Rather, according to historian Helen Carr, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, it was a time of continuous catastrophe.

From the early 1300s to the century’s close, England endured a sequence of calamities so severe and overlapping, that to many it felt like the end of the world had arrived.

“The greatest human catastrophe, the Black Death, happened in the 14th century. That was also a period of famine and two major wars. I think it's reasonable that it’s been called the ‘calamitous century’.”

But while this period of a hundred years is often defined by collapse, it was also a century that laid the foundations of immense social and cultural transformations that created the framework for a better future.

A very wet disaster

The first crisis of the 14th century was brought about by rainfall of biblical proportions.

Beginning in 1315, England was struck by years of near-continuous rain that resulted in widespread crop failure. What followed was the Great Famine, a disaster that ravaged much of northern Europe, but hit England particularly hard.

Harvests failed and food stores ran dry. Grain prices soared. Disease wiped out herds of livestock. Entire villages “ceased to exist because of the famine”, says Carr, and they disappeared from the record.

• Read more | Britain's Little Ice Age

The “appalling situation”, says Carr, “often gets overshadowed by the Black Death, but the famine was pretty bad as well,” Carr explains. “It just constantly rained.”

Malnutrition made the population more vulnerable to disease, and the social fabric began to fray. In some regions, reports of theft, cannibalism and infanticide spread.

Though the rains would eventually ease by 1317, the memory of the disaster, and the collapse precipitated by it, remained stark and keenly felt. But the population would have little time to recover.

How wars and brutality abroad led to strain at home

England’s kings soon plunged the realm into another ordeal: the Hundred Years’ War.

Though the conflict formally began in 1337, its roots lay in earlier tensions between the English and French crowns, particularly over English territorial claims in France.

Edward III’s campaigns during the 1340s and 1350s became legendary for their triumphs at battles like Crécy and Poitiers, where English longbowmen routed larger French forces. But the supposed heroism often celebrated in later chronicles – which Carr describes as having been “glamourised” – came at a terrible cost for those living through it.

• Read more | 10 dangers of the medieval period

“It was appalling, what the English did in France and at the behest of Edward III,” says Carr. “Rape, torture and the killing of innocents; people's homes were destroyed. Their very existence destroyed, their families were wiped out.”

At home, the war required huge taxation and military levies. The Crown’s efforts to finance its continental ambitions stretched the economy, fuelling resentment among taxpayers, and added to the general climate of strain and instability.

The arrival of pestilence

The hardship wasn’t over. In 1348 the Black Death arrived, and it swept through the population with devastating speed.

“It completely turned the world upside down,” says Carr. “Fifty to sixty per cent of the population were killed,” as the disease left no part of society untouched; even “the king and the queen lost three children to the Black Death.”

With no effective medicine and the scale of death incomprehensible, many turned to divine explanation. The plague was seen as punishment for sin, evidence of divine wrath, or a sign that the end of days had come.

Read more | 10 shocking torture methods from medieval history

Writing in a feature for BBC History Magazine, Professor Samuel Cohn explained that “The devastation wrought by the Black Death was massive and unprecedented. Such was the Black Death’s lethal power, it’s been estimated that it took the world population 200 years to recover to the level at which it stood in the early 1340s. And this was a psychological calamity for the people of Europe, as well as a physical one.”

It was, all things considered, a cataclysmic event that shattered England– and Europe.

“It was like an apocalypse,” Carr explains. “And I think that's what people thought it was … they thought it was the wrath of God, and this was a divine punishment.”

Revolt, resistance and the rise of new voices

As the plague’s death toll slowly receded, England now faced a new type of reckoning.

With so much of the population gone, labour became scarce. The survivors of the plague were able to demand better wages, more freedom and improved living conditions. But the ruling classes attempted to clamp down.

Laws like the 1351 Statute of Labourers tried to freeze wages at pre-plague levels, provoking widespread resentment.

This tension built through the following decades, erupting in 1381 when thousands of peasants, artisans and urban labourers rose up in revolt. Marching on London, the rebels demanded lower taxes, an end to serfdom and greater accountability from their rulers. Though the rebellion – known as the Peasants’ Revolt – was ultimately suppressed, it was a moment that signified a social shift.

“The Black Death actually really is the initiator of the Peasants' Revolt,” Carr explains. It sparked “the shifting of the class system and the development of these social groups… They didn't want to be taxed as much. They wanted something akin to Magna Carta.”

For the first time in centuries, the structures of medieval feudalism faced serious and sustained challenge.

How medieval England limped through the crisis

Dragging itself through the trauma and upheaval, and limping out the other side, England survived the 14th century and emerged a changed country.

The labour shortages caused by the Black Death gave workers more autonomous power. Tenants negotiated better terms. Skilled workers gained mobility. Urban life expanded.

“There [was] no serfdom anymore,” says Carr. “With so few people, they suddenly were quite worth something and they could demand higher wages… London became much more of a commercial hub.”

Trade networks, too, became more ambitious. “There was a lot more globalisation happening,” she adds. “People were traveling, people were working seasonally.” New guilds formed. New industries grew. And novel ideas began to circulate, laying the groundwork for later shifts in politics, culture and thought.

The 14th century was a time of unrelenting horrors: of rotting crops, weeping skies, battlefield butchery and mass graves. It was an age when famine, plague and war struck in endless waves. But, Carr explains, this century of calamity was also one of incredible change that spurred on immense progress – albeit at an unfathomable cost.

This article is based on an interview with Helen Carr, speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

The Black Death

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Jo was clad head-to-toe in white overalls, wearing a face mask, and giving the human remains below her every last drop of her attention. The reasons for Jo’s great care would soon become all-too evident. The skeleton over which she crouched had lain under the soil for more than 500 years – and it would yield one of the most remarkable historical discoveries of the 21st century.

Jo could tell a few things about the skeleton as she, bone by bone, brought it into the light. This appeared to be a male, with injuries incurred at or around the time of death – injuries that could have been sustained in battle. He was aged in his twenties or thirties.

Yet it was when Jo uncovered the spine – and noticed that it was curved – that, as she later told me, the hairs on the back of her neck began to stand on end. Could this skeleton be the remains of Richard III, the monarch so famously described by Shakespeare as a “bunch-back’d toad”? It looked promising. But we had to prove it.

• Quiz | Richard III quiz: how much do you know about the last Plantagenet king?

Our first priority was to lift the skeleton and bring it back to the University of Leicester for more extensive analysis. All the while, the media interest in the project to find Richard III was picking up pace – the press and public were captivated by the possibility of medieval England’s most controversial king residing in a car park. What we were about to announce at a joint press conference by the University of Leicester and the Richard III Society would send this fascination into overdrive.

Yet we couldn’t let the media feeding frenzy distract us. While newspapers waxed lyrical about the sensational discovery of the ‘king in the car park’, we knew we just had to get our heads down and quietly and calmly get on with a rigorous investigation.

Missing for centuries

So how did we go about identifying these remains as Richard III? Well, let’s back up a bit. If you were to go missing, how would your family and friends describe you to a search team? Your loved ones would probably provide them with information such as your last known location, what you were wearing when you left home in the morning, your age, and your hair colour. The Richard III project was essentially doing the same thing – only it was attempting to solve one of history’s most famous missing person cases, and that person had been dead for more than five centuries.

As in a modern case, we had a list of what was known about Richard that would help us identify him. The king’s last known location, as evidenced by historical documents, was in the church of the Greyfriars friary in Leicester, where he was buried after his death in 1485, having been defeated by Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth. More specifically, Richard was known to be buried in the choir, a high-status part of the church.

• Read more | Alternate history: what if Richard III had won at Bosworth?

However, more than 50 years later, the friary had been torn down during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, and the land had been sold off more than once and built upon. We knew the location of the friary precinct, but the precise whereabouts of Richard’s grave had been lost to history.

Being a king, Richard’s birth and death dates were well known, so we knew he was 32 years old when he died. Shakespeare, in his plays, famously made him out to be a ‘hunchback’ with a limp and a withered arm. But Shakespeare wrote his play Richard III in the early 1590s, more than a hundred years after Richard’s death, so can only have been drawing on previous accounts of the king’s appearance, quite possibly tinged with Tudor propaganda.

• Read more | Have we completely misinterpreted Shakespeare’s Richard III?

Only two of these accounts were from people who, it seems, had actually met Richard III: one of these, John Rous’s renowned Historia Regum Angliae, described Richard as having one shoulder higher than the other. So Richard having a spinal abnormality was a possibility.

This gave us our list of characteristics to look for when identifying Richard. Crucially, we also had to put a number on how likely it was that the skeleton belonged to the king.

We started by sexing and ageing the skeleton. This can be achieved by examining the bones. For example, men’s pelvises are shaped differently to women’s. And while it’s not possible to precisely determine age at death, an examination of the teeth, skull and ends of bones allows an age range to be specified. From this, Jo Appleby and the team determined that the skeleton belonged to a man, aged 30–34 years when he died. The fact that he was male was also supported by the presence of a Y chromosome, which is inherited down the male line.

By examining the bones by eye – as well as using computed tomography (CT) X-ray scanning technology – the team, including forensic engineer Sarah Hainsworth, was also able to detect and examine 11 perimortem injuries (those sustained at or around the time of death). All of these were consistent with being made by weapons from the medieval period. Scans and a reconstruction of the skeleton confirmed the curvature of the spine and suggested that the right shoulder would have been slightly higher than the left.

Something fishy

What we eat and drink affects the make-up of the chemical elements contained within our bones and teeth. The study of this chemical mix is known as stable isotope analysis, and in this case showed that the individual had a high-status diet that had a strong marine (fish) component to it. Meanwhile, radiocarbon dating delivered a 95.4 per cent probability that the subject died between 1456 and 1530, bracketing the date of Richard’s death in 1485.

While Jo and the team studied the individual’s bones, I carried out the genetic analysis of the remains. DNA testing has the potential to unlock the secrets of a skeleton, but there’s absolutely no guarantees: DNA degrades following death, and what remains is often too fragmented and damaged to analyse. Fortunately, with our Greyfriars skeleton, this proved not to be the case.

So how exactly did we use DNA to link this particular skeleton to Richard III? DNA testing for identification purposes in this sort of case involves analysing the DNA from the remains and comparing it with that of a known, usually close, relative. But there was a problem: we didn’t have the remains of any of Richard’s close relatives to hand. The solution was to test against living relatives of the medieval king.

Yet this approach threw up a further complication: Richard himself left no known living descendants. That meant that the DNA we needed would have to come from descendants of other members of his family. And, as mitochondrial DNA is found in the eggs that mothers generate to produce offspring, we required a relative whose relationship to Richard III was by an entirely female line.

Fortunately, we already knew of one such person. His name was Michael Ibsen, and he was descended from one of Richard III’s sisters, Anne of York. Soon our researchers had traced another female-line descendant of Anne, a woman called Wendy Duldig, who also happened to be Michael’s 14th cousin, twice removed. We had our mitochondrial DNA comparators at the ready.

Then came a breakthrough moment: those comparators showed a match with the Greyfriars skeleton. Interestingly, analysis of the Y chromosome, which is passed down through the male line, didn’t show a match to the living relatives we tested.

However, I knew from my years of research in this field, that we might find what’s known as a false paternity, where the biological father is not the recorded father somewhere on the family tree: the genealogy says one thing, but the DNA tells you some- thing else has gone on!

• Read more | Rediscovering Richard III: the story of identifying a lost king

Picking a winner

It was now time to put that all-important statistical number on the likelihood of the skeleton being Richard. And to do that we turned to a method that’s widely deployed in forensic cases such as this: Bayesian statistics.

Bayesian statistics is a way of calculating the probability of something, and updating that probability by bringing in various sources of data or knowledge. An example that’s often used is horse racing. Say you have two horses, A and B, racing one another. If you don’t know anything about either horse, you might conclude that the chance of horse A winning is 50/50.

But what if we could add some more information here by counting how many times each horse has won when they’d been in a race against each other previously? What if you knew that, out of the 12 times these two horses have raced against one another before, horse A has won eight times (67 per cent of the time)? Well, knowing that, you’d say the probability of horse A winning is higher and the chance of horse B winning is only 33 per cent. Each new piece of information you add will change the likelihood of each horse being the winner.

The beauty of the Bayesian method is that it allows us to combine all the evidence together into one calculation to get a statistical number of the likelihood of the skeleton belonging to Richard III. In that, we have only two possibilities: hypothesis 1 is that this is Richard III; the second is that it’s not Richard III.

