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hi everyone welcome back to the history in 20 podcast hope everyone's alright given the current very strange situation we're living in but well after this podcast might take mine to fit for a little while so we're finally at last on to the part 4 of the Plantagenets miniseries and we are covering Edward the third and Richard the second so let's get straight into it because I'll probably end up going over like I did last time but there we are so who was he Edward the third well he was born on the 13th and November 1312 Windsor Castle in Berkshire he succeeded Edward ii who's his father's eldest son and he was coronated on the 1st of February 1327 and he was married to Phillip ur of high note which was in like the law countries like where Belgium Germany Netherlands are today and he was married they were married for almost 40 years from the 24th of January 1328 to her death on the 15th of August 1369 and Edward is the longest reigning of the Plantagenet monarchs and his reign was from the 25th of January 1327 to the 21st of June 1377 so he was edward ii all the sun and obviously it's when you examine ed with the Third's rents typical to see why he's one of the greatest kings in english history of historians like David Starkey who describes edward as embodying the perfect contemporary image of kingship he personified the values of his age just like Elizabeth the first did and like Elizabeth the second sort is doing now so his first task as king was to actually become King in the first place so if you remember from last time on Edward the seconds deposition his wife Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer taken control of England and Mortimer obviously side with the 3rd as a threat to his well illegitimate rule and obviously it's a lot of wonder why he's got I mean Edward the third is the legitimate heir to throne Mortimer isn't so by 1330 though Martin had got wind of conspiracy against him so he summoned Edward to Nottingham Castle where he was to interrogate him against the council so it's a very game of thrones like this but Edwin third actually Snuka bund of night into Nottingham Castle on the night of the 19th of October 1330 via an underground tunnel and the surprised Mortimer overpowered him and had him arrested and he was then executed as a common criminal at Tyburn but what happened to Isabella well she was his mother and Edward spared her so he sent her off to Berkhamstead castle where she was entitled to yearly pension of three thousand pounds for the rest of her life so Edward could find the rule in his own right but it was almost three years after his coronation so unsurprisingly like last time we follow on what's the main issue plague and Edward again it's Scotland so it eluded his grandfather Edward the first humiliated his father Edward the second so fredward' the third war against Scotland was a matter of Honor and his first major victory was actually at the Battle of Dublin MOA which took place on Dublin more if you'd rather who each took place from the 10th to 11th of August 1332 now if we rewind a little bit Robert the Bruce had died in 1329 and left his infant son David the second in charge of Scotland so obviously this was too good an opportunity for Edward to miss because obviously their King isn't there they have military leaders because at this point David the seconds only five or six I believe so and obviously Edward had learned from his father's defeat against Scotland so you looking for a different military tactic he adopted the French or European style of crossbows of of long bows sorry long bows and it actually paid off because the majority of the Scottish army didn't even reach the English army before they were slaughtered by the archers so the long ball was a vital weapon and as we'll see it to paid dividends through AdWords reign so militarily Edward the thirds tactics relied on the enemy attacking first so unlike at Bannockburn in 1314 when the English ran over first and attacked the Scottish and were defeated Oh like when and they allowed William Wallace to get the upper hand in 1298 at Falkirk as well so this tactic of rely on the enemy to attack first was predominant view throughout woods Road and just a year later in 1333 at Halidon Hill just outside of barrack edward again used the longbow and defeated the Scots this way so the two great victories for a young king at this point just three years through into his full reign I suppose so Edwards next target obviously who else would it be France so the kingdom that had been won and lost by his ancestors since right back all that time ago and Henry the seconds reign so in winter of 1337 38 there was a revolt in Flanders which was under French territory then not part of like Belgium and it was led by a man called Jacob vanitha veld and his problem was that the people of Flanders survived on the business of making cloth but in order to make cloth you needed wool and the best quality well at the time came from England but under French domination Flanders was banned from trading with England so for this this revolt pops up and this is often regard as one of the major possible starts of the Hundred Years War but I could do 20 podcasts on the Hundred Years War I wanted to boy for the time being so on the 26th of January 1340 Edward the third landed at Flanders knee proclaim himself king of France and his claim being that he was the only male descendant of Philip the fourth it was his grandfather so by early February in order to fund a conquest into France Edward left Flanders