Philomena Cunk
Published 20 Dec 2023Are you saying I’m a liar?
Sharing all things Cunk – a fictional character from Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe, Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Shakespeare and Cunk on Earth – Portrayed by the incredible Diane Morgan.
May 19, 2025
Best of Cunk on Shakespeare – Part 1
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QotD: Food for Medieval English peasants
The most common everyday sort of meal in wood-burning Britain was what we might call pottage or frumenty, a thick moist dish in which whole grains or pulses are brought to a boil and then simmered until as much liquid as possible has been absorbed. Think risotto but with less stirring. The simplest version was very simple indeed — wheat or barley or peas cooked in water with whatever fresh vegetables or herbs were available — but if you had the means you could add anything that was in season: meat, fish, butter or cheese, milk or cream, eggs, and even delicacies like sugar, almonds, or imported dried fruits.1 In fact most medieval dishes were thick and sticky, exactly the sort of thing I like to give my toddlers because it stays on even the most inexpertly wielded spoon, and they’re extremely well-adapted to cooking over wood. Just get your pot boiling over a big fire, then as the flames die down your dinner will simmer nicely. You’ll have to stir it, of course, to keep it from sticking to the pot, but you have to come back anyway to feed the fire. You can cook like this over coal, but it’s difficult: a coal fire stays hot much longer, so moderating the temperature of your frumenty requires constantly putting your pot on the grate and taking it off again. It’s far simpler to just add more liquid and let it all boil merrily away, with the added bonus that the wetter dish needs much less stirring to keep it from sticking. With the switch to coal, boiled dinners — soups, meats, puddings, and eventually potatoes — became the quintessentially English foods.2
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. We’re used to thinking of plants as being seasonal, but until quite recently animal products were seasonal too: chickens won’t lay in the winter without artificial lighting, cows stop giving milk when their calves reach a certain age, and generally one would only slaughter an animal for its meat at the right time of year. Geese, for instance, were typically eaten either as a “green goose”, brought up on summer grasses and slaughtered as soon as it reached adult size around the middle of July, or a “stubble goose”, fattened again on what remained in the fields after harvest and eaten for Michaelmas (in late September). Feeding a goose all autumn and half the winter only to eat it for Christmas would have been silly.
2. It’s also typical of New England, which makes sense; the New Englanders by and large came from East Anglia, which is right on the Newcastle-London coal route and a region that adopted coal cookery relatively early.
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May 18, 2025
Why it Sucked to be an Italian Prisoner in North Africa – WW2 Fireside Chat
World War Two
Published 17 May 2025Today, Indy and Sparty tackle some questions on the North African theatre. Why did the Italians think invading was a good idea in the first place? Was Allied treatment of Axis POWs a war crime? How did Italian and Allied tanks stack up?
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The FAL for British Troop Trials in 1954: X8E1 & X8E2
Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Feb 2020The NATO rifle trials of the early 1950s eventually chose the 7.62mm x 51mm cartridge, and the British and Belgians agreed on the FAL rifle to shoot it (and they thought the US would as well, but that’s another story). The British government formally accepted the FAL for troop trials, and in 1954 an order for 4,000 X8E1 rifles (with iron sights) and 1,000 X8E2 rifles (with SUIT 1x optical sights) was placed. These rifles were mechanically the same as what would be finalized as the L1A1 rifle, but they include a number of differing features. Both models had 3-position selector switches allowing automatic fire, and they also had manual forward assists on the bolt handles. The iron sights had top covers with integrated stripper clip guides, as there was concern that troops would have to manually reload their magazines, and stripper clips would speed this process up.
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May 17, 2025
Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1940
Real Time History
Published 3 Jan 2025In the summer of 1940, Great Britain is under attack in the air and at sea. German U-Boat wolf packs prowl the Atlantic and sink over a million tons of shipping. German skippers call this the “happy time” — but was the German Navy actually that successful early in the Battle of the Atlantic?
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May 16, 2025
Those scary “Brexity books”
Andrew Doyle on the sudden interest British police seem to be taking about what kind of books you may have on your shelves at home:
If the British police saw this collection, you’d be lucky to get out of prison in fifty years!