Remember we had our list of features to look for? Well each one gives us a new bit of evidence we can add to the mix and allows us to calculate what’s known as a likelihood ratio for hypothesis 1 (it’s Richard) versus hypothesis 2 (it’s not Richard).

The first count was: how often do you find skeletons from individuals in high-status parts of churches who are male and aged between 26 and 35? It’s about 18 per cent of the time, if you want to know. We did the same for each category. We looked at the counts of how often you find skeletons with scoliosis in the medieval period, how often you find skeletons with perimortem injuries in high-status parts of churches, and the likelihood of the radiocarbon date (given that we knew the friary was built in the 13th century and closed in 1538).

One piece of evidence that we didn’t throw into the mix was the stable isotope data that showed that this was a person with a high-status diet. We would expect anyone buried in a high-status part of the church to eat better than the vast majority of the population, so adding this to our calculations would, we reasoned, have unduly biased the statistics towards the skeleton being Richard. We also included the fact that the Y chromosome didn’t match.

So, what did it all show? We were lucky enough to have David Balding, a world-famous forensic statistician, on the team calculating the likelihood ratio for us. And the results David produced were, I think it’s fair to say, pretty conclusive. Even with our conservative approach, the likelihood ratio was 6.7 million to 1 in favour of hypothesis 1. That translates to a probability of between 99.999 and 99.99999 per cent that these were indeed the remains of King Richard III. We were pretty excited with the results – and, I would argue, with good reason.

Talk of the nation

We all know what happened next. Media attention intensified further still. Richard III could soon be seen staring back at readers from the pages of some of our most successful tabloids. He was name-checked in Prime Ministers Questions. Rumour has it that he even became a popular topic of conversation in the nation’s pubs! Then, on 26 March 2015, the medieval king was reinterred in Leicester Cathedral in an extraordinary ceremony that was televised around the world.

Yet not everyone was convinced. A handful of people (not one of them, it has to be said, a statistician or geneticist) still didn’t believe we’d found him. Quite often they would pick one bit of evidence (often the DNA) and say it wasn’t robust enough on its own. Or they would claim that the skeleton could have been one of Richard III’s female-line relatives.

• Read more | Richard III: latest DNA study ‘doesn’t prove bones belong to former king’

As part of our analysis, we constructed a family tree, tracing his female-line relatives going back several generations, out sideways and back down to Richard’s generation. By comparing this with historical information, we were able to show that these known relatives were either female (and so could be ruled out), or either too young, too old or too dead to have fought at Bosworth. Or they were recorded as not being at the battle.

So the only person on that tree who could have been at Bosworth was Richard himself. Beyond this, given the rarity of the mitochondrial type, the chances of someone carrying it being alive around the right time, in the right age range, known to be killed in battle, have a spinal abnormality and be buried in the choir of Leicester’s church of the Greyfriars were vanishingly small.

Our critics also seemingly didn’t realise that the beauty – indeed the entire point – of Bayesian analysis is that it allows you to combine all the strands to come up with a likelihood. To put it another way, if you were to go missing, people would describe you by such factors as your age, your height, your build and what you were last wearing. The police wouldn’t go on just one distinguishing characteristic, such as brown hair or blue eyes. Just as we did, they would identify you based on all the strands of evidence together. And the evidence was overwhelming that these were the remains of King Richard III.

Ten years on, I confess I still have to pinch myself that I was even involved in the project. I’m so proud of all that was achieved. The team that carried out the planning, the excavation and the enormous amount of post-excavation work comprised a huge number of academics and non-academics all bringing their own expertise to the table to make the project the tremendous success it was. No one person could have carried out the project on their own. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts as we came together to solve this 500-year-old cold case.

Turi King is director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath. In 2012, she led the verification team during the exhumation and reburial of Richard III.

This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

Certainly, on 15 June that year, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the archbishop of Canterbury, prime minister David Cameron and assorted dignitaries gathered at Runnymede. At the meadow by the Thames between Windsor and Staines, they celebrated the charter King John had sealed there exactly 800 years earlier.

That document, sealed under duress from rebel barons and famously subjecting the king to the law and promising justice to all, is widely lauded today as a milestone in the establishment of English law.

• Read more | What did Magna Carta mean to the English in 1215?

Yet the fact is that, in the centuries after 1215, the term Magna Carta was hardly ever used for John’s document. Rather, that was the name given to the charter issued nearly a decade later by King John’s son, Henry III, at Westminster on 11 February 1225.

Although Henry’s charter was based on his father’s, the earlier iteration was usually called simply the ‘Charter of Runnymede’. So when, in 1297 and 1300, Henry’s son Edward I confirmed Magna Carta, he meant the charter of 1225 – and the same was true of all later confirmations. Indeed, though most of its provisions have since been repealed, those chapters that remain on the statute book of the UK today are from the 1225 version.

So how did the Charter of Runnymede in 1215 become Magna Carta in 1225?

•  On the podcast | Are we celebrating the wrong Magna Carta?

Abandoned promises

At the end of 1215 any progression beyond the Charter of Runnymede would have seemed unlikely, for it appeared to be a failure without a future – quashed by the pope, at the king’s behest. It had also, in effect, been abandoned by the rebel barons. Having failed to hold the king to its terms, they had taken another route: they deposed John and offered the throne to Louis, eldest son of the king of France.

Louis came to England in May 1216, on a wave of support – but said nothing about the charter. Under his benevolent rule, he doubtless assured his supporters, it would be quite unnecessary. It was John’s death during the night of 18/19 October 1216 that transformed the situation.

The minority government of his nine-year old son, Henry III – led by regent William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, and the papal legate Guala Bicchieri – was in a desperate situation. Louis controlled much of England. The only way forward seemed to be to accept what John had rejected and Louis was ignoring.

• Read more | The real King Arthur and his Lancelot? Henry the Young King's remarkable friendship with William Marshal

So on 12 November 1216, a new version of the charter was issued in Henry’s name. The most controversial and radical provisions of the Charter of Runnymede were omitted, but the great bulk remained in place. This concession had its effect.

Though there were no immediate desertions from Louis’ side, at the decisive battle of Lincoln in May 1217 (when forces loyal to Henry III defeated an army supporting Louis), the rebel barons hardly fought very hard. None were killed; most simply surrendered. With a revised version of the charter accepted, they could believe their cause was won.

The baronial victory was confirmed by the peace settlement at the end of the war. Louis abandoned his claim to the throne and returned to France. In return, the minority government restored the rebels to their lands and, in November 1217, issued a new and improved version of the charter, accompanied by an entirely new charter regulating the running of the royal forest. It was at this point that the term Magna Carta (‘Great Charter’) was first introduced, referring not to its grandeur but to its size, to distinguish that physically larger charter from the smaller Charter of the Forest. Those two charters would now always be linked together.

With both in place, why might further changes be needed in 1225? Because the 1217 charters remained problematic. How could they be trusted when issued by a king only 10 years old and lacking his own seal? Instead they bore the seals of the legate and the regent.

There was another problem. Might it not be claimed that the charters were invalid, having been extracted from the king by rebellion? At a council meeting in 1223, that point was made by one of John’s most rebarbative old minsters, William Brewer.

Two years later, the chance arose to put these problems right, thanks to a crisis overseas. In 1224, Louis – now king of France – overran the county of Poitou. Far to the south, Gascony seemed likely to fall as well. A gigantic effort would be needed to save the English king’s one remaining continental possession – and for that, he needed money.

• Read more | 6 Magna Carta myths explained

With no reserves of treasure, the government knew that those vital funds could come only from a tax levied on the whole kingdom. They knew, too, that such a tax could never be collected unless sanctioned by a great council – the kind of assembly soon to be called parliament.

How to secure such consent? The answer was for the king to concede, in return for the tax, new versions of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest – versions that put right the deficiencies of their predecessors.

Once again, the exigencies of the continental empire played a central part in the history of Magna Carta. The loss of Normandy and Anjou in 1204, and the heavy taxation designed to fund their recovery, had been a turning point on the road to the charter of 1215. Similarly, the loss of Poitou in 1224 led directly to the Magna Carta of 1225. However, while John failed to recover his continental possessions, the great tax of 1225 did save Gascony, which remained in English hands until 1453.

Doing the deal

Two men above all were responsible for negotiating the deal that led to the 1225 charters, though acting from very different motives. They were the justiciar Hubert de Burgh, head of government since the death of William Marshal in 1219, and the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton.

For cautious, pragmatic de Burgh, the charters were simply a practical necessity. For Langton, one of the great biblical scholars of the age, they responded to deeply held ideas about the need for rulers to be limited by the law. The texts of both charters, crafted by Langton and de Burgh, had new preambles and new conclusions designed to address the anxieties mentioned previously.

In the preamble, the king (now aged 17) was said to act “of his spontaneous and good will” – a statement not found in the 1216 and 1217 charters, nor indeed in John’s Charter of Runnymede. At the end of the new charters now hung Henry’s own seal, introduced in 1218. It showed him on the front crowned and enthroned, and on the back mounted, armoured and brandishing his sword – images that encapsulated the majesty of kingship.

• Read more | Alternate history: what if Magna Carta hadn’t been written?

The conclusion to these revised charters also rebutted the charge that they had been extracted from the king by force. Rather, they stated, in return for his concessions everyone in the kingdom had granted him a 15th part of their movable property – essentially, a 15th part, by value, of their agricultural produce and farm animals. Producing some £40,000, roughly three times the king’s current annual revenue, this was the tax that saved Gascony.

The charge of coercion was thus laid to rest. Magna Carta and the Forest Charter were the result of a freely entered bargain between king and kingdom. The consensual nature of the new documents was further demonstrated by lists of those who had witnessed and, thus, affirmed the granting of the charters – unlike earlier iterations, which had no witness lists to speak of.

All the good and great of the land witnessed the charters, whatever their stance in the civil war. The witness list was headed by Archbishop Langton, 11 bishops and 20 abbots. Then came Hubert de Burgh, followed by nine earls and 23 magnates. Sensing the significance and novelty of this certification, the copy of the charters made soon afterwards at Cerne Abbey in Dorset set out the witness list in beautifully elaborate fashion, and inscribed the place and date of issue in great capital letters.

Inclusivity statement

Langton, responding to ideas about how just rule should benefit the whole community, also did something to make Magna Carta more inclusive. The concessions in the charters of 1216 and 1217, like those in 1215, had been made only to people who were free – thus excluding the unfree peasantry who made up the largest part of the population. In 1225, this changed. The statement that the concessions had been made to the free remained, but it was qualified – indeed, contradicted – by the new preamble in which these concessions were granted to “everyone in the kingdom”. Likewise, in the conclusion, everyone was said to have agreed the tax in return for which the charters were granted.

Langton moved decisively to bring in the church full-square behind the new charters. In 1215, he had felt unable to excommunicate those who contravened John’s charter, in part because it was clearly the product of rebellion. When the charters of 1216 and 1217 were issued, Langton was out of England; now, with the new versions clearly consensual, he and his fellow bishops sentenced to excommunication all who breached them. This set a precedent, and further sentences of excommunication were promulgated in 1237 and 1253, the latter with great publicity and with circulation of the texts.

Churchmen could profit as much as laymen from many of Magna Carta’s provisions but, in particular, they treasured the very first chapter, which guaranteed the freedom of the church. How right Langton had been to add it into the charter at Runnymede.

Strengthened in these ways, the 1225 texts became the final and definitive versions of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest – but they were not without flaw. Despite acting “of his spontaneous and good will”, Henry was not yet 21 when issuing the charters, and therefore underage; this defect had to be put right in a proclamation of 1237.

More serious was the fact that the charters set out no constitutional means of enforcement. The 1215 document had given 25 barons the power to enforce its provisions, but the barons were omitted from the subsequent versions, with nothing put in their place. Though the sentences of excommunication elevated the status and publicised the texts of the 1225 charters, their practical effect is unclear. Not surprisingly, there were constant complaints that the charters were being broken.

The complaints had an element of truth, but some key chapters of Magna Carta were obeyed. The inheritance tax demanded from earls and barons, which sometimes ran into hundreds and thousands of pounds before 1215, was set at just £100. For the most part, widows of barons and knights were not forced into remarriage. Justice was no longer openly sold. The Forest Charter saw substantial areas removed from the royal forest. In general, the rule of Henry III was far less abrasive and extortionate than his father’s.

• Read more | “He was not a great king but he was respected as a most Christian one”: David Carpenter on Henry III

The texts of the charters also became widely known and, thus, sank deep roots into English society. Copies were made by religious houses, magnates, ministers, knights, freemen and lawyers. Of the various versions, that of 1225 was easily the most copied.

