Knights, Chivalry, and the Medieval Realm with Jason Kingsley @ModernKnight

Okay, well, thank you for that. I don't know how I'm gonna match up to your introduction. I apologize now in advance. My name's Jason Kingsley. I have a CBE after my name, so I actually do have… I am a Commander of the British Empire, which is a bit of an anachronistic title, but it's an honor, it's a civil honor which is rather nice for services to the economy. Amongst other things, I have a YouTube channel called Modern History TV, which is weirdly named, and there's a story behind that. It wasn't meant to be a success, it is now, people search for Modern History TV to get medieval stuff, and it's like, ah, that's really annoying. I must do something about it, but I've got nearly 850,000 subscribers. No, no, it's great, just leave it alone, it's great. So I'm just gonna leave it as a funny name. I live on a farm and I train war horses. I have 17 horses, some of them are semi-retired so they don't take too much looking after, but I have six stallions to look after myself, several mares, and they're all sorts of different types, but they're mostly trained for tournament jousting and combat. I've never fought in a real war on horseback, but I have fought in real tournaments on horseback, actually trying to hit people really hard with bits of wood and bits of metal, as they used to do in the old days. We were not trying to kill each other, although that could have happened and we could have had accidents, but we were doing it properly, it wasn't scripted, proper combat. And amongst other things, I am a storyteller because my company Rebellion, I'm the CEO of Rebellion, I'm the creative director as well, and I've held on to that title within the company because that's important for me, because that's why I started the company, is to do cool things. We make computer games, we publish comics, we publish books, we do board games, we have a film and TV studio, we're working with various different TV and film people. We're working on Rogue Trooper with Duncan Jones, and there's all sorts of stuff that's not been announced yet. Maybe I'll come back and announce. Adam Fall has been announced. I saw the gameplay trailer today.

Well, we've got several games coming up, but one of them that's been announced is called Atam Fall, which is partly inspired by British science fiction of the 1950s and 60s, so John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, his whole sequence of books set in a kind of almost cozy British apocalypse, the sort of apocalypse where you can have a cup of tea while man-eating plants are outside and about to. It wouldn't be a British apocalypse without tea. No, no it wouldn't. So that is set in a kind of timeline where we had one of the first nuclear disasters on this island, a place called Windscale. It still exists, it's now being renamed Sellafield, as governments do, they go 'oh we need this but it's associated with the disaster, let's give it a different title and then everybody will forget that we had a really serious nuclear disaster there.' So it's called Sellafield now. It's still a nuclear power station in our world, it didn't go so well, and they contaminated with this weird radiation a huge area of the northwest of England, a place called back in the day was called Cumberland, and in the end the government decided to wall it off and forget about it. And you wake up in this zone and you have to work out what on Earth is going on. And it's not a Mad Max type of apocalypse, there are really weird dangerous things and creatures there, but also there's a village with a tea shop and a bakery and a vicar. There's the sort of British overlay of apocalyptic fiction. There are giant robots in it, there are kind of dangerous creatures in the landscape, and you've got to explore and find out what's going on and how you fit in as a player. Really proud of it because it was my original idea, like a lot of the games we do, and the team have expanded that. That'll be out next year, early next year, and that's exciting. And it seems to be getting quite a lot of attention because it's a bit different. It's not just guns blazing, there are guns involved and knives and dangerous Morris dancers. Yes, that's why I really love this stuff, because it really does smash together British aspect, British folklore with a bit of the Fallout-esque sort of post-apocalyptic, but again post-apocalyptic joviality. Well, it was what would happen in a post-apocalyptic setting in England in the 1960s, what would it be like? The backstory is quite interesting, we've written some novels as well which hopefully will be published next year, set in the same world about what this meant to an economy recovering from Second World War when a big section of England is completely cut off and a disaster. And it's not good, as you could imagine, but it's surviving again. Well, rationing went on to the 60s, didn't it? Something like that, it surprised people don't realize that.

Anyway, alongside all that and all the other games we're working on, I've written a book. I've written a novel. It's set in a… I'm told it's called… It's medieval fantasy, so it is the Age of Chivalry, plate armor, sort of 14th, 15th century in terms of the technology. It's not identified as a land, it's just the kingdom, and there is the king. We don't even get to know the king's name, he's just the king, because that's how everybody describes him. The hero of the piece is a young knight who does a service for the king and wins an award that he isn't quite expecting, isn't quite what he thought he was going to win, and he's a bit pissed off about that, but he's told 'look, come on, just go and take it gratefully.' So he travels to the borderland and to a new thef that's been more or less abandoned for 25 years, and he has to take over and he has to rebuild. And along the way he learns about himself, he starts out fairly naive and then he grows and realizes the world is much more complex than he ever thought.

A little bit, it's really hard. It's really hard when you're writing fiction set in a real world-ish setting, it's not complete fantasy at all, it's got fantastic elements woven in. One of the things is that our knight comes from a social position where you don't talk about the old ways, they're kind of embarrassing, they're not true, it's just not the done thing to talk about them. And the peasants talk about goblins and bogles and Jenny Green Teeth, but that's all nonsense for the lower classes, of course. But maybe it's not. But I think the Green Knight would take issue with you because that story is not necessarily for the lower classes, as most romances weren't. So that's right. But in this world, what I've tried to do is sort of see the world through this young knight and his painful naivety at the beginning and his sort of belief in the simplicity of chivalry and the chivalric rules, although he's aware they can be quite complicated. Can you lie to protect somebody else's honor and how? Where do you go? So he's not totally naive, but he is very unaware of the world. And as he travels and he gets to this place, he realizes that things aren't what he thought. He has to learn and he has to still honor his beliefs and his role in the world, but he realizes that things are much more complicated. So the king says you've got to deal with the outlaws, and to him that doesn't necessarily mean he's got to go and kill them all. So there's a bit of a journey, there's a landscape which he discovers which has got to be improved and put right. He turns up to a place with people that haven't had a lord of the manor for a long time, it's miles away from anywhere, so they've not paid taxes because there's nobody to pay taxes to. There's not much in the way of through traffic because the whole place has been run down, so nobody bothers anymore, and they're just getting on with their ordinary lives sort of hoping nobody notices that they're not paying tax. And he's going 'hang on, no, this whole system is designed around this working this way.' So it's not light, there are light-hearted moments because I've also tried to… he's going there not speaking the local dialect and them not… very important point. Especially, I mean even though this is a fanciful kingdom, it's very true that kings of that time did not speak the same language as the peasantry in many areas, and there were so many different dialects of languages. You know, Lombardic from Sicilian back in the day, I mean even nowadays they're very dissimilar but mutual intelligibility might not have been there.

