Why should we learn about Medieval Warfare? - Episode 1 of the Medieval Warfare Podcast

Dan Franke and Michael Livingston are the guests of the first episode of the Medieval Warfare Podcast, where we discuss why we study and learn about medieval military history.

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Here is the transcript for the episode:

Peter Konieczny: Welcome to the first official episode of the Medieval Warfare podcast. Today we wanted to start off our show by talking about why do we even want to talk about medieval warfare. There are hundreds, if not thousands of historians who research and write about wars, battles, and the military of the Middle Ages. Why do we want to know about this? Why do we think the world should know about this?

I’m Peter Konieczny, the editor of Medieval Warfare magazine. I’m joined by two guests.

Daniel Franke is assistant professor of history at Richard Bland College of William and Mary in Petersburg, Virginia, and he researches military networks and the intersection of strategy, policy, and culture on military operations in the Hundred Years War. He has a forthcoming edited collection, Prowess, Piety and Public Order in Medieval Society.

An award-winning professor and writer, Michael Livingston holds degrees in History, Medieval Studies, and English. He teaches at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina, where he specializes in medieval military history and culture. His last book, 'The Crécy Casebook', won the 2017 Distinguished Book Prize from the Society for Military History.

Both of you happened to do your PhD at the University of Rochester. Did you both go there thinking that you were going to learn about medieval warfare?

Daniel Franke: For me, yes, certainly.

Michael Livingston: No, no. Not at all. Not for me. I was there getting a PhD in English while Dan was over kicking ass in the history department.

Peter: Do you have kind of similar people that you worked with when you were both there?

Daniel: Yeah, I would imagine so. Mike, you would have worked with Tom Hahn, Russell Peck?

Michael: Yeah, Russell Peck, Tom Hahn, and of course Dick Kaeuper, who you worked with.

Daniel: Yeah. So I think we shared the same set of medieval mentors.

Peter: Just one thing – you’d both recommend going there?

Daniel: Oh, heck yeah.

Michael: Oh, yes.

Daniel: In a flash.

Michael: Rochester is amazing for a medievalist of any stripe. You have on the English side amazing scholars, on the history side amazing scholars, in addition to other fields as well. There are some people in Modern Foreign languages and that sort of thing, but one of the key things about Rochester is the Robbins Library, which is one of the finest research libraries for the Middle Ages in this hemisphere, frankly. It is absolutely extraordinary. I lived there for five years of my life, or whatever. Just lived there and worked there. It was great. It was fantastic.

Daniel: I had one of the coveted keys to the Robbins Library because they like recruiting us, some of the medieval people, to sit behind the desk. Of course that was a bonanza, but also the people too. These are people who… you always hear those horror stories in grad school about “I never saw my advisor, and when I tried the door was always closed,” but with the people at Rochester the door literally is always open. I know speaking from the history side of it, we were the envy of many of the other graduate students in my department because we had a very supportive advisor in Dick Kaeuper.

Peter: That’s great to hear. Daniel, I’m going to begin with you and ask what made you want to learn and teach about medieval warfare? How did it start for you?

Daniel: Well, it’s interesting. One of the first pieces of advice I was given when I was going on the job market was make sure you have a coherent story about yourself, so that it doesn’t seem like you just happened into what you do. I thought, well, that’s kind of weird. It always looks more orderly when you look back on it. When you grow up playing with Lego castle sets and watching King Arthur movies, how do you not go on to do sword fighting and want to study the Middle Ages and medieval warfare? But actually in my case I came very close to doing a doctorate in World War II Studies, specifically German Army Studies for Eastern Front sort of stuff. There was a period of time where I was sort of balancing. I was like, I don’t know. I should do this, maybe. But I was drawn back into the world of medieval warfare, and why that was, I think looking back on it I was drawn to the big questions about war. Why do people think that war’s worthwhile? How was their expectation of war impacted by the way that war is organized and fought? When I looked at the two projects I had in mind one was kind of a straightforward, kind of a medieval reading of a modern German memoir. It was kind of straightforward. The other one, which wound up being my dissertation and which I’m trying to turn into a book right now, was much more engaged with those sort of big questions. So to me, medieval warfare on top of being cool and flashy and very different is much more immediate to me in terms of getting us to the big questions about what is the purpose of military force and why do people think it works. And there’s just the challenge of the Middle Ages itself. I just found it endlessly fascinating to just try to wrap my mind around this time and place. There are plenty of parallels to today’s society of course, but in the day to day lived experience it’s just so different, and I just found that a challenge to try to imagine what it would have been like. I know of course, Mike, you’re a very successful novelist so you know what that’s like. In fact, I remember we were talking once and I was like, “Yeah, that’s right.” Sometimes I would stop, even in grad school, and I would say, if I was going to write a story about what I have just been studying – I’ve read 100 articles and books on this topic – how would I write the story? And I suddenly realized there are major gaps. I have no idea if I had a knight walking down a street in Sicily in Palermo in the 1160s. What would that knight see? To me it’s just endlessly fascinating.

