Jason Kingsley @ModernKnight: Imagination Brings History to Life!

Hi, how are you doing? I'm not too bad, thank you very much.

If I back up a bit. So, I'm the CEO of my own big computer games company. We made lots of big computer games like Sniper Elite and Zombie Army and we've got a new game called Atom Fall coming out. Yeah. Sniper Elite coming out but I also have my own YouTube channel Modern History TV and I run my own horses. And I've decided to have a go at writing a novel. So I finished a book called The Lord of Blackthorn. And I'm kind of doing a Kickstarter myself for it. So I'm in a slightly not uncomfortable but unusual position of not having a huge team of people around me. I could sort of co-opt my team to help me out with promoting the book but I partly wanted to do it myself because you'll probably know from reading a little bit about me, I quite like the process of travel, the actual experience itself of doing things. So I put a post out on my own social media saying I'm writing this book, I want to go on some podcasts and be interviewed by a few people. Anybody interested? And a decent group of interesting people got back and said, 'Yeah, we'd love to interview you.' So that's what I'm doing really. I'm unfiltered and sort of without agenda other than trying to promote my book and the Kickstarter that we're doing for it. So for me it's exploring new territory if you like.

Well, no, it's just Rebellion. We've got various different companies that do different things in the group. So it's actually I've got 600 full-time members of staff. You know, I've got a finance department, treasury department, you know, all of that stuff that goes with having a big company. I mean, me and my brother founded it. We don't have anybody else who owns it. So we're in charge. And yeah, it's quite a big enterprise now. We sell games worldwide. Through Steam, Epic, Sony, Microsoft, all of that.

Yeah. Well, primarily, we've got to make good entertainment for people. Um, primarily, our games need to be entertainment. But within that, for something like Sniper Elite, we talk about plausible, plausibly historical. So the technology is what you would have at the time. The locations are what you could have at the time. You know, we take real places and sort of turn them up to 11. You know, we take rumors, historical rumors and imagine that they were true. Unlike a game like Call of Duty, for example, which is very much you're the frontline soldier. Yeah. We, Karl Fairburne, the protagonist, the player is always sort of looking at the wizard war, the war behind the frontline. The war of Nazi super weapons against Allied special weapons as well. And this was a real thing, you know, there were sides of warfare that aren't just the hot frontline trenches type of situation, tanks and bombers. There's a whole bunch of measures and counter-measures and super weapons. And so, that was really the origins of Sniper Elite war were the first shots of the Cold War. So, the very first idea was you go into Berlin to try to get the nuclear secrets back to the Allies and stop the Nazis getting, you know, stop the Russians getting the Nazi nuclear secrets. So, in a way we set it up so that the war was more or less over, although it hadn't quite finished, but it was obvious which side was going to win, but now there was a few months worth of what the hell do we do now kind of situation and nobody's quite sure. Yeah.

Uh and I think it was generally accepted because we found out, really interestingly, that the British and the Americans were manufacturing German weapons at the end of the Second World War because we fully expected to have to rearm Germany and have Germany on our side when the Russians and their faction decided to not stop at Berlin and keep going. Yeah. And so you actually had people at the time the Second World War was not over but kind of was won and everybody thought the Russians wouldn't stop. And there was a lot of tension in the beginnings of the Cold War. So really interesting area of history. It's not particularly my area of study but of course running a games company that makes things. Yeah, I'm quite familiar with it. We also work with the Royal Armouries. So Jonathan Ferguson who's a YouTuber as well and he's a friend of mine but he's the curator of arms and weapons and we're always asking him, 'You got any secret weapons? Any plausible new weapons we could use in the next Sniper Elite?' And I think we've pretty much run out of what actually existed.

But then you start to imagine situations where, you know, what happened just after the war and could we introduce that earlier a little bit as a sort of ultra-secret technology? Um, so yeah, there's always got to be a balance and also the reality of being a sniper special forces is that, you know, from all the snipers we've talked to in real life, the real ones, the modern day ones, there's an awful lot of waiting around. Yeah. Um, pooing in plastic bags and taking it back with you. Um, and deciding you don't have a shot and then going home. Yeah.

So our game has to dramatize. Like movies do, like TV does. You have to dramatize situation to make people feel a bit like they're being a sniper, special forces sniper. Um, and yeah, so that's always the balance and we always talk about that. There's always an ongoing dialogue in the teams about how far do we go? Is that going too far? What do we do next? You know, what about the baddies? Who are the baddies? You know. And then of course you've got the sort of weird fiction world that comes in with Zombie Army, sorry, and all that sort of thing. So there's that but I don't know maybe a poop in the bag QTE, that could work.

