Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to conversations with Tyler. Today, I'm very happy to be chatting with Helen Castor. She is a British historian of the medieval and Tudor period and also a BBC broadcaster. She's taught history at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of numerous books. And most recently, one of the best books of last year, she published the eagle and the heart, the tragedy of Richard the second and Henry the fourth. Helen, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. So Richard the second and Henry the fourth, they're both born in the same year, namely 1367. Just to to frame it for our listeners, could you give us a sense back then, what was it that English government sort of could do, and what could it not do? What is a government like then? I think people might be surprised at quite how much government could do in England at this point in history because England at this point was the most centralized state in Europe, and that has two reasons. One is the conquest of ten sixty six that the Normans have come in and taken the whole place over. And then the other key formative period is the late twelfth century when Henry the second is ruling an empire that stretches from the Scottish border all the way down to Southwestern France, so he has to have a system of government and of law that can function when he's not there. So by the late fourteenth century, when Richard and Henry, my two kings in this book, appear on the scene, The king has two key functions which appear on his seal, the two sides of his seal. On one side, he sits in state wearing a crown, carrying an orb and scepter as a lawgiver and a judge, and that is a key function of what he does for his people. He imposes law. He gives justice. He maintains order. And on the other side of the seal, he's wearing armor on a war horse with a sword unsheathed in his hand. And that's his function as a defender of the realm in an intensely practical way. He has to be a soldier, a warrior, to repel attacks or indeed to launch attacks if that's the best form of defense. And to do that, he needs money. And for that, the institution of parliament has developed, which both offers consent to taxation that he can demonstrate is in the national interest, and it has also come to be a lawmaking forum. So wherever he needs to make new laws, he can make statute law in parliament that, therefore, in its very nature, has the consent of the representatives of …