Review: The Plantagenets by Dan Jones

Marvelous narrative history with everything you could want in a story: romance, lust, betrayal, conflict, odd personalities, heroes, and scoundrels.

As familiar as the story might be of the relationship between Beckett and Henry II, it was a reminder to me how little has changed: the church still battles the secular for primacy. 

I was quite unfamiliar with the reign of Edward I, especially his campaign against the Welsh and the use of the Arthruian legends to diminish the value of the traditional Welsh stories. He stitched the Arthurian legends into Plantagenet family lore. The campaigns against the Welsh were innovative. Edward insisted that roads be widened to 200 feet and trees and gullies and ditches be flattened so as to prevent attacks by the Welsh who were used to harassing his baggage trains and army with guerrilla tactics. He surrounded the Welsh major cities with rings of castles, many of which still stand and are remarkable in that they were designed for offensive as well as defensive use having abandoned the traditional keep for concentric towers connected by rings of walls and no central strong point. (Lots of pictures of these marvelous constructions on the Internet.) He also invented the arrow slits that gave excellent fields of fire to those inside at very little risk to the archer. Castles were used to enclose towns as well making them economic centers. All this was very expensive and this put Edward into an uncomfortable bargaining position so Parliament gained considerable power during his reign.

I certainly would not have wished to be an earl or duke or whatever during the reign of Edward II. Getting on the wrong side of whomever was in power, Isabelle or Edward meant you would run the risk of not just having your head chopped of, but having genitals removed with a bread knife, entrails cut out, dragged by multiple horses, quartered, and on and on. To the applause of crowds. 

Richard II, who most likely had some kind of personality disorder, struck me as having uncanny similarities to Trump. He was paranoid, required constant obsequious gestures from his subordinates, brooked no criticism, and when backed into a corner could become quite dangerous, lopping off heads with regular abandon. Watching Pence the other night (or, as George Will called him, the oleaginous sycophant) lead off with servile comments about our dear leader, just made the comparison to Richard II (who was deposed) more blatant.