and returned to England gathered troops and reinforcements but King Philip the 6th of France who was the current king of France had also turned his attention to the North Sea hmm excuse me so Philip had managed to gather a fleet of just over 200 ships and Edward had 150 so on the 24th of June 1340 Edward entered the way of slice or slice in northern Flanders the French fleet was ahead of them and they were facing the English and they're all chained together so it was like an impenetrable barrier but the English ships advanced towards the French fleet and after four hours of combat which involved archers and foot soldiers crossing onto enemy ships the first line of French ships was broken but after that obviously the French were hemmed in in the bear the English weren't the rest of the French ships tried to escape or Edwards armed and captured all but 23 of the 213 ships and estimates of between 16,000 and 18,000 French seamen and soldiers had lost their lives including all of Philip the sixths Admirals but as ever the victory was short-lived because Edward had run out of money to pay the soldiers before the campaign campaign had even begun so you had to agree to a truce with the French on the fifteenth of September and we fast forward a few years to 1346 and the Battle of Crecy which is on the 26th of August so England against France again but the odds weren't actually in Edwards favor this time there were outnumbered eight to one by the French but Edward was victorious by using long bores again in the French army also actually faced artillery fire from English cannons which was another turning point in military history as a general rule because it's the first use of artillery in a European battle so the French army fled the battlefield in the left fourth I was in Knights dead and huge numbers of foot soldiers dead as well and a chronicler at the time John LaBelle wrote about the butler crécy and he described it as he wrote that it was found that there were nine great princes lying there and around twelve hundred Knights and a good fifteen or sixteen thousand others Esquires Genoese and others and they found only three hundred English Knights dead so that does give a scale of the victory that it was a huge victory for Edward and a massive loss for France but obviously the old alliance France Scotland had was rife in this period and Philip the sixth had rested his hopes on David the second as part of the old Alliance to drive Edward out of France for God so on the 17th of October England of 1346 English forces met a Scottish army at Neville's cross just near Durham and the Archbishop of York eyed the English forces in Edwards absence who's still in France at a time and the English forces beat David the seconds army and even more significantly David was actually captured and sent to London as a prisoner and then over the next 11 months from September 1346 onwards Edward besieged calor by mid 1347 he'd had enough so he brought over the distinguished army of the medieval period and after four days of relentless siege warfare the French army surrendered on the 3rd of August 1347 and opened the gates of color to the English another territorial gain for the English and a pivotal moment as well because obviously 1347 what happens the next year the Black Death so I'll talk a little bit about the Black Death don't they go too much into this virus stuff with everything going on but we have to mention it so I mean modern estimates now reckon about half the population of England was said to have died from bubonic plague which is in this period known as the Black Death and eventually returned swards of like waves of it over the next century or two centuries or so but Edward 3rd didn't close England's ports even in 1348 the plague was at its absolute worst because for him closing the ports would have an isolating trade and cutting himself off from his fellow monarchs including his own daughter John it was on her way to Castile to marry Prince Pedro who was the son to the throne of Castile the heir to the throne of Castile but ironically Joanne herself actually contracted plague on the journey outside Marseilles and she died and also a cause and England's ports would also of cut off from his newly acquired territory of color as well as the other English territories in France like Pompeo Brittany Gascony so in order to combat plague and the sheer numbers of deaths from it Edward actually introduced legislative method measures the most famous was the statutes and laborers which was introduced in 1351 and they same to reduce peasants wages to pre plague levels because during the Black Death obvi she's more peasants died there was more work for the remaining peasants to undertake so they demanded higher wages which Locke the landowners at a time thought was excessive so that was introduced to bring them back to pre plague levels so by time the Black Death had actually calmed down in England in the 13 fifties Edward again focused on France so it was and it's this period as well a lot of historians regard as the peak of his popularity the early 13 50s because he was the quintessential English King Middle English had replaced French as the primary language spoken in England and if you look at the walls Ingham Chronicle the English people thought there a new Sun had risen because of the abundance of peace England and the glory of the victories and one of the most notable of these victories was the Battle of poitiers and 19th of September 1356 but it was not Edward the thirds victory this time really it was his son Prince Edward who's better