 Welcome to the British Library this evening for a new history of the middle ages with Dan Jones. My name is Julian Harrison. I'm a curator of medieval manuscripts here at the library and it's my pleasure to introduce tonight's event. This is our first cultural event on site here in the Knowledge Centre at the British Library since the lockdown back in March 2020. Since then we have presented an incredible range of digital events on our bespoke online platform and we've welcomed audiences from around the country and across the world. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all our audiences for their amazing support over the past 18 months. We really appreciate that. We should also make special mention of the British Library's events team who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to keep our cultural programme up and running through these difficult times. They don't get the recognition they deserve so please can you join me and give them a well deserved round of applause. Tonight we would like to extend a very special welcome to those of you who are joining us online. We hope that you enjoy this evening. At the end of the event we will be taking questions from our online and in-house audiences. If you're watching online submit your questions using the question box below the video. If you're watching online you can use the menu above to provide us with feedback on the event and also to donate to the British Library. The British Library is a charity. Your support helps us open up a world of knowledge and inspiration for everyone. And so we're delighted to welcome Dan Jones for our first hybrid event. In this lecture he will look at the enduring legacy of the Middle Ages with a special focus on some of the most iconic treasures of the British Library. Dan Jones is a historian, broadcaster and award-winning journalist. His books include The Templars, Crusaders and with Marina Amaral, The Colour of Time and The World of Flame. And his books have sold more than one million copies worldwide. He has written and hosted dozens of TV shows including The Acclaimed, Netflix, Channel 5 series, Secrets of Great British Castles. Please join me in welcoming Dan to the British Library this evening. Nobody panic, everybody be calm, there are humans in a room once again and long may it continue this way. It's lovely to see you all here at the British Library tonight. Thank you Julian very much for that kind introduction. It's lovely not to see you at home but to know that you are there at home doing whatever you're doing, hopefully paying attention. I thought as I was coming here today that it's almost 20 years since I came to the British Library for the first time. In a way I was completing the set because when I was 17 years old I had been doing my A-levels and I was working because I lived near Oxford. I got a special readers pass to go and work in the Radcliffe camera at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. I was researching there an essay about King John and Magma Carter. A couple of years later I was a student at Cambridge University and used the university library there. Some of the time I spent in the university library there was researching an essay about King John and Magma Carter. Once I graduated and started writing books I came here to work at the third and greatest of all the libraries in the United Kingdom, the British Library and some of the time I spent here I've been working on King John and Magma Carter. I may not have moved on but I'm very delighted to have been coming here for so long. I've got many happy memories of being here at the British Library, filming, looking at Thomas Moore's handwriting, sitting on this stage with Michael Palin discussing the making of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All of these things have been joyful experiences and it's been my pleasure to have those experiences here at the British Library. It's also great to be talking about the Middle Ages at the British Library. My new book is Powers and Thrones and it's a new history of the Middle Ages and there are very few better places in this country or indeed anywhere in the world to be thinking about talking about the Middle Ages. Julie mentioned that there are medieval treasures here at the library and indeed there are just a few of them. I'll mention the 8th Century St Cuthbert Gospel. Also from the 8th Century, the Myil Quran, one of the first written editions of the Quran. The Beowulf Manuscript, 10th or 11th Century, we can argue about it later. Matthew Parris's Historia Anglorum from the 13th Century, the Harley manuscripts containing the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, the Tale of Gamelin, maybe not by Geoffrey Chaucer but a wonderful tale all the same. A notebook of Leonardo da Vinci. This is just a tiny sample of the treasures that are held here in the British Library from the Middle Ages. So it's a wonderful place to be talking about that subject tonight. What was I doing here nearly 20 years ago? Well, 20 years ago, I came to track, actually not quite 20 years ago, I wasn't doing that 20 years ago, but almost 20 years ago, I came here to track down a 1960s sketch map of London under Richard II. That was one of the first things I came to the British Library to find because I couldn't find it anywhere else. It was a sketch map by a man called Marjorie Honeybourne and it laid out all of the streets, named streets, the churches, the river, all of the features of London from the late 14th Century and Richard II was king. I was going to use it and did use it, in fact, as the endpapers in my first book, Summer of Blood. I can remember in the maps room laying out this enormous, much larger than I thought it was going to be, this enormous sketch map and just marvelling that I'd been able to come to this place and find it. Fast forward to last year, during the last lockdown, I wasn't at the library because the library was closed, but I was using the excellent digitised manuscripts collection to look at a book from the Byland Abbey Library. Byland Abbey dissolved during Henry VIII's Reformation, but parts of its library are now here in the Royal Collection of Manuscripts and I was looking at a collection of the Orations of Cicero and various Christian theological texts which in a leaf at the back has scribbled on it 12 famous medieval ghost stories written down by a monk from Byland Abbey around the year 1400. I was doing that because I was rewriting one of them for a book to come out next month called The Tale of the Taylor and the Three Dead Kings, but the point is here in the British Library there is no shortage of medieval treasures. It's a playground and it's a paradise if you're a medievalist. What I want to discuss tonight are some of the themes and some of the ideas that are in my new book, Pows and Thrones, A New History of the Middle Ages, because, as I've said already, I've been working on the Middle Ages for almost 20 years and this new book, my 10th book, puts together a lot of the things that I've worked on during that time. It's an epic history of the Middle Ages which sweeps from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, the sack of Rome in 410 AD, all the way through to the sack of Rome in 1527, the end of the Middle Ages. Some of the things I want to think about tonight are what we mean by the Middle Ages or the term medieval. I want to think about how the word medieval is used and indeed misused today. I want to think especially about what we today owe to the Middle Ages and then I want to finally offer some thoughts about what a new history of the Middle Ages really means and how we can demystify the Middle Ages which can often be a difficult, tortuous, hard to empathise