Well, yeah, I mean, I'll rewind a bit. So, I've absolutely loved knights and armor and castles since I was a boy. And of course, one's understanding of history shifts and changes as you grow older. And of course, I should say this was a favorite book of mine growing up. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, that's cool. Which also, you might find interesting. Sorry. But it came with Castle Explorer software. Really, really cool. But anyway, sorry. Yeah. So, castles and knights, yeah. So, castles and knights as a kid. And obviously, television shows and action adventures and role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons when I was at school. I went through standard education. I did the sciences, but I always kept my eye in writing, literature, and also in the arts as well. So, I never felt the two should be separate. I felt that you should be able to do both. Because at school, the education system was you either do science or arts once you get past O levels, which was the sort of exams you do at 16. And then for the exams you do from 16 to 18, called A levels back then. I think they might still be, I don't know. You have to specialize really. But I managed to do sciences and art. And I kept my interest in Lord of the Rings and the Thomas Covenant trilogy, and the Earthsea books and all of that stuff. I absolutely loved all of that. And I never saw much of a clash between sciences and the arts, in my opinion. I also was lucky I was very into my horses. And of course, if you're a boy that likes knights in armor, horses are fairly natural thing. The horse riding in the UK at that time, well, probably still is, is very female dominated. So, I was probably one of a handful of boys in a very female dominated, girl dominated landscape of ponies. So, there weren't many of us sort of swinging sticks around trying to hit each other, but I was one of them. And then yeah, went to university, kept going, started a computer games company. And I was always interested in storytelling, but from a digital perspective. And then my interest is about the personal experience. So, the fact that I've got historically accurate steel armor, that I ride on a real horse, I have jousted in historic landscapes at Kenilworth Castle, Dover Castle, at the Tower of London, you know, all of these places where jousting really happened, and I was really jousting there, but in a modern context, made me wonder whether in particular, there was one thing in the Tower of London, I was sweating profusely during a summer joust, and thinking, I bet Henry VIII was sweating profusely when he was jousting in the summer as well. And I'm having literally very similar view to him. Obviously not the landscape outside the Tower of London, but within the Tower of London, you know, the walls were the walls he saw. And it suddenly made me think, I'm actually time traveling here. And nobody would have ever written down, unless he was writing his own personal diary, that was a really sweaty joust, but it was a really sweaty joust.

And it suddenly made me think you can time travel by imagining what ordinary people are going through but outside of the awareness that they're recording things for history. Because one of the problems with history, the written record, is that sometimes it's quite knowingly written, i.e. people are writing it with a view to it being read by people in the future and sort of telling the story they want to tell. In other cases, you've got letters of Roman soldiers wanting socks from their mom and things like that, which just humanize it. Because the Roman legionaries stationed on Hadrian's Wall were like us, you know? They joined the army to have an adventure and they're cold. But at the same time, I suppose those are accidental survivals as well. So either you have knowingly written sources or you have stuff that's random and the odds of having Henry VIII saying, 'Oh, you know, I'm proper sweaty.' are minimal. But so then the story of ordinary people. When I was doing my study, I started my YouTube channel. I was talking about weapons and armor and things, and that was great because I had the experience. But I was also interested in how you became a knight, what happened, and what about people that didn't become a knight. And then you start to dig into the history and you realize that in fact as a knight, you needed to have a certain income because you had to pay more taxes. And then at a certain stage in history, lots of people didn't want to be knighted but had to be forced to be knighted. You know, or didn't actually want to fight, but the king said, 'But, you know, the whole point is you're supposed to fight for me.' And they went, 'I tell you what, if I give you some money, can you get somebody else to fight for me? Because this whole idea of dying for my king kind of seems a bit anachronistic now.' And this is the medieval period, so you know, people didn't want to go and smash the crap out of it. 'I'm replacing the loopholes in my castle with beautiful windows. This is a holiday home, mate. Don't make me go and fight people.' Exactly. So, the whole human side of it suddenly revealed another part of history, and I started to look at primary sources like the court rolls of effectively the magistrates court. So, for people that don't know, the low-level legal system. It's very similar, you know, you have the kind of ordinary crimes. Kind of like small claims court, I guess. Exactly. You had that. And things that mattered to people. If somebody's pig ate somebody's turnips, or somebody's apple tree fell down onto somebody else's land, and who owned the apples? Or the irrigation dispute, that kind of thing. Exactly. Or a cesspit. A cesspit is supposed to be emptied, but it overflows into somebody else's garden. You know, these are things that are broadly speaking, kind of happening today, you know? People have boundary disputes, and they had boundary disputes then.

And it suddenly made me see these people as ordinary people like us, and that made me want to discover how they solved the same problems, you know? I'm kind of interested in myth-busting as well, because I think the modern media, the Vikings didn't really dress like biker gangs, you know, back then.

