Speaker

Helen Castor

Helen Castor

British historian of medieval and Tudor England, and a BBC broadcaster. She taught history at the University of Cambridge (Sidney Sussex College) before leaving academia to write narrative history for a general audience, and is the author of Blood & Roses (2004), She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (2010), Joan of Arc: A History, and The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (2024).

Castor writes biography rather than structural history: her subject is the functioning of power as it is inhabited by particular individuals, and her method is strictly chronological, reconstructing the psychology of her protagonists from fragmentary evidence. The Eagle and the Hart sets Richard II and Henry IV — two kings born the same year, 1367 — side by side to trace how their personal choices became constitutional precedents. She left Cambridge partly for family geography and partly because she wanted to write immersive narrative history focused on individuals rather than the analytical academic mode. Her next project is a full-length biography of Elizabeth I, her stated ‘historical lodestar’ since childhood.

Core positions

  • Reads power through the individuals who inhabit it. She is drawn to the Middle Ages because a sophisticated structure of power stands there ‘in bare bones’, without the modern apparatus of state, so that individual choice and psychology are unusually exposed and decisive.
  • Sees the English constitution as sedimentary, not designed. The 1399 deposition of Richard II shows how precedent forms — ‘you try something, and if it takes, then it gets built in’ — and how defending a constitution may require going beyond it, a precedent later invoked against Charles I.
  • Treats medieval kingship as a real but constrained office. England was Europe’s most centralised state yet held no monopoly of force; royal authority worked only by tapping the private landed hierarchy, and Parliament’s power over taxation was genuine leverage.
  • Uses Shakespeare and science fiction as reading tools. She acknowledges the emotional grip of the Henriad by titling chapters with lines from the plays, while steeping herself in the primary sources, and reaches for Dune and Asimov to render medieval people as recognisable humans in an alien world.

In the wiki