with period in British history. I want to try and offer a few thoughts about how we can, in the 21st century, start to think about the Middle Ages in a way that will continue to get people interested in studying them. So let's start with the first of those questions. What or when are the Middle Ages? Where does the term come from? One of the first uses of nearly the term the Middle Ages comes from a manuscript that's here in the British Library. John Fox's Acts and Monuments, better known as Fox's Book of Martyrs from 1563. The Book of Martyrs is a series of examples of people who were martyred in the name of their faith, that being the Protestant Reformed faith. But in it John Fox salami slices history. Actually he doesn't salami slice history because he cuts it very fat. He wouldn't want a piece of salami from John Fox's salami slice of history. He slices history or rather he slices ecclesiastical history which is the stuff that really matters to John Fox into three chunks. He says at the beginning there was the primitive time. Now he's talking about the history of the church. So what does he mean by the primitive time? Well he says he's talking about the time when Christians were persecuted. So we can imagine Christians persecuted by feckless Romans hiding in catacombs to try and escape crucifixion or worse. That's on the one end of history says Fox. The other end of history, the bit from which Fox is writing, is the present day. He says we would call it the modern age or maybe the post-modern age. And in the middle says Fox there's a sort of funny bit which he says is the middle age. It's not quite the middle ages but it's the middle age. It's neither fission or fowl. It's sort of just six in the middle. It's not incredibly dramatic and it's not incredibly enlightened and modern. It's just there. And a lot of Fox and Fox's definition has stuck because from Christianisation of Rome to the Reformation. That is more or less still the same temporal definition that we have of the middle ages today. One of the other very important points in the development of the idea of the middle ages or of medieval history comes from rather later. It comes from 1994 and the work of bad boy Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino. In his second film, Pulp Fiction, includes an extremely famous bit of dialogue delivered by Ving Reims playing Marcellus Wallace. Marcellus Wallace has just shot the character Zed with a shotgun for reasons that are entirely deserved. He says you hear me hillbilly boy? I'ma get medieval on your ass. He promises to do ghastly things with some of his friends who smoke pipes and are going to bring along pliers and blowtorch. That's a throwaway line in Pulp Fiction but the idea of getting medieval on your ass has been just as important in the way that people think about the middle ages now. As has John Fox's rather more elevated consideration of when the middle age was. These two ideas that it's a sort of bit in the middle in which you might be going around with pliers and a blowtorch. Well you do well to get a blowtorch in the middle ages but the idea of torture, revenge, barbarity, brutality, a lesser period in human enlightenment and development. These things hang around the neck of the middle ages and have proven very hard to shake off. You only have to look at the papers this week if you want to see an example or several examples of the word medieval being tossed about as an adjective synonymous with bad. What are the two most wicked medieval states in 2021? Well, Taliban governed, I use that term lightly, Afghanistan, Republican governed Texas. Both of these have been described as medieval over and over again in the last couple of weeks. In fact I read a piece yesterday entitled, Texas isn't medieval, it's worse than that. I think that's a sideways compliment to the middle ages. But if that's the perception of the middle ages, a time of brutality, a time in which enlightened views about the relationships between men and women, about relationships between different people of different faiths, all of this is somewhere far beyond, far behind where we are now. If that's the caricature of the middle ages, how does it match up with what we've really inherited from the middle ages today? Well, I've already defined when roughly the middle ages were. You can date them more or less from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the early 5th century, or the ongoing process, but the 5th century AD, and particularly from the 410 sack of Rome by Alec and the Goths, through to 1527. That runs from the fall of the Roman Empire to the New World voyages to the Reformation. Now, if we take those dates, and they are somewhat arbitrary dates, but they're roughly in the right place, if we take those dates as the bookends of the middle ages, we're talking about a period that lasted for 1117 years. Now, that's an awfully long time. It's much longer than separates us from that terminal date of the middle ages, twice as long as separates us from that terminal date of the middle ages that I've proposed. But I think that that's a useful chunk of history for us to look at. Where did the middle ages occur? Well, I think for the sake of the discussion tonight, and certainly for the sake of powers and thrones, I think we're talking about mostly the West. Not only the West, but in the book powers and thrones, when I've treated the middle ages, I've looked at a geographical scope that goes from Ireland in the West to the Eastern Mediterranean. Although we do look further afield when we get to things like the expansion of the Mongol Empire in the later middle ages, we do go as far east as Korea. So this is nevertheless a very broad space of geography and a very long time. So what did this very long time and broad space of geography do for us? Well, I wanted to spend a little time thinking about what we have inherited from the middle ages. The first thing I think we can say that we inherit from the middle ages is the notion of state formation, or not the notion of state formation, but the reality of, particularly in the West, of states as we know them today. If we start at the beginning of the middle ages, we're looking at a Roman Empire, which spreads from Britannia all the way through to what we now think of as the Middle East. On the collapse of the Roman Empire, on the collapse of its western half, you see a series of migrations of tribes, a sort of chain of what are called barbarian tribes, by Roman writers, not by themselves. We see a wave of migration beginning with the Huns around northern China, pushing west, driven probably by a mega drought, a form of climate emergency in the east, drives the Huns to the west. The Huns displaced tribes like the Goths and the Allans, they put pressure on the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Those boundaries start to crumble, and with waves of mass migration into the Roman Empire, its political bonds, its internal stability starts to fall apart. In the West, in Western Europe, in place of that Roman Empire, throughout the middle ages, we start to see the evolution of what are the basic unitary states of the West today. Some of those tribes that come into what had been the Western Roman Empire in the early Middle Ages have not lent their names to modern states. There is no state of the Allans today, for example. However, if we think about tribes that followed the Goths and the Allans, we certainly do have a state of the Franks. It's what developed into modern France. We know exactly where we're talking about if we think about the barbarian tribe of the Lombards, we're talking about northern Italy. We know exactly where we're talking about if we think about the barbarian tribe known as the