Notes — Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities

Notes on Helen Castor in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/helen-castor/), 23 July 2025.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? An account of how late-medieval English kingship actually worked, built around Castor’s dual biography The Eagle and the Hart of Richard II and Henry IV — two kings born the same year, 1367. The conversation moves from the machinery of a state that was Europe’s most centralised yet held no monopoly of force, through the incentives binding nobles and Parliament to the Crown, to the constitutional crisis of 1399 when a tyrant was deposed, and closes on how Castor uses Shakespeare and science fiction to recover the psychology of medieval people.

Q2 — How is it argued? Through the functioning of power made visible in individuals. Castor reasons from concrete documentary evidence — the two faces of the royal seal, the 33 Articles of Deposition, Henry IV’s first-person will, the Wilton Diptych — to general claims about kingship, and repeatedly stresses that she writes chronologically to reconstruct individual choice rather than eagle-eyed structural change. Her method is biographical and psychological: power in bare bones, inhabited by particular people.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? Well-grounded on the institutional and documentary specifics she is trained in — centralisation, the enforcement problem, the mechanics of the 1399 deposition, the Shakespearean source-chain through Holinshed and Hall. Her counterfactual claims (that a competent successor to Henry V might have traded the French crown for secure territory) are argued as live historiographical debate rather than settled fact, and she flags them as such. [?] The claim that England was ‘the most centralised state in Europe’ is stated as established consensus but not independently sourced in the conversation.

Q4 — What of it? A transferable model of political history that reads institutions through the individuals who inhabit them, and a vivid case study in how precedent forms — the 1399 deposition becoming a resource invoked against Charles I two and a half centuries later. It gives the wiki its first sustained treatment of medieval English governance and constitutional development, and pairs naturally with the Tudor material in Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World on Shakespeare, power, and the resistance of historical figures to hero/villain sorting.

Glossary

Hundred Years’ War — the intermittent 1337–1453 conflict between England and France over territory and the French crown; fought almost entirely on French soil, financed through parliamentary taxation, and understood by the English as broadly ‘defensive’ when it went well. [§ On why nobles obeyed and why Parliament paid for France]

Duchy of Aquitaine (Gascony) — the vast south-western French territory the English crown acquired through Eleanor of Aquitaine, held for roughly 300 years until lost in 1453; the source, among other things, of England’s Bordeaux wine. [§ On Hundred Years’ War counterfactuals]

County posse (power of the county) — the medieval mechanism of enforcement by which a sheriff could raise armed men quickly through the private landed hierarchy, since the Crown itself had no police or standing army. [§ On what medieval government could and could not do]

Tyranny (contemporary definition) — a king ruling not according to law but by his own arbitrary will and against the interests of his people, as against legitimate kingship defined as rule according to law in the people’s interest; the working distinction contemporaries applied to Richard II. [§ On the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV]

Deposition Articles of 1399 — the 33 articles Henry IV’s committee compiled from the records to justify removing Richard II, centred on his perjury against his coronation oath; cited by historians and, in the 1640s, by opponents of Charles I as constitutional precedent. [§ On the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV]

Wilton Diptych — a small, exquisite portable devotional painting commissioned by Richard II, placing an image of the king at its centre; Castor’s exemplar of Richard’s superb visual taste and his preoccupation with the iconography of his own kingship. [§ On the artistic works from (or inspired by) the period]

Key claims by section

On what medieval government could and could not do [§ On what medieval government could and could not do]

Late-14th-century England was the most centralised state in Europe, a legacy of the 1066 Conquest and of Henry II’s late-12th-century need to govern an empire in his absence. [?]
The king’s role had two faces, shown on his seal: lawgiver and judge on one side, armoured defender of the realm on the other; funding the second required Parliament, which consented to taxation and made statute law.
Government lacked a monopoly of force — no police, no standing army beyond the Calais garrison — so enforcement ran through the private hierarchy of great landowners and their control of the men on their land.

On why nobles obeyed and why Parliament paid for France [§ On why nobles obeyed and why Parliament paid for France]

Nobles obeyed from pragmatic interest — the king was the keystone of the hierarchy that made them powerful, a referee letting them compete safely within the rules — and from sacred obligation, since the king was anointed by God and resistance imperilled the soul.
Parliament frequently refused funds and this was real leverage; the king could tax only by showing that defence of the realm (defined broadly) required it.
The Hundred Years’ War, fought in France, counted as ‘defensive’ in that it claimed territory the king held to be rightfully his, produced booty and reward, and kept the fighting away from England.