Well, there are definitely tales of dragons. Okay. And his grandfather has a dragon fighting spear which is blackened by the soot from the fire, he thinks. But the grandfather passes away when he gets sent as a squire to the chat that becomes his mentor, so we see this in flashback. And so he just thinks it's his grandfather's tales of boyhood, but he's a bit suspicious because he grew up with his grandmother who was a wise woman as well. So you know, and he loved her, but obviously it's all nonsense, isn't it? Well, maybe it's not. I don't know. His grandmother could be a village witch. Why not? Witches at the time… I mean, wise women at the time were very highly valued, this isn't the early modern period where things were a bit more suspicious. So why can't his grandmother be a little bit… well, exactly. But because he comes from a very minor noble family, probably not even noble much at all, he is sort of an outcast when he gets to this very modest real knight who teaches him all the knightly things: how to ride a horse, how to wear armor, how to fight in tournaments, and how to behave nicely at posh dinners, what to say and all that kind of stuff. So that part of his character gets sort of pushed to the background because it's not polite to talk about it in modern society. The modern society that they live in, the king does keep a wise woman by his side called the Crone, who nobody seems to know the name of, and she's always a bit… she seems to be winding up the bishop a lot. And the Crone and the bishop and our knight is told by his mentor that the king always likes to hedge his bets, which is why he's not got rid of the Crone. So there's all of that. So I'll leave it to the reader to determine. What we're doing is quite exciting because we're doing a Kickstarter for special editions of the book, so hardbacks and that kind of stuff. So that'll kick off. There's a page open on Kickstarter if you look for Lord Blackthorn, that's open now if you want to register interest, but then it kicks off around the 6th of November, I think.

Well, I've already written it, it's written, it's been proofread, it's been professionally edited, proofread. Just slightly not funny, but it's always slightly awkward when you're the boss but you want to get your staff to give you proper feedback on something you've done. And you tell them 'look, if you don't think it's any good, for goodness sake tell me, because we won't publish it. It's got to be commercially good.' And I was quite flattered when both David and Beth, who I respect immensely for their literary knowledge, both said to me 'you know what, this is quite a good book. It's surprisingly not bad.' But don't you write all the scripts for your videos? If you write all the scripts, you already have practice. It won't be that… I improvise that as well, I usually write notes and interesting points and things like that. But yeah, so I was quite pleased there. And as I say, it's all ready to go. It will be published by Rebellion probably in the new year, spring, early summertime. These things take a long time, you've got to publish it, print it, ship it out, and all that kind of stuff. So I think those versions will come out around that time. And the Kickstarter ones should happen faster, so I'm hoping to get that. And certainly the ebook should come out really fast. I'm having a discussion with people saying 'look, if they've committed to buy the hardback, they should get the ebook as soon as possible, yes, can read it, and then get the collectible physical copy.'

But I want it to be… there are some moments that I'm very proud of, which is probably hideously egotistical to say.

Yeah, I think there are moments where you just go 'I really like that,' and then there are the opposite bits where you go 'this just isn't working at all, I'm useless, I'm a dreadful writer, what was I thinking?'

Well, we do have rules about how if he doesn't really like something, we have a system. If one person wants to do it, the other person will do it, but if one person really doesn't want to do something, we won't do it. It's sort of worked quite well. We're still around.

