstatesmen-like revenge by making love to the French queen"
Assassin John Felton: "On August the 23rd 1628, John Felton, believe it or not, easily walked into the home of the Duke of Buckingham. Now the main reason for this is that there were a lot of, there's, there's going to be a new naval expedition formed and everybody and their brother is over at Buckingham’s house trying to weasel their way in the command and part of it and all sorts of other stuff. Because the Duke is being heavily lobbied by the people for this. So he just kind of blends in. Well, nobody pays any attention to it. Felton just walks up to the Duke with his dagger. Well, there's a man that’s standing between the Duke of Buckingham and Felton and the Duke is talking to the gentleman, who by the way, is much shorter than both the Duke and Felton. But Felton couldn't get by him so he leans over the man and stabs down at the Duke, hitting the Duke of Buckingham in the chest and then Felton drove the dagger in and cries out, May God have mercy on thy soul! The Duke of Buckingham then pulled the dagger out, but he picked a good spot. The Duke only took two steps before falling over dead. Unbelievably, in all the confusion, Felton just literally walked from the room. He could have actually walked away and gotten away with it. He just made one little mistake. The naval expedition that was being planned was against the French at this point. Somebody in the crowd yelled that the Duke had been killed by a Frenchman, a Frenchman had done it, a Frenchman had done it. However, Felton in the next room didn't hear Frenchmen. He heard Felton. He mis, he misheard what was being said. So instead of just continuing on out of the building, he walked back into the room and confessed. Okay, well, the Duke of Buckingham’s death turned out to be very, very, very, very, very, very popular. Oxford University was actually reprimanded by the government, because of toasting to the health of John Felton, in its various inns and what have you. And when they took Felton from Portsmouth to London for trial, the people lined the road, wishing and cheering him and wishing God's blessing on him. So this a real problem for the government, which is King Charles the First now. Well, King Charles the First realized that he better act quickly before this guy becomes, you know, a martyr, becomes more of a political liability. So he was given a very quick trial and immediately executed afterwards, so that Mr. Felton would not become a folk hero. It was also put out that he was a deranged Puritan, as well. A religious fanatic to kind of put a religious spin on it and he was, he killed the Duke of Buckingham because of his affairs with King James the First"