Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England. This is episode 126, an uneasy calm.

The field is a mass of brightly coloured tents and pavilions and in the centre of it are a mass of French and English knights.

They are apparently all on their knees, weeping for joy. At the sight of the French and English kings Charles and Richard walking between them accompanied by the greatest lords of their respective countries.

Richard was dressed in a long scarlet gown emblazoned with his symbol, the white heart.

Charles VI, the French king, was equally richly dressed and they shook hands and kissed, which is when all the weeping started.

They were there because both the kings were anxious not to fight anymore, unlike Henry III, Edward I and Edward II, peace was to be brought by marriage between the French and English royal houses.

Richard's wife Anna Bohemia had recently died and he was to marry Charles's tiny wee six-year-old daughter Isabel.

But almost as important as that, this was a king competition, a king's beauty parade.

Hands up out there, who's heard of the field of the cloth of gold?

Much more famous, this was the meeting in 1520 you can put your hands down now by the way, between Henry VIII and Francis of France, which has been hammered by historians as a vacuous spectacle.

Well sorry, but Monarchy is all about vacuous spectacle.

The events at Arta are very much the same, just a century or so earlier.

Okay, so Richard and Charles were not the type to wrestle with each other, like Henry and Francis did, but in terms of display it was right up there.

The event could well have cost 15,000 pounds for the English to lay on, so that's 10% or more of the annual national tax burden, which is what they call a hellerbeans.

But Richard really had no choice.

If he had arrived looking like he'd come to read the meter, he might have saved all those beans, but he would have been failing in his kingly duty,

would have lost enormous face in all that, and his own people would have been the very first to lay into him.

Now as it happens, he appears to have edged the competition.

It was pretty much a draw on the costly gift-giving front, but every day Richard appeared in clothes more magnificent than the previous.

Now Charles's kit on the first day drew suitable admiration, but there were gasps of horror, but on the second day he turned up in the same kit, and the third.

Oops, Richard won, Charles zip.

Anyway, the point is that things have changed from the last time we spoke.

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