The UK police certainly seem to believe in that old aphorism that that “You can tell everything you need to know about a person from their bookshelf”. There has been much press coverage this week of the case of Julian Foulkes, a former policeman who was arrested at his home in Gillingham for tweetcrime. It took six officers to handcuff the pensioner and take him to a cell, and bodycam footage from the arrest shows them assessing the contents of his bookshelves. One was seen singling out The War on the West by Douglas Murray and another remarked that there were “very Brexity things”.
I have a fair few “Brexity” books on my shelf too. I have just as many “anti-Brexity” books, as it happens. It seems to have escaped the attention of these officers that it is possible to read multiple points of view without necessarily subscribing to any of them. They have also apparently forgotten that “Brexity” views are fairly commonplace, enough so to win the largest democratic mandate the country has ever seen. If it’s a majority view, is it really all that controversial?
I recall during the lockdown I was scheduled for a television interview and, having set up the webcam, I suddenly realised that the two volumes of Ian Kershaw’s excellent biography of Hitler were not only visible, but prominent. The design of the books’ spines is such that the word “HITLER” is displayed in huge letters. Very dramatic and marketable, but not so helpful if you’re about to appear on live television. I must confess that I repositioned my chair to ensure that the books were obscured.
But why? It isn’t as though any sensible person could possibly believe that my interest in the history of tyranny implies an endorsement of it. I could just as easily have a copy of Mein Kampf on the shelf and still retain my wholehearted opposition to its author and everything he stood for. If I owned a copy of the Koran, would that make me a Muslim? If I owned a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Riders, would that make me prone to passionate romps in stables? As a chronic hay fever sufferer, this hardly seems likely.
The assumption that the books we choose to read are a mirror-image of our private thoughts, or that we are so malleable that any opinion we encounter will automatically be assimilated, is very much a core tenet of faith in today’s woke mindset, one that has quite palpably infected the justice system. Those who are currently serving prison time for offensive tweets will be aware that the unevidenced belief that the public act on cue to the language they read has some very authoritarian consequences.
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May 13, 2025
Mao Wins the Civil War – Chinese Civil War Part 4 – W2W 28
TimeGhost History
Published 12 May 2025By early 1949, Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang is falling apart. Hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops surrender as city after city fall to Mao Zedong. Beijing falls without a fight and the Communists cross the Yangtze. Chiang’s final plan is escape and he moves tons of gold and his best troops to Taiwan. Meanwhile, Mao declares victory and the birth of the People’s Republic of China.
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May 11, 2025
History of Britain, I: Hail Prettanike! Early References to the British Isles
Thersites the Historian
Published 6 Jan 2025The natural starting point for examining the history of Britain is to look at how the island and its inhabitants first entered the historical record.
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May 10, 2025
“Train how you fight” – British plod edition
At Restoration, Connor Tomlinson looks at how British police forces are training and what it tells us about who they think they’ll be fighting:
Britain’s police aren’t training to stop riots—they’re preparing to crush the public.
One of the infamous quotes from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever”. He forgot to add, “on TikTok”. Last Thursday, the Metropolitan Police posted a montage of officers at the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre in Kent, undergoing riot training. The caption read, “Bricks, bottles and fire bombs – our officers prepare for every eventuality at the Met’s elite training centre in Gravesend so they can keep you safe. Stronger tactics means safer communities.” It seems they had one specific “eventuality” in mind, as the mock rioters were wearing the Union flag. There wasn’t a keffiyeh or “Only good TERF is a dead TERF” sign in sight.
But fear not. The same Met Police who defended now-proscribed group Hizb ut-Tahrir’s demonstration after October 7th, saying “The word jihad has a number of meanings“, now insist that “The fact one of the t-shirts has a union flag on it is entirely coincidental”. Well, that’s me convinced. In fact, the Met are exhausted by your conspiracy theories, writing that “It’s disappointing we are increasingly having to challenge this sort of misinformation which only serves to increase divisions and tensions”. But the plummeting public trust in Britain’s police and justice system are of its own making. Britain’s security state is setting itself in opposition to the largely law-abiding indigenous host majority, while gaslighting them about the non-existence of a two-tier justice system that favors tribal minorities.