When the 1217 charter featured, it was often amended in the light of the 1225 changes, thus including from the preamble the king acting of his “spontaneous and good will” and, from the conclusion, him making concessions in return for the tax.

Those examining the texts – and marginal annotations bear witness to intensive study – could see that Magna Carta was far more than just a baronial document. Chapters such as those regulating the levying of fines and the running of local government benefited wide sections of society. The Great Charter would never have survived had that not been the case.

What’s in a name?

By the end of the 13th century, Magna Carta was firmly established at the heart of the English polity and was well set for its long later history. Yet, on that point, one question remains: how and when did the Charter of Runnymede take centre stage and become universally known as Magna Carta?

In the early 17th century, when the lawyers Selden and Coke saw Magna Carta as a bulwark against Stuart tyranny, it was still the charter of 1225 to which they appealed; they hardly mentioned John at all. William Shakespeare himself, in his King John, made no reference to the charter.

The change came in the next century, thanks to lawyer William Blackstone. His seminal work, The Great Charter, published in 1759, printed for the first time an authentic text of the 1225 Charter under the heading ‘Magna Carta Regis Johannis’. His introduction, too, referred continuously to the ‘Great Charter’ of King John.

Blackstone, it seems, was unaware that the word Magna had originally referred simply to the physical size of the 1217 and 1225 charters compared with the Charter of the Forest; he understood it to mean ‘great’ in terms of status, and thus thought it very much applicable to the charter of 1215 – the parent, as he showed, of Henry III’s later Magna Carta. (Blackstone also printed authentic texts of the 1216, 1217 and 1225 charters.)

• Read more | Is 15 June 1215 the true date of Magna Carta? Two historians debate

Blackstone’s terminology stuck. In Bishop Stubbs’ hugely influential Constitutional History of England, published in the 1870s, John’s charter is called “The Great Charter” or Magna Carta. Likewise, JC Holt’s classic book Magna Carta, first published in 1965, was essentially about the charter of 1215.

In many respects, this seems absolutely right. Without John’s charter, as Blackstone showed, the Henrician versions would never have existed. And yet the charter of 1225, consensual in a way its predecessors were not, placed Magna Carta on new and firmer foundations. The charters of 1215 and 1225 should always march together.

This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

• Read more | 6 facts about Magna Carta

But according to Professor David Carpenter, one of the world’s leading authorities on Magna Carta, we might have been commemorating the wrong occasion all along. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Carpenter explains that at the time, people didn’t see King John’s 1215 charter as the Magna Carta at all.

“For people in the 13th century and beyond, John's charter was not regarded as Magna Carta," said Carpenter. Instead, they saw it as "the Charter of Runnymede.”

So if 1215 wasn’t the defining moment, what was? The answer, Carpenter argues, is 11 February 1225 – the date when John’s son, Henry III, issued the final, definitive Magna Carta. “And in that sense, therefore, the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta is 11 February 2025,” Carpenter explains.

• On the podcast | Are we celebrating the wrong Magna Carta?

What was Magna Carta actually about?

The 1215 charter, often hailed as a cornerstone of constitutional law, was essentially a peace treaty. It was a response to the significant grievances of England’s barons, who were furious at King John’s military failures, heavy taxation, and abuses of power.

The charter established a crucial principle: the king was subject to the law. But unlike modern declarations of rights, Magna Carta wasn’t a sweeping statement of liberty. It was a highly practical document, laying out specific limits on royal power. It regulated taxation, feudal inheritance, and legal procedures, while also talking about more prosaic matters such as fish weirs. One of its most famous clauses, still quoted today, declared:

"To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice."

Yet for all its significance, the 1215 Magna Carta failed almost immediately.

Why is 1225 important in Magna Carta’s story?

King John had no intention of honouring Magna Carta, and within months, he persuaded Pope Innocent III to annul it. Civil war erupted, and in desperation, the rebel barons invited Prince Louis of France to take the English throne.

Everything changed when John died in October 1216. His nine-year-old son, Henry III, inherited the throne, but his supporters needed to find a way to stabilise the kingdom. Their solution? Reissuing Magna Carta.

• Read more | Henry III and the Magna Carta that mattered

“In November 1216, from Bristol, Henry issues a new version of the charter,” Carpenter explains. It was a politically strategic move that intended to win back support from barons who had sided with Louis. A further revision followed in 1217, alongside a new Charter of the Forest, which regulated royal forests – a major grievance for landowners.

It was at this point that Magna Carta got its famous name. “We've got to remember that John's [1215] charter is the Charter of Runnymede,” says Carpenter. But after 1217, when the Charter of the Forest was introduced, royal clerks needed a way to distinguish between the two. “So they decide to give it the term ‘Magna Carta’. And all that means is Great Charter.”

How was the 1225 Magna Carta different?

The 1225 version of Magna Carta wasn’t just another reissue – it was qualitatively different from 1215. The key change was that it was no longer extracted from the king by force. Instead, Henry III freely granted it in exchange for taxation.

“There was growing unease over the legitimacy of the earlier versions,” Carpenter explains. William Brewer, a former minister of King John, questioned their legality in 1223, arguing: “The charters of Henry III should not be obeyed. They have no validity because they've been extracted by force.”

The 1225 version removed any doubt by explicitly stating that it was given in return for taxation. “And so no one anymore can say the king has been forced to do it. He's done it freely,” says Carpenter. This made 1225 the final and definitive version of Magna Carta.

Crucially, the 1225 Magna Carta also excluded the most radical part of the 1215 charter – the security clause. The original 1215 charter had contained a revolutionary provision allowing 25 barons to enforce the agreement, even by seizing royal property. It was, in essence, a recipe for civil war.

Because of these changes, “no later king really felt the need to issue another version,” Carpenter noted. Whenever later kings confirmed Magna Carta, they confirmed the 1225 version – not John's 1215 charter. “Even in the 17th century, when the great lawyer Edward Coke dusted down Magna Carta as a bastion against Stuart tyranny, what did he appeal to? It was still the 1225 charter,” says Carpenter.

How did 1215 take over?

So why does everyone focus on 1215 instead of 1225?

The answer lies in the 18th century, with Sir William Blackstone, an influential English lawyer. Blackstone was the first person to print all the different versions of Magna Carta together, showing how they had evolved. His decision to label the 1215 document as the Magna Carta stuck.

“He took an absolutely crucial decision,” Carpenter explained. “He called John's charter of 1215, not the Charter of Runnymede – he called it Magna Carta.”

“Such is the authority of Blackstone that it stuck,” Carpenter said. “So both in popular culture and academic writing, Magna Carta becomes essentially the charter of King John in 1215.”

However, in a twist of irony, the actual law still acknowledges the truth. “There are still chapters of Magna Carta on the Statute Book of the United Kingdom today,” Carpenter said. “And actually, on the Statute Book, it's still the 1225 charter of Henry III.”

Recognising the importance of the 1225 Magna Carta doesn’t mean disregarding 1215 entirely; the original document set events in motion. But without the 1225 version, Magna Carta likely wouldn't have survived. “Without the 1225 charter, and without putting it on a consensual basis – so it's a freely entered into bargain between king and kingdom, supported by the church – I think without that too, the charter would not have survived," says Carpenter.

Carpenter's view is that we ought to see the 1215 and 1225 charters together in tandem, but he also argues that 11 February 2025 is a good moment to reflect on the fact that the Magna Carta we think we know isn't quite the full story.

Professor David Carpenter was speaking to David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation

On 21 July, he had fought alongside his father, King Henry IV, at the battle of Shrewsbury against rebels led by Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy. The royal army had won – but the cost of victory had been high. During the battle, an arrow had pierced Prince Henry’s cheek and lodged deep in his head. He’d been lucky to survive; without urgent medical attention, he would surely soon die.

The procedure Bradmore performed at Kenilworth was a marvel of surgical ingenuity. Over the course of several weeks, the medic widened the entry wound, all the while keeping it clean and free from infection. When the hole in Henry’s face was wide enough, Bradmore used a tool of his own devising to grip and slowly remove the metal arrowhead. Miraculously, during this entire process, the prince hadn’t gone into toxic shock. Bradmore then closed and sewed up the wound. He’d saved Henry’s life.

• Read more | Why is Henry V's portrait in profile?

The operation had been complex and daring. It was also profoundly important for the dynastic history of England, the political history of Britain, and the military history of western Europe.

What kind of king was Henry V?

In 1413, a decade after Bradmore extracted that arrowhead, his patient succeeded to the English throne as King Henry V. Two years later, he was victorious at the battle of Agincourt. He was the king who realised the Plantagenet claim to the crown of France. He dragged England out of the dire condition into which it had sunk during the tyrannical reign of Richard II and the fractious one of his own father.

He dispensed justice and defended traditional religion. He used the English language as a tool to bind his subjects as a nation. And he projected a stern, unyielding, ultra-pious public image; indeed, one observer thought him more like a priest than a soldier.

Henry V was not the sort of fellow we would choose to govern us today. In recent years, some historians have depicted him as a brutal, stiff-necked prig. But his contemporaries revered and respected him, recognising that – as a medieval monarch – Henry ticked every box. He ruled for only nine years and five months, but he was England’s most accomplished king of the Middle Ages.

• Read more | Alternate history: what if Henry V hadn't died in 1422?

Clearly, the surgery that saved Henry after the battle of Shrewsbury was a sliding doors moment in history – but it was far from the only event in his youth that shaped him and, by extension, the realm he ruled. As William Shakespeare recognised, to understand Henry V we must study his experiences as young ‘Prince Hal’ – beginning with his birth above the gatehouse of Monmouth Castle at 11.22am (reputedly) on 16 September 1386, during the reign of his cousin Richard II.

How important was Richard II to Henry V?

“My God! This is a strange and fickle land, which has exiled, slain, destroyed or ruined so many kings… and which is always tainted and toils with strife and variance and envy!” These words, quoted by the chronicler Adam of Usk, were spoken by Richard II in 1399. He was then in the Tower of London, waiting to be deposed and replaced by Henry Bolingbroke – the future Henry IV.

Richard was no one’s idea of a brilliant king – other than, perhaps, his own. He had spent most of his 22-year reign picking fights with his nobles, ignoring good advice and tyrannisin g his subjects. Yet his influence on the young Henry was powerful, and threefold.

In the first place, Richard had been kind and generous to Henry. When Henry was a boy, one near-contemporary claimed, Richard was fond of telling his courtiers of a prophecy that the lad would one day become king. That prophecy, perhaps just a bit of fun to begin with, looked much more likely after 1398.

On 16 September of that year – Henry’s 12th birthday – Richard sentenced the boy’s father, Bolingbroke, to 10 years in exile following an aborted duel with the Duke of Norfolk. This had its roots in a rebellion against Richard a decade earlier. But it was also the first step towards Richard confiscating the vast duchy of Lancaster, to which Bolingbroke was the heir.

Young Henry did not follow his father into exile. Instead, Richard took him to Ireland on military campaign, effectively held hostage to ensure his father’s good behaviour. During this time, though, Richard treated Henry well, even honourably. He knighted the young lad, and praised his “valiant blood”.

Even when Bolingbroke invaded England to claim back his inheritance, Richard did not penalise Henry for his father’s deeds. True, when Richard sailed back to England to try to secure his crown, he locked his young charge in Trim Castle, north-west of Dublin. But no harm came to Henry there and, from what we can tell, the young man appreciated this point and carried a respectful memory of Richard into his later life.

Indeed, one of Henry’s early acts as king was to visit Kings Langley in Hertfordshire, where Richard had been buried after he was murdered in 1400. Henry ordered that the king’s corpse be exhumed, transported with extraordinary dignity and reburied in the tomb Richard had designed for himself in Westminster Abbey.

• Read more | Why are British monarchs traditionally crowned in Westminster Abbey?

Yet Henry gleaned more from watching his captor than simple human empathy. Richard provided an invaluable counter-example of kingship: he showed exactly how not to do the job. Richard was partisan; Henry exercised impartial justice. Richard was allergic to taking good counsel; Henry put consultation with his realm through parliament at the heart of his kingship. Where Richard was inclined towards pro-French pacifism – never a popular stance during the Hundred Years’ War – Henry was blisteringly aggressive.

The final part of Richard’s legacy to Henry is the most overlooked. Richard had a rare instinct for the performance of majesty that Henry reflected, consciously or unconsciously. The famous Westminster Portrait of Richard captures how he appeared to his courtiers: aloof, terrible and apart.