Um, you know, they didn't have undercuts, and they didn't wear maybe they didn't wear eyeliner, and you know, some didn't they didn't sing songs that were invented a couple of years ago. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, and I'm interested in what the reality then? What did they do? And then of course we know that history is reevaluated sometimes. So the idea when I was at school my school level history was Vikings came over slaughtered everybody and kind of stole land. Well, I think there's definitely some of that. But there's also a lot of settling and a lot of exploring and a lot of deals done and a lot of kind of integration at times and there's people murdering Vikings in large numbers sometimes and then being murdered in turn and you know all of it gets actually weirdly the more you look into history of ordinary people the more blurry it gets sometimes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the resolution it becomes less distinct and that's why I actually used to work at the Jorvik Viking Centre. Ah, okay. So I was every day I was dressing up as a Viking and in that sense not dissimilar to some of the clothes I've seen you wearing. And something that was really interesting doing that was the way in which just simple little revelations would come about. So the fact that your shoes for example from that time period they have no grip. There's no leather so there's no rubber sole this kind of thing. They tend to be quite smooth. And two things became clear. First of all, it's unlikely that what we're finding are countryside shoes because the shoes we find are in urban settings. So they're smooth because the streets are being used a lot. They're very muddy and you basically want to mud skate through town. You don't want to get stuck in the mud. Whereas of course people from Scandinavia in a post-Roman world had hobnail boots. It's just that they get plowed up or get reused for other purposes in farm settings. But also as well, that whole thing of mud skating really came to the fore when you try and walk in those shoes on modern streets. I say modern, there was a street in York called Pavement. It's the first street to have been paved apparently. And everyone was very excited, hence the name. But then just next to it you have the Shambles which is all the cobbles. And trying to walk on cobbles in period appropriate shoes is very dangerous. So you have this strange thing where the reenacting community and this came to a head in reenactments of the Battle of Hastings. They stick to the evidence even more so than archaeologists do in so much as well we haven't found any evidence of hobnail boots from this period. And hence you have people running downhill in a reenacted battle and slipping on the grass if it's wet. And it's fascinating how that intersection between a simple question what was it like to go to the toilet in the medieval period and a presumption of how it should have been either based on evidence or received wisdom can lead to very weird ideas about history. I mean one of them of course would be the medieval filter that you see on films. It's always like right make it brown. Make it gray.

Oh yeah absolutely. I one of the one of the fascinating things is is is the ready the readily available colors we have in the modern world and how we mute them because we can. You know, there's a million different kinds of white you can go and buy. Yeah, yeah. Eggshell, yeah. And in the DIY a million different, you know, and multiple different sort of finishes. And there are names of colors I don't know what they're even called, but you know, it's a skill in itself coming up with a yet another interesting name for a very vaguely bluish white. Um and back in the day color was expensive because it was made with rarer elements. In some cases, incredibly rare like lapis like a semi-precious stone was ground up to make a certain type of blue. Yeah. And so the idea of having colors coordinating is probably fairly modern. If you had color, you just had a lot of it. So, if you're the king, I mean, there's a reconstruction in Dover Castle if people want to go and have a look at it. It's absolutely brilliant based on the evidence, apparently. And you go in there and you go, 'Holy moly, this is gaudy.' Yeah, yeah. His chair has got it, you know, it's yellow and blue and green and red painted like almost like a nursery school chair for Yeah. Um and that's because of just showing off the colors, not the subtlety of their sophistication. It was just colored, which you wouldn't necessarily have. You might have the basic earth tones. You know, if you're going to paint your house, you'd have limewash, and if you had sort of red soil, probably get some slightly redder soil and mix it in with the limewash to get a pink, and there you go. That's your paint. Yeah. And I'm interested in how we overlay our own thinking on things. So, I did some research into whether the low you know, peasants. Basically, most of us would have been peasants. So, like 90% of us would have been not quite subsistence farmers, but pretty much growing a lot of our own food and maybe a bit of an excess and depends on where you're talking about, but broadly speaking most of us would have lived in modest settlements and grown a lot of our own food and been very outdoorsy people. We would have been outdoors a lot of the time. Um, and towns were growing, you know, 14th century they start to grow a lot of urbanization and roads start to improve a bit and it's fascinating period as well. Um but did they How did they see themselves? You know, this concept that I think we struggle with is this um particularly in North America they talk about freedom. And the word freedom means different things to different sets of people. So, I've had discussions with North Americans going, 'Yeah, but you know, freedom's the important thing.' I said, 'Yeah, but you don't have a public health service in the same way we do in other places. Uh and you have the freedom, if you like, to buy a lot more firearms when you want to than we do in a lot of other places in the world. So, are you actually free or does that word mean different things to different people?' And so, people said, 'Yeah, but serfs and peasants weren't free.' And it's like, 'Yeah, but they didn't think they were slaves, I don't think. They were just ordinary people that lived within the system.' And if you actually overlay the amount of tax they paid, i.e. the amount of work they had to do not for themselves, cuz you know, like us. I mean, tax could be paid in terms of in kind or in terms of hours of work, but if you translated across, we are in the Western world more heavily burdened by the amount of our work we have to give away to society, whatever however you want to look at it, than they were back then. So, do we consider ourselves oppressed? Well, sometimes, yes, we do. And but most of the time we think we don't really think about it. We sort of get on with the jobs and get on with doing podcasts or listening to podcasts or doing videos or going to work or having a coffee, all of those things. And only occasionally do you stop and go Am I a slave? Yeah, the system. Yeah. And then you probably ignore it and move on. So, I'm just interested in ordinary people partly because I know what it's like to ride horses and stuff. And I always want to know what it's not like not to ride horses sometimes.

