Welcome to the British History Podcast. My name is Jamie and this is episode 210, the Battle of

Ashdown. Also known as, Are You There God? It's me, Apple Red. This show is ad-free due to

member support and as a way of thanking members for keeping the show independent, I offer members

only content, including extra episodes and rough transcripts. You can get instant access to all

the members extras by signing up for membership at the British History Podcast.com. And thank you

very much to Lisa, James and Heather for signing up already. God, in his goodness and justice, so much

offended by our sins, had thus worn down the lands and kingdoms of the Christians.

That's a quote from Prudentius of Tawai and he was struggling to explain why the Franks seem to

almost always meet abysmal failure whenever they fought against the Scandinavians. And while that

quote does come from across the channel, and it was written years before the disaster at the

Battle of Redding, it does give us one of the lenses that the Christians of Western Europe were

using to view these events. It's surprising how many writers from this period when looking at these

events would look to the Bible for an explanation and see things in terms of divine retribution

or divine intervention. And that biblical perspective is something I want you to keep in mind when

you hear the story that I'm going to tell you today. Because if you look at it from a modern

perspective, the following events seem a little strange. But human interpretations of the world around

them have changed throughout history. And that is something that we're going to discuss in a

future shop talk episode on the members' feed. Because it is fairly common to naturalize your own

culture and just assume that the way society currently views things is timeless and common sense.

But it isn't. For example, right now in America, we currently have a hyper individualistic

perspective and it's so far reaching that purchasing a double big gulp from 7-11 is seen as

an unassailable expression of freedom. And in fact, for some people, the threat of losing access

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