Burgundians. So these are the beginnings of unitary states, what will become unitary states in the West that emerge from the Roman Empire. Now some of those kingdoms vanished or have since been absorbed into others. We no longer talk about the kingdoms of Burgundy or Strathclyde, Lombardy as part of Italy, Wessex as part of England. But many of the political units and the states that emerge in the Middle Ages do survive. France, England, Spain, Portugal, these are still the building blocks of the West and they're still the building blocks of Western Europe and they are still some of the most important and powerful nations in the world. But it's not just the individual states that emerged in the Middle Ages, first as tribal groupings then as kingdoms. The idea of super-states is also something that we've inherited from the Middle Ages. Now of course the super-state in the West at the beginning of the Middle Ages was the Roman Empire, but as the period went on we start to see other ideas of bigger states than simply kingdoms start to emerge. One of the most enduring of those is that which was put together in the 8th and 9th century by Charlemagne and his sons. This pan-European Empire, a revived form of the Western Roman Empire, which fused together the lands that we now think of as France and Germany and built around them a European super-state that was in this case centrally governed from Charlemagne's Palace at Aachen and which held the supreme political and to an extent religious power in Europe that was the most important unitary state in Europe. That idea has animated European politicians ever since Charlemagne's day. It's certainly animated Napoleon Bonaparte, probably the statesman who came closest to emulating Charlemagne's great achievement and it lies at the heart of the European project of today to bind together France and Germany. Although for different reasons than Charlemagne put them together, that is still the core of how many people in Europe think that this continent should be organised. It's an inheritance from the Middle Ages. We have of course the notion of a global Da'al Islam. Islam is a religion, as I'll talk about in a minute, that emerged from the Middle Ages, which put together one of the biggest empires, whose early Caliphs put together one of the biggest empires in the Middle Ages, and who left to modern times, who have left to modern times, the idea that certainly in some minds a global Islam is something that can be put together once again. That is a legacy of the first Arab conquest of the Middle Ages. Similarly, the idea of a Chinese global superpower, the most powerful state in the world, where do we look back to see an empire centred on what's now Beijing reaching out far into Eastern Europe in terms of its direct conquest, but into Western Europe in terms of its political influence? Well, we look to the 12th and 13th centuries with the rise of the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successes. All of these big ideas, not only the presence of individual states, but the big ideas about how those states could lock together into super states, all of this is generated in the Middle Ages. How should those states be governed? Well, a lot of the ideas that we have in the West about the law derive from the Middle Ages. I've mentioned very briefly at the beginning of this lecture, Magna Carta. One of the reasons that I've studied Magna Carta many times, besides the fortuity of the 800th anniversary in 2015, is that it forms a very important part of the way we think about law, constitution, politics, government, democracy in the 21st century. Here in the British Library there are two copies of the 1215 edition of Magna Carta, and they are some of the greatest treasures, not only in the library, but they are some of the most treasured manuscripts in this country, for good reason. They stand for something that is greater than their text, this peace treaty that was put together to try and stop, unsuccessfully as it turned out, civil war between King John and the rebellious English barons in 1215. This still underpins the way we think about law today. Just look at what's happened in the pandemic. People posting sections of Magna Carta in the windows of barbershops and gyms when they don't want to close them down. I mean, it's easy to laugh and it is quite funny to think that the Clause 61, the Security Clause of Magna Carta, could save you in 2020 slash 2021 from having to shut down your gym. But that's part of the magic of Magna Carta, and that's part of the legacy of medieval law in England. Someone tried to take Edinburgh Castle the other day, besieged Edinburgh Castle for the 24th time in its history, claiming that they were doing so by right of Magna Carta, that English peace treaty. But it's important, it matters. And it's not just Magna Carta, it's not quite so parochial. What else have the Middle Ages ever done for law? Well, we've talked about the Western Roman Empire, and the Eastern Roman Empire reformed around Constantinople, new Rome after the fall of the West. One of the most important Roman emperors, sometimes called the last of the Roman emperors, was Justinian. One of Justinian's great achievements, were many great achievements during the reign of Justinian and his wife and Empress Theodora. One of the great achievements of Justinian's reign was the codification of Roman law, an enormous project by which Justinian had the best legal minds in the Roman Empire go through the whole corpus of Roman law. Recompile it, put together textbooks for students to learn about Roman law in future in law schools. Had a vision of a reformed Roman law that outlasted him not only by decades, but by centuries. The Roman law that was codified under Justinian, that was revived, rediscovered, re-studied, re-annotated, thought about again and again in the medieval law schools of Bologna and elsewhere. This has underpinned fundamental ideas about law all the way through into the modern era, particularly on the continent, particularly where Roman law is more central to legal systems than it is here in England at any rate. But in England we can trace the beginnings of our own dominant legal tradition to the Middle Ages. Think about Henry II and the early Plantagenets and the development of common law in England. We think about Edward III in the 14th century and the reforms of the law and the peacekeeping and law giving in the English shires through the use of keepers of the peace and eventually justices of the peace. All of these are medieval innovations. In a broader sense we can think about the Middle Ages as the beginning of constitutions, as the beginning of parliaments, the beginnings of the legal profession itself. If you take a wander down to the ins of court or around the temple where the barristers chambers are, you're going back to the beating heart of the medieval legal profession which emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries. So our inheritance from the Middle Ages is a legal inheritance from the Middle Ages, it's profound. If we've inherited ideas about law from the Middle Ages we've also inherited ideas about war and about warfare. Now war and warfare is probably one area where we have significantly surpassed our medieval ancestors in terms of the technology available to us. In the context of war, would you prefer someone to get medieval on your ass or get 21st century on your ass? I'd take my chances with a trebyshe over a drone strike any day of the week. That being said, and actually every time I read about the Taliban being medieval, I try and put that together with the Taliban driving Humvees around and black hawk helicopters and the two necessarily fit together so well. But what have the Middle