Oh, historically? Well, absolutely. Knights basically, broad brush strokes, in the feudal system you had those that rule and fight, those that pray, and those that work. So you got peasants, clergy, and the aristocracy, knights, whatever you want to call them. Generally speaking, the deal was knights are the ones that are supposed to do battle to protect everybody and give their lives up to protect society. Peasants give up their lives by working really hard on the land and growing food. The clergy look after your immortal soul after you die, doing the things that you're supposed to do in the other categories. Now, obviously that's a hideous oversimplification, and you did have mercantile groups and traders and all the other stuff and all the subcategories. But broadly speaking, knights were soldiers. They were the military wing of medieval society. They were also the justice wing as well. They often did magistrate duties, and depending on the status of the knight, they had the power of high and low justice. That means the power to try serious crimes or little crimes, like we would again in England in magistrates court. If somebody steals apples from your tree, back then of course very serious because an apple was food. Now it's a bit more annoying, they take your fence down and they shouldn't have done. You can go to the magistrates court, somebody might have a fine, you've got to put the fence back or give the apples back or whatever. Same thing happened in the medieval period. One of the most fascinating areas I find for looking at ordinary people's lives are the court rolls, the court records of ordinary people's annoyances. Somebody's cesspit has overflowed next door and they're really pissed off about it, and they've gone to court and the court said 'yeah, we'll fine your neighbor two shillings and make him dig out a new cesspit.' Or somebody's pig has gone missing and somebody else is supposed to have stolen it or eaten it or whatever. Things which are kind of funny but also really serious for those people because you wouldn't go to court unless it mattered to you, because it takes time. Just losing eggs or losing a couple of chickens back then was very serious. Yeah, yeah. And we all know how expensive groceries are these days, the inflation rate's gone up madly, but broadly speaking, if we have an income we can get food. But back then, there may not have been food available. It doesn't matter how much money, well if you're rich enough you could probably get food, but if you're on a modest income you probably got the food that you harvested yourself or maybe go foraging a little bit. So were all knights rich? No, no. You had to have a certain income depending on the period. You actually usually paid more money to be a knight, and you had to provide certain equipment yourself. So you had to have a certain income. There's an area of land which is a notional area of land called a knight's fee, which is supposed to be the area of land which could generate enough surplus to provide a single knight and the equipment. Now that could be 300 to 350 acres, or it might be less acres in a really good location, it might be a village or two of people. By village I mean 30 or 40 people families, maybe two of them, and that would generate enough in the way of surplus agricultural product or money to actually pay for a knight to go to fight. That's how I think of it. So theoretically, knights were meant to sacrifice themselves. Now, practically, they often didn't. Yes, some of them even came back to purposely write about their experiences, or they paid money. The king went 'you know what, you're a bit crap at fighting. I know you're a knight, but you're a bit crap at fighting. If you pay me, I don't know, two pounds, I'll go and hire some decent mercenaries, some Swiss mercenaries instead a bit later, but you know what I mean. Go and hire some mercenaries in your state, pay me the money because that's more flexible because you're crap at fighting and you haven't practiced enough.' There are other ways that knights made money, especially when we could talk about the laws of chivalry a bit later. They made money by taking hostages as well, ransoming people. They made good tournament prizes. Tournaments were literally armed conflict which you weren't supposed to kill people, though people did die quite frequently. They were organized tournaments with prizes, and you could… William Marshal himself, the greatest knight, was quite known for one of his techniques: to take the bridle off his opponent's horse and lead them to the end where he could then say 'I'm having your armor, or you've got to pay sufficient funds for me to release your armor back to you and your horse.' These were real, real pretend battles, if you want to put it that way. These were hardcore sporting events, I suppose, a bit more than sporting events. Imagine the ultimate fighting, unlimited rules fighting, but with arms and armor and horses and many many people on the battlefield. There were places that were licensed for this in England, there were sort of five or six places licensed, so you had to pay a fee to the king of course, it's all about getting money for the king ultimately. But they were licensed. You weren't supposed to outside those, you were supposed to try and avoid killing people because you should actually die in service of your king and country. Well, no, in terms of you should go and kill the infidel. There were quite a few notes where people go 'if you die in tournament, your body can't be buried on hallowed ground,' which was widely ignored because of course if your son dies in tournament and you're a local lord, you're going to make sure your son is buried properly regardless of what the bloody bishop says, because you've got an army.

Well, jousting. So the process of tournament becomes as time goes on more organized, and it starts to become one-on-one combat, and it starts to become about display as well as martial skill. So jousting, which really is just a mounted knight with a spear back in the day before there was a difference between lance and spear, they would run at each other and practice that cavalry combat technique against other cavalry. Incredibly dangerous, doing that in mail. But I presume they used blunted spears unless they were doing it to really kill each other, which seems a bit unlikely most of the time. I'm sure they did it in arguments. It then becomes a bit more about display, conspicuous consumption, and showing off your sheer prowess and your ability to withstand a strike. Because jousting was scored, we think, by breaking a lance on the other person. So it would be incredibly unchivalrous not to present yourself as a target to the other person. And as a jouster, I find it quite difficult not to just sit there and be hit because I'm focusing on me hitting the person. But some people do flinch. I've competed against people that just can't help but sort of try and dodge the incoming lance, which is unchivalrous even today. It's really annoying when you're trying to do a display joust if the bugger twists away from you. So it's a demonstration of the ability to withstand that kind of hit. Because if you've never jousted, it's really weird. It's a very weird psychological combat sport. There's not much you can do by way of defensive maneuver. You're running with a tilt rail, which is a much later invention to stop horses colliding face to face. But with a tilt rail, you're not going to collide with the other person, you're going to go past them at a close distance. And when you hit them or they hit you, you are usually tilted back slightly. But you don't know immediately sometimes whether you've hit them or they've hit you or you've both hit each other. It's only when you sit back up again and slow down and come to the end that you look up and see the fact that your lance is shivered that you realize you've struck. But you're not quite sure where you've struck, because you can be right onto the targe, the small shield that covers the left hand side, the heart basically, which is a big target. Typically, the targets we've done it, the target of the head is usually avoided in modern jousting for the obvious danger of eye hit. So we usually avoid doing that deliberately, though it does happen. The targe, the shield, the body. So you might miss to the right and hit somebody outside the shield or the arms. Anything below the waist is a foul. Hitting the saddle steel is a foul. Obviously hitting a horse should lead to elimination, because horses should be sacrosanct when it comes to jousting today, and perhaps not so back then. But did they really aim for each other's horses back then? In war, they absolutely did. In war, yes. There's a Pietro Monte in his memoirs as a mercenary and a jouster, 15th century, really interesting thing. He says 'if you are involved in a joust or tournament, check the rules beforehand whether the horses are target.' I'm paraphrasing that because I read it a few years ago. He says something along the lines of 'because if you kill somebody's horse and they weren't expecting it, there will be significant consequences for you after the tournament,' which is intriguingly mysterious way of saying I don't know whether he means you'll be attacked and beaten up or killed.

