[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Dan Jones is a historian known for making the Middle Ages seem exciting. He's written many best-selling histories about the Crusaders, the Knights of Templar, The Wars of the Roses, he has a podcast and a show exploring castles on Netflix, but now Dan can add novelist to his long résumé with his debut, Essex Dogs. The novel draws on Dan's extensive knowledge to tell the story of a tight-knit troop fighting in The Hundred Years' War in France. There's a large, burly Scotsman, a 16-year-old expert archer, a completely lapsed priest, and their captain named Loveday FitzTalbot, who just wants to make sure his men get home and get paid. Will they all make it out alive, and is the conflict in France enough to tear the Essex Dogs apart? Kirkus Reviews calls the novel "an enjoyable romp through the darkest of ages."

Dan Jones joins me now. Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Jones: How are you doing?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing great. Obviously, you are, first and foremost, known in your career as a historian. When did you decide to become a novelist?

Dan Jones: Well, all the way through, I guess, the first 10, 15 years of my writing career, people kept asking me when I was going to write a novel as though it was a given. The way I'd approach nonfiction over, I think, 10 nonfiction books was very biography-led, colorful, cinematic kind of style of storytelling allied with all the historical research underpinning it. I guess that suggested that I might one day get around to writing a novel, but actually, I didn't believe that I would. I was terrified by the idea of switching out of nonfiction into fiction because it's really scary. I felt like you're bearing a lot more in fiction, and so I was resistant for a very long time until two things, I suppose, happened.

One was that I had an idea, certainly of an opening scene for a book that could only be done as fiction, and that was to tell the story of a platoon of ordinary soldiers in the Middle Ages. The second was I turned 40, and I wrote 10 books. I just had this feeling those round numbers were trying to tell me something, and that if I didn't make the jump from nonfiction to fiction now, then I might never do it and end up regretting it when I was 80.

Alison Stewart: You write in your acknowledgments, "Yet even then I dithered. It was not until that summer after a wide-ranging conversation over dinner with George R. R. Martin, a history lover whose works of fiction I admire enormously, that something clicked." What did you talk about?

Dan Jones: Well, George was in London-- This would have been the summer of 2019, I guess. George was in London enroute to Dublin, Ireland, because he was going to Comic-Con, I believe. We did a kind of onstage conversation for 1,000 people in London, and we talked. He was then promoting his book Fire and Blood, which was this "popular history-" well, the history is quote-unquote, of the Targaryen dynasty, which is now the big new HBO TV series. Well, we talked a lot about the process of writing history to make it exciting. I got the sense in our public conversation of just how much of a history lover George is. I kind of knew, but it was the depth of interest in history as well as his interest in great storytelling.

Then when we went out for dinner afterwards, we just continued that theme, really. His deep love for all things historical, particularly the Middle Ages, was extremely impressive, his knowledge and his passion, but what I came away from the conversation thinking was, "Well, here's a guy who's doing a lot of the same work that I'm doing in my nonfiction books, but he's producing a radically different product and seems to be having so much fun doing it." The nerves and the apprehension, I guess, I'd felt for a long time about the prospect of writing fiction gave way to a sense of excitement at the possibilities if one approached fiction with a sense of mischief and fun, but also with the rigorous love for the historical material that I'd seen in George, who is one of the great living writers, I believe.

Alison Stewart: How did you land on The Hundred Years' War as the backdrop for this story? Remind people why England and France were at war when we meet the Essex Dogs.

Dan Jones: Well, I'd written a lot about this period before. I'd written a book called The Plantagenets, I'd written the book about The Wars of the Roses, and both of these books in different ways touched on relations between England and France in the 14th, 15th centuries. The Hundred Years' War, contrary to its name, lasted for somewhat more than 100 years. It's a sprawling, interconnected series of wars between the English, the French, but also the Scottish, the Castilians, the Flemish and a bunch of other people besides.

