Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities
Historian Helen Castor, author of The Eagle and the Hart, talks with Tyler Cowen about how late-medieval English government actually worked, why nobles obeyed the king, whether England could have won the Hundred Years’ War, how the deposition of Richard II in 1399 became a constitutional precedent invoked against Charles I, and why she reads medieval kingship through Shakespeare and science fiction.
Key ideas
- Medieval England was Europe’s most centralised state, yet held no monopoly of force. The Crown could impose law and raise taxes through Parliament, but had neither police nor standing army; enforcement ran through a hierarchy of private landed power, so royal authority worked only by tapping local magnates.
- The nobility obeyed out of pragmatic and sacred interest. The king was the keystone of the hierarchy that made them wealthy — a referee letting them compete safely within the rules — and he was anointed by God, so resisting him risked both worldly position and immortal soul.
- The deposition of Richard II in 1399 set a double-edged precedent. Henry IV’s committee drew up 33 Articles of Deposition to justify removing a tyrant; the same act established that defending the constitution might require going beyond it — a precedent the men against Charles I actively cited in the 1640s.
- Personal choice, not just structure, drove the outcome. Richard II’s decision to sail personally to Ireland in 1399 left England undefended for Henry’s return; Castor treats individual psychology as exposed and decisive precisely because the medieval state lacks the thick apparatus that obscures it in modern history.
- Shakespeare and science fiction are working tools for reading the period. Castor uses the plays’ phrases as chapter titles while steeping herself in the sources, and reaches for Dune and Asimov to render medieval people as recognisable humans in a world whose assumptions differ sharply from ours.
Content
What medieval English government could and could not do
Castor opens by upending the expectation of a weak medieval state: late-14th-century England was the most centralised state in Europe, a legacy of the 1066 Conquest and of Henry II’s need, a century later, to govern an empire stretching from Scotland to south-western France in his absence. The king’s two functions appear on the two faces of his seal — lawgiver and judge on one side, armoured warrior and defender of the realm on the other — and to fund the second he depended on Parliament, which had developed both to consent to taxation shown to be in the national interest and to make statute law carrying the realm’s consent. What the state lacked was a monopoly of force: no police, no standing army beyond the Calais garrison. Enforcement was therefore its central problem, solved only by working through the private hierarchy of great landowners who controlled both wealth and the men on their land — the sheriff’s posse, the power of the county.
Why nobles obeyed, and why Parliament paid for France
The landed nobility obeyed, Castor argues, because the king was the keystone of the very hierarchy that made them powerful; they wanted more, but not at the risk of losing what they had. She likens the king to a referee who lets players compete safely within the rules — a referee, moreover, appointed and anointed by God, so that resistance imperilled the immortal soul as well as the mortal estate. Parliament, for its part, frequently refused funds, and refusal was real leverage: the king could tax only by demonstrating that defence of the realm required it. That defence was defined broadly enough to cover the Hundred Years’ War, fought almost entirely in France — a war that, when it went well, claimed territory the English king held to be rightfully his and produced booty and reward, and that kept the fighting over there rather than here.
Counterfactuals: could England have won, and did war shape the state?
Historians, Castor notes, disagree about almost everything, including whether England could have held a large part of France and whether war made England a ‘war state’. On the first, she thinks things could have looked very different: had Henry V not died of dysentery at 35 in 1422, or had a competent king followed him rather than his infant son and eventual nonentity heir, England might — like Edward III before — have traded the maximalist claim to the French crown for secure retention of territory. Instead it kept the empty claim (not surrendered until 1801) and lost nearly all the land, including 300-year-held Aquitaine and its Bordeaux wine. On the second, she sees no great gulf between a ‘war state’ and a ‘law state’: kings who managed subjects for the needs of defence also understood they had to govern well at home, and Edward III and Henry IV both showed the two went hand in hand.