Henry paid tribute to this at his own coronation in 1413. Observers noticed a transformation come over him, so that all hint of levity left him and his manner henceforth became all “gravity and discretion”. Richard loved to perform majesty, and rarely missed an opportunity to do so. Henry thought just as hard about presenting a striking image of what kingship resembled.

After his military victories at Harfleur and Agincourt in 1415, he appeared at a triumph in London looking sombre and severe, refusing to celebrate his own achievement but giving all thanks to God. Henry’s vision of kingship was austere and pious, whereas Richard’s was flamboyant and self-serving – but they both knew precisely what they wanted their subjects to see.

When did Henry V get his first lessons about warfare?

If Richard shaped Henry’s understanding of how to ‘perform’ kingship, the boy’s father gave him an unusually good apprenticeship in the military and political business of ruling England. Henry was just 13 when he was created Prince of Wales, straight away becoming actively involved in public affairs and, above all, in warfare. This vocational training began in 1400, when his father took him on an expedition to Scotland.

This mission was not a success, and the Scots ran rings around Henry IV’s army. Nevertheless, it gave Prince Henry the chance to see for the first time the immense logistical operation that a military excursion demanded: the tons of flour, salt, wine, beans, fish, cheese and bacon needed to feed the men; the crates of arrows, crossbow bolts, axes, lances, guns and spare pieces of armour required to equip the army; and the transport and support ships involved, sporting such pious names as Trinity of the Tower and Holy Ghost.

From that point onwards, barely a year of Henry’s youth did not involve some form of warmongering. His main training ground was his principality of Wales, where his father gave him a leading role in the struggle to contain the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr.

That insurrection, which began in 1400 and rumbled on for more than a decade, was a hands-on education covering many aspects of warfare in which Henry would prove a master when he joined the fray of the Hundred Years’ War. In Wales there were castles to be besieged, including the vast fortresses at Harlech, Conwy and Aberystwyth. There were archers and men-at-arms to deploy, and new weapons to play with, including rapidly improving cannons.

The prince had to enforce discipline among his own troops and strike fear into the hearts of his enemies. The first time captives were executed on his command was during the siege of Conwy Castle, when Henry was just 14 years old. Perhaps most vital of all, he had to negotiate constantly with his father’s treasury and with English parliaments to cadge every penny of war funding he could secure in order to keep his soldiers paid. This was never easy.

• Read more | Why Henry VI’s reign was such a disaster

How did Henry V take to combat?

Henry clearly had a taste for combat from a young age. In a letter he wrote in May 1403, when the prince was 16, he related with proud glee how he had reacted to reports that Glyndŵr was looking to pick a fight.

“We took our men and went to [Glyndŵr’s] principal house named Sycharth, where we supposed to find him if he wished to fight in the manner he said,” Henry recalled. On arrival, however, “we found no man, and so we set fire to the whole place and several other houses of his tenants around”.

Captives were beheaded. The countryside was burned. This was the way of war in the early 15th century, and the young prince didn’t shy away from the brutal reality. When he became king and set his sights on the French crown, this enthusiasm for hyper-aggressive warfare – along with the practical lessons Henry had earlier learned about fighting and financing campaigns – stood him in excellent stead.

• Read more | 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Henry V and the battle of Agincourt

Even his near-death experience at Shrewsbury was a learning moment of sorts: he had commanded a division in battle and been badly injured but survived. It might be speculation, but surely not wild fantasy, to suggest that Henry may have concluded from this episode that God had saved him for a reason.

Whether or not this was so, one thing was certain: by the time Henry V succeeded his father, he had undergone an unusually long and intense on-the-job training as a warrior king of the Plantagenet dynasty. Not since Edward I nearly 150 years earlier had any English king come to the throne so well versed in the arts of war.

When he inherited his father’s crown, Henry V held many advantages besides experience. One of the most crucial was the fact that, unlike Bolingbroke, he did not usurp the throne – he inherited it. The crown was his by right of blood, not conquest – and he did not have kingmakers such as Henry Percy (the powerful magnate of north-east England who had helped the elder Henry depose Richard in 1399) demanding reward for helping him succeed.

Was Shakespeare's Prince Hal accurate to the real Henry V?

This natural privilege might have inclined some young princes towards a sense of lazy entitlement. Indeed, that is part of the popular image of ‘Prince Hal’. No aspect of Henry V’s career as prince is so well known as Shakespeare’s suggestion, cobbled together from various sources written after Henry’s death, that he had enjoyed a riotous youth, spending his time carousing in taverns with low company rather than attending to the serious matter of learning to govern.

Shakespeare’s Hal is an entertaining, amusing dramatic portrait. It is, though, more or less the opposite of the truth, which is that Prince Henry spent far more time at work than at play.

• Read more | A wayward prince? King Henry V's misspent youth

In 1405, Henry IV became seriously ill with ailments that have never been satisfactorily diagnosed. Contemporaries believed that he had leprosy; modern scholars think he may have suffered a series of strokes. Whatever the cause was, his health became progressively worse.

As his father’s condition deteriorated, Prince Henry took on greater responsibility for overseeing government. During the crisis years in Wales, he threw himself into suppressing Glyndŵr’s rebellion. Subsequently he took a deep interest in the defence of Calais, at the time an English port. In 1410 and 1411 he was almost working as a prince regent, chairing a royal council whose decisions were made with full royal authority.

In 1412, his father’s health improved and the king demoted Henry, transferring his favour to the prince’s brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence. But that proved to be only a brief dip in the grand scheme of Henry’s career.

The legend of the idle ‘Prince Hal’ derives from a combination of oblique poetic references to his sexual habits as a prince and tenuous stories from later writers. One claimed that Henry enjoyed incognito street fighting, another that he kept low company until after his coronation, when he turfed out the bad influences.

• Read more | Henry V’s greatest victory (and it wasn't at the battle of Agincourt)

None of these tales stand up well to scrutiny. There is sounder evidence for Henry’s brothers causing trouble in London’s taverns than there is for the future king doing so. Judging by Henry’s overall career as prince, he was so heavily immersed in war and government that it is hard to see when he would have found much time or energy for larking around.

When Henry was crowned king of England amid blizzards on 9 April 1413, writers indeed detected a change in his personality as he strove physically to embody the heaviness of monarchy through a new piety and severity of expression. This act was, he seemed to think, an essential part of the theatre of his coronation.

Underneath it all, however, there was little that Henry needed to change about himself. All of the hard work had been done in the 26 years that had led up to that fateful moment.

Dan Jones is a historian, broadcaster and author of Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England’s Greatest Warrior King (Apollo, 2024)

This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

The inspiration for the Missing Princes Project was the Looking For Richard Project, a research operation gathering and examining information about Richard III’s death and burial. The catalyst happened during the week of the reburial of Richard III in 2015.

The headline of a full-page article in the Daily Mail said – I’m paraphrasing – something along the lines of “it’s mad to make this child killer a national hero”.

• Read more | A ‘car park king’ timeline: the discovery of Richard III

The article then cited the traditional narrative around that story – that after King Edward IV died on 3 April 1483 (not 9 April, as was previously believed), his sons Edward and Richard were taken to the Tower of London, and said to have been murdered there on the orders of Richard III.

But there was no evidence in it. I thought: okay, maybe that take is right – but you have to go in with an evidence-based analysis and methodology. By the time I was on the train leaving Leicester after the reburial, I was putting together this new evidence-based research project.

• Read more | Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower?

Some sceptics might say that, in light of your work on Richard III, it would be hard for you to be an impartial investigator. Was that a question you had to confront?

One hundred per cent. It was something I had to come to terms with in my own mind, because the story of Richard murdering the two princes is so incredibly powerful. It’s enmeshed in our psyche, thanks to Shakespeare’s play and Sir Thomas More’s literary narrative. I had to say to myself that it’s about finding whatever we find.

The reburial of Richard III was an attempt to make peace with the past, but I think that – because of this article in the Daily Mail – it was very clear that the debate was still ongoing. In order to lay Richard III to rest, we had to see if we could answer this question either way.

• Read more | Like father, like son: Richard Plantagenet and Richard III

Is there anything that might have made you think that Richard III had been guilty of murder?

I was looking for something in the record somewhere that said the boys died, or which recorded pious prayers or observances recited for the souls of the princes. In those highly religious times, that should have been there.

What we found defied expectations – and this is the first big discovery of the project – because, in all of the day-to-day administrative accounts we studied, it’s business as usual. When either of the boys are mentioned, it talks about them in terms suggesting that they remained alive.

One of the most important areas of investigation was the battle of Bosworth in 1485, when the worlds of Henry Tudor and Richard III collided head on. In exploring that event forensically, I discovered a number of key aspects, among them the entry point into England for the story of the murder of the boys – the moment when we first see it in English accounts and documents. It arrived with Henry Tudor and his French invasion force.

• Read more | Alternate history: what if Richard III had won at Bosworth?

Henry was heading to London, because whoever holds the capital holds the kingdom, when Richard III intercepted him and cut him off at Bosworth. But Henry paused and undertook searches in the north, sending out messengers and gathering intelligence. He tried to get hold of the Yorkist heirs, and he was looking for the boys at the same time.

At that point, it became very clear that we had to widen the investigation and consider the possibility that the princes had survived.

• Richard III quiz: how much do you know about the last Plantagenet king?

What have you discovered about the fate of the two princes, Edward and Richard?

In terms of the elder boy [who became King Edward V on the death of his father], the most remarkable discovery was made in the archives in Lille, France in May 2020 by Albert Jan de Rooij, a member of the Dutch Research Group, part of the Missing Princes Project team, which involves more than 300 people around the world. He discovered a long-lost accounting receipt dated 16 December 1487, made out to King Maximilian I, who was one of the leading players in Europe – a powerful man who went on to become the Holy Roman Emperor.

This receipt is for his payment for 400 pikes, weapons for elite troops, which he collected in June 1487. It tells us that he paid for these weapons on behalf of a nephew of [Richard III’s sister] Margaret of Burgundy – the son of King Edward IV, who was expelled from his dominion. It’s very clearly telling us that this was Edward V, the elder of the princes in the Tower.

We’ve had the authenticity of the receipt checked by numerous experts. It’s signed by Maximilian’s secretary, Florens Hauweel, and names about 14 key individuals from Maximilian’s court and the court of Burgundy at the time. In another section, two other leading members of Maximilian’s court signed it and confirmed that all the details were accurate and correct. It’s quite an astonishing find.

We already know that the Yorkist invasion of 1487, ending with the battle of Stoke on 16 June, was in support of the claim by one Edward. And we know that the coronation that took place in Dublin on 27 May 1487 was for a claimant to the English throne called King Edward. Because of the receipt, we now know that this person was the eldest son of Edward IV.

But is it not the case that the boy crowned in Dublin, and for whom the battle of Stoke was fought, was claimed by his supporters to be Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick?

No. His supporters called him ‘King Edward’, and the only King Edward at this time was Edward V. The Earl of Warwick had never been proclaimed king, and was barred from the throne by his father’s attainder [the Duke of Clarence had been executed for treason].

The story that the boy was Warwick (at that time being held in the Tower of London) was put about by Henry VII and his supporters. This, we now know, was smoke and mirrors by Henry, so that he could claim that the Edward in Ireland was an imposter. He was later, by November 1487, given the name Lambert Simnel, purportedly a 10-year-old commoner, the son of a joiner, tailor, baker or cobbler.

One of the leading players at the 1487 coronation in Dublin was John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln. After the death of Richard’s son, Edward of Middleham, Lincoln was heir apparent to Richard III. So you’ve basically got the man who could have been King John II of the House of York sitting in the audience to watch this unknown boy being crowned.

We are meant to believe, according to the later Tudor stories, that he was happy to sit there and let a common boy be crowned in this highly religious, most holy of ceremonies. And Edward V was the only member of the House of York who had a greater claim to the throne than John de la Pole at that time. So the actions of such individuals begin to make sense.

Do you reject the theory that Lambert Simnel was an imposter?

I do, because we’ve now got proof of life for Edward V, in the form of Maximilian’s receipt, dated over four years after the last recorded sighting of the princes in the Tower. And everything else we’ve discovered – including in the timelines, the person of interest files, the referencing, the cross-checking – confirms that the boy crowned in Dublin in 1487 was Edward V.

What did you discover about the other prince?