At root is a very petty argument, really, between kings who all want each other's crown. That's what it boils down to. The kings of England want to be kings of France as well. They're greedy. They take with them-- Well, for example, in the Crécy campaign, which is what Essex Dogs describes, Edward III takes an army of 15,000 men across the English Channel from England to the beaches of Normandy. I mean, it really is D-Day only in 1346 instead of 1944. Lands them on- well, it's just up the coast from what was Utah Beach in '44, and then leads them on this campaign that really does resemble in many senses the Normandy campaign of 1944. They burn a swathe through the Norman countryside, they cross rivers, they sack cities, they end up in this enormous battle in Crécy.

I was interested in telling a story of medieval warfare, which I had written a lot about from the perspective of knights, nobles, kings, the kind of officer class; I was interested in telling that story from the perspective of ordinary people. Because as a history writer, I was acutely aware, all the time I was working on it, that this was an inaccessible story for a history writer. You can't make Band of Brothers set in the Middle Ages because there aren't soldiers' diaries that would allow you to draw on that, so you can't write the real history. This was a project that I felt could only be attacked via fiction. We would have to create these characters, and then render their experience on campaign realistic via the tools of historical research.

The Hundred Years' War felt like a very promising place in which to set this book because I felt like modern readers, having seen things like Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan and so on, would feel like they kind of knew this landscape. They know what the landing of the Normandy beach was like if they've ever seen the Bob Capa photos or watched Saving Private Ryan, and yet here it is 600 years earlier in medieval costume. I felt like that would be a very interesting creative combination.

Alison Stewart: Did you feel a sense of responsibility in any way, giving, as you describe them, ordinary people a voice?

Dan Jones: Yes, I think I did. I felt a sense of, I wouldn't quite call it righteous anger, but it wasn't far away from it at some point. I'd written so much from the other point of view. You write about these campaigns in history books, and whether you mean to be or not, you slip onto the side of the knights, the nobles, the kings because they're the voices that you can really hear through authentic medieval sources. These are the people the chronicle writers are really interested in, and so you tend to see things from their perspective.

As soon as you move the camera, as it were, onto the shoulders of some ordinary people, you see what a farce and cruel pretense the idea of chivalry is, and this sort of lord literally lording it about that the people like the Black Prince and Edward III do, and the callous disregard they have for ordinary people's lives. All of this being drawn out of the historical sources, and then I've transmitted it via this fictional story. I got quite uptight about chivalry and nobility in a way that I had never had been previously.

It's hard to feel responsible to characters who are figments of my imagination, but certainly by the end of writing Essex Dogs, and I'm currently writing a sequel, Wolves of Winter, I was very, very emotionally involved with these characters and very committed to their struggle.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Dan Jones. We're discussing his debut novel, Essex Dogs. You heard there's another one coming. We'll talk more about that in a minute. Dan, were you able to go to any of the locations in France you describe in the novel?

Dan Jones: Well, the first glimpse I got of the very first scene in the novel, which is this storming of the Normandy Beaches D-Day-style, came on New Year's Day 2019 when I was on Omaha Beach with some friends. I'd hired a house in Normandy near Saint-Lô, and we were walking on Omaha Beach. I'm sure some of your listeners will have been. It's an extremely moving experience. The war cemetery above it is an extremely moving place to be. You can't help but consider what it must have been like for people on these beaches. The idea that I had on those beaches was, well, this happened 600 years ago.

Subsequently, along came the pandemic, and so it was only actually after I'd finished writing the book that I went and walked the- no, I didn't walk the entire route, I drove some of it because it's several hundred miles, but I followed in the exact footsteps of the real soldiers who went on this campaign, and therefore, my fictional Essex Dogs. Saw everything they saw, and was relieved in one way, and somewhat moved in another, to see that it was kind of just as I'd imagined it.

You see, if you go to somewhere like [unintelligible 00:10:26] the River Seine, not far from Rouen, you see the broken bridges that were broken in 1944, 1945 with the battle for Normandy, but the same breaking of bridges had occurred in the 1346 campaign, and so these eerie stumps sticking out of the water and the relics of a battle that was fought there only two generations ago. It was a pretty moving experience to do it. We made a couple of films, actually, there on the History Hit network, which is the real history that underpins the novel Essex Dogs. It was a great experience.

