Hello and welcome back to the History of England, episode 142, Greatest Man, or Monster.

What can I say everyone? It's an emotional moment. I realised while I was away that without

the podcast my life lacked a purpose, a focus, who am I? What is my identity? Until this moment

when all is reconciled and made whole once more. I exaggerated a little for a fact obviously,

but it is remarkably good to get back in front of the microphone once again. So let's start

the service with notices shall we? On occasion in the past, but in fact increasingly rarely,

I recommended an audiobook courtesy of Audible. I can recommend Audible from personal experience.

It's so much more affordable than CD and has a massive range. And you can get a free

audiobook on a 30-day trial or discounted membership when you follow the link from my website,

thehistrivingland.com. This week, given that we're moving on to Henry

the Fifth, I suppose I can but recommend my old A-level play, Henry the Fifth by that

bloke Aussie's name. This is an audio recording with Timothy West, so I hope it's good, and it's

the full thing. Before I took that most undeserved and frankly outrageous,

gratuitous holiday, we had got to the end of Henry the Fourth, and therefore arrived at

a period where the next two monarchs each have a claim to be on the one hand the greatest

monarch of England, Henry the Fifth, or the very worst, Henry the Sixth. So today, we're

going to kick off with Henry the Fifth and have a look at his reputation in history and

what the lad was like. We should start, of course, by kneeling at the

shrine of the ultimate authoritative histories, a shrine accompanied by two weighty and hallowed

tomes, 1066 and all that by Seller and Yateman, and the Ladybird Kings and Queens of England,

1968 edition. Although actually, in that regard, Henry the Fifth actually had a complete

book dedicated solely to him, called Henry the Fifth, an adventure from history. Our collective

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