Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, episode 106, Calais and Neville's

Cross.

So last week we heard about the Cressy Campaign of 1346.

Now when I originally wrote that episode, I'd done a bit of backgroundy stuff about

medieval war strategies, as always I got carried away with Cressy and overrun, so I cut

it out and I'm going to do that now.

This is just in case you say I wish you'd had all this stuff earlier.

If you do, yes you're right, sorry.

So we'll do that stuff and then get back to the aftermath of Cressy and then talk about

the knife in the bag, otherwise known as Neville's Cross.

The first point to make is that taking castles in the 14th century was still really, really

hard.

We've talked many moons ago about some of the kind of technology attackers had for walls,

mainly catapults and trebuchet.

Now these were fine at causing mayhem within the town, but the trajectory they gave was

not great for bashing down the walls themselves.

Cannon and gunpowder will eventually turn the tables on this and signal the end of the

medieval castle, but we're not there quite yet.

In fact, Escalade or Negotiation was without doubt the most effective way of taking a castle.

Escalade meaning assault by ladders slung over the wall.

So capturing territory wasn't always the aim of the medieval attacker.

I mean sometimes it was, so our poor Senashal Stafford for example, told off by Lancaster

...