One might think, as Sam Bidwell suggests, the police should preoccupy themselves with preventing street conflicts not between Britain’s indigenous host and immigrant populations, but between its Indian diaspora and Pakistani enclaves. On April 22, Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 26 and injured 20 more in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Both nations cancelled the other’s visas, and are in the process of expelling foreign nationals before they expire. Pakistan has suspended all trade with and air travel from India. Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Modi has warned, “India will identify, track and punish every terrorist, their handlers and their backers, [and] we will pursue them to the ends of the earth.”
Thanks to decades of mass immigration and multiculturalism, Britain is home to powerful Indian and Pakistani ethno-political lobbies. Around 3 million Indians and 1.9 million Pakistanis live legally in the UK. They are substantially younger than the white British host population, and already brought Leicester to an ungovernable standstill in 2022 when Muslims and Hindus rioted for a month over a cricket match. Last Friday, both factions gathered outside the Pakistani Embassy in London for a mixture of a protest and a dance-off, replete with Indian, Pakistani, Israeli, and Palestinian flags. Most alarming was when Colonel Taimur Rahat of the Pakistani military appeared to make a throat-slitting gesture toward Indian protestors.
Both subcontinental factions have sympathetic politicians. They weaponize domestic antidiscrimination law to pursue foreign policy goals: for example, listing the denial of an independent Palestine and Kashmir as an example of Islamophobia, in guidance adopted by local councils. Conservative-party candidates committed to a Hindu Manifesto at the last general election, promising to further liberalize visa rules for dependents and elderly parents of Hindus already in Britain. Indian-heritage cabinet ministers, like Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak, instigated an unprecedented rise in Indian migration after Brexit. Patel described these migrants as “living bridges”, using Prime Minister Modi’s term.
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May 9, 2025
They keep saying the quiet part out loud – democracy is a threat to the establishment
N.S. Lyons went to Barad-dûr Ottawa earlier this month to speak at the 2025 Civitas Canada Conference, and posted his remarks on his Substack:
The 2022 Freedom Convoy induced a state of panic in the Canadian federal government, yet the elected representatives proved completely unwilling to even talk to anyone from the protests. The government clearly persuaded itself that this was an actual insurrection, and waited for the violence to break out … and there was no violence, other than that provided by the police and a few paid actors.
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen! It’s a pleasure to visit the North and get a glimpse behind the new Iron Curtain …
As it happens, the official theme of this conference is “Freedom and its Discontents: Liberal Democracy at a Crossroads”. That is a timely theme indeed. Because I think it isn’t too extreme to say that, all around the Western world today, democracy is under assault — even that it risks extinction. It risks extinction because the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.
In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.
In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities simply canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d’état against the democratic process.
In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary”, is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago.
One gets the sense that the honest view of our exasperated political elites is as captured in a Bloomberg News headline from last year which read: “2024 is a year of elections, and that’s a threat to democracy”.
In country after country, governments are moving to desperately tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.
In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people per year (that’s 33 per day on average) — are now arrested for speech- and literal thought-crimes, including silent prayer. UK jails now hold hundreds of political prisoners, more than anywhere else in Europe outside of Russia and Belarus. These are people persecuted for, essentially, voicing dissent over their government’s catastrophic policies. Recently, for instance, a British woman with no criminal history was jailed for more than two years for a single Facebook post criticizing the state’s willful failure to stop illegal migration.
In Brazil, a single Supreme Court judge, in alliance with the country’s leftist president, has effectively established a judicial dictatorship, locking up political rivals by decree, silencing the speech of opposition figures, and utilizing state leverage over the financial system to punish political enemies by banishing them from public economic life.
But of course Brazil’s authorities learned these tactics by observation. Observation of Canada, to be precise, where Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.
Today, the Canadian government’s weaponization of the legal system and public institutions, including state-funded media, to impose a quasi-totalitarian progressive ideological regime, censor and jail dissenters, and effectively transform Canada into a one-party state, has, I’m afraid, won your country a real measure of global infamy. Many Canadians here may not be aware of just how your government appears from the outside, but I’m afraid it’s not a good look at all. Unfortunately I must report that when many of us look at Canada what we see is a global leader in progressive authoritarianism, out-of-control migration, growing anarcho-tyranny, foreign subversion, and ideologically-induced economic stagnation.
But then, what we might realistically call the liberal-authoritarian model is, sadly, the new normal in the West, where many hyphenated liberal-democracies seem to have concluded that they must now begin to cast off the democratic half of that historical compact.