Ages left us in terms of the way we think about war? They've left us the idea, an idea that is incredibly important in the Western imagination and that's the idea of the knight. The knight is an essentially medieval figure. The idea of the mounted warrior is not a medieval invention but the idea of a mounted warrior who fights in the Frankish style with a couch lance on a cantled saddle with stirrups to something flying backwards when he attacks the lance. The idea of the mounted warrior who fights for the lance in the saddle in first male armour and then plate armour, that's medieval. The idea of the mounted warrior who fights with a lance and a couch and a saddle and plate armour or male armour and obeys a code of chivalry, a code that is deeply embedded with ideas about not only the best way to fight and the best way to die and the best way to kill but the best way to love, the best way to act in a social setting, the best way to behave in society, the best way to treat people better off than yourself and less well off than yourself. The idea of nightliness and the idea of chivalry which comes out of it, this is a very important idea as is the literary legacy of chivalry, the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table still being made for Hollywood today, the very night, just the latest of the adaptations of Arthurian stories, all infused deep down with a medieval warrior mentality. These are all deep, deep inheritances of the Middle Ages. There's religion. What have the Middle Ages done for us in terms of religion? We only have to look at the three great religions of the book to see that enormous amounts of the way that Christianity and Islam and Judaism exist and intersect and interact in the modern world is a legacy of the Middle Ages. We could spend hours and hours talking about Christianity but let's just think about a few of the headlines. During the Middle Ages we see the final, not the final, a definitive split between the eastern Greek and western Latin halves of the Christian church. In the western half we see the rise of popes to a position of extraordinary power, tussling always with emperors in the mould, who fancy themselves in the mould of Charlemagne, for supremacy over Europe, for supremacy over the law, for supremacy over appointments to political office. Think about some of the enormous characters who occupy the papacy during the Middle Ages. Urban II launches the first crusade, Innocent III launches more crusades than I've got fingers on this hand. Gregory IX fights his bitter war with the Honestaufen. The rise to would-be supremacy of popes is a medieval story and the veneration with which the pope is regarded above all other of the most senior bishops of the church. That is a legacy of the Middle Ages. Doctrinal developments such as purgatory, developments that are both doctrinal and military such as the penitential armed pilgrimage, the crusade. These come from the Middle Ages and these are still with us today. If we think about, I've talked about this in this theatre before, two years ago, when there were also people here, thankfully. The idea that there is somehow an elemental struggle between Christian crusade and Islamic jihad, an idea that is not very firmly or carefully rooted in history but has been very pervasive nonetheless and which forms a mainstay of ISIS propaganda on the one hand, of alt-right propaganda on the other. This comes from the first crusade, 1095, 1096 onwards. This is where these ideas are, or this is where people have looked to justify their ideas of a civilisation or duel between Christianity and Islam. In these medieval campaigns conceived as penitential pilgrimage to rescue Jerusalem to defend Constantinople and after that to go and take pretty much anywhere that innocent III decided needed taking. These are all the legacy of the high, the later Middle Ages and we're still living with their consequences today. More peaceful aspects of religion, of Christian religion in the Middle Ages. Think about monasticism. There aren't many monks left in England thanks to Henry VIII. I've talked about Bail and Abbey being ruined already. But the rise of monasticism from the 10th, 11th, 12th into the 13th century, that gave us the idea of a network of institutions embedded, or people, if we think about the mendicant orders, embedded in society, a place where men and women could retire from the world for whatever reason, where they could live by an order, where they could either retire because of old age, where they could retire because of inclination, where they could do work that was neither agricultural nor military, but was deemed to be for the good of society. The whole idea of doing service to society, even if it was conceived in monastic terms, in terms of faith and of helping souls, cure of souls, this is something that comes out of the development of asceticism in the Middle Ages. But so too does the tradition, very strong, I'm thankful to say in this country, of the provision of medical care of somewhere for people to retire, for people to retreat from the world, all of these, for people to learn. Education being carried out by the church is something that is now so deeply knitted into the fabric of society that we barely think where it's come from. We rely on most of those things today. We rely on the state for most of those things today. But the fact that they are pervasive and available in society, we can trace the roots of that back to monasticism. That's just Christianity. Islam appears in the Middle Ages and the early Middle Ages. In the 7th century we see the birth of a faith, one of the most important, most widely followed faiths in the 21st century. We see not only its doctrinal development, its conception, the writing down of its sacred texts, but we see a rapid growth in Islam in the 7th, 8th centuries, into the 9th century. So that there are from a small group of Muslims who are the friends and family of Mohammed, we start to see Muslims living as far afield as trans-Oxania in the East, Sicily, Spain and Portugal in the West. The North African Mediterranean coast becomes predominantly Muslim during the Middle Ages. The cultures of the Iberian Peninsula become richly mingled with Christian and Islamic elements during the Middle Ages. We see the Sunni-Shia split in the early medieval origin times of Islam. We see the appearance of non-Arab Muslims during the Middle Ages when Islam is exported to Persia. We're still living with the consequences of that today. Of course, besides Christianity and Islam, the Middle Ages is an incredibly important, if not happily important period in the development of Judaism, particularly in Europe where the period of persecution, of expulsion, the formation of the blood libel, all of these are the products of 12th and 13th century Europe and the white heat of the crusading movement and the tragic consequences of Europe having failed to deal with the way in which Jewish people have been allowed to live among non-Jewish people in Europe. We saw of course the tragic consequences of that in the 20th century and it's something that remains a problematic, pernicious part of society today. What about commerce? Well, the Middle Ages is traditionally thought as a time of backwardness, of non-modernity. If we're thinking about a time when, if we're thinking about commerce in the Middle Ages, it's very easy to think about it being very localised, very unsophisticated, nothing could be further from the truth. As the Middle Ages go on, the trade ties which had bound together the Roman Empire and which fall apart at the end, with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, start to re-emerge. We see the silk roads tying together trade, silk roads that