known as the Black Prince because of the colour of his armor who led the troops and succeeded and it was a massive victory for England because the Black Prince had shown he was as competent as his father and he was the heir to the throne something which edward ii had failed to do and the likes of Henry the third had as well and this obviously looked really good to the English people at their future King is going to be this successful and party it was also significant as well because King john ii of france was captured and sent to London in Starkey again first of Poitier's the climax of Edwards was the greatest victories England had achieved for over a century of a and a half another contemporary chronicler Henry Knight and also praised the Black Prince stating that the Pope is a Frenchman what Jesus is an Englishman now we shall discover who is stronger but unfortunately Edward the third was never actually able to take advantage of his position and assert himself as king of France due to financial issues again in 1360 signed the Treaty of Brittany renouncing his claims to the French throne so annoyed consolidated his territorial gains a victory on the scale across your Posse eluded Edward and his sons for the remainder of his life as we enter the 13 60s it sees Edward unfortunately slow drought slow down a lot mentally and physically so as I'd said earlier the victories had dried up but a lot of his lead and Earl's and barons had died some do to play some because of old age complications and by the early thirteen 70s of serious concern for the health of both Edward the 3rd and the Black Prince in 1376 there was a parliament held but Edward and the Black Prince were both too ill to attend so the black Prince's son also called Edward so it gets quite confused and he died in France a little more questions about the succession of the Plantagenet dynasty and it was decided in the end that Richard who was the Black Prince his second eldest son should succeed him when he died but the Black Prince would stare prints forever because on the 8th of June 1376 he died and he was only 45 so his second eldest son Richard was officially in line to succeed the King after his grandfather's death so after under the Third's death in England once again faced the prospect of a boy king like we did with Henry the third and then the Order of the Garter which had was established in the early thirteen sixties came into fruition here because Edward made Richard the second and Henry Bolingbroke who was Richard's cousin through his Uncle John of Gaunt John of Gaunt was the black Prince's next eldest brother so second youngest brother he made them both Knights of the Garter in April 1377 which meant that they would both fight together and not against one another and then eventually after a fifty year a Edward the third died aged 64 and his reign like we look at it we said before it's one of the most fondly remembered and romanticized in English history so the English Brut Chronicle sums up and argues that Edwin third was for sooth of surpassing goodness and very full of grace even by comparison with all the worthy men of the world for by his virtue and even the grace given to him by God he surpassed and shone above his predecessors who were themselves noble and worthy man but despite Edward's death the problems of succession were definitely gonna plague Richard for the majority of his reign because we end up with a boy king on the throne again so even though it's old move on to Richard ii then and even though he succeeded the throne due to decisions made by Edward and through a very legitimate bloodline descended from his grandfather directly descended it didn't mean there's no controversy so four of Edward the third sons who survived until manhood fought between themselves and the families between the net for the next century really so the black Prince's family John of Gaunt Lionel and Edmund were the sons now gossip and rumors had suggested that John of Gaunt was the most likely to usurp Richards rone which was why Edward had taken the initiative to make both Richard and Henry John of Gaunt son Knights of the Garter so that to vowel that wouldn't fight against each other so Richards Ren didn't get off to the ideal start because a bit about him as a child well yeah when he was a kid he had a set of dice that were lauded so that he'd always win so if you kind of get that image in your head this action sort of summed up his attitude throughout his reign so obviously royal power relied in the support the nobility so Richard had to tread carefully in his reign but chief of these Nobles was John of Gaunt so when Edward 3rd had made John John of Gaunt Duke of Lancaster in 1362 he'd essentially given him unchallenged power in the north of England and by 1377 by time Richard's on the throne Edward's death John have gone to 30 castles across England and his House of Lancaster a private army of 4,000 men so the sheer numbers show the amount of power that he held so even 30 years after the Black Death had ravaged dura so England was still feeling its impact even in the 13 70s and 80s so Richard felt you had no other option but to infuse Paul taxes and he introduced three between 13 77 and 81 where he demanded a shilling from every adult in the land whether it was a Jew a merchant peasant so the way the taxation was much heavier on the peasants obviously shillings a lot more to them than it is to a Jew and it triggered one of England's most famous revolts the peasants revolt but contrary to popular belief the rebels didn't actually target Richard ii so