It may seem that this hardening of control is a response to the rise of so-called populism, which has swept the Western world. Certainly many authoritarian measures have been justified, without any sense of irony, as necessary to defend “our democracy” (so-called) against the dissatisfaction of the actual demos. And it’s true that fear of populism — which is really fear of genuine democracy — does seem to consistently provoke a spiral of ham-fisted reactions by our increasingly authoritarian states. But the reality is that populism is itself a reaction, an organic immune response to the particularly unresponsive and anti-democratic new form of governance that has visibly overtaken the West in recent decades.
May 8, 2025
Dambusters – Was It Worth It?
HardThrasher
Published 5 May 2025The third and final part in a series on the Dambusters Raid; looking at the attacks themselves and their aftermath
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May 7, 2025
Boldly Bombing Bugger All – The Bomber War Episode 1
HardThrasher
Published 13 Oct 2023To see more on the Fairey Battle go here – The Fairey Battle – Light Bomber, Hea… also subscribe to Rex’s channel, he’s ace
Selected Online Resources
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casab…
https://discovery.nationalarchives.go… – Western War Plan W5a and W6Selected Bibliography
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing 1910-1945 – McFarland et al.
Dresden – Sinclair McKay
Dresden; Tuesday … – Fredrick Taylor
Absolute War – The Firebombing of Tokyo – Chris Bellamy
Black Snow –
Bomber Command – Max Hastings
Bomber Command’s War Against Germany, An Official History – Nobel Franklin et al.
The Bomber Mafia – Malcolm Gladwell
Undaunted and Through Adversity (Vol 1 &2) – Ben Kite
United States Strategic Bombing Survey (European War) (USSBS) Sept 1945 – Var. – https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catal…
America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing 1910-1945, McFarland
Big Week – James Holland
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May 6, 2025
If “a trade imbalance constitutes an American ‘subsidy’ justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet”
Despite getting his preferred choice elected as Canadian Prime Minister, US President Donald Trump still seems determined to troll Canadians about becoming the “51st state”. Among his shifting set of justifications for this is the trade imbalance between the US and Canada, which Trump chooses to interpet as a “huge” subsidy the US is providing to Canada. On that basis, there are going to have to be a lot more US states in the future:
So now we have serious commentators gaming out the pros and cons of war with Canada. What started out as a mildly amusing bit of presidential “trolling” is now being discussed as next year’s Donbass.
If, for the purposes of argument, one accepts the President’s line that a trade imbalance constitutes an American “subsidy” justifying annexation of that country, then the US is going to have to annex most of the planet: last year Washington had a one-and-a-quarter trillion-dollar imbalance with the world. It’s not hard to figure out why: over recent decades the uniparty turned a country that used to make things into a crappy low-wage service economy. […] The US now has trade imbalances with — or “subsidies” of — not only the countries that you’d expect (China, Mexico, Germany, Japan, India) but a lot of ones you wouldn’t (Finland, Algeria).
True, Canada is closer than Algeria, so there are national-security implications for Washington: the country and its politicians (Trudeau, Carney) have been entirely hollowed out by Peking, but then so it goes south of the border (Biden, McConnell). And Trump’s plan for a “fifty-first state” will not solve that problem.
The “fifty-first state” shtick can’t ever have been serious, can it? Geographically, the fifty-first state would be bigger than the other fifty combined, and with a bigger population than California’s. Last time they added stars to the flag, both parties got something out of it: the GOP Alaska and the Dems Hawaii. So wouldn’t it make more sense to make Canada’s ten provinces and three territories a baker’s dozen of new American states with a couple of senators apiece? Yeah, sure – if you want Republicans never to win a national election again.
So, aside from last week’s vote, how is the other side reacting? Last Thursday’s print edition of The Spectator contained a curiously phrased squib from my old editor, Charles Moore:
The President may be only hazily aware that the King, of whom, he says, he has the “honour to be a friend”, is also King of Canada. If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person, Trump may come to see that his next-door neighbour is part of a long-standing, legitimate order which Canadian voters are happy to endorse.