Oh, yeah, yeah. A way of monitoring tax systems.

Yeah. No, so so we And and history is always overlaid by our own perceptions. Yeah. Um The grime of time as well, yeah. Yeah, and you know, so you look at the um look at the ancient world. It's not again not an area I've studied very much, but ancient Rome was very likely quite brightly painted. You know, the statues were unlikely I believe to be left as raw marble. Yeah, the marble was the under surface and they were painted. And they were painted flesh tones with eyes, you know, eyeballs put on and hair, sometimes body hair painted on in public places. And I think we would probably I think if we did time travel, we'd probably go back and go oh lord, this is really quite gaudy. Yeah. Gaudy and over the top. And there was graffiti, you know, there's graffiti and we've got the usual images drawn The the universal symbol, yes. Drawn everywhere. And you know, Marcus Marcus is a [ __ ] and things like that written on worse things written on the walls. Um and for me that enlightens me about human beings being more or less the same throughout history. Yeah. And sometimes I then think to myself, I wonder I wonder how we're going to be seen. Um Yeah. Just this is a little example of this. I remember when we used to drive backwards and forwards to Oxford University along the Fosse Way, Yeah. which is an ancient Roman road. Before various motor the M40 was built, lived in Leicester, drove down. And that was so zigzagging through the countryside and then cutting down the Fosse Way, which is a modern road. It's quite bumpy but very straight. Yes. And I thought to myself, well, I wonder if 2,000 years ago there'd be a Roman soldier, young Roman soldier, marching somewhere. Don't know where, probably roughly where I'm going, maybe to somewhere down in East Anglia or anyway, wherever it might be. And I wonder if he was thinking, I wonder what's going to be here in 2,000 years. Yeah. And now I'm driving along in my lime green mini going, 'Oh, I wonder if there was a Roman soldier 2,000 years ago thinking of this.' Yeah, and that I think is one of the truly fascinating questions for me is to the extent to which people in the past, especially in the classical world, had a concept that the world would definitely be changing because Yeah. I I I think the reason why I say that is that so I've I have looked into this in terms of evidence for sort of like imagining new inventions. And one of the earliest examples I can find is actually from the Middle Ages where there is a a monk who sort of says, 'Wouldn't it wouldn't it be strange if carts could drive themselves?' There's something like that. He doesn't There's no mechanism speculation. He's just Wouldn't it be weird if there were no horses? But this idea that people, for example, in the Roman world or before imagined that there would be anything substantially different is very hard to pin down. And yet today we're in a very weird place where our grandparents, our great Very frankly, our parents, they saw different worlds. They were involved in different tiers of infrastructure and the economy. Things like social mobility, etc. All this stuff has changed so much in a matter of say a hundred years, 200 years that we know the future will be different. Quite possibly in a way in which And it's not to say that people in the past were daft or were incapable of imagining it. But they had no They didn't have the same demonstration of change throughout their lifetimes perhaps as we're often exposed to. Um and that thing about yeah, I wonder what it's going to be like in 2,000 years time. I mean an example you say you talk about graffiti. Um one of my favorite things about Pompeii and its graffiti is there's a character called Julia Felix who's an owner of property at the time when women weren't allowed to own property. Um and she got around this did Lucky Julia by owning the man who owned the property. So she owned a slave who she gave the property to by name. Uh so he had property but obviously he was someone else's property. But we know this partly because of the graffiti but also it reminds me of this was a few years ago now. Uh probably 20 12 2013 something like that. Um on the metro in Walls End I was getting onto the train and someone had daubed on the wall. You have to excuse my friend my French folks at home. Um [ __ ] the Tories and very quickly it was scrubbed off the wall. And I thought it's a shame in some ways because that stuff where people were insulting others actively doing political campaigning in very crude ways that stuff did survive in places like Rome. Um but I get one more thought that comes to mind based on what you're talking about though is I don't know if you recall but when the Rome HBO BBC dual production TV series came out one of the main um complaints from reviewers was that where is the city of marble? Where is our glorious where is this vision of Rome Rome? You well it wasn't there yet. It looked more like a riot of color and dirt and people and flesh you know it wasn't this sort of 1950s Hollywood production of Rome. And that insight is I think it has to be crucial cuz for example when it comes to castles lime washing one of the things that a lot of people they often freak out about is when you show them a picture of a castle that's white they go what? Why? Cuz they used to they used to it's almost the inverse of the marble sculpture in that sense isn't it? Yes yes absolutely. Well I I I that some of the stuff I that's what I talk about a little bit in you know, in my YouTube channel as well. But and um but when one is raking a sort of fantasy world um especially if you talk about that because the beginning of the book it features a castle that's newly built. Yeah. Um but that um the chap has not got permission from the king to crenellate. Oh, okay. Um and there's the whole the very beginning of it is this is part of the kicking off of the story. It's like why hasn't he done this? Because it's simple. He just has to pay a little bit of money and it's a formality. Yeah. But the formality represents fealty. It represents the system. And if you break the system, it becomes very serious and then there are consequences and everything. So, um and our young knight talks about the surprising whiteness of the stone Yeah. and how expensive that stone is cuz it's not the local stone. Somebody shipped in this expensive stone to show off his power and wealth. Yeah. And I so and I think um conspicuous consumption was has always been a thing. It's the thing now. People drive Ferraris, you know, through London where there's no point because you can't Okay, with the speed bumps, yeah. Exactly. I mean, it's really silly, but it shows off it shows things off and people did that back then and they bought special horses that weren't very comfortable, but looked showy. Um and there's a whole thing about white horses in history cuz white horses usually get they're harder to keep clean. Yeah. The whole thing and if you've got a clean white horse, you've got staff. Yeah. And you can maintain it, whereas a brown or black horse, you quickly give it a brush and nobody notices the muck stains on it. So so is that is that is that part of your trick then is that you try to you try to explore what's inferred in very quickly in a cultural way to people previously. But you just sort of explore it a little bit. So the inference of a white horse actually implies several layers of thought there. Yes. Or we think we think it does. But there might be people who just had a white horse cuz they liked the horse. And then and are we putting too many layers on this? Um I think it was um the author of a secret diary of Adrian Mole. There was a They they did a She did a Sue Townsend, I think. Great books of an era. Um but she did low level in an O level paper in her own book. And she didn't She got a passing grade, but it wasn't very good one. And one of the questions was why did the author choose blue curtains in his room? And of course