No, that's not mentioned. He's not a particularly well-connected knight at all. And this is one of the reasons he thinks why the king goes 'okay, right, off you go.' So is he sending him to a lab as a punishment? Well, we don't know. It's part of the discussion. He realizes it might not have been the gift he thought it was, and there might be reasons for that, but he's not sure. So I'll explore that in the next two books. I'm going to write it. I've got plans for a trilogy. It's gonna be five books, Jason. It's gonna be a trilogy of five books. I know. This is nice. I have been there myself, and the lies we tell ourselves are very elaborate, but eventually you just surrender to it. And so I find it fascinating. I'm really looking forward to the reaction of people from reading it. I've sent out early reader copies to a handful of friends who I appreciate their honest feedback, which is going to be a bit disappointing because I've already written it and it's really edited. So if they hate it, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I don't think they will. I always tell people, whenever I have to give my books out for art copies or editors, I always say 'I hope you like it. If not, don't tell anyone.' Yeah, keep it quiet. I think people will like it. I've tried to make the action charge along quite fast. Pacing is very important. I want to make a commercial book that people can enjoy, but also that maybe has some layers to it as well. So it's hard to deliberately put layers in, and easy read with historical value. Yes, yes, exactly. And I've messed around with historical… not historical facts, but they reference a holy book, but they don't call it the Bible, they call it the Great Book in my book. They call it the Good Book, that's kind of funny. Because I didn't want it to necessarily be the Christian Bible. I wanted it to be like the Christian Bible enough that it could be or couldn't be. And there's a couple of characters mentioned. So for example, Christmas is Crispin's Tide, not Christmas. And Crispin and Crispinian were obviously related to that period. So it was a genuine real world medieval celebration, but I thought if I say Christmas again, it's sort of anchoring it to our world very clearly. And I want it to be slightly ambiguous as to where this is set and whether it's our world. And yeah, it's been a challenge. It's been a challenge. Good old historiographic metafiction. I mean, it could be an alternate universe, it could be something like that. There's nothing wrong with that. But it still takes place in the what we would call the Age of Chivalry, correct. The Age of Chivalry, and it's in the border marches. The borders were a real thing. The marcher lords paid different rates of tax because they expected to have more battle. They were exempt from certain obligations to fight in other wars because they needed the soldiers there. So the fact that borders did exist, particularly with Wales and Scotland, they were genuine things. So that's parallel. One of the things I've tried to bring in is some of the horse control as well, because not a lot of people know how to make a horse go sideways, for example. And I have our character in a certain situation where his horse, which is similar very similar to one of my horses when I was imagining it, who's very responsive to the leg aids. So when you control a horse, have you ridden a horse?

Okay, so you'll know that the way you control a horse is with your whole body. Your balance, where you're sitting, whether you're tipping over to one side or another, where your weight is forward or backwards, the pressure you have on the reins should be handled like a communication device to the horse's mouth. You don't pull on them, you give a command via putting a bit more tension on them. And you can do it with both hands, you can lift your hands up or lower them or move to the side or whatever. Ride one-handed with swords, that's something I had to learn. My first riding was always done two-handed, and I had to learn to ride one-handed because you obviously need to control a weapon, you have to hold a weapon. And how you train the horse to deal with leaning when you're using a weapon, but you also use your legs. You can put your leg in front of the girth, on the girth, or behind the girth. You've got three places on the side of a horse, three on either side, and you combine that with your rein movements. And now I'm talking about it, it sounds incredibly complicated, but when you do it, I've been riding since I was years old, so for me I sometimes have to think 'what do I do when I want the horse to spin on the spot?' Because you can spin a horse on the forehand, which is its front legs, or you can spin a horse on its haunches, which is the hind legs. And it's two very different places. In combat, if you spin a horse on its rear, it tends to lean back and then spin around its bum, which is quite useful if you want to spin a horse's bum. You spin on the front legs, and that can be more aggressive in a different way because the bum is a big powerful lump of a horse, and that's going to smash a space. There are all sorts of wonderful potential moves, and I was trying to write these down to say 'he wants to move his horse sideways to allow another knight to come past him on the open side, the offside.' So here's an interesting anecdote: why do people drive on one side of the road or the other? In England, we drive on the left hand side of the road, because in part we've never changed from the way it was probably done on horseback. On horseback, you get on the left hand side of the horse with the horse facing in the direction you want to go, and you want to get on from the side of the road. So you wouldn't turn the horse around, that's just daft. You get on and you ride in the direction you're going. So it's kind of evolved along those lines a little bit. So we have what we call the near side of a horse, which is the left side, the side you get on, the side you typically lead a horse from as well.

Always but typically and The Far Side which is your right side. And if you've got a lance, for example, a lance is 8 to 12 foot of oak, usually ash or sometimes pop, but if you're fighting it's going to be ash. It's a nice strong wood that's not too heavy. And you can hit either... you don't want to go directly over your horse's head because that gets the horse's head in the way and you're going to have a collision. So you're either going to hit somebody with a lance to the right or to the left. Hitting to the left means you have a more obtuse angle to the target, which means the lance is more likely to break and shatter. Now when you're jousting, if you want to shatter your lance, you want both ends to be fixed and you want the energy to go into distorting the lance and then shatter the wood, and then the energy is dispersed. If your lance bends and then straightens, it's going to push them that way and you that way, or push up into your face. I've had lances going right up, not breaking, and going right up catching under my chin and spinning off. The physics takes over, and a 12-foot piece of wood that doesn't break, moving at 40 miles an hour combined speed, one going one way, one going the other, has a lot of energy in it, so it just goes wherever it wants to basically. But if a lance shatters, the energy goes into exploding the wood. If it doesn't shatter, then you've got problems. I had a personal anecdote: I was down at Pendennis Castle, which is down in Cornwall, beautiful place, but quite a long drive from pretty much anywhere apart from Cornwall. Right on the sea coast, lots of sea mist. I did a joust on the Saturday and I did the morning joust on the Sunday, and the lances had been left out overnight. A sea mist came in and everything was slightly damp, and the lances would not break, they just bent. We got photographs of them bending hugely. We couldn't shatter any lances, and it was the most dangerous joust I've ever been in because there was no energy. The energy was going into bending and straightening, and that just straightens, and people were getting injured, splinters going everywhere, no splinters, but the end of the lance was digging into people's flesh. It was an absolute catastrophe just because of the sea mist that came in to dampen the wood sufficiently overnight. Tiny little detail that you wouldn't think of, but I know about. So if I was going to write a book about jousting, you know, the weather that night may have a big effect on the grand tournament afterwards.