Peter: Michael, was your experience similar? What drew you to talking about battles that took place six or seven hundred years ago?

Michael: Yeah. To kind of sort of pick up on what was just said, Dan’s quite right about this “filling in the gaps” business. As I said earlier, I came to medieval warfare sort of indirectly. I was trained as a textual scholar, as an editor of medieval manuscripts. Rochester was a great place for that, and I specialized in it very early. So I was interested in sort of recovering in a sort of artefactual sense as I best I could, from manuscripts to what ought to have been said. What do I think is happening here? Trying to edit these texts. And that was great for a while. Part of doing that is you have to have expertise in history. You have to have it in literature. You have to have it in language. You’ve got to know a lot of stuff to be able to pull that off. I was a history undergraduate so I was very much trained in sort of historical methods in that regard. The more you do that kind of work, the more you become aware of these deep and profound gaps that we have in our knowledge. The Middle Ages, we’ll bark about people calling it the Dark Ages, but it is rather appropriate given this kind of lack of fullness of information that we have. Which is wonderful to me and to the way my mind works, because I like getting in there and trying to fill in those gaps. As a result of this kind of combining forces of my need to find gaps and fill them in and that kind of thing, I did become more and more interested in battles and down the road a little bit got into the Battle of Brunanburh, a fairly little-known battle but one of the more important battles actually in English history. Trying to fill in the gaps of what happened at this battle led to me trying to fill in the gaps of another battle, and one thing after another. I think my biggest role, if you will, in things as they stand right now is that I am coming at most of this material from a kind of sideways perspective in that I don’t take for granted anything. You mentioned the battle of Crécy casebook. Part of how that got to be the big deal it did is because I was dumb enough, if you will, naïve enough, to ask the question of, “We all say the battle happened here – how do we know?” And it turned out that we didn’t, because the battle didn’t happen there. As soon as you started teasing that out, it all fell apart. But nobody had bothered to ask that. Kind of coming out from somewhat of an outside perspective helped a great deal in that.

Peter: I came into it – when I started I was halfway through my undergraduate and it was the first time I actually went to the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the one at Kalamazoo, Michigan. I knew nobody when I went there. All I knew was I really liked the Middle Ages, and I was probably the only undergraduate that was there at that conference that year, about twenty years ago, sitting in with the medieval military historians, Kelly DeVries, and Bernie Bachrach and Clifford Rogers. They were so warm actually to me and were right away like, “Who are you?” They let me in on conversations they had. So they really kind of brought me into it. So it was those kind of relationships that really kind of got me… Wow, these are really interesting people to talk with. They’re telling me all these things, these fascinating things about military history, which other groups didn’t at Kalamazoo. It was part of that that kind of brought me in, but it was also kind of agree, it’s these kind of questions that kind of just drive me to kind of learn. With military history you kind of take it almost piecemeal. You can ask the who, what, where, and why, which you can’t necessarily with other kinds of topics. You can learn something fairly small in military history and discover something like that. So that’s how it kind of brought me in.

Michael: Absolutely true. You’re quite right to point out the wonderful camaraderie that there is between… Military historians in general are just great people, but I think medieval military historians are quite a little band of brothers, if you will. With the exception of Dan Franke. Oh, I’m sorry, Dan. Hi. I forgot you were on the line still.

Daniel: That was my experience as well, actually, my first Kalamazoo. I remember Dick Kaeuper said, “All right, you’re going to go. Make sure you introduce yourself to Kelly.” I went to one of the panels and I came up afterward and it was Kelly DeVries and John France were standing there. I said, “Hi, I’m a new grad student of Dick Kaeuper’s.” And Kelly was like, “Hey, John – look! We have another Kaeuper student here!” I was like, I have no idea what’s going on. I’m just feeling my way out here. It’s my first time at this conference. And they were like, “All right, come on. We’re going to do stuff.” I’m like, “Oh.” It really has made a difference over the years, a tremendous difference.