She was the author, so she absolutely knew the factual answer. And the answer was she just wrote it down because she looked up and she had blue curtains, so she wrote down blue curtains because it's another word. And she was trying to get to her word limit that day. But the correct answer according to the literary studies was that it reflects his mood and I see. And the blue was chosen because it's sort of isolating color and cold and you know, he's separated from society. That kind of thing. And she was going, 'No, no, I'm the author, so I can tell you I didn't.' And sometimes we put too much onto it. But I also like to speculate as well and take things and try to build a story around it. So I wanted to tell people about what you might do if you visited an inn. You know, you say you're a medieval traveler and you know, what was an inn like, explaining what they do in their travel stops basically. They're like motels. And of course everybody would have animals or many people would have animals. So you have a whole section of animals. And then, because my mind works like this, I was thinking what in Dungeons & Dragons or Tunnels & Trolls, you'd have all sorts of exotic animals. And I suddenly thought, you know what, in a fantasy setting, you'd have inns because you've got travelers. You'd definitely have inns close to the frontier because you've got adventures coming in and out with ill-gotten gains. You'd have a whole society and a system set up to look after their exotic animals too. And some of them are carnivorous creatures, so you've got to separate those out, and you've got some that can phase through the wall. I mean...

And it suddenly occurred to me, there's a huge thought experiment you could do there because it's like, okay, so maybe some inns only take the carnivorous riding beasts, but they won't take any of the others because they're not designed for it. Or they charge you more. It's like, 'I'm sorry, mate, you've got your saber-tooth tiger. That's going to cost you twice as much as somebody with a dog. Last time we had the saber-tooth in, oh, it was a bloodbath.' And you suddenly think there's really interesting human-level stories about just the real historical reality then sort of overlaid on fantasy landscape. And I want to do a piece on economy as well, because I was looking at one of my areas I'm trying to look at and find stories about is the fall of Rome and the Roman legions leaving England, and it appears that the setting is very checkerboard. It's not like everybody just left. It's like some places people seem to have just left, other places seem to keep going more or less Roman for a few generations, slightly shifting and changing. And there doesn't seem to be much of a pattern. And you know, what does a society do when nobody's making money anymore? Because you've got the whole thing about coinage. There's a time when it doesn't appear that anybody was making coins that anybody trusted. So kind of money runs out. I mean, not in the way we haven't got anything to spend, but literally we don't have any coins. So how does...

Yeah, well, it's funny you should say that. I've heard it described as a little bit, funnily enough, a little bit like the way that the landscape that mammoth occupied can be understood. And that is as a tartan. So, there's a reason for mentioning this, but mammoth, a little bit like elephants today, sort of managed their landscapes. They trampled certain crops, they resulted in different soil conditions and so on, depending on where they are. And it appears that mammoth didn't just occupy a band of tundra becoming arboreal, but rather they seem to actually actively mix it up, and it created these bands of interference and stability combined with a little bit of chaos. And that's kind of analogous to the sort of world that people were living in in post-Roman Britannia, because you had this broader sense of a world. One thing that a lot of people, of course, would say about this is they start talking immediately about the Dark Ages. And these people weren't suddenly unaware of their place in the world. But they, as you say, had differing access to resources. They had suddenly differing political allegiances. Sometimes you might have a local warlord essentially. You might have ongoing salt trade perhaps across the English Channel to France. You might have interests coming in from Scandinavia and they're coming down, and there was all sorts of variety of things happening. But what I suppose the only thing we do know is that that patchwork was being negotiated over the course of 200 years.