The next key document discovered by the project relates to the younger of the princes, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. It’s a manuscript that was first discovered in the 1950s but was dismissed by a Dutch historian who said: oh, this is nothing – this is just the story of the imposter York – and it was just put back into the archive. But then, in November 2020, another member of the Dutch Research Group, Nathalie Nijman-Bliekendaal, came across the same docu- ment in the Gelderland Archive in the Netherlands.

It really is astonishing. This is a semi-legal document – a witness statement – written in the first person. In it, Richard tells what happened to him, from leaving sanctuary in Westminster in 1483 to arriving at the court of his aunt, Margaret of Burgundy, in 1493. It’s a 10-year account of his experiences after the death of his father.

What evidence is there that this account is authentic?

First, the information in the manuscript itself, and second, the checks we undertook afterwards. It’s a four-page manuscript that includes detail after detail about his story. Police specialists confirmed that if someone is lying, they’re loose about details, but if somebody is telling you the truth, they’ll give you detail after detail. The document names some 20 individuals – key members of the Yorkist court, and other people who would have been at the Tower of London at the time. And Richard also names 19 places he’s been.

One of the Dutch Research Group members, Jean Roefstra, went into all the administrative day-to-day accounts in Holland, looking for this individual and trying to see if he’s given any other names – for example, Perkin Warbeck, which is what he was later called by the Tudor authorities. But he couldn’t find that name anywhere – and he’s been searching for years now. The only names he could find are Richard, Duke of York, or the son of Edward IV, or the nephew of Margaret of Burgundy, or the ‘White Rose’.

The second answer to this question lies in the checks we made in terms of the authenticity of this document. All of the specialists at the Gelderland Archive looked at it and confirmed that it’s absolutely of the right period: the writing, watermarks, paper, grammar and language are all correct. They signed an authenticating document for us confirming their opinion.

We also gave it to independent specialists for the TV documentary on Channel 4, including Dr Janina Ramirez and Dr Andrew Dunning, curator of medieval manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. We can say it’s absolutely authentic, and that all of the discoveries in it are real.

How does the manuscript advance our understanding of what happened to Richard?

It’s proof of life, and it gives us his story. It tells us that he was sent to safety on the continent for a number of years by John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, with two Ricardian Yorkist retainers to watch over and look after him. He was later given the name Perkin Warbeck by the Tudor government, and was said to be the son of a boatman, born at Tournai in France. That story is false.

We’ve uncovered further evidence, too. In the Saxon State Archive in Dresden, Germany, Nijman-Bliekendaal found a receipt for a pledge of payment for 30,000 florins made to a leading member of the Burgundian court, Duke Albert of Saxony, a large sum of money, which Richard would repay upon becoming sovereign ruler of England. This document was signed by an individual who called himself Richard of England, and who was claiming the throne. It carries Richard’s royal monogram and has a royal seal, perfectly intact, with the royal arms of England and a crown.

Then another find was made in the Austrian State Archive by Zoë Maula of the Dutch Research Group. It’s a letter from Maximilian to Henry VII, mediating between the English king and Richard, Duke of York. He says to Henry that there are many signs that can’t be counterfeited to confirm that this person is who he said he is. He mentions three birthmarks on his body: on the mouth, the eye and thigh.

So we found several documents in Europe that confirm who this person was, providing ample evidence. It’s hugely compelling.

Assuming, then, that both princes survived and became known as Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, is there an argument that Richard III made a mistake in letting them survive? After all, they both went on to contest the throne

Yes – but, again, you have to go back and look at the situation in that moment. The princes were declared illegitimate by parliament and, as bastards, they had no claim to the throne.

A lot of historians in the past have said that Richard III took the throne illegally, so we aimed to discover if that was the case. We found a dozen evidences confirming that he was the legal king, which removes his motive to murder the sons of Edward IV. Killing children in those days was, as it is today, the most heinous of crimes.

In those highly religious times, it was believed that God, hell, purgatory and the soul were real, so child murder was not something that anybody would have taken lightly. Could the boys have been murdered by anybody else? I could see no evidence to support that idea.

It seems there was an attempt to remove the boys from the Tower in July 1483 while Richard III was away touring the country – and it seems that Richard then moved the princes to secure locations.

What do you think is the most likely narrative for what happened to the boys that summer?

The older brother, Edward, was removed from the Tower of London on or by 11 August. He may have travelled with John Howard to Gipping in Suffolk, the home of Sir James Tyrrell, a servant of Richard III who was later said to have confessed to the princes’ murder. Or he may have gone to the estate of Francis Lovell, another ally of Richard III, at Longdendale in Cheshire, or at some point to Barnard Castle, now in County Durham.

A key contemporary source is Niclas von Popplau, a Silesian knight who was at Richard III’s court at the start of May 1484. He tells us that he had heard that the princes were being kept at Pontefract Castle. We also know, from a treason trial of Yorkist rebels in 1486, that King Edward V was expelled from his dominion and sent to the Channel Islands before the battle of Bosworth, but then with the death of Richard III, he eventually went to Ireland.

And what do you think happened to Richard?

He was put on a ship by John Howard and sailed to Boulogne-sur-Mer. He was taken to Paris, and stayed there for quite a while with his Ricardian retainers, Thomas and Henry Percy, who looked after him. He travelled around the Low Countries and northern France for the next 10 years with the Percy brothers.

Then, following the battle of Stoke, at which the forces of Edward V were defeated, Richard sent Thomas Percy to his mother, Elizabeth Woodville, in England to make sure that she knew he was alive. He sent her messages and evidences to confirm that it was him.

Richard then went to Portugal with Henry Percy. Henry VII was by then looking for him, sending out spies to wherever Richard was. When Henry Percy died around 1490, Richard travelled to Ireland, where he was known.

A new discovery tells us that he’d been there when he was about six, and was made Lieutenant of Ireland, so the leading earls there would have met him as a boy. It’s clear that he was recognised on his return to Ireland as the younger son of Edward IV.

What do you hope to find in phase two of the project?

We know now, at the end of phase one, that the boys survived, but there are still key moments when we don’t know what happened to them, and we don’t know where they’re buried. That is what we’re now looking into during phase two. We’d really like to be able to tell the final part of their story and, one day, to honour the final resting places of these young men – or, potentially, men who died in old age.

Philippa Langley is a historian and producer, best known for her part in the discovery of Richard III in 2012. It’s a story that she told with co-author Michael Jones in The Lost King (John Murray, originally published as The King’s Grave), which was made into a film by Stephen Frears

The Charter of the Forest was a piece of legislation issued in 1217 on behalf of King Henry III, England’s 10-year-old monarch. The Charter curbed the unbridled power of the monarchy over England’s forests and reasserted the rights of the common people.

Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, England’s kings had been able to seize swathes of forest and turn them into hunting grounds, or Royal Forests, meant exclusively for their use. (It’s worth noting that at this time, a ‘forest’ was not quite what we would think of today – it could also refer to heaths, moorland, fields and even villages and towns in rural areas.) This had deeply frustrated the barons, who were unable to develop land unless the king granted them the right to do so.

• Read more | Where history happened: exploring the ancient forests of England

It also caused great misery for the common folk, who had traditionally used the forests to sustain themselves – cutting down trees for firewood and to build their huts; gathering water from streams; foraging for vegetables, fruits and nuts; and hunting the game that darted through the undergrowth.

What changes did the Charter of the Forest herald?

The Charter contained 17 clauses, which were all centred around issues connected to forest land. It drastically reduced the amount of Royal Forest, by vowing that all land that had been claimed as royal hunting grounds by Henry II, King John and Richard the Lionheart would be “disafforested” if it was not legally part of their estates. It also reinstated the forest’s status as common land, meant for the use of the community.

• Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Plantagenets

According to the Charter, “every free man” could gather firewood there and was entitled to “conduct his pigs through our… wood freely and without impediment”. Moreover, every person that resided in the forest was allowed to “make in his wood or in land he has in the forest a mill, a preserve, a pond, a marl-pit, a ditch, or arable outside the covert in arable land, on condition that it does not harm any neighbour.”

Thus, the Charter took power out of the hands of the king and returned it to the people who lived and worked in the forests. This was a watershed moment in England’s history: rights had been granted to the nobility and clergy before, but never to the common people.

How is the Charter of the Forest linked to Magna Carta?

In 1215, when Magna Carta (then called the ‘Charter of Liberties’) was sealed by King John, it included four clauses related to the Royal Forests: as well as signalling improvements to the enforcing of Forest Law, there was also a vow to turn the Royal Forests John had created back into common land, as well as the riverbanks he had claimed for his own.

• On the podcast | David Carpenter responds to listener questions on Magna Carta, the great medieval charter and its 800-year-long legacy

However, the document was quickly repealed, and in 1217 the new boy king – Henry III – issued a fresh version. This time, though, there was one major change. All four clauses relating to the forest were removed from the original document, expanded upon and put into a new charter: the Charter of the Forest.

At the time, this newly created charter was seen as just as important as Magna Carta. While Magna Carta was largely devoted to the problems that affected society’s elites, the Charter of the Forest was more useful to everyday people – most of all for those whose homes were in, or close to, a Royal Forest.

How did the Normans change the use of forests in England?

In 1066, William the Conqueror and his Norman followers totally transformed England’s forests. William brought the French tradition of Royal Forests – land that was marked out as royal hunting grounds, where the monarch could come to shoot deer and spear fish – to his newly conquered territory. These Royal Forests sprung up all over England: by 1086, around 25 of them had been created, including Sherwood Forest and the New Forest.

The kings who succeeded William continued this practice, with each monarch creating more Royal Forests. Henry II in particular claimed huge swathes of land, as he apparently found great solace in his monumental hunting grounds. His royal treasurer, Richard fitz Nigel, commented: “In the forests are the kings’ retreats and their greatest delights. For they go there to hunt, leaving their cares behind, to refresh themselves with a little rest.”

By the early 13th century, approximately one-third of southern England had been turned into Royal Forests – and those who lived in them had to adhere to the onerous Forest Law. This law was meant to protect the royal hunting ground – from the animals living there that the king would wish to hunt, to the trees that game would shelter below. Therefore, according to Forest Law, no one living on land that was designated a Royal Forest could impinge on its suitability as a hunting ground.

• Read more | Death in the New Forest: how King William II met his demise

People were prohibited from constructing buildings, hunting animals or fish, cutting down trees or bushes, and putting their animals out to pasture. The Peterborough Chronicle stated of the Forest Law: “Powerful men complained of it and poor men lamented it.” Royal foresters were tasked with making sure that these strict regulations were followed – and those who broke Forest Law often faced serious consequences.

What were the punishments for breaking Forest Law?

Punishments were often extreme: according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, King William I decreed that the killing of deer and boar in his hunting grounds was strictly forbidden, and anyone who slew a deer “should be deprived of his eyesight”. And during Richard the Lionheart’s rule, anyone who killed a deer would be blinded and mutilated – although Richard was only in England for a handful of months throughout his entire reign, and he rarely went on hunts when he was in the country.

As well as corporal punishment, fines were often imposed on those who broke Forest Law. If a royal forester couldn’t track down the individual who had flouted Forest Law, they could fine the whole community. These hefty fiscal penalties went straight into the royal coffers: John, for example, received a large portion of his income from them.

• Read more | Was King John really that bad? Yes, says Marc Morris

The Charter of the Forest lessened the severity of punishments, although the killing of deer was still deemed illegal, as they all belonged to the monarch. As the tenth clause of the Charter stated: “No one shall henceforth lose life or limb because of our venison, but if anyone has been arrested and convicted of taking venison he shall be fined heavily if he has the means; and if he has not the means, he shall lie in our prison for a year and a day.”

How long did the Charter of the Forest remain part of English law?

The Charter has the accolade of being the longest-standing statute in England’s history. On 11 February 1225 Henry III issued his final version of Magna Carta – along with a revised version of the Charter of the Forest, which is now regarded as the definitive version.

It was reissued numerous times after this, including in 1297, when Edward I reconfirmed it and Magna Carta in the Confirmation of the Charters. He declared that the two documents would become England’s common law, and twice a year they both should be read out loud in every cathedral in the land.

• On the podcast | Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough explores the history of Britain’s forests at the home of the Robin Hood legend

In 1642, the Charter was still part of law and relatively well-known, although in later centuries it faded into obscurity. The 16th/17th-century jurist and politician Sir Edward Coke reflected on the Charters: “It is called Magna Charta, not that it is great in quantity… nor comparatively in respect that it is greater than Charta de Foresta, but in respect of the great importance, and weightiness of the matter, as hereafter shall appeare: and likewise for the same cause Charta de Foresta is called Magna Charta de Foresta, and both of them are called Magnae Chartae Libertatum Angliae [Great Charters of English Liberties].”