instead they actually targeted the normal families around him those families like John of Gaunt's House of Lancaster because they were after a relative taxation form that didn't feel it was fair which obviously it wasn't so the peasants rose up in Essex and Kent mainly and they were led by a man called what Tyler and the marched on to London the pillaged the city from May to November 1381 and Richard his mother Henry Bolingbroke and a few of the other Nobles rush it into the Tower of London for safekeeping but with obviously enormous courage at the time Richard was only 14 years old he actually went out to face the rebels with just a small entourage and he met them at Mile End where he offered them a charter of liberties and then at Smithfield and he actually approached what Tyler dressed him as brother and asked why the men of Kent and Essex haven't gone home but unfortunately Richards act of diplomacy was actually undermined really when the Lord Mayor of London attacked and murdered what Tyler but Richard quickly got the attention of the shocked rebels and he shouted I'm your leader follow me and miraculously the mob did as they were actually commanded and followed Richard out of harm's way so that a full-scale bat wouldn't erupt but there were now leaderless and their grip on London and obviously broken the rebels now easily dispersed by the London militia and all of a sudden Richards appearance as a man of the common people had vanished because he was now back to the manipulative teenage king that was gonna haunt him for the rest his kingship this image of him as an arrogant leader really because he even went to watch the executions of some of the rebels and formally acknowledging that any sympathy that I'd shown or he pretended to short is more likely had gone so Richard was reluctant to give up power now that he tasted it he gave his favorites in Parliament positions of high high power and on numerous occasions that to remind of his great grandfather's fit for doing the same obviously is a great grandfather being Edward the second and look back to Edward the second in gavest and there's no benefit to give in your favourites positions in Parliament and government so the Royal government was actually on completely unlike his grandfather's because it became a high tax high spend affair and the taxpayers money as usual went nowhere just squandered eyes favourites and failed campaigns in Scotland and France and by 1386 Parliament had had enough so because these failed campaigns in France England first a genuine possibility of a French invasion so they so called wonderful Parliament's of 1386 agreed to help Richard financially and militarily if he dismissed his favorites from government and Richard retorted by saying he wouldn't listen to Parliament even if they want him to dismiss his kitchen Scullion she was just he was 20-year old acting like a petulant child so eventually Parliament threatened Richard with deposition and he finally surrendered to Parliament which bound him to ordinances again like Edward second in Parliament also impeached one of his favorites Michael Dilip all and instituted and enquiring to royal finances in spending richard stormed off in anger went the tour of his kingdom but Richards tour wasn't because he had any sort of genuine interest in his subjects it was instead an attempt to gather armed support against the nobility and to gain legal legal judgments to rescue his prerogative but the nobility wasn't finished yet because one of the natural leaders they turned to was the Duke of Lancaster's son Richard's cousin Henry Bolingbroke so ten years after the two boys had sworn never to take arms up against each other there's 20 year old men now tensions rose so richard ii and henry bolingbroke are obviously very different man and it eventually resulted in them to meeting on the 19th of december 1387 Rud cot bridge just outside of Oxford so the Royal Army was led by Robert de verre and the nobles army by Henry himself and Henry won a resounding victory and de verre fled into exile leaving Richard without his troops and powerless and Richard had hidden for safety in the Tower of London when he heard the news that Henry's forces had won so there's no other option for him than to surrender so the merciless Parliament's of 1388 dismantled Richard's power completely his friends were driven to exile the kingdom was ruled by a committee of the Lord's and even Richards personal affairs but to be put into the hands of a board of guardians as if he was either a child or in sir and the only thing Richard was left with was the official title of King of England but that was still it off because over the next sort of ten years you rebuilt his power structure and in February 1388 just after his 21st birthday made a plausible cause to Parliament that he matured from a boy into a man because he turned 21 and he reached out for the support of his uncle and Duke of Lancaster John of Gaunt who actually agreed to use his influence to pacify the country some Richard managed to rebuild his personal following and treated his former enemies with mercy but you can't give him too much sympathy because he was still the monistic manipulate manipulative man he'd been all those years ago in the summer of 1381 so the depth of his hatred which although it been stemmed for a few years was still relatively fresh when he came back in to Parliament so when his royal when his royal army leader Robert de verre died in exile 1395 Richard arranged a funeral for him and all the noble Lords who'd fought against him were obliged to attend