Hello everyone and welcome to the History of England, Episode 128, the NASA System.

The reason historians love the chronicles jondafuassa is that he does tell a good story.

The latter is sometimes wrong in terms of the sequence of events.

But what he does do is give the kind of colour which is very rare.

As an illustration, I thought I'd read a bit out of Fwassa to show that Richard and his uncle the Duke of Gloucester didn't see I to I.

So according to Fwassa, Thomas Duke of Gloucester had a household night in whom he particularly confided a night called John Lacking Hay.

A night who sounds as though somewhere in his hands' history was a man with limited farming skills.

Anyway, Fwassa records something of a rant from Gloucester. Here are a few extracts.

Those frivolous French are so overbriving with conceit. They have never brought any of their enterprises to a successful conclusion.

That was proved often enough in the wars of my royal father and my brother the Prince of Wales.

They could never capture a castle or win a battle against us. I don't know why we had this truce with them.

For if we started this war again, we should make Hay of them. They used fraud and trickery to steal back the domains in Aquitaine.

I pointed that out several times at various meetings we had outside Calais.

But they answered me with such smooth and flowery language, though somehow they always managed to fall on their feet.

Nice touch about making Hay of them, don't you think? Hopefully his mate John Lacking Hay wasn't too hurt.

Anyway Gloucester could and did go on. Basically he was a denier. He couldn't accept that in the end his father the glorious Edward had ended up on the losing side and he hated the French for their smooth ways.

Whereas Richard absolutely loved the French for their smooth ways and enjoyed smoothing with the best of them.

Through the truce at Arthro, the marriage to Isabelle the daughter of Charles VI. Richard had clearly signaled that from now on the French were friends, not food.

Worse, he'd actually agreed to a war against the English friends, the millenies, in alliance with the French. Now this was unthinkable.

And although the French might be giving the English good hiding at the moment, there were plenty of people prepared to forget all of that and say that if only we were a war, honour and power and glory would inevitably follow.

Just to illustrate the point, Gloucester growled on.

The slackness of our leader and king, who has just allied himself by marriage with his principal enemy, that's hardly a sign, he wants to fight him.

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