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Hi, everybody.

From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

I'm Patrick Wyman.

Thanks so much for joining me today.

The Hundred Years' War was one of the defining conflicts of the Middle Ages. For more than a century, the crowns of England and France went to war on a regular basis.

Nobles and soldiers loyal to the two kings, both and neither of them turned Western Europe into a battlefield year after year,

decade after decade through ceaseless raids, skirmishes, massacres, and some of the most famous battles of the age.

But trying to get a grip on more than a century of war spread between Scotland, the low

countries, France, and Spain is an extraordinarily difficult task.

How should we understand these various

flare-ups and confrontations? Why did the wars continue? Who was responsible for them? And why,

at the end of the day, do they still matter? These are the kinds of questions we're going to put to

today's guest. Michael Livingston is a Citadel distinguished professor in the Department of

English, Fine Arts, and Communication at the Citadel. He's an outstanding military historian

whose work I drew on during the many episodes I did on this topic years ago, and he's also

the author of a great many popular and scholarly works. Professor Livingston has a brand new book

out that I highly recommend to you all. Bloody Crowns, a new history of the Hundred Years War, available now from basic books. Professor, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Thank you for that kind introduction. So why did you write this book on the Hundred Years War? I mean, what initially drew you to the topic? Well, I've been working on 100 Years' War stuff for a while, the Battle of Cresi, the Battle of Agincourt.

I've been doing a lot of work in this area, both large and small.

And I was actually in conversation with a fellow author, Dan Jones.

And, you know, we were talking about, like, what might our next projects be? And I sort of suggested one to him and he suggested one to me. And his suggestion for me was to do a one volume, 100 years war, which I laughed at. I thought that was a joke. That's a funny thing. How would you do that in one volume? And he said, no, no, I'm serious. We need a new one. We need a good one that's kind of up to date and thought that I could pull this off. And I was sort of dumb enough to say yes. Really glad I did. It was an amazing project, really, really a lot going into it, right? Not just sort of the research, but like narrative-wise. Like, how do you construct something like this? How do you weave a thread? And so a lot of challenge, and I really did enjoy doing it. But yeah, there was early on, there was like, there's no way I'm actually going to try and do this. It's really too insane. But it's such an important period. You know what? You need this kind of coverage. I'm so glad that you mentioned Dan's name. Dan is a good friend of mine. He's been on this show seven, eight times over the years. And I actually just wrote the acknowledgments for my new book that's coming out next year. And in the acknowledgments, I thanked Dan because exactly the same thing. I was laying out this project to him and what I was planning on doing.

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