Yeah, absolutely. And this whole thing, it's one of the things that I often find fascinating actually. It is, and you mentioned time travel because actually a place like, there's a poem called The Ruin, written by a Saxon poet in what is thought to be Chichester. And it's collapsing, and he's describing how the red-tiled roofs are bowing, how plaster covered in frescoes is molded, and how these rocks hewn by giants, obviously it's a rhetorical device to describe an imperial power, an imperial force. You know, these halls must have been brightly lit and so on. But it's a world that occurs to me we don't really tolerate today. And an analogy might be something like Chernobyl and Pripyat, where you have buildings that are being reclaimed and no one is seeking to demolish and rebuild because they can't, it's dangerous. And I think there were towns in that sort of space in the post-Roman world that were ruinous. But people were living just sort of on the fringes. So for example, here in Wallsend we know that people moved away from Segedunum to Wallsend and founded a whole new town on a tributary onto the Tyne. But clearly they were still doing things in the stables of the old Roman forts. So we find some evidence of people living in these structures, but the infrastructure itself sort of fell out of favor as much as it fell into ruin. And that whole thing, that's a question that I think lots of people are accustomed to asking about the future, you know, what will happen if there's an apocalyptic event. But that hinterland of the remnants of one civilization and the fact that people don't go away, they just change, is fascinating. But I would explore that space by saying, so was that because they didn't really like the Roman stuff, or was it just not suited to them, or had they lost the will to maintain them in that way? Did it just seem unnatural, or was it that the skills had depleted a bit? It's like, that's going to require a really big piece of shaped wood and that's quite expensive to get. If we just use the poles we can get from the hazel coppices, that'll do for now. And then the other thing is slowly falling down and it's too dangerous. We don't know how to make the tiles anymore. They're too expensive. Yeah, and I find that fascinating because it's sort of, was it just they couldn't be bothered, or was it that they didn't have the money or the time, the expertise? I think it's a combination because you would have had, you know, the models from the 1950s and 60s would have had you thinking about civilization creating surplus and that surplus allowing people the space to be a master potter or whatever, and that sort of applies I suppose. But actually again, in a town like where I live in Wallsend, people didn't just go, 'I don't know how to mine anymore, I don't know how to build a ship anymore.' It's that the systems surrounding those industries went away.

Suddenly being a riveter, or one of my favorite jobs listed in the directories for 1900s world then was an 1880s holder-upper. You hold up the sheet while you make rivets to the ship. But those people didn't forget. They didn't lose the skills. They just had nowhere to apply them and no larger system that it was serving. So I think there's something, again, it's a mess as you were saying, the more you look at it, the messier it is, but also the more real it is. But that brings me to the reason why I mentioned time travel. I have a question here that I've triple underlined, in fact. People always ask me this, and I'll give you my answer afterwards. Would you ever want to time travel?

Yes, I would love to. However, it would depend on the circumstances, I would say. So, am I physically going to be there for a length of time? Am I a disembodied viewer? What's my motivation? Can I record it? So for example, I would love to see a medieval tournament, a real one. I would probably also like to take part in one for real, because I've got those skills and I'd love to see how my skills apply. I suspect they'd probably be okay, but somewhere in the middle, there'll be plenty of people worse than me and plenty of people better than me. I would probably be appalled at the way they spoke to ordinary people. I'd probably be like, 'Ooh, you can't say that to someone,' and everybody's kind of okay with it. And the way they handle the horses might be, 'Oh my God, you can't treat a horse like that,' and I'd find it very upsetting. I would also love to go back to those potentially pivotal moments in history which have changed me, maybe they didn't, but maybe like the Battle of Hastings. What actually happened? Was it because it's not like William the Conqueror was the victor and everything was settled for him. His whole life he had uprisings, he was putting down the harrowing of the north, all sorts of stuff was going on. So he literally won that and then rushed to London to be crowned king, which indicates he wasn't necessarily that secure in the kingship. You don't rush if you know you've won, you take your time. But he kind of rushed there and almost at sword point said, 'You're going to crown me now.' And then he spent the rest of his life managing the system. What's great about the Battle of Hastings is that lots of different viewpoints were written about it, so it's really interesting from that perspective. I would be fascinated to see how effective a horse charge is on rough and tough huscarls in a shield wall. Did it actually have an effect? Were many people actually killed, or was it more likely that they were killed once things broke and there was a rout, and one side was running away and the other side was just cutting them down because their blood was up? They were being absolute bastards to the other side, trying to reduce numbers so they don't have to fight them next time. I would love to see a Roman legion marching, and how well organized it was. I suspect it was fairly well organized, but not always.

Um, and yeah, how well organized was it? And I suspect it was fairly well organized, but not always. Well, in that sense, people often talk about these things. One of the phrases I came to dislike the most when I was a student, but this was largely because of my particular mentors. I really appreciate the space they gave me to think about this, was this idea of the Roman military machine. You know, it's not a machine. It's a mass of people. And as you said in your interview with Michelle, knights themselves had a retinue of people supporting them. And the same goes for a group of Roman soldiers. Yes, you had the armed column, but there was essentially a town moving with them. And that as you say, the question is as to how organized that is, and whether or not it is. So one simple thing is technically you're not meant to get married if you're in the legion, but clearly people did. So it's a human reality. As far as time travel goes, my only provision would be twofold. First of all, guarantee of return. And secondly, adequate health care. I don't want to catch something I'm not immune to.