existed before the Middle Ages, but we see the silk roads tying together trade between the eastern and western parts of Eurasia, particularly after the rise of the Mongols in the 13th century and the Pax Mongolica, in which it was said that a woman could walk with a gold vase on her head from one end of the vast Mongol Empire to the other, untroubled, such was the severe discipline and policing of the Mongol Empire. Very bad if you annoyed the Mongols and refused to give up your city to them or flashed them a defiant eye because they'd kill you and kill all your friends and burn your city to the ground and it would be as if it had never been there. However, good for trade. An attitude, again, not unfamiliar today. We start to see the rise particularly in the west of the merchant as an important and valued and powerful member of society, a social type. In technical terms we see the rise of double-entry bookkeeping, of companies, of banking, of credit transfer, of insurance, the basic building blocks of what we know today as capitalist slash post-capitalist society. We start to see individual merchants, larger-than-life individual merchants, exercising enormous power, the Medici in Florence and later in Rome as popes. My own favourite character from the whole of Powers and Thrones, Dick Whittington, not a Victorian pantomime character as so often thought, but one of the richest and most powerful figures in late medieval England. Dick Whittington is an extraordinary person. Dick Whittington, if you think he's just the lad from the farm who had a knapsack on his back and a lucky cat which went off to the car and killed some mice and got him some money and bowbells and whatever the whole story is, changes every time you see a pantomime. Think again, Dick Whittington, Sir Richard Whittington, was one of the most extraordinary people in the whole of the later Middle Ages. Served five different English kings, came from a nightly family in Gloucestershire, travelled to London, apprenticed as a Mercer, buying and selling cloth, among other things, very fine cloth. Served five English kings, became friendly with Richard II, which is a precarious thing to do, sold him vast amounts of cloth, was rewarded with high political office, four times Mayor of London, once Mayor of Calais had controlled the staple between London and Calais, managed to survive the fall of Richard II in 1399 without losing his head, was not a given by any means and was still serving Henry IV, Henry Bollingbrook, a short time later, managed to exercise so much power by virtue of his money that he was trusted by Henry V to help fund the Agincourt campaign without Dick Whittington no battle of Agincourt, traded prisoners after the battle of Agincourt, trading ransom, buying and laying off ransoms to make money there, was so wealthy by the time of his death that in his will he left sufficient money, not only for new public toilets and sewers and rest homes for single women, single mothers in London, but left so much money that there are still people living in subsidised Dick Whittington paid for accommodation today. He died in 1423, the housing is now in Crawley. There was a property swap in the 20th century which moved the property out of London, but there are people living in housing subsidised by Dick Whittington's will today. Dick Whittington himself was not only an amazing character, he also stood for an amazing type of character who in the middle ages was profoundly important, that was the merchant. We've only scratched the surface of the legacy of the middle ages, we haven't even talked about art or buildings or science. These things perhaps should be more obvious, but my plan when I was writing Pows and Thrones was to spend a week for each chapter, there were only 16 chapters, I would spend a week in each city that I'd chosen to be emblematic of a different thing in the middle ages. I started with Rome, then I went to Ravenna and saw the great mosaics and the basilicas and churches of Ravenna dating from 6th, 7th centuries. Then lockdown happened and so the book had to change, but if we imagine what a great jolly holiday travelling the artistic capitals of Europe I might have had starting in Rome moving to Ravenna, we could do a wonderful tour of Europe based just on medieval art. It would take us all the way through to the paintings of Jan van Eyck and all the way through in fact to Leonardo da Vinci and Dura at the other end, the art of the middle ages, particularly the later middle ages, where the Renaissance is astonishing. But then again so were the buildings, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, built by Justinian, all the way through to Saint Chapelle, that soaring masterpiece of gothic architecture, those thin walls and huge windows and the light pouring in from all sides and the colour pouring in from all sides in a way that's supposed to evoke a sense of heaven on earth built so Louis IX of France could house the crown of thorns which he'd bought at great expense from Constantinople. Think about the Dome of the Rock, think about Lincoln Cathedral, so different architecturally but all products of this extraordinary age. The Castles of North Wales built commissioned by Edward I down to the Alhambra in southern Spain. These are some of the greatest buildings on earth all from this period. So these are some of the legacies of the middle ages and it's only a fraction of them and the history of the middle ages, this is the longest book I've ever written and it's the longest because the history of the middle ages is absolutely packed with extraordinary people, amazing times, transformational events. But before I take some questions I just want to think about what a new history of the middle ages means because history is not just the stuff, history is also a dialogue, it's a conversation between us, here, here, now and the past. And so when I sat down to write a new history of the middle ages I had to think carefully about what that meant and in which way I could present this material and which way we can present this material in order to make it not relevant but resonant with the lives we lead in the 21st century. I'm sure many of you at home or in the audience here today will have read Barbara Tuckman's Distant Mirror written in the 70s, 1970s. As a sort of meditation on, well it's a book about the 14th century but it's intended to bounce parallels between the calamitous 14th century, a time of war, a time of plague, a time of economic crisis, a time of popular rebellion and the 20th century which had produced all of those things and in powers and thrones and in the thinking I'm doing about the middle ages at the moment I've tried to work out how we can bounce the 21st century off the middle ages. When I was writing that book I had five words or five phrases on the wall next to my desk in the office. They were themes that I felt were very important to us in the 21st century and will probably become more important to us in the 21st century but which could also be found in the middle ages. Those five things were climate change, mass migration, pandemic disease, I wrote it before the pandemic. I wish I hadn't been right, technological revolution and global networks. I think as I've gone through the story of the middle ages in the book it became ever more obvious that these were moving factors that one didn't have to look very far into the material to see rise out. If you think about climate change climate change frames the middle ages. We think that we're the first generation to live through climate change. We're probably the first generation or a set of generations to live through man-made climate change. We're the first generation to live through man-made climate change on a