The Parliament of Bats: Plantagenets at War
Gone Medieval
History Hit
4.5 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How could England be ruled when the king was just a baby? When Henry VI came to the throne at nine months old, the hunger for power among his Plantagenet uncles spilled into violence. 600 years ago, in February 1426, parliament even moved to Leicester to avoid mob violence in London. Even so, MPs armed themselves with wooden bats and clubs. What happened next?
Matt Lewis and Dr. Hannes Kleineke explore one of the most explosive parliaments in English history and an episode that presaged the Wars of the Roses.
MORE:
How Parliament Came to Westminster
Henry V with Dan Jones
Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, |
| 0:07.7 | power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. |
| 0:13.2 | Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger and some of the world's leading historians, |
| 0:18.0 | as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on |
| 0:22.3 | History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries |
| 0:27.2 | with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. |
| 0:33.6 | Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. |
| 0:40.4 | Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves |
| 0:45.9 | into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, |
| 0:51.3 | the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. |
| 1:00.2 | We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. |
| 1:10.3 | Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. |
| 1:24.3 | Exactly 600 years ago in February 1426, England was teetering on the edge of chaos. |
| 1:32.3 | Four years earlier, Henry V had died suddenly at the age of 35, leaving his nine-month-old baby son to become King Henry the 6th. |
| 1:42.3 | Within weeks, the baby Henry had also become king of France |
| 1:46.0 | on the death of his maternal grandfather, Charles the 6th. |
| 1:50.0 | Over the next couple of years, a council of ambitious, powerful men |
| 1:54.0 | circled around the infant king, |
| 1:56.0 | locked in a bitter power struggle that threatened to tear the realm apart. |
| 2:00.0 | And as if to underscore just how precarious this moment truly was in a bitter power struggle that threatened to tear the realm apart. |
| 2:04.9 | And as if to underscore just how precarious this moment truly was, |
| 2:07.7 | by the time Henry VIth was three years old, |
... |
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