Yes, I am a bit of an iconoclast. I have a horrible habit of asking why. And is there a better way of doing it? I usually ask why, I think that's my science training coming in, which is, okay, this is the perceived wisdom. It might be true. Let's investigate it. What does the data show? So my brother and I are very keen on looking at data when it comes to our computer games. What sort of person is buying this? How do we get more of those people to know our game exists? Because discovery is a big thing at the moment. Huge markets worldwide. People can't buy your game or book unless they've heard about it. So how do you get people to hear about it? And more and more our lives are guided by these faceless robotic algorithms which change and shift. And those algorithms are very bizarre. It's probably a topic for another subject along with AI as well, how we're living through another industrial revolution, but it's wild. But the thing for me is always asking enough questions so that you get to the bottom of the proper reason. Or a reason you think, 'Yeah, that makes sense.' Or actually, that still doesn't make sense. Why do we do it that way? Because data can get lost. And one of the things as the company has grown, I always have to fight against is this idea that I've said something that's then been interpreted by somebody, simplified by the next person, then written down by another person. For example, I was being asked by HR recently about somebody who wanted to move and they had certain flexibility in working hours. They said, 'But the rule is if you live more than 50 miles away from work, you can't do X or you have to do Y.' I went, 'Well, who said that rule?' They said, 'Oh, you did.' I went, 'When?' They said, 'Four or five years ago we asked you the question, and you said, 'Oh, 50 miles.' I bet you I didn't. I bet you I said, 'I don't know, about 50 miles seems about reasonable, but let's keep it flexible.' And they said, 'We have to have a policy.' I said, 'Yeah, our policy is to be flexible within reason.' We have a set of guidelines, but if somebody's 51 miles away or 49 miles away, come on, be a human being. Interpret and go, 'Yeah, fine, we'll work with that.' So it's a guideline for future conversation. And obviously if somebody lives 200 miles away, it's different than if somebody lives 2 miles away. So it was one of those funny things where it's like, 'Hang on, you're talking about what I said, and I know what I said.' I know how I always say these things. I say, 'Okay, in that circumstance we'll make this decision. That doesn't mean we're going to make the same decision because the circumstances of the next person might be different.' And I think history is a bit like that, and writing is a bit like that. You've got to have rules, but as a famous fictional pirate once said, they're more guidelines. The code is more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules.

Well, very well. I'm blessed to be incredibly successful, and I think that comes with hard work, sure, but I think that's a bit of a shibboleth as well. I think you have to have hard work and luck and be in the right place at the right time, and then make good of the opportunities that are thrown at you as best you can, and rinse and repeat. Keep working hard. But working hard on its own will not necessarily bring you success. You need luck on your side. I got involved in computer games at the very beginning of the industry, and the industry has grown. So I would have to do a really bad job to not grow at least at the rate of the computer games industry, but we've grown much faster. So it's definitely the industry is growing, but I've we've grown beyond that. So I have an additional positive effect, I hope, on what we do. But yes, I think decency and decent human beings, most human beings in my experience are decent to one level or another. And it depends on the circumstances. People can be having a really bad time and you don't even know about it, and they're just being shitty because it's actually not you, it's them, somebody else you don't know about. But by and large we're social animals. We need to communicate well with other people, and by and large society is functional even though you see moments where it's dysfunctional. There's a lot of dysfunction going on at the moment in the world, but actually if you look at the data, there's an awful lot more functionality going on. People are by and large living longer, healthier, dramatically wealthier. So the idea of not starving for a substantial number of people on the planet is, you know, we're not going to starve, but there are still people starving. So we're not there yet. But this idea that everything is terrible is not the case if you look at the raw data, but there might be pockets of it in different places. So I also feel that in business, if you do good business, by and large people want to work with you again. And also, if you do somebody over in business, you probably won't work with them again unless they have no choice, and then they're working with you against their intentions. But you also don't typically know when somebody is saying something or not doing something because they won't tell you they're not going to work with you again. They're just telling their mate, 'Don't work with them, they're shit.' And then he turns down the work with you. You won't necessarily know that. But sometimes you find, 'I need a plumber, has anybody got...' and you phone them up. Or somebody phones you up and says, 'I need a builder, was that bloke you worked with any good?' 'Ah, no, I wouldn't work with them again.' So quiet networks like that. So it doesn't always work, and you can get exploited, but I think proportionately, doing good by other people gains you more than it loses. And vice versa. And I think the media is very guilty of this. It tends to make the C-suite, it's a very American thing, but the bosses are sort of other. And I think it has gone a bit wrong actually in the states at the moment because I and a lot of my colleagues who are in charge of businesses that they built themselves could easily run multinational companies as far as I'm aware. And they've got people running them who don't seem to be particularly good at running them, but they've kind of fallen into that position. Running a big company does take a lot of energy and experience. You need to know how to manage people, how to communicate well. But it's not rocket science. It is something people can train themselves for. You do have to be good at making decisions though. You have to be comfortable making decisions that may be wrong. And some people don't like doing that. Some people just don't want to make decisions. And we have it in our own organization. Sometimes people are very senior, but they don't want to manage anybody. They're very good at their job. And other people are very senior and are happy managing people. So as a team leader, you've got to try and fit the right people in the right place because you get so much more fun working with people that are good at their job and are enjoying it. It's just better all over.