perilous, as perilous a scale as we are experiencing at the moment. However, to think that we're the first generation to have had climate change framing our lives would be very short-sighted. We can trace the building blocks of the middle ages to climate change. What happened to the climate at the end of the Roman Empire was the end of the Roman climate optimum, a time of warm and wet weather very conducive to agriculture. Very conducive to agriculture around the Mediterranean. The falling off of that and the cooling of temperatures coincided, I do not say solely caused but coincided with the end of the Roman Empire. What coincided with a period of enormous growing prosperity, invention, agricultural yields, population growth around the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th centuries the medieval climate anomaly, a time of gently rising temperatures, relatively stable rainfall. What coincided with the calamitous 14th century, great famine at the beginning of the 14th century which killed around 10% of populations in Europe, the black death in the middle of the 14th century which killed around 40, 50, 60% the onset of the little ice age. The middle ages are framed by climate change and it would be foolish to write a history of the middle ages, particularly in the 21st century without reference to it. Similarly with migration, I've already alluded to the massive waves of so-called barbarian migrations which brought the western Roman Empire to its knees. But there are other examples of migration we can see throughout the middle ages albeit not on such a great scale as the Franks moving towards now France or the Anglo-Saxons moving, or I shall tell you more about that the week moving into England. We can see the building of the Crusader states as a migration, a migration of noble or knightly families from west to east. If we squinted a bit we could see the Mongol conquests as migration, migration at the point of a sword we could say the same for the Arab conquests. We can look around the middle ages and we can see many many examples of migration and migration not simply as just a fact of life but migration as a moving historical force. Migration is something that animates people to extraordinary action. If we look at the peasant revolt of 1381 what is it the Chaucer whose manuscript is here in the British Library? What is it to the Chaucer notes about the peasant revolt? He has a sideways reference to it. I think of the Nun's Priest's Tale. He remembers when Jack Straw and his many would any Fleming kill. It's a reference to the murder of dozens of Fleming's in London at the height of the peasant revolt of 1381 by what we'd now call populist mobs on the rampage to beat up and harm foreigners coming over here taking our jobs. It's alarmingly resonant with the world we live in today. I have a card here that says pandemics and underneath it says move on quickly. But I won't. If you think about the current pandemic what does a pandemic do apart from make everyone miserable and far too many people die, sicken and die? Pandemic also shows you very clearly what a society looks like and when we look at how the black death illuminates the 14th century showing us what a society looks like when faced with the catastrophe of a pandemic. How its religious impulses are brought to the fore. How its global networks are illuminated by the fact by as disease vectors rather than simply trade vectors. We see very similar things than we've unfortunately experienced in the last two years with Covid. We look at the Middle Ages, we can see technological changes as an important historical moving factor. The inventions of the Middle Ages, the astrolabe, windmills, paper, gunpowder, water clocks, eyeglasses, all of these. Very important and still important in the world today. But none perhaps so important as the invention that in many ways brought down the curtain on the Middle Ages. The printing press. What does the printing press do? Printing press allows rapid access to publication by many more people than it ever had access to that before. What do they start doing? Well, think about what people started doing in the 21st century when they had access to iPhones and social media. Start boasting unbelievably and arguing bitterly. Particularly arguing bitterly about religion. The link between, the link you see from the printing press around 1450, the reformation at the end, starting at the end of the 15th century, at the beginning of the 16th century. There are extraordinary parallels with the so-called culture wars, albeit they're not about religion, but the culture wars that are being fought online and offline today. Of course, then we can look at global networks. I think I've alluded to them in terms of pandemics. But we can see, as Valerie Hansen has written very well, a tenuously globalised world in the Middle Ages in the year 1000 onwards. Some of the texts I enjoyed using most when I was writing Paws and Thrones were accounts of people like Marco Polo, if you believe him, many do not. Giovanni D'Apian, Del Carpine, who does seem reliable, Francescan Friar sent to the court of the Mongol Khans. We see these texts, these writings that describe a world which, if not completely globalised in a way that it is today that people anywhere could, in theory, be watching me speak now, we're still talking about a world where people travel far more than we may give them credit for and know far more about the world around them than we give them credit for. So I think it is more than possible to write a new history of the Middle Ages in the 21st century, for not only do we have an extraordinarily rich legacy from the Middle Ages all around us and with us today, we also, if we mine that history properly and we think about it carefully, can see all the things that animate us, or many of the things that animate us today, reflected in that 1117 year period, which is why at the beginning of the book I've used a phrase from Ecclesiastes, and it's the phrase that I'll use to end this lecture. It's the passage I'll use to end this lecture. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it has said, see, this is new? It has already been in the ages before us. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Dan. That was an absolutely engrossing talk tonight, and you might have noticed that there is a new book available. Is it good? Dan Jones, Paris and France, available in all good bookshops now. We're going to take a few questions, and not just from the audience here present at the library tonight, but also going to take questions from our online audiences, but after that Dan will be signing copies of said book outside here in the foyer. So if you would like to ask a question tonight, I would like you to raise your hand, and one of my colleagues may come. Do we have microphones tonight? We have microphones tonight, so I want my colleagues, and in fact, just next to you there, there's a lady there who would like to ask a question first, and then I'll come to you. You say, of course, that you chose something arbitrary to terminate the Middle Ages. Why the sack of Rome 1527? Well, it's not entirely arbitrary, and I suppose there are two answers, one historical and one literary, and the historical answer, as you know, let's say the literary answer first, is that I like symmetry, and a sack of Rome to a sack of Rome has a sort of a neat shape to it, and I believe that in writing history books, you are a popular history books, popular narrative history books, we're balancing somewhat the impulses of nice literary shapes and the material we're divulging. But I think the second sack of Rome that we've mentioned, that you've mentioned and I've mentioned, which this book finishes, is important