Let’s just run that again:
If, as seems likely, the King follows his mother’s twice-used precedent and opens the new Canadian parliament in person …
The last time his mother opened Parliament in Ottawa was in 1977 — her Silver Jubilee year. Trudeau-wise, Justin’s father Pierre was not keen on it, but didn’t feel he could pick and win a fight with the Palace over it. A quarter-century later, Trudeau’s successor Jean Chrétien, a towering colossus of micro-pettiness, was annoyed at being given a crappy seat at the Queen Mum’s funeral and so scuttled Her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee throne speech.
So why would Charles Moore think it “likely” that the King would be opening Parliament in Ottawa later this month? If, as it was in my day, Speccie columns for Thursday’s magazine have to be filed on Tuesday, that would make Moore the first guy in either the Canadian or UK media to know what was not revealed to the world until Friday […]
The King has travelled far less in the first three years of his reign than his mother did: shortly after her Coronation, the Queen set off on a tour of parts of the Commonwealth that kept her away from London for six months. Her son can’t do that because he’s very sick with cancer. So it’s quite something that he’ll land in Ottawa on Monday May 26th, deliver the throne speech the following day, and then fly out again. Carney wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t going to take the opportunity to put his view of Canadian sovereignty into the Sovereign’s mouth.
So, if Trump really has the “honour to be a friend” of the King, the only point of this 24-hour flying visit is so His Majesty can send the message that friends don’t let friends threaten to steal each other’s countries. In fact, he has made a point of referring to himself as “King of Canada” quite a bit of late. […] The “King of Canada” bit was done at the instigation of Carney. Which is odd. Especially from a party that has spent half-a-century diminishing and degrading the Crown, and for a monarch who is, unlike his mother, largely unloved and unloveable. Yet Carney seems belatedly to have come around to the old-school monarchist view that, without the Sovereign, there is insufficient to distinguish Canada from its domineering southern neighbour — especially when that neighbour keeps talking about taking it. On the other hand, both the King and his Canadian prime minister are bigtime players at the World Economic Forum, so they’re not the most obvious choice for defenders of national sovereignty. On the other other hand, it’s one thing to surrender it to fellow globalists, quite another to surrender it to Donald Trump.
I have no idea where this is headed, and if anyone can enlighten me I’d be happy to hear it. But Trump has doubled down on it, and Carney is playing the King card to oppose it. As longtime readers know, I have a general preference for smaller nations as happier homes for their people. If Alberta or Quebec voted to secede, why would you take the trouble to do that just to become a minor and inconsequential part of another big country?
But, that aside, why would it be in America’s interest to absorb a hostile population of mostly lefties over a vast and unpoliceable landmass? The history of the last thirty years is that China has shown there are subtler ways of taking over the world without firing a shot, while America has persisted in doing it the old-fashioned way and, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and elsewhere, has gotten nowhere. Why add Canada to the list?
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May 5, 2025
Remembering The Battle of Britain (1969)
At SteynOnline, Rick McGinnis discusses the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, which was considered a financial flop at the time it was released and only turned a profit once home VCR sales provided a new revenue stream — it was how I first watched the movie, although I do remember seeing posters for it at the cinema while it was in theatrical release.
The best recent depictions of the war – my subjective list includes Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan, Dunkirk, Das Boot, Greyhound and Letters from Iwo Jima – were mostly made with veterans advising on historical accuracy and mostly being heard. This wasn’t always the case: for at least two decades following the war, when veterans were still thick on the ground, historical accuracy was frequently sacrificed in the interest of adventure, drama, comedy or romance.
(My subjective list includes Kelly’s Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone, D-Day The Sixth of June, Where Eagles Dare, Operation Petticoat, From Here to Eternity and Von Ryan’s Express. Not that these aren’t entertaining, enjoyable films; they just shouldn’t be considered history.)
If there was a turning point – a film that struggled and mostly succeeded in telling a plausibly accurate story about the war to audiences likely to contain not just veterans but civilians with lived memories – it was probably Guy Hamilton’s Battle of Britain, released in 1969, barely thirty years after the event it commemorates.
While in pre-production for the film, 007 producer Harry Saltzman and his co-producer (and veteran RAF pilot) Benjamin Fisz realized that their American backers at MGM were nervous about making a film about something Americans knew little about. This led to The Battle for the Battle of Britain, a short TV documentary about the film and the event that it was based on, hosted and narrated by one of the film’s stars, Michael Caine.