And as we were just talking about, obviously chivalry comes from the word horse. Well, it's interesting because the word knight in English comes from 'cniht', which is a servant or a lad. When I was talking to somebody about this, the term 'lad' came up. In contemporary English, you can go out drinking with the lads. It doesn't have a gender, or if you're in Ireland, there are also women. Lads is anybody. You talk about the guys and you talk about men and women inclusively. And the lads here particularly typically means male, but it's sort of drinking buddies. The trouble with words like 'knight' is what did they mean by it? It's become something else. I mean, Samurai I believe means servant as well, so there's this concept of being a servant that goes with it. But 'cheval' is French for horse, and chivalry comes from that. So you've got the knight and cheval. I think knights predate horse soldiers to a certain extent. So if you want to say that knights are really post-Frankish, post-Merovingian, Carolingian warriors, then yes, exactly. So it's really interesting.

I one of my first books, my business book I did, 'Leading the Rebellion', it's just here, which was a sort of gallop through how chivalry can map itself to business. It was a silly idea I had, and it actually became quite difficult sometimes because some of it just doesn't map at all, but some of it does. So things like honesty, you know, being honest, what does it mean? And the thing with chivalry, the rules of chivalry can be interpreted widely or ignored by people throughout history. Oh, knights ignored them all the time. Absolutely, there were knights who wrote about how much they loved the violence without any religious aspect to it. There were also knights who decided mercy was a big thing, but again, if you had mercy on your opponent, which you are supposed to do, then you could ransom them for cash. If nobody wanted to pay that ransom, well then the mercy no longer applies. And looking after the innocent, what do you mean by innocent? Some of the earliest rules were sorted out where the church said don't attack churches, obviously why they would have that rule. When you're having fights, remember church land is sacrosanct. So those are the first rules of chivalry: don't fight on Sundays because people are supposed to go to church and pay their tithes. But it's okay for knights to go out on Sunday as long as they go to mass first. So it becomes a nebulous concept, chivalry. It's an ideal that everybody fails to meet, and nobody's quite sure what it means. I think this is mirrored in the Arthurian mythos, which is again very odd. If you start digging into it, when does it start? Who did it in the 15th century? Malory, it all gets very blurred. The idea that you're not quite sure what you're supposed to be questing for, and the quest is the thing, not the finding. Pretty much all of you will fail miserably to meet this ideal, and that's the point. The point is you're a feeble human being and you've got to strive to be better. It's multifaceted and really interesting as a philosophy. And really hard how it ties in courtly love and the tradition of unrequited love. Lancelot, okay, he did do a thing with Guinevere, but he wasn't supposed to. He succumbs to his... well, when it comes to Chrétien, because he invented Lancelot really. But the romances, we're going to talk about romances in a minute. Romances in general, obviously, 'roman' like 'le roman' which is where the French aspect of the word is still maintained today, whereas 'roman' is just a novel or story. The only reason they were called romances is because they were writing in their language and not in Latin. That's pretty much it. Whenever they made a new character like Lancelot, then somebody else would take it up and go, 'Oh, but what about his backstory?' So Lancelot had other loves, he had random children, he was also the son of fairies. They made up whatever, it didn't matter. But that tradition kept on throughout. It's the same thing when you ask what is a medieval romance.