because it draws together themes that I've built up in the last part of the book which are particularly about the importance of the Reformation and the building passions of reform and reaction which are funneled together violently, uncontrollably violently, in 1527 with the sack of Rome. I think that it involves powers represented by Charles V, the line to Charles V of the growth of Holyroven Empire, the rising power of Spain and Portugal, partly due to the New World explorations, all of those are themes that come together, and it's a great set piece in which to show how all of this pays off in action. So that's why those are the two reasons why the 1527 sack of Rome is the end point of the book. I think that this is a question for one of the gentlemen on the aisle down there. Do you still like to ask a question there? And then we'll take an online question. Whereas somebody, yes, raise them hand there. Thank you. Talking about the themes of migration, something that always confused me, is the contrast between what happened in this country, in Britannia, when the Romans left in the early 400s, and what happened in Gaul. The Romano-Britons just seemed to disappear. Doesn't it mean any English, at least Britannic British place names in England today, whereas in Gaul, they seemed to have assimilated. So are you thoughts on that? Well, partly mythological, the first thing to say is that it's very difficult to know, and that the archaeology is so open to interpretation, reinterpretation in this period that it's always difficult to trace what Romano-British actually meet, who the Romano-British actually were, and how we define that term then indicates what we think when we see the archaeological evidence. In mythological terms, the Romano-British become King Arthur. That's the retreat westward that would explain that. I think that in more likely in political terms, it's geography as much as anything else. Britain is cut loose from the Roman Empire. It takes far less time for the influences of Roman culture to wither away, because they're simply culturally unsupported and politically disconnected from the continent in a way that Gaul isn't. I think that that fact, it's not a particularly new observation, but the fact of Britannia as an island is important in that context. I think with regard to place names, place names have been overwritten, I suppose, in English history, certainly. By Viking influence, by Saxon influence, the place names in this country have changed a number of times. On the last day before lockdown, finished making a programme for Channel 5, walking Britain's Roman roads, and one of the things that I found then was, we do know what a lot of the Roman place names were, but they've just since been overwritten by Anglo-Saxon and in certain areas, Viking names. I'll have a question from Jessica of the United States of America. She says she's just got her book and she's really excited to dig into it. Her question is, can you just share one story given that this book is so big, but can you just share one story that you wish you had included if it had unlimited time and space? What got left on the cutting room floor? Joan of Arc had to sneak in as a snowman. I'll explain what I mean there, which is when I was putting this book together, I didn't want... Each chapter of this book takes a phase with both chronological and thematic of the Middle Ages. So it goes, Romans, Barbarians, Byzantines, Arabs, Franks, Monks, Knights, Crusades, and so on like that. They fall more or less sequentially, but they deal with bigger powers. If the book's a meditation on power and what power was and what power meant to the Middle Ages, it deals by and large with bigger powers than dynasties, and it deals with bigger things than wars. So there's not a whole chapter on the Hundred Years' War, just as there's not a whole chapter on the wars between the Hone Stalfon and the Popes. Those things are covered, but they have to fall within other thematic chronological chapters. Had there been a chapter with just the Hundred Years' War, Joan of Arc would have loomed very large. She's a wonderful character, a fascinating character, a character I know people are very interested in, and she has the great virtue of being a woman. It's very hard to have a decent gender balance in the book about the Middle Ages when it's quite a patriarchal time. But I wanted Joan of Arc in there, so I was very glad to find that around 1435, this is in the chapter about artists. It's Renaissance really, a little bit of writers and a lot of artists. Around 1435 in Ara, when Philip the Good of Burgundy was at the peak of his powers, and was hiring Jan van Eyck to advertise the Burgundian magnificence, the magnificence of the court of Burgundy to the world, he was hanging around in the cold winter of 1435 in Ara when there were loads of incredible snowmen around the streets of Ara, and there was a dance macabre of skeletons, and I think there was three living and three dead kings maybe, and there was Joan of Arc, the snow woman of Joan of Arc at the head of her little army. And I thought that is so wonderful that I have to include it, and it's the only way to get Joan of Arc into this book, given that I'm not doing... So Joan of Arc is there as a snowman, snow woman, snow Joan, but not as a fully realised living, breathing human being, and I regret that, but I don't think I'll change it either. Well, in fact, there's a follow-up online question which is related to that, and it's, can you just talk briefly about the role of women in this particular period and what might very influence be on the history today? Yeah, there are some extraordinary women in this book, and there are some extraordinary women in medieval history, and they range from the Empress Theodora, who I mentioned briefly, a wife of Justinian, a saviour in many ways of the Roman Empire at the time of the Neacol riots, which engulfed Constantinople to the point where Justinian was thinking of fleeing, persuaded not to buy Theodora. Lots of scandalous things were written about Theodora, particularly by Procopius, and she did all sorts of terrible things when she was on her way to becoming Empress, including training geese to pick barley grains out of her knickers. Not there's anything wrong with that, but obviously times have changed. And Joan of Arc and Eleanor of Accraetain, of course, makes an appearance, but by the same token, we can't pretend. So I talked a little bit about finding things in the Middle Ages that will resonate, that will say, ah, the world is not so different as it was. But that's different from imposing them. One of the things that I found problematic when I was conceiving the book was, okay, I want lots of great women in this book. However, if I make this so full of great female characters that it appears that there was absolutely a totally fair kind of gender balanced, diverse and ideal 21st century thing going on in the Middle Ages, it would not be that true to the history of what was, for the most part, a patriarchal and male dominated society. So in answer to the question, by and large the role of women was not quite so advanced and enlightened as it is today. And it was not, although we can, and in my book, Crusaders, the one before this, I tried very hard to pull out examples of women participating in the Crusades. But the lesson of doing that was, it's the Middle Ages. It's like a sausage fest. Do you know what I mean? Like you can fight these things intellectually and with every fiber you're being, but sometimes you can, but better it's nice now. I think that's a sausage fest where it's going to be a phrase that lingers in my memory. There's a lady here. Do you have another question from her? And I'll come to you