Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Helen Castor is a British historian and BBC broadcaster who left Cambridge because she wanted to write narrative history focused on individuals rather than the analytical style typical of academia. As someone interested in individual psychology and the functioning of power, Castor finds medieval England offers the perfect setting because its sophisticated power structures exist in “bare bones” without the “great apparatus of state,” bringing individual power plays into sharper relief. Her latest book, The Eagle and the Hart, exemplifies this approach by examining Richard II and Henry IV as individuals whose personal choices became constitutional precedents that echo through English history.

Tyler and Helen explore what English government could and couldn't do in the 14th century, why landed nobles obeyed the king, why parliament chose to fund wars with France, whether England could have won the Hundred Years' War, the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV's deposition of Richard II, how Shakespeare's Richard II scandalized Elizabethan audiences, Richard's superb artistic taste versus Henry's lack, why Chaucer suddenly becomes possible in this period, whether Richard II's fatal trip to Ireland was like Captain Kirk beaming down to a hostile planet, how historians continue to discover new evidence about the period, how Shakespeare’s Henriad influences our historical understanding, Castor’s most successful work habits, what she finds fascinating about Asimov's I, Robot, the subject of her next book, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded April 2nd, 2025.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,
0:09.4	bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.
0:13.5	Learn more at Mercadis.org.
0:15.7	For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,
0:20.4	visit Conversationswithtyler.com.
0:27.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
0:31.1	Today I'm very happy to be chatting with Helen Castor.
0:34.5	She is a British historian of the medieval and tutor period, and also a BBC broadcaster.
0:40.6	She's taught history at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of numerous books,
0:45.6	and most recently one of the best books of last year, she published The Eagle and the Heart,
0:51.6	the tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV.
0:55.2	Helen, welcome.
0:56.7	Thank you so much for having me.
0:58.7	So Richard II and Henry IV.
1:00.9	They're both born in the same year, namely 1367.
1:04.9	Just to frame it for our listeners, could you give us a sense back then?
1:09.3	What was it that English government
1:11.2	sort of could do and what could it not do? What is a government like then?
1:17.1	I think people might be surprised at quite how much government could do in England
1:23.3	at this point in history, because England at this point was the most centralised state in Europe.
1:32.8	And that has two reasons. One is the conquest of 1066 that the Normans have come in and taken the whole place over.
1:40.0	And then the other key formative period is the late 12th century when Henry II is ruling an empire that stretches from the Scottish border all the way down to southwestern France.
	...

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