Michael: Yeah, amazing people. Amazing people in this business.

Peter: We all say that we’ve got a passion for medieval warfare and we love it and stuff like that, but there are also larger reasons on why we think it’s important to teach it and tell other people. Why should we learn about knights, crusades, and the military systems of long ago? Michael, I’ll start with you, in part because you teach at the Citadel, which is a military college. How do you explain the relevance of medieval warfare to your cadets?

Michael: Of course there’s sort of a pat answer I could give of course which is that whole study history so that you don’t repeat the mistakes, and that sort of thing. But of course as historians it ends up we instead just end up watching everybody else make the same mistakes who didn’t bother to study history. It’s very frustrating. I am teaching a lot of students who are going to be out in the field, who are going to be leading men and women on the field of battle. Yeah, you’re not going to be doing this with swords, hopefully. If you are things are already in trouble. But tactics and things on that kind of granular level may be different, but on the larger scale of what happens in strategy in battle hasn’t changed all that much. When you kind of break it down and tell them about the Battle of Shrewsbury or tell them about whatever it is, what you’re talking about is things that are still applicable and to their lives and their future. It’s also, to me in the way I approach this stuff anyway, also a very concrete life and death example of critical thinking at work. To sort of look at okay, why were these decisions made? Why did this king make these decisions? What was in his mind? What was he using logistically? What was he thinking in terms of this and morale and whatever it is? In order to stop thinking about war as just little animated blocks that move against one another with some cool sound effects or something, but instead what is reality and how does affect our ability to think critically about materials? Whether that’s war-related or not, the ability to think critically is going to help us. This is such a wonderful concrete example of that that becomes applicable no matter what they’re majoring, no matter what they’re doing. You are going to be better served with being able to think critically, and I can think of no better means, no better mechanism to get them excited, get them interested than medieval warfare.

Peter: Daniel, you are kind of new to teaching. You’re starting to creating courses on medieval warfare, what is it that you want your students to learn, who are civilians?

Daniel: Well, I taught for a few years at West Point, so I kind of was able to hone my craft there. The switch in the last couple years back to civilian students has been challenging in a sense because for starters they don’t stand at attention when they’re late for class and wait for permission to enter the room.

Michael: More’s the pity.

Daniel: Yeah, more’s the pity. Beyond that, there is a great sense of “why am I here?” Especially in sort of intro courses. For me, focusing on medieval warfare as a way of teaching students is a way to, for what I see a lot of, is getting students to realize that there are things you can learn from history, and also that you might like knights and you may love Game of Thrones because, well, who doesn’t I guess? But the reality is so much more interesting. Once you actually engage with that, then you can begin to unlock the modern world where we use medieval, Middle Ages in general, but also medieval warfare in particular for all kinds of purposes. So if we’re watching – I show a lot of movie clips and documentaries in my classes typically or I’ll assign them, and students always get a kick out of it when I say, all right, let’s say Nick Cage’s Season of the Witch. If you’re a medievalist you’re like, that’s a horrible movie. I won’t rise to its defense, but the sword fighting was actually not bad, particularly the squire. Somebody had taken a five minutes to look at their cowl. There’s some half swording, there’s reversing. The squire reverses the grip on the blade. So this movie’s absolutely awful, but when you watch that, this is the place where they did their homework. So for me, half the challenge is getting students to realize there’s a deeper story behind these films and images that they just take for granted in today’s modern society. If we can get past that, then I feel like I’m ready to start where Michael was talking about. Now we can focus on there’s things you can take away from this. But whereas with cadets there’s a certain focus to their interest, whereas I think with a lot of students these days outside of military schools and military academies, there might be interest, but it’s sort of getting them grounded and situated in how to critically appraise what’s around them. Once you do that, then you can get into the decision-making processes. Of course you’re also battling some disappointment because when they realize that it really wasn’t as bloody as in Game of Thrones? You’re like, “Well, there were a couple occasions when it was pretty grim,” but buckets of blood and gore, well… Yes, but also no. You could take Dickens’ opening to a Tale of Two Cities and apply it to the Middle Ages – it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a time so much like our own that it won’t be considered remarkable if it wasn’t for certain peculiar aspects of that time. So why should people study it? The approach that I’ve taken once I got out of West Point was very much a case of people should study this because in popular culture these days where you’ve been fed a picture of what the Middle Ages, including medieval warfare, is like. Which plays to certain tropes and certain themes and certain values, which are not accurate, the depiction isn’t. If that’s off, then you should question what you’re being sold in popular culture.