On Hundred Years’ War counterfactuals [§ On Hundred Years’ War counterfactuals]

Historians dispute whether England could realistically have held a large part of France, and whether war shaped the English state into a ‘war state’.
Castor thinks the outcome was contingent: had Henry V not died young in 1422, or had a competent king (not his infant, later nonentity, heir) succeeded him, England might — like Edward III — have traded the maximalist claim to the French crown for secure retention of territory. [?]
Instead England kept the empty claim (unsurrendered until 1801) but lost nearly all the land, including 300-year-held Aquitaine.
She sees no great gulf between a ‘war state’ and a ‘law state’: effective kings governed well at home and managed defence abroad, and the two went hand in hand (Edward III, Henry IV).

On the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV [§ On the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV]

Richard II and Henry IV matter because they forced the realm to confront where kingship shaded into tyranny, and what could be done about a tyrant short of waiting for God to remove him.
Henry IV did not simply seize power: he convened a committee that combed the records for 33 Articles of Deposition documenting Richard’s perjury against his coronation oath, made Richard abdicate as well, and claimed the throne through a deliberately fudged series of assertions.
Because it took, 1399 became a double-edged precedent — a tyrant can be removed, but removing him may require pushing beyond the existing constitution — and the Deposition Articles were under active discussion by opponents of Charles I in the 1640s.

On the artistic works from (or inspired by) the period [§ On the artistic works from (or inspired by) the period]

Shakespeare’s Richard II was popular in print but its deposition scene was omitted as too dangerous, given uncomfortable parallels with an ageing, childless, heirless Elizabeth; Essex’s supporters paid for a Richard II play before the 1601 rebellion, and Elizabeth reportedly said ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’
Richard II had superb visual taste (Westminster coronation portrait, first-ever double royal tomb, the Wilton Diptych — each centring an image of himself) but was probably no reader, despite employing Chaucer.
Henry IV was a reader and music-lover, less interested in images; his remarkable first-person English will (‘I, Henry, sinful wretch’) and his careworn Canterbury alabaster tomb show a man weighed down by what he had done.
A Chaucer became possible because English matured into a language used across all classes — helped, paradoxically, by the war drawing cultural lines against France — giving a vernacular for poetry (Gower, Langland, and anonymous poets besides).

On whether Richard II pulled a Captain Kirk [§ On whether Richard II pulled a Captain Kirk]

Richard’s personal voyage to Ireland in 1399 was a stupid mistake, but of a piece with a whole approach that assumed he had made himself safe by cutting down his rival Henry and seizing his inheritance.
He went in person because he had enjoyed his 1394–95 visit, when Gaelic chiefs swore homage and let him depart satisfied while carrying on as before; leaving England undefended gave Henry his opening to return from exile to a people who flocked to him.
Castor uses science fiction (Dune’s Paul Atreides as the chosen one) to render medieval people as recognisable humans holding narratives of destiny that did not, in Richard’s case, survive contact with England.

On the original historical sources of the period [§ On the original historical sources of the period]

No diaries and few private letters survive, but the centralised state produced vast legal and administrative records; new understanding comes more from deeper sifting and fresh questions than from digitisation or dramatic new finds.
Castor writes strictly chronologically because we live chronologically, building individual psychology cumulatively from fragments and filling documented gaps (e.g. the kings’ education) by inference from family and later character.

On how Shakespeare influences our understanding of history [§ On how Shakespeare influences our understanding of history]

Shakespeare’s portrait of Richard II is astonishingly fine, though more articulate than the historical record supports; Henry gets the ‘short straw’, flattened into a grey careworn figure once Shakespeare’s interest shifts to Hal.
Shakespeare worked from Holinshed’s and Hall’s chronicles, which themselves drew on the medieval sources; Castor acknowledges the plays’ emotional grip by using their phrases as her chapter titles, then returns to them after immersing herself in the primary sources.

On what motivates Castor’s scholarship [§ On what motivates Castor’s scholarship]

She is preoccupied by two things: the psychology of her protagonists (getting inside their minds) and the functioning of power.
The Middle Ages attracts her because a sophisticated power structure stands there in bare bones, without the modern apparatus of state, so that individual choice and psychology are unusually exposed.
She left academia partly for geography and partly to write narrative, individual-focused history rather than the analytical academic mode; her next book is a full biography of Elizabeth I, her lodestar since age five.