I think it follows in that tradition, yes. It follows in the tradition because I try not to explain everything in detail. I want people's imagination to be triggered because I like stories that have places for me to explore in my mind. You know, Lord of the Rings, classic book, I absolutely love it. So much is missing from that massive book that is exciting. Is it? I don't know. The Silmarillion is... well, yeah, you get credit for trying to read the Silmarillion. I mean, it's so dense, I bounced off the Silmarillion so many times, sad to admit. I want to tell... thank you, it's our secret, just us and everybody else listening. But any really good book takes you on a journey in your mind and helps you explore a new landscape. I think the story needs to be satisfying but also leave space for your imagination to fill in areas. Talking about the days before copyright, when fanfiction was in fact all fiction. People would say, 'That's a great character, I'll write about that character and add something else to it,' and nobody cared because there wasn't canon in the same way. Canon, the whole rule of 'this is the story' is a fairly modern invention. In many ways, it's sort of 'I own the story, you're not allowed to do anything with it.' But back then, the stories were sort of public ownership. Many people, especially in courts, did read them and recite them and share them. So people would say, 'Oh, but what about this character? I want to know about this character,' and then they would write about that character. They threw in so many fanciful elements. It follows along the tradition of the lays, the Breton lays, which were very short, but then the medieval romances. There were also medieval epics like 'Hereward the Wake', which this kind of reminds me a little bit of. You read his story, the 'Gesta Herewardi', and you think, is this history? Is this fiction? There's a little bit of magic here but not much. How much am I supposed to believe? And then they just built on that. So everything is just building upon this lay tradition. There are medieval epics and then medieval romances. Within those romances, everybody was writing about them. France had their own, Germany had their own. There were so many different medieval romances that they just kept building on it. Nobody really cared whether or not anybody was following canon. Canon didn't exist then. You could make up a character and write about it. There was nobody around to say, 'I don't want Lancelot to have an affair with Guinevere.' Everybody would say, 'Ooh, salacious, very good.' There are even reports of people saying, 'Oh no, no, they're getting too sexy, we can't put the romance in there.' And then you have reports from Eastern peoples who were reading this in Eastern Europe going, 'Oh yes, more sexy please.' They had different ideas about what should be in these romances, and there was really no wrong answer. It changed over time. The law of copyright came in after the printing press was invented because suddenly you went from having a few thousand books being made per year in England to hundreds of thousands if not millions of books being produced in a year. The accessibility became huge, the price of books collapsed, not collapsed but made it available. So if you were of modest means, you could have a library. By a library, I mean four or five books. That was a big library. People were very proud of their library of five books, which is wonderful. I've got books I've bought not read. I'm sure other people have to say, 'Oh, we all have those records of sins.' My son, I know it's awful. So sad. One day I must do something about it, but I probably never will. We always say that and then we go, 'Oh, a new book, a new shiny thing.' So in a way, there wasn't any form of protection of ideas back in the medieval period. Something I might look into a bit because it suddenly occurred to me copyright is fairly modern. The idea of preventing somebody else from copying your work comes from the very earliest industrial side of things. I always think of the medieval period as shading out before other people. 1485, the death of Richard on the Battle of Bosworth. Lots of things were happening before you got printing press, gunpowder. Urbanization came in in the 12th, 13th century much more. The whole libraries, public libraries, universities. Absolutely. So it's all a continuum anyway. It's really silly to say where medieval ends. You have arguments online, 'Why are we arguing about this?' But the internet is made for arguing. That's what happens. We lost the Greek forum and so we came to the internet. What did somebody say? It's the biggest village. The world is a village. All the village idiots suddenly represent a significant portion of the population, whereas before it was that one bloke that you'd all grown up with. That's Jimmy. We all know Jimmy. He's fine, he's sweet, just slightly kicked in the head. He's fine. But exactly to your point about copyright, their attitudes are very different because reading and writing these things was a form of entertainment. People might not have been able to have any other kind of entertainment. So we have things like plays and lays and romances that were read out to the general population. Many of them were written to be read in court or to bolster a courtly experience for people either who were there or who couldn't be there. Also, for people who think of the amount of people who could read and write back then, it was vastly different. You could argue that many people don't read and write nowadays, however it was a different aspect. Being able to write your name or read some things is very different from being able to read or write for pleasure. People can be functionally literate but not comfortable with reading. There are plenty of people I know that just don't read because I secretly think they're not very good at it. It's not easy to drift. I think people that are readers, I'm not even aware I'm reading. In fact, the magic of a book can be broken if I suddenly think I'm reading. I just sort of flow into the page. You have to hallucinate off the page. You just sniff the words in and the imagination. When you're tired, you realize you've read the whole page and you can't remember a damn thing of what you've just read. You say, 'Right, it's time to switch the lights off and go to sleep.' But back then, audiobooks were the way. People joke about audiobooks today, 'Oh, you should read.' It's like, no, actually audiobooks are reading. I don't care who says it, audiobooks is reading. That's how it is. This is how most novels, most books, most stories were originally written, to be read aloud and to be shared with people in the room. There are some people I know who read something like Jane Austen and go, 'Why is this written this way?' Well, it was meant to be read. You could read it to yourself, but you were often reading to somebody else. Maybe in a family only one person or two people were able to read. You had to read to somebody else or teach them to read. It's an oration. You have to have that performance aspect to it. So when you're reading something and you think, 'Oh, this is a bit rubbish, the prose is terrible, why did they write it this way?' It's probably because you're supposed to be giving somebody information. It's a way of communication. Go read your book out loud. I've been challenged: can I do the audiobook now? It's like, yeah, I probably should. I would like to, but can I do it justice? I hope so, but we'll see. I've got to find the time to read the book out. I think it might take 22 hours for a 400-page book, about 22 to 24 hours, depending on how fast you read, depending on whether you're going to do character voices. It's a whole thing. That's why there are people who are narrators, and I am not one of those people. I might try it, but that's probably about a week's worth of reading. Give yourself a good three weeks to do retakes. Audio takes sometimes if the audio is not correct, you have to do remixes as well. If you're going to do voices for your characters, you have to make sure you highlight everybody's place and make notes to make sure you do all the voices correctly. Now I'm worried. I'll probably try it and see. I like challenges. That's the other thing, the idea of challenge. The idea of pushing yourself. This is what I wrote in the other book, 'Leading the Rebellion': I think we all should set ourselves quests, just small quests. It doesn't have to be find the Holy Grail or anything. Well, don't worry because the Holy Grail is not real, no one's going to find it. But the quest can be just to get fitter, or learn a new sport, or learn a new skill, or read that Silmarillion at last. You don't have to understand it, just get to the end. I think elements of chivalry can reflect on all of us in our modern society. Somebody said to me they read the book and then decided to try and shape their week with a series of micro quests. Basically their commute was: 'Right, my first quest, I have to get ready for combat.' So they get the clothes on, go out the door, catch the bus, and then they must find an elixir of awake, the great being juice. They go and get themselves a coffee to wake up. They said it was really fun for a week. They were doing these ridiculous quests and it kind of added a pageantry to their day. I don't think they kept it going, I think it was quite exhausting, but I think that's a very healthy way of looking at things, especially during COVID when we were all stuck inside for much of the day. Going out and doing something felt like a quest because you were really going on a journey. Walking two hours to a far grocery store just so you could get some air. Absolutely. I don't know what the rules were where you were, but here you weren't quite strict. They're quite strict here as well. You weren't supposed to leave the house apart from one exercise session a day or something like that, but how long that exercise session could be, nobody knows. They're all a bit vague. I think the general principle is trying to stay away from people as much as possible. But I had the horses to exercise, I had the farm to run as well. I remember the first time the lockdown happened, it was all a bit, 'Oh, this is a bit weird, like out of fiction, this is just so strange happening.' I think we got used to it quite quickly, but it was very odd. Everybody had to move over to doing video conferences for work and all that kind of stuff. But I still had to exercise the horses, I still had to muck them out because they need it. I wasn't sure what the guidance was for that. I need to exercise them, I need to ride around my farm, which is how I exercise them. Am I allowed to do that? Because it seems a bit sort of great, I can just go out and ride all my... well, technically you were the king of your own domain at that point. I was on my own land anyway. So I looked it up, I took some advice, I thought I better just be careful, a bit of a public figure, so I don't want to be seen to do the wrong thing. I need to check. The National Farmers Union was very clear: they said no, no, no, you've got to maintain horses, you've got to do all the things you would normally do. So if you normally exercise them, you obviously can't go to events because there won't be any events, but you must do the same thing, just keep going. So I had the absolute majesty of being able to go out as often as I wanted because I've got many horses to ride through my landscape, and feel quite guilty that other people were stuck indoors. But on the other hand, I can get snowed in, and there's mud now starting, and the winter's kicking off, and I'm miles away from the nearest whatever it might be that I need if I need help. So there's swings and roundabouts.