Peter: Yeah, I like that answer, too. One thing that I enjoy talking about when I talk about military history and history of warfare is that you can say that there’s always a winner and a loser in these battles or sieges, and you can kind of look from two different points of view, which is really sometimes hard if you do other kinds of history. It’s usually kind of a straightforward narrative. But in military history you can kind of look at how people made errors, strategic or tactically. You can see examples. You kind of mentioned that little trope. I think it’s called “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I don’t kind of believe in that either, but there’s always little bits in that. There’s little lessons. I wonder how much you ascribe to that kind of thinking.

Michael: This whole concept of getting to reality, trying to understand what reality was, which Dan was just talking about, is so important because it kind of infiltrates our ability to approach anything in the world. It doesn’t matter what it is. Yeah, to realize there is even good in a Nicolas Cage film is vitally important. I’m actually just getting ready to write an article. I was asked to write an article ranking Nicolas Cage films about the Middle Ages because he’s done so many.

Peter: He certainly has.

Michael: He certainly has. It’s one of these things like you’re ranking it and it’s kind of like if somebody asked you, “I’ve got a baseball bat and I’m going to hit you in one of your knees, so choose the best one.” “Well, okay, left knee.” But nevertheless there is good in them and there is utility to these things, but it’s only useful in so far as we are able to understand and comprehend what is reality and not alternate reality, and to actually triangulate this stuff with our knowledge. This is where again medieval warfare can be so essential because it is so appealing, visually appealing. It’s exciting. We all grew up, as Dan said earlier, playing with the castle Legos, all that stuff. Hell yeah. Watching Game of Thrones, which is totally awesome, and the Battle of Bastards was cool. That stuff appeals to up popularly. It appeals to us individually. So it becomes such a useful medium to kind of turn… They’re already interested in this. They’re engaged in it. Very easy to turn them from that into, “now let’s grapple with this stuff in a more historical way.” It would be much harder for instance than saying, let’s talk about what a medieval table actually really looked like. What did a medieval fork look like? Let’s use that as a way of kind of looking at our assumptions. Nobody’s going to care. I’m already bored talking about it. But if instead we talk about a battle and war and yeah, there’s knights and stuff and arrows, and oh my gosh, and this! A storm of arrows! That actually didn’t really ever happen, but whatever. It’s just so much more appealing that way. And they pay us to do it. I don’t get it. it’s great. It’s the greatest thing ever.

Daniel: There’s another aspect, too, to the utility of studying the Middle Ages. I’ve been poking at a project like this now, in my copious spare time, since probably late 2015. I was going through everything that I had done at West Point, and then I was looking at every time the Middle Ages or medieval warfare is discussed sort of in high-level military and policy journals. I’ve gone through a bunch of them and I’ve looked at them. There’s a number of masters’ theses you can get off of the CARL, the Combined Arms research library site. There’s even one on leadership at Crécy, interestingly enough. When I’m going through and I’m looking at the way that policy analysts and policy makers and even military, a lot of military figures talk about medieval warfare, I realized there is a great utility to studying medieval warfare and to talking about it at a high level, because there currently isn’t a sort of book out there which says, “look, military strategists and policy makers, if you want to use the Middle Ages as case study and as examples, here are some ways to do it. Here is the vocabulary and here are the questions you should be asking.” That to me gets stewed to something which I think we’ve all kind of hit on here, but haven’t maybe vocalized as explicitly, that is it’s just simply the challenge of trying to understand a society and a time where not only the warfare but the society itself that produces the fighting machine is very different. One of the running critical themes you can find from a foreign policy journal to a lot of position papers, especially for recent US military affairs, is that if you go into a country you have to think outside the box. You’re dealing with a country which is not similar to yours – society, fighting methods, culture, expectations behind what a warrior in these other societies will do and aspire to. I think medieval warfare has a lot to tell us about that, from such things as a favorite example which I’ve been working on, sort of my first case study on this, the military these days, since the global war on terror started, has been focusing on this thing called dark networks, which is essentially terrorist networks. They’re networks that you know exist but they don’t want to be discovered. First of all, historical study as we do is very much a case of dark networks because you’re dealing with fragmentary evidence. But a good example of how to sort of inform military strategists and policy people in a good way is to say, let’s take a look at the Albigensian Crusade. This is a classic case of dark networks. Toulouse says, “Look, we all know each other. I don’t really know – how are we supposed to distinguish the people who are in the network from those who are not in the network?” The campaign begins to unravel and suddenly what seems like a very clear objective gets bogged down when people are not necessarily going to turn in their neighbors. So it’s things like that just really drive home to me that there’s sort of a high level policy aspect to talking about medieval warfare. Even if you go to – and correct me if I’m wrong, Michael – but my impression of when I’ve gone to, say, the Society for Military History conferences is it’s the World War II guys and the Civil War guys, and then there’s like an ancient and medieval panel over to the side. Some people show up out of curiosity. It’s like, “Really? Medieval warfare? What do you people do?” There’s not as much conversation as there should be.