Alison Stewart: In your novel, the leader of the group is Loveday FitzTalbot, who is really concerned with bringing all his men home, making sure they also follow orders and don't go rogue. How did you come upon the name Loveday FitzTalbot?

Dan Jones: I don't rightly know. Do you know what? He was Loveday for so long. I had pictures of these characters before I had names. In my office at home, I have this enormous-- One wall is completely covered by a corkboard where whichever book, be it a history book or a novel I'm working on, is the architecture, the structure, the characters are all there, and they were mugshots on the wall. I drew a lot of these from medieval artists, chiefly the early 15th century because the art becomes a lot better in 15th century, so from artists like da Vinci, but principally from Jan van Eyck, the Flemish artist. I took lots of pictures from the backgrounds of his great altarpieces and paintings, so I had these faces. Loveday had a face very, very early on.

The name Loveday, I honestly can't remember where it appeared from. He was FitzTalbot because that's the name associated with another part of The Hundred Years' War, and I wanted to suggest a sort of fallen nobility within Loveday. He's the leader, but he's also one of his men. Once Loveday was in there, it stuck. Lots of people tell me now, when I'm out talking about the book, "Oh, I've got a friend called Loveday." Very big in Cornwall, apparently, and so now I say, "Oh, yes, he had a family in Cornwall," and the backstory develops the more I hear about other people who've been called Loveday.

Alison Stewart: How does Loveday feel about the war at this point in his life?

Dan Jones: He's over it. He's done, and he just doesn't quite know it yet. It's one campaign too far. The Essex Dogs, the little platoon that he leads, has another leader called the Captain who's gone missing, and in fact, he's abandoned them. It's left Loveday, a deputy promoted to leadership, which he's very, very anxious about.

He's been a reliable soldier of fortune throughout his life. He's in his early 40s now, so he's cracking on forward to middle-age in medieval terms. He's fought in the Scottish wars, and he's been in France before. He's done a lot of non-legit violence, as in not for the king, breaking the king's law, all his life, and hasn't really stopped to question it. Yet, as he leads his men off the little landing craft, running, screaming up the beaches of Normandy on the 12th of July 1346, there's something in his gut telling him, you've lost your bottle, effectively. You've lost your nerve. This feeling pervades the rest of the story.

He's a very self-effacing character in many ways. He's a weird kind of hero because he's ambiguous about almost everything he's doing. His one root instinct is the protection of the men he's led. He feels this enormous responsibility to protect them, even when not all of the men who are fighting for him are very nice. Some of them are outright horrible; father, the disgraced priest, for example. Yet, he feels this sense of a higher responsibility for them, which in this shape of the story is designed to bounce against the pretended morality of chivalry that the king and the princes and the nobles all subscribe to. Whereas you see in them a lot of fine words about fighting for one another, but absolutely nothing in practice.

Loveday is the other way round. He's often very tongue-tied when he tries to express himself, but what pulses through his character is this sense of avuncular love for his men.

Alison Stewart: The youngest of the group is just 16, an archer named Romford. How does all the violence and the fighting affect the youngest member of the Essex Dogs?

Dan Jones: Oh, poor Romford. You just say his name, and I want to put my arms around him. Romford is a street kid from London and Suffolk, particularly, which is on the south bank of the River Thames, and in the 14th century was London's red light district, if you like. It was where the bad stuff went down. He's been drugged up by a father and a brother in the drinking dens and the taverns and the houses of ill repute in Suffolk. He's lost his father, his brother has disappeared, and he's run away, and he's found himself on the ship going to France because he might as well have been anywhere else.

He's quite dissociative. He's very lost. He finds in the Essex Dogs the only group of adults, because he's still a child, really, although by medieval standards, he is an adult too; the only group of adults who've ever really looked out for him instead of not caring about him or actively abusing him in some way. He's a deadeye archer, and he's very good at gambling. He has a lot of natural talent, he doesn't quite realize it. He's strangely ambivalent about a lot of violence, both towards himself and towards others. He just accepts that this is a violent world in which he lives, and you're going to be buffeted if you live in it.