Included with the 2005 collector’s edition DVD of Hamilton’s film, The Battle for the Battle of Britain begins with a series of “man on the street” interviews conducted outside the American embassy in London. Older interview subjects talk vaguely about how they’d admired the British for standing alone against Nazi Germany at the time; younger ones almost unanimously admit that they don’t’ know anything about it. One woman states that she doesn’t wish to give an opinion since she works for the embassy. At the time these interviews were made the average age of a British pilot who fought in the battle and survived would have been around fifty, as the vast majority of the young men who flew to defend England in the summer of 1940 were on either side or twenty.
Making Battle of Britain felt like a duty in 1969; it attracted a cast of big stars who were willing to work for scale just to be involved, but that didn’t stop the film from going massively over schedule and over budget. Historical accuracy was so important that Saltzman and Lisz ended up collecting what became the world’s 35th largest air force, rebuilding wrecked airframes and making planes that had sat on concrete plinths outside museums and airfields flyable again.
Still from The Battle of Britain
The film begins with the fall of France in the spring of 1940, and British pilots and air crew struggling to get back in the air ahead of the rapidly approaching German army. We meet the three RAF squadron leaders who will be at the centre of the action: Caine’s Canfield, Robert Shaw as the curt, intense “Skipper”, and Colin Harvey (Christopher Plummer), a Canadian married to Maggie (Susannah York), an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
Back across the channel we meet Sir Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command and the man who will lead the English in the air battle to come. Blunt and charmless, Dowding had the unenviable task of telling Sir Winston Churchill, only just appointed Prime Minister, that he doesn’t support his promise to send more fighter squadrons across the Channel to aid the French as they would be squandered in a lost cause and, in any case, he needs every plane and pilot he has to fight the German invasion that’s doubtless coming.
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The Bloody Battle of Agincourt | Animated Episode
The Rest Is History
Published 30 Nov 2024“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”.
The Battle of Agincourt in 1415 endures as perhaps the most totemic battle in the whole of English history. Thanks in part to Shakespeare’s masterful Henry V, the myths and legends of that bloody day echo across time, forever enshrining the young Henry as the greatest warrior king England had ever known. So too the enduring idea of the English as plucky underdogs, facing down unfavourable odds with brazen grit. And though the exact numbers of men who fought in the two armies is hotly contested, the prospect was certainly intimidating for the English host looking down upon the vast French force amassed below them the day before the battle. Hungry and weary after an unexpectedly long march, and demoralised by the number of French that would be taking to the field, the situation certainly seemed dire for the English. One man amongst them, however, held true to his belief that the day could still be won: Henry V. An undeniably brilliant military commander, he infused his men with a sense of patriotic mission, convincing them that theirs was truly a divinely ordained task, and therefore in this — and his careful strategic planning the night before the battle — he proves a striking case of one individual changing the course of history. However, the French too had plans in place for the day ahead: total warfare. In other words, to overwhelm the English in a single devastating moment of impact, sweeping the lethal Welsh archers aside. So it was that dawn broke on the 25th of October to the site of King Henry wearing a helmet surmounted by a glittering crown and bearing the emblems of both France and England, astride his little grey horse, and riding up and down his lines of weathered silver clad men, preparing them to stride into legend … then, as the French cavalry began their charge, the sky went black as 75,000 arrows blocked out the sun. What else would that apocalyptic day hold in store?
Join Tom and Dominic as they describe the epochal Battle of Agincourt. From the days building up to it, to the moment that the two armies shattered together in the rain and mud of France. It is a story of courage and cowardice, kings and peasants, blood and bowels, tragedy and triumph.
00:00 What is to come …
00:50 Shakespeare and Henry V
02:53 Agincourt is exceptional
04:15 The battle is a test of God’s favour
05:27 The English see the French forces …
09:30 The French aren’t offering battle
10:40 Why the French delay
11:13 The French think they’re going to win
11:35 An ominous silence
12:35 Henry’s plan
20:50 The French plan
24:28 How big were the armies
28:49 The lay of the land
34:50 Henry makes the first move
37:00 The French charge into darkness
38:57 The French army advances
45:50 Reaction to the slaughter
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