and by 1397 Richard was strong enough to strike so one by one the Lord's who'd rebelled against him are either exiled or executed on highly exaggerated charges of treason and he also surrounded Parliament with his Cheshire archers who did gathered on his tour of England in 1387 so he'd regain his prerogative at last but in saying that Richard had served the best revenge or what he thought was the best revenge for the man who ruined the mind and betrayed him the most his cousin Henry Bolingbroke so when Henry had a quarrel with another nobleman Thomas Mowbray Richard ordered that the two of them should fight to the death and God would be on the just man's side so again he's not acting like a petulant child this time but more like a Roman Emperor in the Coliseum ask him people to fight to the death for his entertainment but just as the two fighters were about to charge each other Richard threw down his staff stopping the fight and resuming judgment to himself and if his final decision was that Henry was to go into exile for ten years while more burrows go into exile for the rest of his life but in while he was in exile in Paris in 1399 Henry Bolingbroke heard the news is father John of Gaunt who was the Duke of Lancaster had died and he also heard the news that Richard had wasted absolutely no time in taking all of Lancaster's possessions and thus Henry's inheritance so this act of greed from Richard on his bird Henry on his return to England so although Richard still felt relatively safe in England because he thought France was on his side his look would definitely soon change because the Duke of Burgundy was forced out of Paris because of plague and that ultimately left Henry Bolingbroke free - there is he pleased so Henry left France with a fleet ten ships and landed on the Yorkshire coast and upon hearing this news Richard fled to Wales and sought safety and some of Edward the first great Welsh castles now Henry already knew that his cousin was likely to flee and he money-structured persuaded him out of hiding with the promise that he'd only returned to claim his inheritance and had no intention of threatening the crown itself obviously this was a lie but it worked Richard believed it so as Richard came out with the gates of Flint castle in north east Wales an ambush of Henry's men had laid in wait for him and so the capture day so the king of England was now he's gone cousins prisoner so Richard decided to under Kate is thrown to God because he had no illegitimate children and Henry Bolingbroke took the empty throne for himself and his claim was obviously a legitimate one like Richard he could trace his descent directly from Henry the third so Richard was from Henry's eldest son Edward who was Edward the first and Bolingbroke from Henry the third second son Edmund Earl of Lancaster so the birth got a legitimate claim to the throne from Henry the third so in less than 12 weeks Henry Bolingbroke had gone from landless exile in France to Henry the fourth king of England so however even though Richard ii had been deposed by law he was still an anointed monarch which Henry wasn't and Henry knew this and he also knew from Richard's Last Exile that he wasn't safe unless Richard was dead so Henry didn't want blood in his hands literally for the murder of Richard so instead he left him to starve to death in Pontefract castle and sometime around about st. Valentine's Day 14th February 1400 Richard ii died a starved wreck of a man he could have been so summing up greatly richard ii should never have been king at the time he was I mean he shouldn't have been King anyway his older brother Edward died but then again the same could easily be said for Henry a second the very first plant ungently defied all odds to become king and with richard ii death in 1400 the Plantagenet dynasty had actually come to an end so after almost 150 years of direct descendants from 11:54 in henry ii $13.99 in richard ii it finally culminated with a king i had the attitude of a spoiled child and in saying that there are no other medieval european dynasty would ever have as much power as the Plantagenet during the high middle ages and especially not into the 15th century so over the course the next hundred years following richard ii death there were seven kings in comparison to the eight planted units in 150 years seven kings over the next 100 years not compared to the 8 planted units over 150 and just for a little bit of context out of those seven Kings three of them were murdered one was killed on the battlefield three died in the beds so we've got a really really key period in the 15th century is very turbulent but if you look at it in one way it's the most common thing the 15th century most popular part the 15th centuries the Wars of the Roses but that's a completely different story for another time so I hope you enjoyed learning about the Plantagenet so if you've enjoyed listening to these podcasts as well it's like to thank a couple of people it's plenty of people I could thank it take too much time but thanks for your continued support and listening to them I'll keep them coming up and I hope everyone stays safe in this isolation that we're in in a minute and hopefully you'll find a bit of time to listen to this podcast and subscribe to the channel like the Facebook page send me an email if you want any requests that's at history inch length at gmail.com I've been told to have to give a shout-out to one lads from work so Ethan hope you listen to this one you enjoyed it mate so thanks very much you're on and I'll see you on the next one Cheers