There's a little bit of sadness in there, but there's also an enormous resilience, but he is what I would describe as a fiend. He's found his escape from the horrors of this world through an expert's nose for the powders at the back of apothecary shops. His is a sort of-- As he goes further and further into this heart of darkness of a campaign, he goes deeper and deeper into a savagery of the self, which ends up nearly bringing him to great mischief.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Dan Jones. We're discussing his debut novel, Essex Dogs. This is a book about war. There's action sequences, but there are moments of quiet and reflection. How did you figure out the balance?

Dan Jones: I felt my way, really, because you know what? I'm a total beginner or I was a total beginner at writing fiction again, and so a lot of it was gut instinct. As a writer of history, I'm an extremely architectural writer, and I do a lot of planning work, and every book is in its right place before I begin writing and it's writing to an architectural plan.

I remember, to go back to my conversation with George R. R. Martin, he'd told me, "There are two types of writers: architects and gardeners." I thought, "Well, he must be an architect because he knows what he's doing," and he said, "I'm a gardener." What? He said, "I just plant a seed and see where it takes me." That was the process for- I found was the only process I could work to for Essex Dogs. It was a real relearning of process as a writer for me.

In terms of finding balance, the closest analogy I could make for you is that it's like hearing a tune; you know when it's got to be loud and you know when it's got to be quiet. I was musician and not a professional musician, but I was a keen musician in my teens up to my early 20s. I listened to a lot of music and I know a lot of musicians, and so the rhythm of music has always been with me in terms of sentence building. Now, I've found that the rhythm of music, it was really something that carried me along, pacing the novel; that you know when it's got a crescendo and you know when you've got to have some sort of brooding-building quiet. It's real gut instinct, I think.

Alison Stewart: You fictionalize quite a few real historical figures. One of the most prominent is Edward, Prince of Wales, became known as the Black Prince. Regarded as a great knight. People probably know the image. If you don't, go Google it now. You don't paint him in such a heroic life. What went into that decision?

Dan Jones: It's mischief, a lot of mischief, and a little bit of the righteous anger I mentioned earlier. If you go to Canterbury Cathedral, one of the most famous cathedrals here in England, where I'm talking to you from right now, you will see there the Black Prince's glorious armaments; this beautiful, colorful breastplate, and the plume on top of his helmet, and so on, and all this sort of ceremonial armor. His name has become a byword for the glories of chivalry; the idea that knightliness was to be equated with high morality and virtue and glory and all of these things.

This just struck me as a little bit kind of cap-doffing subservience towards a man who'd been responsible for massacring entire cities in his career, and who never struck me as anything but a bit of a brute in all the historical sources that I'd read, and that he was being covered for by all the sycophants who were around him, who were writing his legend as he was still alive and certainly straight after his death. I thought, well, here he is in the Crécy campaign in 1346. He's 16 years old, much like Romford. Unlike Romford, who's just at the very bottom of the food chain, the Black Prince is given command of the vanguard of the army. He's notionally in charge of the front bit of about a third of the army.

I thought, well, what would such a person be like? He's going to turn out to be quite a brute in his later life and somebody, by the way, who marries his first-cousin. Yet, what is a 16-year-old like? I thought, I've met enough 16-year-olds, and indeed, I was a 16-year-old boy myself some time ago, to know that you give them a sniff of authority and power and they really are likely to start throwing their weight about them, being awful. The Black Prince is awful, and he's completely-- Well, he's largely unchecked by authority, except by a couple of the earls deputed to look after him and show him the ropes, who go way too far in treating him very, very brutally because they're sick of his nonsense. What you get is a bullied bully who's afraid, who's not self-confident and who's trying to overproject, who's not really got any sense of the worth of human life-- [crosstalk] Go on.

Alison Stewart: To find out what happens, you have to read the book.

Dan Jones: Well, you have to read Essex Dogs, yes.

Alison Stewart: Essex Dogs by Dan Jones. Dan, thanks for spending time with us.

Dan Jones: It's been a real pleasure, thank you.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for today. On tomorrow's show, we go back to '93 when Steven Spielberg released two of his most famous films: Jurassic Park and Schindler's List. We'll talk about how he pulled it off. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I'll meet you back here tomorrow.

[music]

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.