No, I haven't. I've seen them on lidar views, that kind of thing, but no, I haven't.

I don't think it was Black Death. I think people were driven off the land. I can tell you afterwards by email, and I'll put it on screen for folks at home.

No, exactly. But often a lot of them were Black Death, though.

Oh, yes, yes, I am. One of the conceits in the book is that the land is not named, so we don't quite know where it is. It comes across as a form of England, and the story takes place in one of the border regions. But it's our world through a looking glass a little bit. The main character, a young knight, travels to the borderlands and has to reestablish his fiefdom. He was brought up by his grandfather before he went to be trained as a knight, and his grandfather told him tales of dragons and all sorts of fun tales, which as a boy he was terribly excited about. When he became a young man, that was all put aside, stayed with him a bit, but it was put aside for the knightly thing and court and behaving properly. In this world, it's not the done thing to talk about the old ways. Society high society doesn't talk about it, it's impolite. Even though at the king's court, he has several bishops, but he also has a woman called the Crone, who is very short and wizened and carries a staff. Our character asks his mentor, 'Why does the king keep the crone?' The mentor says, 'It's always best to hedge your bets in war and in politics. The king is just doing what you need to learn to do, which is always have a backup plan.' So he goes off on his adventures, and as he has adventures, he realizes the world isn't quite as simple as he thought. He develops a different experience of the world and discovers that things aren't quite as straightforward as he thought. Some things are real, but some things still might not be real either. And how does he fit in? Is he being manipulated? What's going on? There are battles, knights in armor, bandits, and horses. But there are other things going on. He finds a black lance, for example. He doesn't use it in this story, but he finds it on the borderland, and he doesn't recognize the wood, but he puts it back. I've tried to create little story nuggets to make people go, 'What's that about?'

Yeah, and actually a couple of things you might find interesting on that note. Two designs that I love that have that same aspect of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it.' One of them is the common watering can. I think early versions of the current design you find in Tudor contexts, they tend to be pottery, but it's a pot with a spout and a handle. Whenever people try to monkey with these designs, they often fail. I saw this experimental watering can that was like a vase with a flute, and no one buys them because it doesn't look like a watering can. The other one is the late Roman cavalry helmet. It's a design that you see going through from the Roman-Saxon transition because people were being brought in to the Roman cavalry as high-status mercenaries. They were inheriting some of these helmets, and some of these designs you see being echoed in things like the Coppergate helmet and onwards. Because again, the shape is just the way you do it. And if that, the big question at the heart of my interest in archaeology is why does anything change? It has to be a combination of things: do you have a reason to change it? Does the person who suggests the change have adequate social standing? Are they seen as a weirdo and no one listens? But by definition, we know that history has happened because things have changed. That may sound ridiculously straightforward and obvious, but it's actually quite profound. We only know that history is different because it is different and things have changed.

Oh, I love it. I absolutely love it. I love it for the pageantry and what it does. It's grotesquely anachronistic in so many ways. There are elements that annoy me that don't work at all. But I love the fact that it's about jousting. Pretty much all of it is ahistorical. But the pageantry of a joust, the fact that ordinary people were watching and probably watching for different reasons than nobility. I think ordinary people were probably watching because they wanted to see the nobility beaten black and blue. Secretly they don't want to say that, but they're kind of hoping that that bugger that's just put their taxes up gets smashed off his horse and knocked unconscious or breaks his neck. 'Oh, he's got a concussion. Aw. What a shame. Never mind.' And yet the nobility are showing off their martial prowess and their horses. We know that people didn't have enough jousting horses, and I also know how to train jousting horses, so I know how difficult it can be. Some horses just won't joust. They're too sensible. Others take to it like a fish to water. I love the performances as well. They're great. I love the fact that Chaucer's in it and talks about traveling and fonging. 'All fong you thee.' For me, I really appreciate the use of pop music. 'We Will Rock You,' David Bowie in the dinner scene. It reminds you that people were people and they were getting out of these interactions lots of the things that we love and need today.

No, I'm just... the key thing for me is that some people get to read it. What I would say is, like any author, give us a review. If you get a chance, just put a quick review down there because again, our lord and master, the algorithm, likes to see reactions and engagement. Even if it takes you two seconds, just go, 'I like this book, full stop.' That's great. If you like something, say it out loud digitally. Buying isn't enough.

Cheers.