No, I didn't. I started the thinking about it. I thought I really want to get round to writing a book. I started to sketch broad brushstroke ideas, so I wouldn't say I started it. I had many false starts. It took me probably a couple of years to write the first one. And usually, because I've got quite a busy day job, I normally write between 6 and 8 in the morning. So I get up, make a cup of tea, and then sit down with my laptop and start exploring the landscape. Do you get up even earlier to do things about the farm? No, I get up at 6, have a cup of tea, work, and then I do the farm things from sort of 8. Bare minimum with the horses is an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. So before I jumped on this, I normally do the horses about 8 in the evening for about an hour, cleaning them out, feeding them, checking water, checking the horses in the fields are okay. They need to be checked twice a day. It's a routine farm routine that animals need. They like certain things. But I did it earlier today to come on this. It's just got to be done. The weird thing is it's almost so automatic for me now that I will come in and take my Wellington boots off and go, 'Have I actually done it?' Because I'm thinking of other things. Have I gone outside and done the horses? Yeah, I have actually. Well, will they start to complain? If you haven't been out there, oh yeah, then you'll know. They're very vocal. Several of them can hear the door open. Actually, I think they can sometimes hear me in the kitchen when I make a cup of tea. That alerts them. They've got big ears. They start stamping at the ground, they start kicking the door. There's three of them that make the kick, one that bites his door, makes a noise, tries to lift the door off its hinges, several that just make whinnying sounds. Horses have a language. I know what they're saying more or less: 'I'm hungry.'

He's called Phantom. He's a Criollo stallion that's gifted to our protagonist by his mentor right at the very beginning. He is fairly new as well, he's been in tournaments and stuff but he's fairly new to this. There's also a mule that comes along for the ride. I have a mule. I wanted to challenge myself with a creature that was different to horses. I've had horses in my life since I was eight, and they're incredibly familiar, they're always individuals. Unusually, I handle stallions. Most people don't handle stallions, but I've got several of them, some are homebred. I train and break horses in myself, or gentle them, I prefer the term gentling them, get them used to saddles and train them in all the maneuvers. The mule, who still doesn't have a name, is called on my YouTube channel 'The Mule with No Name' because when I first did a video with him, he didn't have a name. He still hasn't told me his name. Some creatures tell you their name straight away, and he has not. But he's become a friend. I ride him a lot. He has enormous ears and can hear so well. He is a right character, brilliant, proper character. In this, I've channeled the mule with no name into the story as well.

Our main character, the baron, is the baddy at the beginning. Our main character has Phantom gifted to him along with his armor, and he takes the mule with him as his baggage. Then he rides to his destiny. I'm obviously channeling horses I know and describing them. In the subsequent books, I'm going to involve some of my other horses as well. Phantom is obviously ghost, yes, correct. Phantom is ghost. The mule is the mule. Somebody said, 'Oh, is the young knight you?' Not really, but parts I suppose you could argue. It's not a self-insert. People talk about what aspects did you put in. I guess the certain willful naivety, belief that the world is a better place than it probably deserves to be thought of, a kind of personal drive to do better for himself and others around, a slight over-trust in people to do the right thing. I think that's bitten me a few times in my life where I've hoped somebody is more decent than they turn out to be. Not very often, but sometimes. I don't think those are negative characteristics. I think especially if you keep doing that, it's actually to your credit because often times people just get jaded. If they lose trust in someone, they start losing trust in everything. So I think your hope for good is a virtue. And I think that's a chivalric virtue as well: hope in the future. Hope is a gift we give ourselves. If you just spend your life assuming it's going to be terrible and grinding your way through to the end, that strikes me as quite pessimistic. I believe in optimism. You should strive and try. You will probably fail quite a bit, but failure teaches us things that are different than success. Success can be very difficult too sometimes, but failure teaches you things as well. Partly it teaches you to get back up again. There's that expression: you get back on the horse if you fall off, and that's literally true because otherwise you get scared. I've fallen off horses many times when I was younger, but recently I've fallen off horses when training them. When you're first backing a horse, understandably the horse sometimes doesn't agree with the principle of you being on its back. Sometimes it's fine. Talos, for example, one of my half-Shire stallions, huge horse, absolutely enormous. I backed him myself. You're never sure with stallions whether they're going to take to it, but he's such a lovely character, he was fine. He just went, 'Yeah, sure, okay.' I was thinking, 'Oh, that's very unspectacular.' I'm quite glad it's not spectacular because he's about 900 kilos of stallion. He's huge. How many hands? He's 18.3. For those that don't know, horses are typically measured at the withers, just above their front legs, not the height of their head. 18.3 makes him just under six foot. When I stand next to him on flat ground, I can't see over him. So that's big. Then you sit on that and you realize your head is probably eight and a half feet. You suddenly realize that's the view of a mounted knight, mounted warrior. You see above the heads of everybody else, and everybody has to look up at you. You have to stab downward or get out of the way, let the archers shoot them. It's one of the things that I wonder whether that whole social hierarchy came from the physical structure of looking up and looking down at people. If you're on a horse, you look down on people and they look up at you. Castles, any kind of fortress, is always higher to give you that vantage point. So yes, you are looking down on people always. We don't think of it now, but we have the concept of penthouses. People who live in the penthouse might be a bit swanky, and everybody else is just plebs. Thrones tend to be above, courts have steps, a judge sits physically higher than everybody else. So you start to look at it and you go, 'Actually, we do genuinely have people higher up.' Stages are higher up, often tilted so you can see. If you've ever stood on a production stage, sometimes it's tilted so you can always see the character's feet. Stages are tilted this way, audiences are tilted that way, so everybody can see at least from the ankles up. That's wonderful.