Michael: I don’t know how often it’s happening at other places. I know here like at the Citadel I have a lot of kind of cross talk with people in the history department who are very much not medieval, which is amazingly useful. A lot of really good insights have come from that. I think, I hope anyway, in both ways. Certainly I’ve gotten a lot of great stuff that way. But I think you’re right – there is a degree to which people studying the modern period aren’t as able to recognize the medieval forbearers and everything that we can sort of accomplish by doing that, by breaking that apart. You make an excellent example, Albigensian Crusade absolutely dark network. For any policy makers listening in on the podcast, I should note that “kill them all, let God sort them out. God knows his children” is not actually the best outcome of that particular dark network problem. That’s not the solution. But the idea that you can go to these relatively, we think, known and everybody knows what happened at Agincourt, everybody knows what happens at Crécy, everybody knows, everybody knows. Well, we don’t, but we know the effect of them. We may not know exactly what happened on the field of the Battle of Hastings, but from a kind of policy perspective, as Dan’s talking about, we can know what the effective result was. That moment obviously William the Conqueror wins, King Harold loses. Did King Harold really take it in the eye? I think probably he didn’t, and I’m working on that right now. We know that he lost, right? Whether or not the detail was this or that, and I think it’s interesting to look at that detail and how did that myth get started and what fed that myth and all that, which tells us a great deal about culture and human behaviors and all kinds of things like that. Scribal transmission, all that good, fun stuff. But also when we kind of take that bigger picture, those facts don’t change. Those sort of broad images of what’s going on, those don’t change. And there are a great deal of lessons that can be learned from that. Dan is absolutely right.

One final question for both of you is that in your particular research and writing, who is it you’re trying to reach in particular? And who is out there that you’re not reaching and you’re trying to figure it out? I’m the editor of Medieval Warfare magazine and my whole goal is to bring scholars and historians and get them talking with the wider public, and get your stories out there. I’m wondering when you kind of approach this, who is your kind of audience?

Daniel: Speaking personally, my audience that I’m trying to reach are the people who make decisions about the MacArthur genius grants. So if you know any of them, that would be fantastic.

Michael: I guess I honestly don’t even think about that. Do you even think about that, Dan? Who am I trying to reach? I think about fellow scholars and people who are interested. I guess I don’t really break it down beyond that.

Daniel: For me, it’s mostly either my students in the immediate classroom, or if I do an article on my blog on medieval warfare certainly that’s for people who are already interested. The sort of modern war, medieval history case study thing I’ve been working on, that actually has caused me to think about audience because who am I trying to reach? Again, it’s a question really that you have to have ready to answer when you try to pitch it to a publisher, right? They say, who do you expect is going to buy this book? I’m like, well, if you want policy people to buy it then you need to write in a certain way. If you want it to appeal to people who study Middle Ages or specifically medieval warfare you need to make sure you have a certain focus. And then there’s just the issue of ways outside of that, out of the sort of publishing angle to be visible. I did this thing last semester where we were going to have medieval warfare day and I brought in my swords and my tabard and I had my van braces. I went out on the quad and apparently I disrupted the entire campus because students who saw things from the window, they were just getting up and walking to the window and professors across campus are like, what the heck’s going on out there? It’s like, well, there’s my audience right there.

Michael: Well done.

Daniel: So I think these days especially, we hear this a lot about the changing face of academia. You’re not going to sit in your office and then go burr around in the archives for a year or so and then publish an article in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, which I love. I absolutely love that journal, but that alone is not enough these days. You have to… Like you do, Michael. A column on Game of Thrones and medieval warfare or a podcast, a blog. That we have to be much more aware of reach in general.