afterwards. Okay, thank you. Moving on from the sausage fest. Please, let's. Did writing your book during the throes of the pandemic inevitably influence your perspective? And what kind of record do we have of the media equivalent of the anti-vaxxer? Ah! Yes, it was strange, because when I put my five themes that we could try and lift out of the Middle Ages on the wall, but honestly, pandemics was there and I thought, that's tough. I'm not sure. On the one hand, people really aren't that tuned into the threat of a pandemic. I mean, I'd just come back from Tokyo, actually, and I've been there in 2019 in the World Cup and rugby World Cup, and I've seen a lot of people wearing masks and had been sort of reminded, shit, yes, SARS wasn't that long ago, you know, and they'd had this lingering, or partly it was a lingering effect on the way people acted and travelled. So it's sort of, okay, this is definitely part of the world picture, but how resonant will that be in 2021 when this book comes out? Well, alas, too resonant. It definitely helped me take a slightly different view on the Black Death and see... So my feeling, watching the pandemic emerge, as I've said, you learn far more about society than you really do about viruses in a pandemic. I'm not very interested in the structure of coronavirus. I don't know, maybe you guys are, but I'm not. I'm very interested in the way that society has completely changed because of its presence and how it's just pinged and just like an x-ray on showing you the developmental bits in 21st century society, it's shown us what prisoners we are of technology as well as how brilliantly enabled we are by technology. It's shown us how absolutely terrified we are of death and how completely unacceptable we find death. It's individual death, statistical death. It's shown us how obsessed we are with counting things. Really good at it, really obsessed with it, and how that leads us behaviourally both as a society and as an individual. OK, so all of those things I thought, well that's all lit up by the pandemic. And so you then go at the Black Death the other way round, if you like. You stop being very interested in rats and fleas and just say, look, there was this disease. You know, I'd read a lot of books about the Black Death that just went on and on and on about why pestas, but what could it actually have really been? How did it become, you know, a localised plague all over the place for hundreds and hundreds of years and then, wow! I don't know, but it happened and actually that's somehow or other syniopestas becomes incredibly virulent and super, super highly transmissible. It mutates, OK. So great, it mutated. That then becomes far less interesting in the writing of the book and I'm glad I didn't have to spend three pages talking about bacteria. You can say, look, this is what a pandemic does. It shows you a society and its obsessions and so the bid on the Black Death starts, if I recall rightly, with a parade through London and it's the guy Robert of Avesbury comes out of his house and sees a parade of flagellants walking through the streets of London trying to get God to cut everyone a break, basically, whipping themselves and this is great description. It's gory and it's horrible so it's great on the page. They're whipping themselves and blood running down the back so they're open shifts and it's terrible and they're lying on the ground, whip whip whip, sing sing all of this sort of stuff. And of course, I think that's great, that's a wonderful scene to show us how the plague drew out these the essence of Christianity in the West at this time and then there was another bit of me that was going I bet there was no social distancing. That, if anything, is a super spreader event and they should have been in their houses. I didn't think I'd have thought that. We're not writing it in 2020. 2021. I'm going to have this question here and then I'm going to have two quickfire questions from our online audiences. Thank you. Obviously in English context we split the Middle Ages as you define it, quite neatly almost down the middle with 1066 and see the most two completely different disciplines between English dark ages and then English middle or high Middle Ages. How useful do you think it is in general to study such a vast period of time given that within localised context it is usually split? It was useful for me. I've written, this is my 10th book and I couldn't have written this before having done nine other books I don't think which I mostly occupied the later Middle Ages. I found it actually very helpful to put together all of this stuff in narrative chronological order and I found that stepping back and taking such a vast view of this period which is as you rightly say normally either it's sliced down the middle in 1066 in English history or it might, you know, you go early Middle Ages, high Middle Ages, late Middle Ages and those have their own specialists and their own literatures and their own experts and their own barriers between them. I thought there was actually something very interesting about putting it all together and saying as a writer then you have you can bounce things off like the plague of Justinian here that you know are going to come back with a black death there to carry on with that subject or Vikings you can seed stuff with Lancer Meadows and that you know is going to come back in Chapter 15 with New Worlds. So that's nice to I love working on that bigger a canvas but yeah it also just shows how everything fits together. I like big books that give you context and I hope that readers will come away from this book saying yeah I could have taken a left the monks but I was super interested in the Arab Conquest or whatever that you might come in for one thing and then find you're actually interested in another bit of it. It's a sort of gateway drug we're going to end with two very quick online questions so maybe just a quick couple of ideas. Thank you very much Marissa for your question. She's asked if there's any medieval practice or tradition that you think should have been carried through to the modern era and going to break it back with a separate question from John. Thank you very much for your question John as well. Which one medieval event would you most like to have been present at and why? Someone asked me this the other day I don't want to go back to the middle ages. I'm super happy looking back unless you guarantee me Bill and Ted's phone box. I know I'm coming back to California to do that thing on that test. I don't want to go because I don't want to go anywhere where there weren't highly effective and easily available painkillers. I've said it before and I've said it again make me go. What medieval practice my god I guess making snow people of notable characters but maybe that has carried on. We just don't have enough snow yet. Why not? If I walked out of my house and found a dance macabre and a Joan of Arc I'd be thrilled. I'd have Instagram content for days but I think even saying it out loud I'm sure that people do that. Places where it snows more. More snow please. Let's wildfires please. That was really great thank you so much. I just want to remind everybody that there is a very exciting programme of events that we're going to be having here at the British Library this autumn and you can go book them either to view them online or you can come here in person like you've all done here tonight. First of all thank you so much to our online audiences for watching this event tonight. Thank you so much everybody who's come here as well. We're really grateful for you to attend tonight's event but thirdly thank you to Dan Jones for being our very special guest here tonight. Thank you. Thank you. Charlie.