The Charter of the Forest was only repealed in 1971, when the Wild Creatures and Forest Laws Act took its place. As part of this act, the monarchy lost its claim over “wild creatures… together with any prerogative right to set aside land or water for the breeding, support or taking of wild creatures; and any franchises of forest, free chase, park or free warren.”

What is the legacy of the Charter of the Forests today?

Even though the Charter of the Forest no longer remains part of English law, it has continued to have a huge impact – in Britain and beyond. In 2015, for instance, the UK Forestry Commission was embroiled in a case about whether sheep could graze freely in the Forest of Dean, as claimants argued that this right had been given to them by the Charter of the Forest.

And in the US, the Charter has influenced laws relating to the regulation of forests and natural resources. Forests are viewed as common lands, which can be used by all who live there – this concept perhaps finds its best expression in the country’s National Parks, which are meant to be enjoyed by all citizens. Centuries on, the Charter of the Forest continues to shape how we use our land, all over the world.

This article was first published in the August 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed

King Henry III would have said that he had given long years of peace to England, linked to an absence of foreign war. He was a pacific king as well as a most Christian one. He had none of the cruelty and irreligion of his father, King John. He gave huge alms to the poor, attended multiple masses, and, most importantly, was rebuilding Westminster Abbey in honour of his patron saint, Edward the Confessor.

Henry had accepted Magna Carta, and his financial exactions (though still resented) were far lower than John’s as a result. His critics, though, saw him as a simple-minded, naive king who had plunged into ill-advised projects, including trying to place his second son on the throne of Sicily. In his open-handed way, Henry had also given gigantic rewards to his foreign relatives, thus creating tensions at court and divisions with his English subjects.

And Henry, politically unaware, had failed to reform local government. This meant his sheriffs and judges had become increasingly oppressive. Magnates, too, had been allowed to expand their local power. If there was peace, it seemed to be peace with injustice. So when we get to 1258, there was revolution in the court of Henry, with one group of courtiers turning on another, led by Henry’s half-brothers from Poitou.

You state that Henry is less central to volume two than to volume one. Who is the key figure in this story?

The central character is Henry III’s brother in-law Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, one of the most extraordinary people to have ever dignified and defiled – at the same time – English history. He is central to the seizure of power in 1258, in which a baronial council took over the government of the kingdom in a revolution far more radical than Magna Carta.

The sealing of Magna Carta in 1215 left King John in charge of central government. He could still appoint ministers and pursue what policies he liked. In 1258, a baronial council reduced Henry to a cipher and essentially then ruled the country. Simon de Montfort was integral to that.

• Read more | Simon de Montfort and the barons’ crusade: why rebel lords waged holy war against Henry III

Montfort became even more central after 1261, when Henry recovered power. At that point Montfort left England, only to return in 1263. Between his great victory at Lewes in May 1264 and his death at the battle of Evesham in August 1265, he was the real ruler of the country. He was the first magnate to seize power and govern the kingdom. He was also the first populist leader in English history because he had a wonderful political sense of the issues that would resonate with the public.

From the word go, Montfort was highly controversial. His enemies thought he was driven by a lust for power. He also had a series of material grievances, because although he had married the king’s sister, he constantly said he had not received the lands and endowment that ought to have gone with her. Montfort saw the revolution of 1258 as remedying his own grievances as well as those of everyone else.

What made Simon de Montfort tick?

Montfort was driven by a strong sense of religiosity. One of the most remarkable things about this period, and a major theme of my book, was the intertwining of religion and politics. What drove Montfort – and in some ways, the whole reform of 1258 – was this deep feeling that the barons had to reform the realm in order to purify their own souls. They thought that to get salvation, they had to act justly themselves.

Montfort’s father had led the Albigensian Crusade (1209–18) in southern France, and Montfort, like his father, was seeking a righteous cause for which he might fight and, if necessary, die. Montfort had a political feel for the issues that would galvanise local communities. What he seized on when he came back to England in 1263 was ‘England for the English’.

• On the podcast | Simon de Montfort's medieval revolution

This is a very important period in the development of English national identity shaped, unfortunately, by hostility to foreigners. In 1263, he introduced the Statute against Aliens, which stated that no foreigner could ever hold office in England, and that all foreigners must depart, apart from those who were accepted by parliament.

Vitally, Montfort was also a great general. Unlike Henry III, he knew how to fight war and understood its brutal violence. That’s partly because he’d been the king’s lieutenant in Gascony in the 1250s, where he ravaged the lands and the crops of his enemies. He did that when he came back in 1263. In 1264, he won a battle at Lewes and, against all the odds, captured the king.

You needed huge self-confidence to fight a battle, so most people avoided them. Yet Montfort marched out of London early in May 1264 with no other aim than to bring the king’s army to battle. He did so by taking his army up onto the top of the Downs during the night, so that when the king woke in Lewes Priory he looked up and there was Montfort’s army above. They came crashing down to win the battle in which Henry, his brother and his son were all taken prisoner.

What about other key characters in the story?

One is Henry’s queen, Eleanor of Provence. She played a very important part in the politics of this period. She was far tougher than Henry. She supported the revolution of 1258 against her husband, because it got rid of the king’s Poitevin half-brothers, with whom her faction of foreigners from Savoy were at daggers drawn.

After supporting the revolution of 1258, she changed her mind and played a big part in Henry’s initial recovery of power in 1261. Antagonisms she created helped lay the ground for Montfort’s return to England and seizure of power in 1263. A year later, Eleanor was abroad after Henry’s capture at Lewes, and she gathered a large army in Flanders to invade England.

• Read more | How to be a medieval queen: the realities of being a royal woman in the Middle Ages

In the end, she ran out of money and no invasion took place. But it’s interesting what this tells us about the attitude to women in politics. Although they feared an invasion by foreigners, the medieval chroniclers commenting on these events are full of praise for the amazonian exploits of Eleanor in raising the army. That’s an indication of the scope that a woman might have to play a major part in politics.

The other great character in the book is Henry’s son, the future Edward I. From 1263 onwards, it’s Edward rather than his father calling the shots. And they are shots. Edward saw that he needed to defeat Montfort by war, not compromise.

In 1263, when Edward takes command, you suddenly feel this galvanic force driving on the king’s party and army. It’s totally different from the way Henry had acted in all his previous reign. The comparison between Henry’s lethargy and Edward’s aggressive energy is quite extraordinary.

How was the 1258 revolution against Henry effected?

It was done by violence. In the parliament of Westminster in April 1258, Henry was begging for a gigantic tax to pursue the Sicilian project. The barons said that they would give their reply on 30 April. On that day they marched in full armour into the Great Hall at Westminster. Henry came down from his chapel, and realised at once that this was unprecedented. Henry cried out: “What is this, my lords, am I wretched fellow, your prisoner?”.

Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, replied: “No, my Lord, but you must hand over the government of the country to us,” and the reforms went from there. The extraordinary thing about the reforms is that, in the end, it was not just a court revolution in which the king’s unpopular half-brothers from Poitou were expelled and the barons took over the government of the country. Instead, in wide-ranging changes to law and local government, the activities of baronial officials were made subject to reform, just as much as the officials of the king.

And that’s where religiosity comes in. Influenced by the teachings of churchmen and the example of King Louis IX of France, Montfort was far from alone in thinking that barons had a responsibility for the actions of their men and would be damned if those men acted unjustly.

What was the popular reaction to this revolution?

It’s remarkable in that here was an unprecedented revolution, demeaning the king, reducing him to a cipher, and yet everyone thought it was a good thing. The qualification is that many didn’t quite know what was happening; in some ways, it was a secret revolution. In the great proclamation explaining the council’s authority, the barons were less than explicit about it taking over the government of the country for a full 12 years, which was what Henry had been made to accept.

It could look as though the council had just a temporary brief to promulgate reforms with the king’s consent. Those who did appreciate what was going on, meanwhile, thought there was every reason for stripping the king of power, given his misrule. There’s no indication in 1258 that people believed this was an illegitimate revolution. Gradually a name for the reforms of 1258–59, ‘The Provisions of Oxford’, was introduced and they were hugely popular.

How did King Henry respond?

Henry recovered power in 1261, and that was due to a break-up of the baronial coalition. You could credit Montfort for the reforms of 1258, but you could also credit him with destroying them because he quarrelled with several of the other nobles. There was a very considerable feeling that Montfort was an extremist. There was also resistance to some of the local reforms.

The idea that these reforms should embrace the malpractices of the barons themselves was not popular with some of the great magnates. So the baronial coalition broke up and the queen changed her mind, because Montfort himself had clashed with her own party, and Peter of Savoy in particular.

• Read more | Henry III in his own words: the medieval king as you’ve never seen him before

The queen and Henry’s brother, Richard – Earl of Cornwall, and also king of Germany – masterminded the king’s recovery of power in 1261. The only baron who refused to accept this was Montfort. He left England at the end of 1261, saying: “I would rather die without land than depart from the truth and be perjured.”

Henry thought it was all over then. In 1262 he pressed on with rebuilding Westminster Abbey. He went to see his brother-in law, Louis IX in France. Unfortunately trouble was brewing at home, and for that, Henry was not entirely to blame. During the course of 1262, Edward, Henry’s son, had quarrelled with some of his leading baronial supporters, in part thanks to the influence of his mother.

A party of ex-Edwardians formed and they got together with Montfort, who came back to England in the spring of 1263. He placed himself at the head of a new movement designed to reimpose the Provisions of Oxford, linked now to the Statute against Aliens. There followed a struggle for power which culminated in Montfort’s victory next year at Lewes.

But Montfort doesn’t emerge victorious. So what happens?

After Lewes, Montfort appeared supreme. Henry was in captivity, as were his brother and his son. From May 1264 onwards, Montfort was the governor of the kingdom. His parliament of January 1265 was the first to which knights from the counties and burgesses from the towns were summoned. It was the first parliament with an embryo House of Commons. But within a few months, Montfort was dead.

He inspired huge devotion among people below him and enjoyed huge popularity in the wider political community, while at the same time antagonising equals and people who thought they were his superiors. They found his self-righteousness, his domineering ways, absolutely intolerable. The beginning of the end of the regime was when Montfort fell out with someone who very much thought he was his equal – the Earl of Gloucester, Gilbert de Clare.

The earl felt that Montfort didn’t take him seriously enough. Montfort went to Hereford to see if he could reach a settlement with Clare. But at that moment, Henry’s son Edward escaped from captivity and joined up with Clare. A large group of magnates really had had enough and once Edward was free, once he was with Clare, the regime began to collapse. That ended with the battle of Evesham and Montfort’s death.

Did the battle of Evesham end the war?

Evesham is really a turning point in late medieval politics because the clement centuries now give place to the centuries of blood, as the famous historian Maitland said. Previously in battles, great nobles were rarely killed. At Evesham, it’s all different. About 30 of Montfort’s leading supporters were deliberately done to death on the battlefield. Their surrenders were not accepted.

• Read more | How to be a medieval king: 6 pieces of advice for would-be rulers

The high point, or the low point, of this was that Montfort himself was not merely killed, but his body was horrifically mutilated. Not merely were his head and limbs severed in the manner of a traitor. His testicles were cut off, hung either side of his nose and then stuffed in his mouth.

Evesham didn’t end the war. It went on for another two years because Henry and Edward, in great unwisdom, decided to confiscate the estates of the Montfortians, while at the same time leaving them at large. That left a group of disinherited who continued the war until there was a settlement allowing them to recover their lands, although with financial penalties. By the end of Henry’s reign in 1272, the political community was coming together again.

What is Henry III’s legacy?

One aspect of Henry’s legacy should be mentioned at once. His persecution of the Jews prepared the way for their expulsion from England in 1290. But for Henry’s Christian subjects, his antisemitism only enhanced his reputation for piety. It was that reputation that helped him survive Montfort’s challenge.

Henry was never threatened with deposition, unlike his father King John. He owed much to Edward, and also to the status and institutional strengths of English monarchy. But he also owed much to himself. His reign shows that in order to succeed, or at least to survive, one did not have to be a warlike and masterful ruler. How could one depose this ‘Rex Christianissimus’, this ‘most Christian king’?

• Read more | 10 reasons why Henry III may have been a great king

Whatever its defects, the long peace of Henry’s reign was also appreciated, especially when contrasted with Montfortian war. Of course, the good relations Henry established with France, Scotland, and ultimately with Wales, did not survive the reign of his son. But the post-Magna Carta parliamentary state, anticipated under Henry, and achieved by Edward I, formed the basis for England’s late medieval polity.