The people were just people. They're the same as us. They had the same hopes and dreams. They wanted to be safe and peaceful, be with people they cared about, and have enough food. They weren't different, they just had different technology. I try to bring that through all the time. We see them in a different light because forms of entertainment stylize it. Everything's muddy, Vikings wear eyeliner and have undercuts and dress like bikers. That's not how they were at all, but it's still fun, it's fantasy. I wish there was something a bit more historical about Vikings in particular because the colors, the style of clothing was more impressive than that. But budgetary constraints and what people expect... What often happens is productions get greenlit very late, there's no time to do any historical research, and all the people have worked on this Viking thing, that Game of Thrones thing, that Lord of the Rings thing, so stuff gets moved from one show to the other and everything ends up looking brown and the same. One of the things we do know: if you look at ancient Rome, it was almost certainly brightly and garishly painted. It wasn't classical marble. People forget that many of the statues were painted in naturalistic colors or arguably quite garish colors. Some of the ones that were naked would have had pubic hair painted on them and eyeballs. The marble was an underpinning that was then painted. I think we'd expect it would be very different. We go back to ancient Rome and go, 'Oh Lord, this is really quite garish.' We go back to medieval, maybe the inside of medieval churches were painted as well, all beautifully painted. Even things like merchants' halls. There's one in York called The Merchant Hall. It's been restored, and the wallpaper is foot vertical stripes of red and green. All the walls are red and green stripes. You look at it and go, 'Wow, that's just bizarre.' But color was status to a certain extent. If you could afford color, you would show it off. I think Dover Castle, I did a joust there. It's a wonderful place. Weirdly, I rarely get to look around these places because I'm doing an event. But Dover Castle has a reimagining, an accurate sort of painted king's chamber. One of the chairs there looks like a chair from a kindergarten because it's red, yellow, blue, and green. I said, 'Is this what the factual history tells us?' Yes, it is. I said, 'Well, not what you expect, is it?' But it's brightly colored. The importance there wasn't the choice of color. You paint my throne bright colors: red, yellow, green, blue. Great, sign it up.

That is up to others. That would be delightful. Is it a life ambition if you like to get that? Because then I'd be Jason at last. Exactly. That might happen, who knows? I guess if I keep going in the trajectory and keep doing kind of good things, whatever that means, it's not impossible that that would happen. But that's very much up to other people. I'm not quite sure how the whole system works. I think what happens is people need to apply for you and then write letters of recommendation from other people. Then a letter campaign. Let's do it for you, Jason. Absolutely. In Canada, it's the same thing. If you want the Order of Canada, people have to nominate you. So of course I'll never get nominated. But I'm sure by the power of YouTube, we could get a letter campaign going for you. Absolutely, it would be wonderful. I think getting these is a bit like winning certificates at school. Whilst it's sort of pointless, it's not pointless. It means everything. It means something to you. It's a personal achievement, same as learning to ride or learning to read. These little achievements that make us who we are are hugely meaningful. I remember my first swimming certificate, swimming the width of the pool. At the time, I was so excited. You get a certificate, literally a piece of cardboard with a dolphin on it. But it's what it means. It represents something. It's a public acknowledgement that you've achieved something good. It doesn't matter, but it does matter in some ways. So yeah, I'd also love to be... as far as I know, there's nobody with a modern knighthood that actually jousts. I think that would be really cool. That would be fantastic. I would love, I know it's not allowed, for you to, in the style of the Green Knight, take the horse through the hall and be knighted that way. That would be absolutely fantastic. They probably don't allow that. The royal family is kind of young now. Can we get a joint knighthood for you and Ghost? That would be amazing. I certainly think the horses deserve it. What horses did throughout history, absolutely awful and fascinating. For all horses, exactly. It would literally be for all horses. You'll probably note in my videos, if it features a horse, I always give the horse credit first. People have said to me that's a bit weird, and other people say that's so lovely. It's like, no, they deserve it. He's an actor in the video. You need to give him credit.

It's really kind of you to invite me on. Going back to the rules of chivalry, I think one of the important things is that we all, no matter what the level of success we have, maintain a level of humility. I'm delighted to be on this podcast with you, and it's been fun. After all, that's what we're all here for, trying to do interesting things. Maybe a little bit of wisdom will rub off on other people. I have no wisdom to share with you except that, well, congratulations. I'm sorry that you're a fiction author. Welcome to the club.

Sir, we could do a whole other podcast on the Oxford comma. I'm a huge... I missed that. So we'll do a thing on the Oxford comma next time. Anytime you want to talk about language, I'm always here for you.