The deposition of 1399 and its long shadow
Do Richard II and Henry IV matter, given both reigns were truncated? Castor argues they forced the realm to confront what kingship was and where it shaded into tyranny. The working definition of the day was clear — kingship as rule according to law in the interests of the people; tyranny as arbitrary will against those interests — but the hard question was what could be done about a tyrant, and whether one must wait for God to remove him. Henry IV did not simply seize power; he convened a committee that combed the records to draw up 33 Articles of Deposition documenting Richard’s perjury against his coronation oath (Richard had claimed the law was ‘in his own mouth’ and his subjects’ lives and property his to command), made Richard abdicate as well, and then claimed the throne through a deliberately fudged series of assertions. Because it took, it became precedent — and precedent cut both ways: a tyrant could be removed, but doing so might require pushing beyond the existing constitution. By the 1640s the Deposition Articles of 1399 were under active discussion by the men standing against Charles I. This, Castor says, is how the English constitution works: you try something, and if it takes, it gets built in.
Richard, Henry, and the arts
The conversation turns to culture. Shakespeare’s Richard II (mid-1590s) was popular enough to run to several printed editions, but the deposition scene was omitted from print because it was too dangerous: the parallels with an ageing, childless, heirless Elizabeth were uncomfortably close, and on the eve of Essex’s 1601 rebellion his supporters paid for a Richard II play at the Globe. Elizabeth herself reportedly said, ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’ Richard, Castor judges, had superb visual taste — the Westminster coronation portrait, the first-ever double royal tomb, and above all the exquisite Wilton Diptych, each placing a stunning image of himself at the centre — but was probably no reader, despite having Chaucer in his service. Henry IV, by contrast, was a reader and lover of music, less interested in images; his remarkable first-person English will opens ‘I, Henry, sinful wretch’, and his widow’s alabaster Canterbury tomb shows a man of not-quite-46 weighed down by what he had done. On why a Chaucer becomes possible at all, Castor points to English maturing into a language used across all classes — helped, paradoxically, by the war drawing cultural battle lines against France — giving the vernacular into which a genius could pour poetry.
Richard’s Ireland blunder and science fiction as a lens
Cowen likens Richard II’s personal voyage to Ireland just before his deposition to Captain Kirk beaming down himself — clearly a mistake. Castor accepts the analogy: it was a stupid mistake, but of a piece with Richard’s whole approach, since he believed he had just cut his rival Henry off at the knees, seized Henry’s inheritance, and made himself safe. He went to Ireland in person because he had enjoyed it in 1394–95, when the Gaelic chiefs prostrated themselves, swore homage, and let him leave satisfied while they carried on as before. Leaving the kingdom undefended gave Henry his opening to return from exile — not with an army, but to a people who flocked to him. Science fiction, Castor says, helps her put recognisably human people into a world whose landscape and assumptions differ from ours: she sees Richard in Dune’s Paul Atreides, the chosen one who expects to speak and be obeyed — except Richard is not in Dune, he is in England, and it does not work.
Sources, Shakespeare’s grip, and what Castor is maximising
On evidence, Castor describes joining scattered dots: no diaries survive, few private letters, but a centralised state generated vast legal and administrative records that reward deeper sifting more than new digitisation. She writes strictly chronologically because we live chronologically, building up individual psychology from fragments. She admits fighting off the vivid emotional pull of Shakespeare’s Henriad — Falstaff and a dissolute Hal are largely invented — and acknowledges it in the book by using phrases from the plays as chapter titles, then returning to the plays after immersing herself in the 14th- and 15th-century sources. Asked what she is maximising, she names two preoccupations: the psychology of her protagonists, and the functioning of power — which is why she loves the Middle Ages, where a sophisticated power structure stands in bare bones, without the modern apparatus of state, leaving individual choice and psychology exposed. Her next project is a full biography of Elizabeth I, her lodestar since she first opened a history book aged five.
See also
- Helen Castor — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Richard II — the deposed king at the centre of the conversation
- Henry IV — the cousin who deposed him
- Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World — companion CWT conversation on Tudor power, Shakespeare, and the flattening of historical figures