Henry has also one great achievement that stands to this day, and that’s Westminster Abbey. We owe to Henry the sumptuous church where centuries of royal coronations, including the 2023 crowning of King Charles III, have taken place.

This article was first published in the June 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine

Between 1154 and 1485, a period of 331 years, England was ruled by one family. Every king during that time was a descendant in the male line of a French count, Geoffrey of Anjou, whose badge, the broom plant – planta genista in Latin – is the origin of their name: the Plantagenets.

The Plantagenet dynasty had its origin in the Loire valley, and the first two Plantagenet kings of England, Henry II and Richard the Lionheart, spent much more time in France than in England. This French connection continued throughout the Middle Ages. The body of Henry III lies in Westminster Abbey, but he commanded that after his death his heart should be interred in the Plantagenet family mausoleum of Fontevrault in the Loire valley. Richard II was sometimes called ‘Richard of Bordeaux’ from the place of his birth, while Edward IV was born in Rouen.

Despite these ties with France, the Plantagenets are England’s longest-reigning dynasty. It was their births, marriages and deaths that shaped the political history of England and much of France. They provide a perfect example of what dynastic rule meant.

Most Plantagenets, like most people in the Middle Ages, died before their 10th birthday. Those who survived – who are the ones we know something about – might live a fair bit longer. The average age at death of the Plantagenet kings was 45. The unlucky ones, like Edward V, one of the ‘princes in the Tower’, did not make it to their 13th birthday. The longest survivor, Edward I, died at the age of 68.

Sudden and unexpected deaths, either through violence, like that of Richard I, or from disease, like that of Henry V, could transform the political world overnight. From both these deaths the eventual outcome was the expulsion of the Plantagenets from most of their French possessions.

But long-lived kings presented problems too. Heirs might get impatient and fractious, while the so-called dotage of Edward III (when the king was in his 60s, a relatively youthful age) created serious problems, which affected English politics and undermined the Plantagenet war effort in France. Kings were meant to have sons, but not too many. Given the high rate of infant mortality, it was best if they produced numerous children. Edward III and his queen, Philippa, had at least 12 children; nine of these survived infancy, and five of the nine were boys. This ensured that the dynasty would continue in the male line, but it also stored up trouble for the future, with many royal descendants ready to make claims if given a chance.

But kings without sons were vulnerable – get rid of them, and there would be no heirs to fight back and pursue revenge. When Henry Bolingbroke usurped the throne from Richard II, he faced opposition, criticism and, sometimes, rebellion, but Richard had no son to fan the flames. In contrast, when Henry VI was removed by Edward IV in 1461, there was a son, and Edward’s regime was not truly secure until the killing of that son 10 years later. A son or two was the safe formula for a medieval king.

• Read more about the Wars of the Roses 

These sons became active early. Henry II, the first Plantagenet king, started as the son of a French count, but by the time he was 20, he had fought and married his way to become one of the most powerful rulers in Europe. This early start was not unusual. This was a world in which teenagers could rule. Henry’s son Richard became Duke of Aquitaine, ruling a third of France, aged 14. Edward III took control of the government, killing his mother’s lover and sending her into permanent house arrest, when he was 18. His son, the Black Prince, won his spurs at the battle of Crécy, aged 16. Richard II confronted and won-over a crowd of armed rebels when he was 14.

But, if youthful kings and princes could certainly exercise powers of command effectively, the accession of an infant was a dangerous moment. At this juncture, learned men would quote the line from Ecclesiastes 10, 16: “Woe to the land where a child is king!” Unlike earlier periods, when an adult male was the preferred successor, the rules of succession that applied in the Plantagenet centuries took no account of the age of the heir. Henry III came to the throne aged nine, Richard II aged 10, poor Edward V at the age of 12. This meant regencies, rival factions, decisions about (and by) queen-mothers, and, of course, endless negotiations about future brides.

For a dynasty to survive, it had to reproduce. And by the 11th century, in most parts of western Europe, this meant marriage as defined by the church. Earlier, more casual arrangements had been replaced or marginalised. William the Conqueror’s alternative nickname was William the Bastard, but during the Plantagenet centuries illegitimacy was taken seriously as a bar to succession. None of the numerous illegitimate children of the Plantagenets raised a claim. When Richard III decided to take the throne from his nephews, he thought it necessary to undertake an elaborate process to declare them illegitimate. Even if no one believed his arguments, he felt it a case he had to make: if the princes were not of legitimate birth, they could not be kings.

• Read more | Did Richard III really kill the Princes in the Tower?

An unusual example of illegitimate children rising high is provided by the offspring of John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford, though they needed the backing of both pope and king to be declared legitimate. Katherine was the daughter of one of the knights of Hainault who had come to England with Philippa of Hainault, queen of Edward III. Katherine had married an English knight but had also been recognised as Gaunt’s mistress.

The high-born ladies of the royal dynasty were not amused when John of Gaunt and Katherine subsequently got married. “We will not go anywhere she is,” they said. “It would be a disgrace if this duchess, who is low born and was his mistress for a long time when he was married, should have precedence over us. Our hearts would break with grief, and with good reason.” But the ladies were ignored. The children of Gaunt and Katherine were given the aristocratic-sounding surname Beaufort; they and their descendants were to be one of the most important political families in England for the next century. And Margaret Beaufort, Katherine’s great-granddaughter, was the mother of the first of the Tudors, Henry VII.

However, most ruling families used formal marriages as an essential part of their strategy and hence they became  a never-ending subject of debate, discussion and disagreement. Marriage was indeed one of the preoccupations of this dynastic world. There were always marriage negotiations going on, many leading nowhere. Sometimes this even involved babies being committed to future brides or bridegrooms. Henry ‘the Young King’, son of Henry II, was married at the age of five to the even younger daughter of the king of France. Contemporaries noted with some disapproval this marriage of “little children still wailing in the cradle”, but it brought Henry II the important border territory of the Vexin as the baby princess’s dowry.

Marriages at this social level were about power and property, especially the forging of links with other ruling dynasties. For the first three centuries of Plantagenet rule, the queens of England were all foreign, the majority of them French, indicating the central place of France in the Plantagenet world. Indeed, between 1066 and 1464, no English king married an English woman.

One of the jobs of queens was to produce children, especially sons. Because men are capable of fathering children longer than women are capable of bearing them, it was not uncommon for kings to remarry after the death of a queen. Edward I produced 16 children with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile. He then had three more when he was in his 60s with his young bride, Margaret of France.

Queens were also meant to be mediators, softening the harsh masculine power of their husbands. A famous example is Philippa of Hainault, wife of Edward III, pleading for the life of the burghers of Calais, six men from the French town whom Edward had ordered to be hanged. A less well-known example of the same queen’s intercession occurred early in Edward’s reign, when the wooden stands set up for Philippa and her ladies to watch a tournament collapsed. No one was badly hurt, but the carpenters would have suffered if she had not pleaded for mercy with her husband.

And queens were often fierce champions of the rights of their sons. The Plantagenet dynasty owed its crown to the determined and persistent efforts of Matilda, daughter of Henry I, who never gave up the fight until her son, the future Henry II, was recognised as heir to the English throne. She was never queen, but she kept the title ‘empress’ from her first marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, and she lived for 13 years after Henry’s accession with her status as the king’s mother.

In the last decades of Plantagenet rule, it was Margaret of Anjou, queen of the disabled Henry VI, who led the struggle for the rights of their son, Edward, Prince of Wales. She was described as “a great and strong laboured woman”. At the low point of their cause, Margaret lobbied persistently for French support, and even agreed to an alliance with the Earl of Warwick, a former chief enemy who had fallen out with the Yorkist side. But the apparent triumph of 1470, when Warwick put Henry VI back on the throne, was followed by the crushing defeat of 1471, the deaths of Warwick, Edward Prince of Wales and Henry VI. Margaret was a prisoner but, with the death of her son, no longer had a cause for which to fight.

For the sons who did not succeed to the throne, some kind of provision had to be made. And it could be spectacular. In several cases, the younger sons of the Plantagenet dynasty aimed at crowns for themselves: John, son of Henry II, was meant to be king of Ireland and was sent a peacock crown – although he had to settle for ‘Lord of Ireland’ instead, a title the kings of England bore down to the time of the Tudors, when it was upgraded to ‘King of Ireland’.

• On the podcast | Robert Bartlett explores how medieval royal families sought to retain their grip on the throne

Edmund, son of Henry III, was, famously, proposed as king of Sicily, although the only result of this scheme was an explosion of resentment among the English baronage and the civil war of 1264–65. John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, claimed and fought for the crown of Castile. The only one actually to establish himself on a distant throne, however, was Richard of Cornwall, the younger brother of Henry III, who became ‘King of the Romans’ – which meant Holy Roman Emperor elect – and was crowned in Charlemagne’s old capital of Aachen.

Dynasticism was characterised by ambitions that extended far beyond the boundaries of states. Dynasties looked out for their family interests, not for those of a nation or people (insofar as these can be said to have ‘interests’). And the horizons of the Plantagenet dynasty extended well beyond England and France. Richard the Lionheart conquered Cyprus, establishing what was to be the most long-lived of the Crusader states, and Edward I was knighted not in Westminster or Windsor, but in Burgos, on the occasion of his marriage to Eleanor of Castile.

Edward named one of his sons Alfonso, and this child was for many years his heir apparent. If Alfonso had not died at the age of 10, Edward I might have been succeeded by Alfonso I and English naming patterns could have been different to this day, with Alfonso as normal a name as Edward.

In a dynastic world, everything hung on the thread of a vulnerable human life. This life might be wiped away by illness at any time. Or it could be unbalanced, as in the case of Henry VI, whose mental illness came upon him in the summer of 1453. It is sometimes thought that Henry’s madness can be traced to his maternal grandfather, Charles VI of France, but they had very different forms of illness. Charles had remarkable fantasies, such as the belief that he was made of glass and so might break, but Henry simply slumped into a stupor, failing to register even the birth of his only son.

Sudden sickness and madness were part of the uncertainty about the succession – a recurrent anxiety in the dynastic world. Naturally, people sought out methods to diminish that uncertainty and to have guidance for the future. Some of these methods were dangerous, as Eleanor Cobham found out. Eleanor had married Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, brother of Henry V, in 1428. She had been his mistress for some years, and once he had his first marriage annulled, she was able to become his wife. After the death of his older brother, Humphrey was next in line for the throne. If Henry VI died, Humphrey would be king and Eleanor queen.

Eleanor was perhaps unwise. She consulted two astrologers to see whether the young king would live and obtained potions from a wise woman to help her conceive – she could be the mother of kings. The astrologers – both of them respectable and learned men – told the duchess that Henry VI would suffer a life-threatening illness in the summer of 1441.

The events of that summer were in fact very different. Duke Humphrey had his enemies, as well as his ambitions, and they saw their chance when they heard that his wife had been dabbling in magic and getting predictions of the king’s illness or death. In July 1441 Eleanor was arrested and tried on charges of necromancy. She admitted that, in order to help her become pregnant, she had obtained potions from ‘a wise woman’ – a phrase that her accusers would interpret without a doubt as ‘a witch’. She was forced to repent her errors. One of Eleanor’s astrologers died in the Tower of London, the other was hanged, drawn and quartered. The ‘wise woman’ she had consulted was burned alive. Eleanor herself had to do penance, walking barefoot to the church, was divorced from Duke Humphrey and spent the remaining 11 years of her life a prisoner in remote and windy castles. She was never the mother of kings.

But another permanent threat was simple physical violence in this complex, brutal world. In the medieval period there were 58 male descendants of Count Geoffrey of Anjou (excluding those who died as babies). Of these, 23 died through violence – 16 of them (almost three-quarters) in the 15th century, the last century of Plantagenet rule.

This century clearly belongs to what the great medievalist Maitland called “the centuries of blood”, after an earlier period when the upper classes had been relatively less bloodthirsty in their feuds. And this bloodletting marked the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, as Henry Tudor picked up the bloody crown at Bosworth field. But it was certainly not the end of dynastic politics.

Robert Bartlett is Wardlaw professor of medieval history at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton UP, December 2012)

This article was first published in the December 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine

Meanwhile, in the Lady Chapel behind, tucked away and noticed by almost no one, is a small wooden pew-end representing Henry V’s successor, and only child, Henry VI. Can anything more aptly demonstrate the reputations of this father and son? Henry V loomed over his offspring from the grave, and in his father’s shadow Henry VI grew up stunted, emotionally and politically.