Michael: If we’re talking about – and both Dan and I have said this repeatedly – that we think this is so applicable. We think has such a value to the world. Even though it happened a long time ago, it continues to hold great value, and in fact in some respects gets more and more valuable the further we go because the more we know about it. And when you think in those terms, at some basic level we want to get as many people aware of this as possible. Dan mentioned my work on columns and things like that, which are deliberately aiming for a large audience. It’s for a website that gets 1.7 million hits a month. Well, that’s a few more people than will read that article that I wrote for this journal, which was an outstanding article but like thirty people will read it. So there’s definitely kind of an audience differentiation there. The one that’s reaching out to that big audience is going to be pitched different. It’s going to have a sort of different rhetoric approach and all that kind of stuff, but of course the end goal of it is still going to be the same thing. It’s still going to be about trying to increase that awareness, still going to be about trying to just convince people that this is worth thinking about, whatever it is. Whether it’s analyzing the Battle of Bastards in the Game of Thrones, or it’s ranting about the worst Nicolas Cage movies about the Middle Ages. The same thing is happening in either of those when you break it down. It’s the same thing that we do in our journal articles, as far as just intellectuals. One is a more smaller group of likeminded people and you can push things in different directions, and the other is a public perspective. Dan is absolutely right that the more public we can move, the better. Things like this podcast – I really have to applaud you, Peter. This is such a great idea to have something like this and to use this mechanism to not only keep people who already love it interested but to expose hopefully new people and get new readers, new listeners, new people interested in the field, and that can only be good things for the rest of us.

Peter: I’ve always been involved in this kind of work. I think about 15-16 years ago when we started the De Re Militari website, that first kind of showed me that there is a much wider audience beyond the people that were in the conference rooms at Kalamazoo or at Leeds or even at the university conference. It shocked me at first to see that there’s hundreds of thousands of people that were coming to read academic articles or bits of chronicles. So I’ve kind of used that kind of thinking as I’ve gone on, and hopefully with Medieval Warfare, with the magazine, we can keep doing that.

Michael: We love it. We love it, man. It’s great.

Peter: Before we go, is there anything else that you guys want to mention about what work you guys are doing right now?

Daniel: So I’m working on primarily a study of military networks and mobilization in the 1300s for eastern England and sort of turning the dissertation into a much modified and expanded volume. I’ve been doing a lot of work with medieval heraldry, actually, focusing on a role of arms which was created sometime around the Crécy campaign, either I think I would say probably at the siege of Calais, but that’s getting ahead of myself. I am heading down the rabbit hole when it comes to trying to identify coats of arms. That’s mostly what I’m working on at the moment.

Michael: It needs to be done though, man. Coats of arms are just an unbelievable rabbit hole, like you said. It breaks my brain every time I have to deal with them. So what I’m on working on these days, I have a few things that are under contract that if my publishers are listening of course I’m working on. So I’m scheduled to do another casebook on the Battle of Shrewsbury, which should be very fun. There’s some really cool stuff there. Of course that’s the one where the future Henry V gets shot in the head with an arrow – awesome. Don’t lift your visor in battle, boys. It’s not a good idea. I’m also with Kelly DeVries working on a textbook on medieval warfare for the University of Toronto Press. That one’s going to be I think a great utility. It’s a much-needed resource to just have… It’s kind of like a sourcebook. It’s not just us gabbing on about something – look, here’s what they themselves said about this. We’ve cast a really wide net for that. I always use the example whenever anybody asks me about it and says, what do you mean a wide net? I say, “Well, we have a section on camp followers, which are a real thing. You had camp followers.” And those of you who don’t know what that is can Google it. It gets ignored. It’s just one of these things that gets ignored. So it’s going to be in there. Then I’m working on a few little things with the Battle of Hastings and the Battle of Agincourt. I might be writing another book on the Battle of Crécy, we’ll see. So a few things in the fire, and then writing novels on the side and that kind of stuff.

Peter: With that, I want to thank my two guests - Daniel Franke and Michael Livingston - as well as this show’s producer Angus Wallace. And I want to thank you for listening to the first episode of the Medieval Warfare podcast. If you liked it, I hope you will subscribe and get future episodes. I’m Peter Konieczny. Thank you so much.

Our thanks for the transcription from Kabro Co.

The Medieval Warfare Podcast is hosted by the History Network