• Read more | Henry V's reputation: 5 facts you might not know about the king's softer side

On the 600th anniversary of his death, Henry V’s triumphs are still rehearsed in productions of the eponymous Shakespeare play. His appears to be the ultimate underdog success story. Eldest son of a Lancastrian usurper, Henry V united England to claim the French throne, overcame substantial odds to win the battle of Agincourt in 1415, and was rewarded at the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, where he was named heir to the French kingdom and married Princess Catherine of Valois. Revered as “the flower in his time of Christian chivalry”, he died on campaign, aged 35 in 1422, leaving a nine-month-old son who shortly after was proclaimed King Henry VI, of England and France.

Henry VI’s life also gained Shakespeare’s attention, but in the three plays bearing his name he is an insubstantial figure with few lines, completely overshadowed by more dynamic characters, chief among them his queen, Margaret of Anjou. Where Henry V’s reign is a litany of triumphs, his son’s reads like a top trumps of failure: he lost the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, was twice imprisoned by his Yorkist rivals and died, almost certainly murdered, in the Tower of London shortly after his only child had been hacked to death in battle.

But if we peer beyond the lustre of the father and misfortune of the son, a more complicated image emerges: there is much to praise in the character and priorities of Henry VI, and a good deal reprehensible in the actions of Henry V. Most damningly of all, many of the failings of Henry VI can be traced back to his father. Although Henry VI reaped a bitter harvest for his people, it was Henry V who sowed the seed.

• Read more | Why is Henry V's portrait in profile?

Lover and fighter

The defining difference between Henrys V and VI can be summed up in a single word: warfare. Henry V was first and foremost a soldier, witness to military campaigns from the time he was 11 and left with a disfiguring scar when struck in the face by an arrow in his first battle, aged 16. The primary focus of his energies was gaining the French throne by military force.

Henry VI, by contrast, was an out and out pacifist. In the cause of peace, he chose his queen, sacrificed bellicose advisers and surrendered vital bargaining chips to the French. Although Henry VI was willing to don armour and ride to battle, he never once raised his sword against an enemy, and his first experience of military violence came in his 34th year, when he watched impotently as his leading supporters were butchered in the streets of St Albans.

Henry V’s military activity provided common experience and a focus for loyalty with his peers and subjects. It made them, to quote Shakespeare, a “band of brothers”, winning Henry fame and his subjects glory.

• Read more | A wayward prince? King Henry V's misspent youth

Henry VI was trained for warfare by a military veteran and kitted out with weapons and armour as a child. He even rode a courser (warhorse) from the age of three. Yet the only time he visited France was for his coronation as a 10-year-old. Military leadership was always deputised to a noble kinsman.

Why, then, did the son not become a formidable military leader in the mould of the father? After all, the Hundred Years’ War was far from over. The answer is a question of nature but also, importantly, of nurture. Henry V was extraordinarily fortunate in his upbringing, and in many ways his formative years and ultimate monarchical successes mirror those of Henry VI’s Yorkist rival and successor, Edward IV. Both Henry V and Edward hailed from families with many sons. This meant they were expendable, and therefore benefited from being allowed to witness lordship and warfare first hand.

By contrast, Henry VI was an only child in the utterly unprecedented position of governing two realms, as a baby. His life was so precious that it could not be endangered by proximity to war. Henry VI’s insecurity was exacerbated by biological factors beyond his control: despite marrying and producing illegitimate children, none of his Lancastrian uncles had legitimate offspring, which meant that until 1447 his closest heir was the 50-something Duke of Gloucester, and after that, his distant cousin Richard, Duke of York. If Henry died fighting in France, as his father had done, the Lancastrian line would die with him.

Nonetheless, if Henry VI had really wished to lead an army, he could have done so. The teenage king Henry VIII insisted on riding to war early in his reign, despite lacking brothers or an heir. Indeed, more than once in the reign of Henry VI, preparations were made for him to cross the Channel in force before royal command was delegated elsewhere, and when the Lancastrian throne was threatened by internal rivals it would have greatly bolstered Henry’s cause if he had personally fought alongside his men.

Henry V knew the power that the presence of the king in the field could hold. At Agincourt, the French noblemen were numerous but their king, Charles VI, was too mentally unwell to attend. By contrast, Henry V was, according to a contemporary English chronicler, “the first to charge the enemy… giving his men in his own person brave examples of daring as he scattered the enemy ranks with his ready axe”.

• Read more | Henry V’s greatest victory (and it wasn't Agincourt)

Henry V’s dominant leadership was a major factor in English victory, but there was a dark side to warfare that never sat well with the pious Henry VI. He never forgot that his father’s “glorious” French wars had unleashed suffering on both sides of the Channel. Indeed, by modern standards some of Henry V’s military choices rank as atrocities. After Agincourt, he ordered that prisoners of war be murdered.

And it was not merely enemy combatants who suffered. Innocent women and children were starved to death during Henry V’s five-month siege of Rouen in 1418 and 1419. Even his direct contemporaries found some of the king’s actions excessive. An English eyewitness at Rouen described with pity: “A child of two years or three going about to beg its bread, [as] father and mother both were dead… And women holding in their arms dead children… and the children sucking in their pap within a dead woman’s lap.”

• Read more | Henry V: the cruel king

Two years after Agincourt, another (anonymous) Englishman commemorated Henry’s victory in ambiguous terms: “Our England, therefore, has reason to rejoice and reason to grieve. Reason to rejoice [in] the victory gained and the deliverance of her men, reason to grieve for the suffering and destruction wrought in the deaths of Christians.”

This was the true face of medieval war, and it was a reality that Henry VI could not stomach. In this, he was far from alone. By the time his father died, the English were sick of conflict, being already 85 years into the Hundred Years’ War. It was increasingly difficult to extract taxes to pay for military campaigns from a parliament that felt the war offered little advantage to Englishmen. The sheer scale of the bloodshed was starting to be questioned.

By 1439 it was claimed that more men had died in the century of warfare than were alive now in both kingdoms. As a member of Henry VI’s council (or the king himself) observed: “So much Christian blood shed that it is [both] a sorrow and a horror to think or hear it.”

In 1440, aged 18, Henry VI marked his accession to adult rule – which had been slowly proceeding since 1437 – with two statements of intent. He founded Eton College and shortly thereafter another at Cambridge, becoming the first king to create his own educational establishments. And he took the first step towards peace with France, defying his father’s last wishes by freeing the French prisoner of war, Charles, Duke of Orléans. Orléans had been pulled from a pile of corpses on the battlefield at Agincourt 25 years earlier – and his release had been expressly forbidden by Henry V. Flouting the late king’s will yet further, Henry VI suggested to one of his negotiators with France that in return for an alliance, he would surrender the French crown.

Henry’s peace policy was so audacious that it divided public opinion and alienated his closest advisors. His uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, declared it was “the greatest sign of infamy that ever fell to [the king]… or to [his] noble progenitors”, and that he “would rather die” than accept it. Henry VI was at pains to emphasise that his new peace policy was the natural continuation of his ancestors’ wars. They, too, had ultimately negotiated peace – Henry V’s Treaty at Troyes was a case in point. But his subjects were not appeased. And worse was to follow.

Ceding territory

Henry VI was right that a grand gesture was required to end the Hundred Years’ War – but his judgment was poor on exactly what that gesture should be. Having freed Orléans, he then married the impoverished French noblewoman Margaret of Anjou to please her uncle, Charles VII of France, and ceded the hard-won territory of Maine in the process. He lost control of his disgruntled garrisons in France, giving the wily Charles VII justification for military vengeance. The result, ultimately, was the loss of all Henry’s French territories, including some that had been held by the kings of England for centuries.

This was one of several instances in which Henry’s good intentions, but poor judgment, proved his undoing. He was honest to a fault, politically naïve, generous in the extreme. In a king, such virtues became vices. He failed to match his rivals for guile and was horrified by what he considered their treachery in abandoning alliances with England.

In his own realm, Henry rewarded servants and overlooked wrongdoing in his supporters. When asked for favour, he invariably showed it, without considering the consequences. In the most notorious instance of his absent-minded liberality, he gave the same West Country title to two men at once, inciting a decades-long civil war. His constant desire was to avoid conflict. Where he had a choice between something right but difficult, or wrong but easy, he always chose the latter.

• On the podcast | Lauren Johnson discusses the life and reign of Henry VI, whose decades on the throne coincided with the disaster of the Wars of the Roses

The cause of this character fault is to be found in his childhood. It had taken an extraordinary collective effort by the ruling elite of England to ensure Henry V’s son inherited England peacefully. There had been boy kings before – the last, Richard II, was crowned at the age of 10 half a century earlier. But there had never been a baby king of England. While who should rule was never in question, how they should rule was, and the resulting factionalism dividing Henry’s council was to blight his childhood.

Henry VI had a superfluity of uncles and mentors, each with their own ideal of government. His great uncle, Archbishop (later Cardinal) Henry Beaufort, led a band of noblemen and bishops who favoured a royal council; his eldest uncle John, Duke of Bedford, sought to rule France and act as protector over a council in England; and his youngest surviving uncle, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, craved the regency of England solely for himself.

• Read more | The miraculous afterlife of Henry VI

These were powerful men, the wealthiest and most influential of the realm, and reconciling their conflicting demands would have been challenging for an adult king. It proved insurmountable for Henry. Time and again during his childhood he was called upon to witness public peace-making between his uncles, only for cohesion to collapse in private. Bedford was often abroad fighting Henry’s wars, leaving Cardinal Beaufort and the Duke of Gloucester to scrap things out between them: in parliament, palaces and even the streets of London, where tensions once escalated to such an extent that armed men faced off across London Bridge.

Gloucester was the first to realise that Henry’s essentially pliable nature made him susceptible to coercion, and tried to motivate his nephew into assuming power early so he could rule through him. This led to a bewildering face-off between king and council, where the adolescent monarch was told, with all possible respect, that he simply wasn’t up to the job of ruling yet.

The encounter compounded the sensitive Henry’s mistrust of his own judgment, encouraging his instinct to delegate authority to one leading courtier after another: first Gloucester, then the generally despised Duke of Suffolk, the unfortunate Duke of Somerset under whom France was lost, and eventually his queen, Margaret of Anjou.

The fatal flaw

But Henry V must share some of the blame for the problems of his son’s reign. In 1422, as he lay dying in France, physically wasted by camp sickness but still mentally acute, Henry V added codicils to his will that dictated how his successor should fight the French war. Those deathbed directions held his successor hostage for 20 years, leaving no room for his son and his advisors to manoeuvre, even as circumstances changed beyond the late king’s foresight.

Had Henry V lived, he almost certainly would have adapted his policy, as Henry VI was forced to do. But leaving no latitude in his directions, Henry V effectively stymied Lancastrian government. Henry V’s decision to lead his armies in person at the sickness-ravaged siege of Meaux was also disastrous to his regime. It directly caused his death, and left his infant son without kingly example or paternal protection.

This proved to be Henry VI’s fatal flaw. Because he never met his father – who departed to France during Queen Catherine’s pregnancy – Henry VI never witnessed kingship in action. He never even saw true leadership first hand, since those ruling on his behalf took pains to defer to him in public. His exempla were biblical figures and historical kings, but he never learned how to temper the ideals of kingship with the realpolitik of medieval rule.

• Read more | The miracle of Henry VI: how the weak medieval king became a 'saint'

If Henry V had lived to have more sons, and to offer an example to his heir, things could have been different. He would have been beset by the same troubles as his son. Charles VII would have raised an army against him. Continental intrigues and English infighting would have bedevilled attempts at peace. The English treasury would have been drained to breaking point. Henry V was lucky, then, to die at the height of his powers, ensuring his lasting fame.

Had Henry VI died in spring 1453, when his wife was pregnant, French lands being reclaimed, talk of a fresh invasion led by the king himself on the wind, and parliament pliable, we would remember him considerably more kindly. Instead, he died a prisoner of Edward IV, aged 49, shabby and bearded, teeth ground down by years of anxiety, having lost almost everyone he cared about – most of them violently. As William Shakespeare recognised, Henry V’s life story is a glorious history because of how it ended, just as Henry VI’s life was a tragedy.

Lauren Johnson is a historian and writer. Her books include Shadow King: The Life and Death of Henry VI (Head of Zeus, 2019)

This article was first published in the September 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine