541: No Such Thing As A Sycamore In A Silver Coat

Transcript

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Speaker 6 Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined by the history guy himself, Mr.
Dan Snow.

Speaker 6 If you are a person in the UK who likes to watch history documentaries, you will know all about Dan.

Speaker 6 If you are a podcast fan, you may well know his podcast, History Hit, which is an absolutely brilliant history podcast that both myself and Anna and Dan have recently appeared on.

Speaker 6 So do look for his podcast and listen to our episodes and indeed all of the episodes of that brilliant show.

Speaker 6 Actually, while you're on the podcast app of your choice, why not find mine and Anna's new podcast? It's called Quite a Good Sport.

Speaker 6 And I'll tell you some more about that in a minute because I should also say we're going on tour.

Speaker 6 The tour, which we booked so many months ago and felt like it was so far in the future, is just around the corner. Ah!

Speaker 6 If you live in Edinburgh, Edinburgh, that will be our first date and we'll be playing there on the 14th of August 2024.

Speaker 6 You can see a live podcast recording including all the bits that I normally cut out because we can't possibly broadcast them. It will all be there in Edinburgh.
I really hope you can make it.

Speaker 6 We love doing these shows and we love meeting everyone afterwards.

Speaker 6 If you live in Bristol, Dublin, Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, London or Manchester or the environs of those cities, then do go to nosithingsoffish.com forward slash live and find find out how to get tickets for the shows that are near you.

Speaker 6 Anyway, just quickly back to that new podcast of mine, Nanana's. What I think I'll do, rather than explaining what happens, I'm going to put a little teaser at the end of this week's episode.

Speaker 6 So once the show's finished, if you listen on for another minute or so, you'll get a really good idea of the show.

Speaker 6 It's basically me and Anna speaking to Olympians and then trying out the sport ourselves.

Speaker 6 So in the latest episode, we speak to a couple of TGB's rowers and then we get on the Thames and see which of her and I is the best at rowing. I really think you'll enjoy it.

Speaker 6 It would mean the world to us if you could click follow on your podcast app of choice.

Speaker 6 It would mean even more if you could find the time to listen, and it would mean more still if you actually managed to give us a review. Anyway, stay tuned for the little teaser of quite a good sport.

Speaker 6 Go to no suchthingsasfish.com forward slash live for details of our tour and sit back, relax, and enjoy our latest episode with the history guy, Dan Snow. On with the podcast.

Speaker 6 Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber.

Speaker 6 I'm sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, James Harkin, and Dan Snow.

Speaker 6 And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order. Here we go.
Starting with fact number one, and that is Dan.

Speaker 6 When Captain Scott, the infamous British expedition leader, got to the South Pole, he saw in the distance a little flag fluttering and his heart sank. And then he saw a tent.

Speaker 6 And inside that tent, there was a letter. And that letter was addressed very neatly to King Harkon of Norway.

Speaker 6 It was a letter from an explorer, Roald Amundsen, who'd arrived at the South Pole a month before Scott, breaking the records, the first human being to reach South Pole.

Speaker 6 And he'd left a little tent and a letter saying, hey, Scott, would you mind posting this to the king just to tell him I got here?

Speaker 6 I mean,

Speaker 6 shade thrown. That's great.
It's a great prank, except it's one of those pranks that have gone wrong because he would have been back at home and they went, you know, he died.

Speaker 6 And he's going, oh, my God, someone, don't find the letter. Don't find my cheeky prank.
You're so right. I read one theory, right?

Speaker 6 That the reason that he put the letter there is to prove that he got there. Because let's say he gets down there and he writes a letter and says, I got to the South Pole.

Speaker 6 And then he gives it to the king. Well, it's just his word against anyone else's.

Speaker 6 But if he puts a letter there and Scott picks it up and takes it back, then that's evidence because it's another person who's seen where this letter got to. You're right.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you've got to leave something. I don't know.
I think that's his excuse when he gets it down. Sorry, but you know, Scott's dead now news.
No, because we're in a serious context, sure.

Speaker 6 I just love the fact there's those pictures of it. And it's just the Antarctic Americans is a featureless, white, icy football field.
And so they could have taken that picture anywhere.

Speaker 6 And so, yeah, you're right. I guess you are right.
You've got to leave something there. And also, Scott literally slept there and then went, started off the next day.

Speaker 6 It is the most extraordinary box-ticking exercise. You know what? I did that when I went to Bangladesh because I tried to go to as many countries as I can.

Speaker 6 And I stopped over in Bangladesh, slept there one night, and then left. But I count it as going there.
Airport hotel? Yeah. I'm not sure that counts.
What? Of course it does.

Speaker 6 It's kind of like touring, isn't it? I watched a Celine Dion documentary recently. And she says exactly that.

Speaker 6 She says, I've been around the world, I've been everywhere in the world, but I've never seen anywhere.

Speaker 6 Because she was in and out. Yeah, she is the Captain Scott of the Pop Welsh.
She is, right? Yeah.

Speaker 6 I really thought you were going to say I watched Celine Dion documentary and I was able to tick off my 100th Celine Dion documentary.

Speaker 6 I only watched a a second. Yeah, still counts.
Yeah, the other thing, we in Britain talk about Scott a lot, obviously, and we ignore Amundsen, by the way, who didn't just get to the South Pole first.

Speaker 6 He's an absolute legend. He was the first man through the Northwest Passage and the first person to get to the North Pole as well.
Yeah. Albeit in an airship.

Speaker 6 Does that count? That's the thing. Because, yeah, it was the 1920s, wasn't it? He decided to fly over the North Pole.
Do we count that? I think it counts. Okay.
Well, I think it counts.

Speaker 6 If I've been to Bangladesh, then I think that counts.

Speaker 6 But also, didn't he? He was going to walk to the North Pole, and then he got news that Piri had allegedly done the same. And then that was when he decided to go to the South Pole.
Is that right?

Speaker 6 I think so. There was a failed expedition to get to the North Pole, for sure.
I'm not sure why he turned around. That's a hell of a turnaround in terms of distance.

Speaker 6 Well, I believe that's the case. And I believe all of the people who are on the ship thought they were going to the North Pole.
And then they started going down, down, down.

Speaker 6 And they stopped off at Funchal, which is in where is that? Portugal, I think. Yeah, one of the islands off Portugal.

Speaker 6 And they kind of then said to the crew, they said, okay, by the way, we're not going to the North Pole after all. We're going to the South Pole.
And it is a dick move, much like the letter.

Speaker 6 And yeah, he was a legend. I like him, but he was a cheeky legend.
I mean, he really did do that because he'd been told to go to the North Pole, but he just wanted to be the first somewhere.

Speaker 6 So as James says, thought someone else had got there and turned around his boat just to beat Scott.

Speaker 6 And the thing was, and again, this could be Lady Duff protest too much after the event, but Scott insisted he was never racing. Oh, I know, brilliant, isn't it? It's so true.

Speaker 6 He was there for a scientific expedition. He wrote in a letter, oh God, I've heard Amundsen is trying to get there before me.
That's fine. He probably will.
You know, he's got dogs. I've got horses.

Speaker 6 He'll go faster. I'm not interested in that.
So it's a picture of Scott trampling the wheat, hurdling the dead,

Speaker 6 flogging his men ever further south. I read a history once of Amundsen.
It said the trip to the South Pole was smooth and uneventful.

Speaker 6 Don't bother reading off.

Speaker 6 And when they got back, they'd put on weight.

Speaker 6 British expeditions, British expeditions anywhere, be it desert, rainforest, Arctic, and you know, high latitude, the kind of the lads arrive back, a shadow of the former selves.

Speaker 6 They've got eaten each other, broken. These Norwegians get back.
Many of their dogs are still alive. And they're just like, all right, lads, here we are.
We're actually ahead of schedule as well.

Speaker 6 Hobby, it's too cruel.

Speaker 6 That thing, the thing of saying, does it count? Because it was done by plane. That's a thing that Amundsen had his whole life after that trip, right? People didn't accept, particularly the British.

Speaker 6 Asterisk. Yeah, he was like, you didn't do this.

Speaker 6 You had skis.

Speaker 6 You did it the improper way. When he got back, he was at a dinner at the Royal Geographical Society.
This is in 1912.

Speaker 6 And the president, Lord Curzon, offered a toast, but not to him, but to the dog team because he was like, they're the ones who got there. And also, he did eat a few of his dogs.
Oh, yeah. Didn't he?

Speaker 6 Yeah, right. So I think that's, you know, if I'm going to die, that's fine.
I'm eating my dogs first. Oh, yeah.
Anna, I'd eat you. Like, it's like.

Speaker 6 I'm sure that's a good thing.

Speaker 6 Just close quickly. Dan, why did you come back a lot heavier than when you left and with none of your friends? You've only been to Exeter.
Yeah, one-man podcast from now on. No such thing as a fish.

Speaker 6 The dogs, to be fair, were mobile food storage units. I mean, they were meant to be eaten and it fits a bit grim and then fed to each other and then fed to the humans.
Literally, Doug Eat Doug.

Speaker 6 Wow, we think their trip, it also, as well as being an eventful, just sounded quite fun like they're just reading about it they did things like um guess the temperature contests well this is not the trek to the pole is it this is when they were overwintering so i think a lot of people don't focus on that bit and when they were overwintering they're in a hut there are lots more of them not just the guys who then trekked to the pole and they had plenty of supplies and it does sound super fun they was you know they had um uh hot toddies cigars lots of music they played this fun guess the temperature game they had lots of puzzles they played

Speaker 6 in that scott and Neova wintering fell out massively with Evans, who was his second in command.

Speaker 6 They decided they absolutely despised each other, and that could be the reason that they didn't make it to the pole the following year. Really?

Speaker 6 Disback from the pole the following year because of the kind of terrible divisions within really?

Speaker 6 Right. Do we know why? What's that word?

Speaker 6 Because I think spending a long time in a hut, I mean, you three spend a long time together, and you all seem to get on fine, but you know, add an Antarctic winter, no daylights, you know, you might fall out with each other as well.

Speaker 6 And so I think it would break any team apart, but those two just were just incompatible. And the diarising diarizing

Speaker 6 because you would look at Scott going, What are you writing?

Speaker 6 Are you writing?

Speaker 6 That's whatever. Whenever Andy's on his laptop, you're always like that to him, aren't you? What are you writing? Writing.
I'll eat you. Are you bitching about me? Are you bitching about me in there?

Speaker 6 I can't help anyone who has a diary that I've ever met. I hate it.
Really? Yeah, writing about you. Yeah, I get paranoid.
You are not the main character.

Speaker 6 You wish they're right about you. Had some sushi, uh, went home, didn't do much else.
That's what's pissing me off, and I'm not being rid of the value. Didn't see Dan today, that was a shame.

Speaker 6 Hopefully, tomorrow.

Speaker 6 But yeah,

Speaker 6 it's why, whenever they send people to space or on these long expeditions, they often look for the most boring characters possible who don't want to talk, who have zero anger temperament.

Speaker 6 They're just like Tim Peake is such a pleasant man. We met at Tim Peake.
Yeah, pleasant, not boring. I noticed you were so

Speaker 6 exactly. I think Dan Steiber, is that the application for the European Space Agency I see lying in in the bin there with a rejected stamp on it?

Speaker 6 Yeah, apparently they're even saying it's super boring, guys.

Speaker 6 It's interesting.

Speaker 6 Oh, my God. Well, Amson was not boring at all.
Obviously, he was a character. Yeah.

Speaker 6 In fact, I think he started his journey to the Northwest Passage at midnight because he had to escape gambling debts. I think.
Really?

Speaker 6 When he sailed the boat off, because the people that he owed were threatening to impound his boat. But it is funny, we talk about this heroic age of exploration.

Speaker 6 I mean, so many of them were absolute clowns and charms. I mean, Shackleton was astonishing in a crisis, but also he needs to be because he was prone to getting crises the whole time.

Speaker 6 You'd best be an absolute legend when everything goes wrong because you're going to make everything go wrong.

Speaker 6 So I mean, he would leave with sort of creditors running along the quayside, roaring at him, and sort of also cuckolded husbands shaking their fists. I mean, it's complete chaos, sure, sir.

Speaker 6 But he was good leading guys on the ice. You know, I guess they're different skills.
And he was the next person to try, wasn't he, after starting Adam's, so brilliant there.

Speaker 6 So he went, he had a nervous breakdown and then went, you know what? Ship was never about getting to the South Pole.

Speaker 6 It's actually the greatest prize is crossing the continent from one side to the other via the South Pole.

Speaker 6 So he managed to flog this to a bunch of old heiresses, widowed heiresses, who then gave him money for his famous expedition to the Transantarctic Expedition, which did not set foot on the mainland, but led to his eternal heroism because in getting them out of the mess he'd got them into, he obviously won great acclaim and

Speaker 6 was brilliant. But yeah, so that was his his big scheme was like oh yeah no it's not about the south pole that's

Speaker 6 what i find kind of interesting is scott and admundson got there you think right so and then shackleton sort of said he was going to do his thing but actually no one else really bothered yeah

Speaker 6 well someone's done it in a way in a way why would you yeah

Speaker 6 wasn't the next person to get there was at the north pole edmund hillary went to one of them hillary was the next person to walk to the south pole he was the next person

Speaker 6 Yeah, there was a guy called George Dufeck who flew there.

Speaker 6 And this was in 1956. And

Speaker 6 they interviewed him on the ice. So they actually had a video camera there.
Apart from they didn't have any of the images because the film froze solid.

Speaker 6 Oh, really? So they took it home, tried to develop it. Actually, it was frozen, so they got no images.
Oh, guys, that would be a great episode for you guys.

Speaker 6 Pictures that we know were taken and then didn't make it. Yeah.
That got ruined. Like

Speaker 6 the famous D-Day shots and everything like the ones that we have are just a fragment of the ones that he took that day. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 And the British beach shots were destroyed on the way back as well. That would be great, wouldn't it? Yeah.
There's also the photos that are sort of currently sitting held on ice.

Speaker 6 So Mallory, Mallory and Irving. Oh, yeah.
Well, that camera. Yeah, that camera is still missing.

Speaker 6 Kodak have said that they still think, because of the cold conditions, that they would be able to develop the film should we ever find that.

Speaker 6 Yeah, but I've had some photos sent to Kodak where I was just facing slightly towards the sun and they couldn't develop those. Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 One more point about Scott is that Scott also is technically in that territory of the Mallory and Amundsen and Emilia Earhart because we don't know where he is, but we roughly know where he might be because he was left in the tent.

Speaker 6 They packed the tent over with snow and they say it will be something like 20 feet below the surface now with the amount of snow that's on top of it.

Speaker 6 So we don't know where he is, but there's an estimate that within the next couple of centuries, the bit that he's in might snap off from the side and float out into the sea.

Speaker 6 So one of his wishes would have been as a captain is burial at sea. And so in 200 years, he might get his wish, which is a little nice.
That's nice. And

Speaker 6 that's how different we are. I thought immediately as an archaeologist, finally, we can get a hold of him and have a good old look at him and whatever.

Speaker 6 Because you'll be like, yeah, you're just like, oh, it'll be so nice and buried at sea. And I'm like, let's get in there.

Speaker 6 That will last.

Speaker 6 Get investigated. I only have one thing on letters now.
This original fact was about sort of letters really throwing some shade. And I found something I didn't know about Winston Churchill.

Speaker 6 This letter he wrote when he was imprisoned in the Boer War, so 1899. And

Speaker 6 he's been taken as a prisoner of war. He was only 25 years old.
And him and two much older guys in the prison decided they were going to escape. They hatched this really elaborate plan.

Speaker 6 And they didn't really want Churchill with them because he was a bit famous. He was a massive loudmouth and he was quite overweight and not very fit.

Speaker 6 And he couldn't speak Dutch or Afrikaans or Zulu, and they could.

Speaker 6 Anyway, Churchill was like, I'm going to tag along.

Speaker 6 And then he just went off on his own and did it on a night that they didn't want to escape, jumped over the prison walls, had no plan, no maps, couldn't speak any languages.

Speaker 6 Somehow stumbled into another British guy who rescued him, a classic Churchill, always falling into the lap of luck. But the letter he left behind in the prison was so good.

Speaker 6 He left a letter of apology on his bed to Louis de Souza, who was the Boer Secretary for War.

Speaker 6 And it just said, I have the honor to inform you that as I do not consider that your government have any right to detain me as a military prisoner, I have decided to escape from your custody. Wow.

Speaker 6 Regretting I am unable to bid you a more ceremonious or personal farewell, I have the honor to be your most obedient servant, Winston Churchill. Wow, great.
P.S.

Speaker 6 I always include a little bit about Dan Schreiber in my letters and didn't meet him today, but I'm sure I will tomorrow.

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Speaker 6 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that Eleanor of Aquitaine gave us fireplaces.
Nice. Did she? Well, this is my claim, and I'm going to stand by it.

Speaker 6 So I didn't realise how late it was that we really started building fireplaces, chimneys into our homes.

Speaker 6 But it was certainly after the Norman invasion in Britain.

Speaker 6 And anyway, Eleanor of Aquitaine is around in the 12th century, and she marries Louis VII in 1137 and that meant she had to move from the south of France, which is nice and hot, to Paris, the Ile de la Cité, where she had a castle and it was all cold and bare.

Speaker 6 So she refurbished and like really like stripped everything down, redid it, loads of colourful tapestries on the wall, widened the slits. I guess they got aerial slits.

Speaker 6 She's like, what's the point of these aero slits? I'm going to turn them into big old windows. Made it nice and homely.
And she was really cold. So she had the masons build in fireplaces.

Speaker 6 And there doesn't seem to be, as far as I can can tell, evidence of places really having these like built-in fireplaces, like a proper hearth, as we know today.

Speaker 6 So people would always have, you know, a fire in the middle of a hut with a hole in the roof or not, or might like build a chimney outside a house. But it's, look, it's spurious.

Speaker 6 And then she married Henry II of England and brought them over here. Is that what we're saying?

Speaker 6 And then I know that she did extensive refurbishments on all the places that she lived over here as well, the palaces. So, I mean, she must have.
Okay, well, we have a historian on the show.

Speaker 6 If only fireplace was my specialty.

Speaker 6 However, I have been to the White Tower, one of the great, most magnificent donjons in Europe at the centre of the Tower of London.

Speaker 6 And there are fireplaces in the Tower of London and in the White Tower. And that was built in the 11th century, almost 100 years before her.
Now, they could. Well, they're domestic fireplaces.

Speaker 6 Oh, I see. It's domestic.

Speaker 6 Do I not see that in my originality?

Speaker 6 Changing the rules here. It's not a race, everyone.
They are.

Speaker 6 Listen, I think Ella Racco Twain is one of the most exciting and magical figures in our history, and she deserves to be on this podcast.

Speaker 6 I'm just not sure she deserves to be on for introducing five places.

Speaker 6 This is the only reason we're talking about her. I refuse to stray from

Speaker 6 her introduction.

Speaker 6 She was, I will allow us to stray into just her being a big interior designer, if you want to broaden the elevator

Speaker 6 chat, because she did, she revamped so much that I think her mother-in-law refused to live with her, which is kind of sad but I really like the idea of her moving in with the king who she thought was really monkish this is her first marriage oh he was a Muppet yeah oh I think that those were the words weren't they that's the translation um and then the mother-in-law just thought this woman is taking over making it all gaudy and she moved in really good musicians feels like she really created an interesting intelligent culture in this palace which she then brought to Britain she certainly did and I love the story about her that she went on crusade with that said monkish husband And you know, they always say, My grandma used to say, Go traveling with your girlfriend before you get marry someone.

Speaker 6 You really see them for who they are. Traveling when you have a bit of doing kind of annoying admin, you got stuck with logistics, you get a bit of tummy problems,

Speaker 6 and you know, if this is the one, spending one night in an airport hotel just so you could click off a country, indeed, indeed, murdering some non-Christians.

Speaker 6 Yes, well, no, in the case of her, of course, he was insufficiently forward in murdering non-Christians because she thought he was wet, she thought it was a bit useless.

Speaker 6 So, they go away on crusade, which is the ultimate sort of travel, get to know your partner, travel adventure, and just comes back and she just goes,

Speaker 6 I'm dumping you. You are a

Speaker 6 spectacularly useless human being.

Speaker 6 And they get it all annulled in the way that Aristocrats managed to do. Didn't they? It took a while, didn't it? They kept asking the Pope.

Speaker 6 And he kept telling them to keep shagging each other and tried to make an air

Speaker 6 think. And that did not work.
The Pope supposedly made them a special bed to sleep in to make them more likely to have sex with each other. No way.
Apparently.

Speaker 6 What's a bed that makes you more likely to have sex with each other? one near a fireplace presumably yeah yeah

Speaker 6 well it didn't work because the year she got divorced from him she married the very hunky young duke of normandy henry who then became henry ii of england so she and everyone goes henry ii's great empire and i always think it's odd that we don't call it perhaps it's not odd given the yeah it's just a misogyny but it with that actually it's kind of her empire in a way she's the one who brings these all these massive french possessions so basically she and henry end up owning more of france than the king of france and then her absolutely useless sons just spunk the whole lot of it.

Speaker 6 But only after she dies, basically, if you look at the history of that empire, it essentially lasts for the course of her life. Right.

Speaker 6 And then her most useless son in English history, which is up against

Speaker 6 John. You don't like John.
Oh, okay. John of England.

Speaker 6 You don't like John. Sorry.

Speaker 6 I'm fond of John.

Speaker 6 What are we talking about? He gets a bad rep, doesn't he, Anna? He's my friend. Oh, my God.
Ella Rockjane was an extraordinary mother. We've got a John Truther on the podcast.

Speaker 6 I've always wanted to meet one. Here we are, friends.

Speaker 6 Also, John of England is of England necessary. He's not from anywhere else.
He doesn't have any other nickname. It's not John.
Oh, he does. Oh, he does have a lot of nicknames.
Oh, yes.

Speaker 6 And you know what they are because you're grimacing. The other nicknames are Lackland and Soft Sword.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 Which basically all that means is poor guy didn't get and inherit any land and Softsword didn't really want to be too fighty. Does it not mean impotent?

Speaker 6 Oh, I think all the sources seem to say Softsword genuinely is about his military cowardice.

Speaker 6 He lost the empire. When he inherited the throne by possibly starving his nephew to death, he controlled an empire that stretched through much of what is now France, Ireland, and England.

Speaker 6 And by the time he died, his empire was the East Midlands.

Speaker 6 A nice part of the world. Nice part of the world.
Don't get me wrong. Nice part of the world.
Lucky, I would be very happy to have an empire there. But

Speaker 6 just before he died, when he contracted dysentery, he lost the crown jewels while crossing the wash to set aforementioned East Midlands.

Speaker 6 So he lost the crown jewels, arrived in the East Midlands, and died.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and then his luckily for that benighted family, his dysenter saved the dynasty because his son they stuck his son on the throne because he was so young and they were they worked out they could just manipulate him that's a nice mouthful isn't it dysentery saved a dynasty yeah yeah um i what the reason i like king john is because we don't mind about owning empires what we mind is about being good to your mum and i think a lot of

Speaker 6 no they got on well they did and also well done him because her favourite was famously richer the lionheart who everyone loves and richard the lionheart dies and she becomes very fond of john and actually i think the only time that he really showed true courage and desire to defeat the opposition is when she was abducted by her grandson i believe when she was about 80 and that was when john was like no way you're not abducting my mum and he properly went and defeated him and rescued her because was richard the lionheart that good yeah i think he was less good than his statue outside the house of lords deserves i mean he didn't he didn't show any interest in England.

Speaker 6 He just was off on crusades. He went on crusades and then he got captured, didn't he? I've been to his cave where they kept him.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's in, it's, it's a 20-minute drive from where my family grew up in Austria. Am I right in saying that? Or did they

Speaker 6 deepmans?

Speaker 6 And they asked for £150,000 silver marks, which was at the time three times the annual income of England. And today, that would probably be in the trillion.

Speaker 6 It's about £1.5 trillion, something like that.

Speaker 6 maybe around two trillion pounds that they ask so how do you get that money she basically just had to tax the hell out of the entire country Eleanor of Aquitaine right see good mother bad leader maybe good mother yeah there's a great quote about King John it's he was a very bad man more cruel than all the others he lost after beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land for which reason he was greatly hated whenever he could he told lies rather than the truth yeah but who wrote this this wasn't his mate who wrote this was it it was possibly not his mate Snow.

Speaker 6 I will agree. I will admit it's an anonymous chronicler.

Speaker 6 Anonymous of Betune.

Speaker 6 I didn't realise how fun bitching about historical figures is. I'm having so much fun.
Well, welcome to my world.

Speaker 6 Gossiping about dead people. That's what we do for you.

Speaker 6 Well, what are you thinking of her second husband? Because he was more fiery, wasn't it? It was like she went from the monk to the player.

Speaker 6 The monk is spong, Henry II, sort of you almost the great king of English history. He had a young, he had his uncle, Henry, unimaginatively, and he rebelled against him.

Speaker 6 Uh, Richard rebelled against him, so he was very bad at managing his sons. And well, but they rebelled because Eleanor was very good at managing her sons, right?

Speaker 6 So Eleanor sort of persuaded all her sons to rebel against him.

Speaker 6 I'm basically in a grump, a sort of 700-year or 800-year-long grump, because if he'd managed to cement that empire, we'd can you imagine what a great country's supposed to be stretching from the Pyrenees to Carlisle.

Speaker 6 Do you think Mbappe could have played for England? Exactly.

Speaker 6 Oh my god.

Speaker 6 It just be glorious. And you know, that's why I often, you know, it's like Henry V didn't wash his goddamn hands, got dysentery and died.
You know, I mean, it's like, sort it out, Harry, England.

Speaker 6 That's what?

Speaker 6 Wow. Boil your water before

Speaker 6 drinking it. You mop it.
For Harry, for England, that's what. But also that remind, yeah, that reminds me.

Speaker 6 And then that reminds me of the fate of the last chance, the last best chance we had of this glorious Anglo-French nation, which is the most extraordinary thing when Winston Churchill offered a full union of Britain, UK, and France in 1940 when the French had the Germans overrunning France, desperate to keep their more, particularly their navy and their colonies in the war.

Speaker 6 Churchill goes, which is always brilliant when the Brexit hack bangers are talking about, he goes, Britain and France, full union, bang, one indissoluble country. Let's do it.

Speaker 6 The French said no. Was there any possibility that was going to happen? It doesn't feel like it was a likely historical thing.
It wasn't likely, but I mean,

Speaker 6 you know, lots of things aren't likely. Yeah.
Getting shot,

Speaker 6 shot in the ear isn't very likely. I mean, like the two most consequential presidents of the 20th century, FDR and Reagan.
FDR survived at about a six-foot range.

Speaker 6 He's fired five shots being fired at him, which killed the guy next to him and other people around him. Before he'd even, at the height of the depression,

Speaker 6 before he'd been, he had to do his inauguration to his present election. Reagan was killed about two months into his first term.
No Reagan, no Roosevelt. He was killed.

Speaker 6 Sorry,

Speaker 6 almost killed. Almost killed.

Speaker 6 By a fragment of a, you know, the bullet had been a few millimetres, you know, Reagan would have been killed.

Speaker 6 So the two most consequential presidents of the 20th century had absolutely no right to survive. Unbelievable.
Pure luck. That's this mad journey we're on, folks.
Yeah. It's crazy.

Speaker 6 Something about Eleanor of Aquitaine that is not often said. So Queen of France, Queen of England.
Yeah. Not many people have done the dollar.

Speaker 6 I think it's the only one. Mary Queen of Scots claimed it controversially.
You know, sort of could have, could have claimed it.

Speaker 6 Her followers might have claimed it. What do we know about her grandmother? Dangerous.

Speaker 6 Oh, Dangerous? Dangerous. Yeah.
Her grandmother's called Dangerous. And who? That's all we know, right? Is there much?

Speaker 6 No one knows her nickname, I think. Yeah, but no one knows what her real name was.
We think it's Amard.

Speaker 6 Right. But yeah,

Speaker 6 she was known by everyone as dangerous. So cool.
Because she was such a seductrix. Yeah.

Speaker 6 And you know what? I didn't know that Eleanor just means

Speaker 6 other anal. So anal is a name.
Sorry, sorry,

Speaker 6 sorry.

Speaker 6 Other anal. Yes, no, I didn't.
That would be Eleanor.

Speaker 6 Um,

Speaker 6 so I think her mum was called Anal. What? It's this word you keep saying.
So think of how Eleanor is spelt. Yeah.
What's Eleanor? Yeah. It's how it's spelled.

Speaker 6 Knock off the E-L and swap around the A-E. So A-E-N-O-R was a name.
Okay. And she, and you're called Eleanor if you're the other anal.

Speaker 6 So her mum was called Anal or Enal. But now we only have Eleanor.
We only have other anals. Why is the name Anal? Well, Well, I think we've

Speaker 6 proved that in this podcast, why we've

Speaker 6 now got other people called Eno?

Speaker 6 Yes, not as long a debate as I was expecting.

Speaker 6 Einol is the way you write it down.

Speaker 6 And then when you speak it,

Speaker 6 it becomes clear. I think it's weird not to work the courts of love.
Oh, okay. Okay.
Can we just ask Dan if he believes the courts of love existed? Okay.

Speaker 6 Okay, so the courts of love was the idea that Eleanor had this special court for women who had, you know, fallen out with their husbands and they would give them advice and stuff, right?

Speaker 6 Yeah, it sounds great. It's like a problem page.
You meant the other dad.

Speaker 6 I was like,

Speaker 6 why do you think I know anything about that? You love resolving people's romantic issues.

Speaker 6 So confused. Yeah, sorry.
Other dad. I just think it's cool that this is an idea.

Speaker 6 I think it was written down by Eleanor's daughter and no one knows if it's sort of made-up fantasy or if it really happened. And what was it?

Speaker 6 That a bunch of noble women, including Eleanor, her daughter, and some other noble women would have knights turn up with their romantic problems like hey i fancy this woman but there's this other woman who fancies me who should i get with and they would arbitrate

Speaker 6 and cool have you tried an or

Speaker 6 good god

Speaker 6 as someone with a very very formidable mother-in-law i can imagine that's the kind of stuff that they get up to is that how you were selected a cool no no i i would have never made it through that process.

Speaker 6 But no, I think if you're a very impressive, powerful old woman

Speaker 6 in the middle ages, I can imagine that you would knock heads together and sort out your

Speaker 6 love lives in your retinue. Sort out the men.

Speaker 6 Filthy men in the palace. But I think the jury's out in general, right? Yeah.

Speaker 6 The jury of the courts of London. Well, that is also medieval history, full stop.
Yeah. It's all just jury's out.
Really?

Speaker 6 The only thing we can say with absolute certainty is that Elna of Aquitaine did not invent the fireplace.

Speaker 6 I cannot believe. And I know that's going to be the ending to this section, and I'm furious.

Speaker 6 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that when the Romans defeated barbarian tribes, they would often send them to Britain as punishment.

Speaker 6 Well, in their faces, because Britain is great. A great Britain, exactly.
Yeah. I'm looking at that in case you're saying that.
So you're looking at a nervous look.

Speaker 6 I mean, mean, it's definitely true. We know, for example, there were Syrians, they were cool.
There's a thing on Hadrian's wall about the Euphrates boatmen that were brought up to work on the Tyne.

Speaker 6 Can you imagine?

Speaker 6 And it's also true that the Romans did regard Britain as the end of the goddamn earth.

Speaker 6 Although there are periods when the emperor was in Britain and it was like the big, it was the heart of the empire.

Speaker 6 But for long periods, you're probably like, you're going to get sent to the furthest frontier. I can imagine that that is true.
There's a great line that a poet wrote to Hadrian.

Speaker 6 He says, I don't want to be Caesar, i.e. the emperor, stroll about among the Britons and endure the Scythian winters.
So he's comparing being among the Brits as winter on the Ukrainian steppe.

Speaker 6 Like that, those are the two worst things you can imagine as a Roman. But what was it like when they got here? Would it have been nice? Well, I mean, it's much as it is now.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's the weather is average. You know, what can I say? I think the truth is that only Romans wrote this history, right? The barbarians.
And so we have no idea really what stuff was like.

Speaker 6 But you're doing the Romans hated it.

Speaker 6 Caesar was really mean about it himself and said, the Brits are the most ignorant people i've ever conquered and cicero said they're the ugliest most stupid race i ever saw and there also seems to be i was going through the sources of what romans said about brits it seems like we were always naked and that doesn't make sense to me because it's freaking cold here well one roman source says the reason we were naked is because it was so wet So this one Roman story said, most of Britain is marshland because it's flooded by the continual ocean tides.

Speaker 6 The barbarians usually swim in these swamps or run around in them, submerge the waste. Of course, they're practically naked and don't mind the mud because they're unfamiliar with the use of clothing.

Speaker 6 And actually, the sense is that wearing loads of trousers and things, you just end up just getting

Speaker 6 wet and muddy all the time. That's true.
Let it all hang out. I've also been out on a night out in Newcastle in February, and they still don't wear clothes up there.
Yeah, no, true.

Speaker 6 I guess they were made of hardier stuff. I did swim in the river at the weekend, and I thought I wouldn't be able to wade around in this all day, every day, come rain or shine, naked.

Speaker 6 But well done, those early Brits. Sure, it's tough as Amundsen.
So, um, there was a thing called deportatio in insulum, which apparently means exile to an island.

Speaker 6 Sometimes you go to Britain if you had been particularly bad. Tiberius exiled to Rhodes, which must have been quite nice in comparison, I'd say.

Speaker 6 But then Cassius Dio wrote about 5,000 Sarmatian cavalry who were sent to Britain after the Romans had taken them over. Britain was just a nightmare for the Romans.

Speaker 6 Unending ulcer

Speaker 6 of pain and suffering. They did not conquer the whole archipelago, right? So you've got Ireland and you've got much of Scotland for much of the period was unconquered.

Speaker 6 And as a result, you cannot expend the resources required to fully conquer that archipelago, given its geographical and weather and nightmarish difficulty of doing so.

Speaker 6 But then it's too embarrassing to leave the bit that you have conquered.

Speaker 6 But then that's almost untenable because your entire coastline from Cornwall to Carlisle and across to Newcastle is just vulnerable to these unending incessant raids by these lunatics. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Pick and choose at the time. And then the north coast is exposed to the unconquered Baltics Baltics and stuff.
So it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare.
And when did they, was it like 300s?

Speaker 6 When did they finally bugger up? They sort of pack up shopping about 405, 410. Okay.

Speaker 6 The biggest concentration of coin hoards in our history is from that period. It's quite interesting.
So you bury your money when you're very, very pessimistic about the immediate future.

Speaker 6 Like, lads, get the money. And so we've just got this massive spike of coin hoards.
It's kind of scary. It's all the Romans burying their money.
All of these in the villas, just everyone burying it.

Speaker 6 And of course, it also means those people didn't come back for it. Now, maybe they escaped, but it often occasionally would have meant they'd be killed and stuff.

Speaker 6 So those coin hoards have been buried, and no one's coming back from them. So it's just a sense of just society just kind of collapsing in the early fifth century.

Speaker 6 The kind of Romano-British that were left, the sort of Roman elite who were still there, we get a letter written from the Romans going, please, the Romans come and help.

Speaker 6 And it's like the barbarians push us into the sea and the sea push us back onto land. So we have to choose whether to drown or be murdered.
Oh, God.

Speaker 6 You know, it's like it is just, it's full, full Armageddon. It's crazy.

Speaker 6 One thing that we still seem to have from the barbarians, anytime someone says, blah, blah, blah, supposedly that has come from the word barbarian itself.

Speaker 6 So the word barbarian supposedly comes from ancient Greek and it was taken. It definitely comes from ancient Greek.
Yeah, sorry. Sorry.

Speaker 6 Supposedly comes from the fact that when foreigners were speaking and you didn't understand, you would say ba ba ba ba ba ba. That's what it sounds like to us.
And that has evolved to blah blah blah.

Speaker 6 So anytime.

Speaker 6 Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So anytime we say blah, blah, blah, we're barbarians.
Yeah, yeah, because it is literally anyone who's not Roman and sort of Greek, isn't it? Yeah. And it covers a lot.

Speaker 6 The biggest barbarians of them all, the Goths, probably. The Goths.
Okay.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Because they were like sort of stimulated.

Speaker 6 The fall of Rome.

Speaker 6 Oh, yeah. Oh, sorry, Anne wore lots of black and already missed.
This is my chemical romance. So, yeah.

Speaker 6 Meet up in Whitby. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 The Goths crossed the Danube, didn't they, in like the 370s. And it seemed to work incredibly well, the Roman policy towards barbarians for hundreds of years.

Speaker 6 So people would knock at the door and say, hey, we want to be part of Rome, please. They might be fleeing, you know, other forces or whatever, just want to be part of Rome.
We want to be part of Rome.

Speaker 6 And so they'd be split up, tribes would be split up.

Speaker 6 They'd have to abandon all loyalty to tribal chieftains, give some of their military to the Romans, and then they were sort of allowed to stay and mind their own business. I think basically.

Speaker 6 They messed it up a bit when the Goths came over. I think they let too many over, and then they stopped letting other people.
And then, basically, Nigel,

Speaker 6 they didn't know enough food to feed them all so then they got upset and then they threw this dinner party and I think Rome fell because of a cocked up dinner party

Speaker 6 because it was this Roman general Lupicinus who realized the Goths were coming over invited a couple of their leaders he was getting really drunk with them he told his men to go and kind of besiege the Goths and word got back to the dinner party and it all kind of kicked off everyone was a bit pissed by then so Lupicinus was probably a bit loose with his instructions and started killing some of the people who'd come with them

Speaker 6 And that was kind of the beginning. And then the Goths got together, fought against him.
And that was when the Roman Empire started its very

Speaker 6 crumbled 376.

Speaker 6 It's a catastrophic battle at Adrianople. One of the worst defeats in Roman history, where the Eastern Emperor takes on the Goths.

Speaker 6 The Western Emperor is coming to help him, but he wants the glory for himself, doesn't he?

Speaker 6 So he attacked too early, just got totally annihilated. And then the Goths just went on this rampage all the way through the Western Empire.

Speaker 6 I think the only time the Romans really got defeated by barbarians until this period was the Battle of Teuterburg,

Speaker 6 which we mentioned, which was all in this forest. And they basically wanted to take on the Germans.
So the Germans attacked the Romans, didn't they, in the forest?

Speaker 6 And turned out the Romans couldn't hack it basically and were absolutely vanquished. I think they killed 10% of their military.
And they never tried to go into Germany again, really.

Speaker 6 And that is basically why we have that division today between Latin languages and German languages.

Speaker 6 One of the most significant defeats, yeah.

Speaker 6 Augustus ran around the palace in Rome shouting, Varus, give me back my legions.

Speaker 6 It was one of the worst defeats, but then they did sort of nibble into bits, Jerry. But effectively, yeah, that policy of just permanent expansion was sort of brought to a halt at that point.

Speaker 6 Just like that today. That's why we basically have two big language groups in Europe.
And that's how

Speaker 6 you ever want to depress yourself, read about that. It was a torrential rain in a dark German wood.

Speaker 6 And the Romans were marching along and their guide, their German guide, a guy called Arminius, and he sort of disappeared. And it turns out he's actually guiding them into this terrible trap.

Speaker 6 He had been a collaborator, but in fact, it turned out to be the leader of the resistance. And they're then just ambushed repeatedly.
The general commits suicide.

Speaker 6 I mean, it's just this total annihilation of a once mighty force. I can't bring myself to get depressed about something that happened 2,000 years ago.

Speaker 6 No, there's just enough today, or in the last hundred years. Yeah, no,

Speaker 6 I let myself get over that. And I think you need to work on it.

Speaker 6 God,

Speaker 6 what's the big one that wakes you up at night?

Speaker 6 This is very personal. I mean, I have an overactive imagination.
At night, I do kind of read about like the first emperor of China, Chin Shuani, the most powerful man in the world, built China.

Speaker 6 Extraordinary dynasty is going to last a thousand years. Within three years, his children and grandchildren are enslaved and murdered in the streets by the coming Han dynasty.

Speaker 6 And you think, if that can happen to him, it can happen to anybody.

Speaker 6 I'm just terrifying. Are you waiting for history here to be toppled and your kids attacked by

Speaker 6 Sassy? Indeed.

Speaker 6 But I just, the horror of somebody, you know, the peak of their powers like croesus in lydia you know the richest man in the world little did he know the fate that was waiting for him but look wait we can wait for all of us too and so you feel you might be now at the peak of your powers you're the most dangerous that's even sadder

Speaker 6 this is as good as it gets for me

Speaker 6 sad indictment of my life yes relatively speaking i'm probably at the peak of my powers and then and one day i might you know i might be standing there with a kitchen knife defending my house yeah so they'll be talking about the fall of dan snow's empire Empire.

Speaker 6 They'll be talking about sort of the coin hold of the south coast as the as the Danes pulled up on the beach

Speaker 6 Harland comes over the hedge

Speaker 6 having to defend my family.

Speaker 6 Anyway, that's the kind of thing I worry about. I'm glad you asked.

Speaker 6 I wasn't hoping, I was hoping to share that.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

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Speaker 6 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is is my fact. My fact this week is that America has a witness protection program for their trees.
Oh. Okay.

Speaker 6 This is a really cool idea, I think. There's a lot of historical spots in America where battles, civil wars would have been fought and so on.
And often...

Speaker 6 when the landscape is done of all the debris of whatever happened there, the trees will remain and they're technically witnesses to history.

Speaker 6 In many cases, these trees might have taken bullets in from the wars and the bark would have grown over and embedded in these things.

Speaker 6 So they're actually literally holding history inside of them that we don't yet know about.

Speaker 6 And so this was an idea that was set up by the chief of the National Park Services and they decided, let's start designating trees a witness protection whereby you can't chop them down, you can't harm them, but they're archived in the Congress Library and so on.

Speaker 6 And yeah,

Speaker 6 a classic American, for something that we have here called a tree protection order. Yeah.
They just have a much cooler name for it. Yeah.

Speaker 6 When you said that, I did think they sort of hide them, they move them, they get the Gettysburg trees trees and they move them up to Saratoga,

Speaker 6 why is there a bunch of birch trees here and one sycamore tree in the middle,

Speaker 6 disguised,

Speaker 6 wearing a silver coat? Yeah, it's his brother. Shut up.

Speaker 6 Are people trying to harm these trees? Because that's the thing.

Speaker 6 I just think they just

Speaker 6 want to be nice to trees, don't they? Yeah, well, I guess we do accidentally hurt trees, I guess.

Speaker 6 We do accidentally chop them down. There's a lot of...
Yeah, but always accidentally.

Speaker 6 I don't think anyone's ever ever accidentally chopped out a tree yeah but this is like there's a sign up so like the loggers will go around the forest presumably and then there'll be a big sign that's like this tree is

Speaker 6 which we have in this great country as well yeah but we don't have a cool name

Speaker 6 so you might be chopping down a load of trees and accidentally chop down an important one absolutely is an example of that yeah and do we have it in this country for sort of trees that have witnessed great historic events well we should do we did chop down the royal oak yeah great story so there was a royal oak that charles the when he was then charles Stewart was hiding in, and the parliamentarian forces were rummaging around beneath the canopy and he dyed out of the story for the rest of his life.

Speaker 6 Anyway, he then came down, went over to France, and then the Royal Oak

Speaker 6 came back as king, pubs reopened, lots of pubs called the Royal Oak, sort of it became a meme.

Speaker 6 And then in the 19th century, lots of people started visiting and chopping bits off and traipsing across this guy's farm. And this lunatic farmer just chopped the tree down.

Speaker 6 Zero respect for trees or witnesses to history.

Speaker 6 Trampling trampling is crops trampling is crops that but there is now a a daughter or a son of that of that tree which was sort of recovered and grown and then that one was hit by lightning and now and prince charles that made him a bit sweaty so he went and planted a another tree so is now a grandchild the main one's looking a bit it's like looking like it's been hit by lightning and then the other one's looking quite verdant and fresh um and it's small it's about six foot high so there's it's three or there's two generations there on that spot

Speaker 6 It's in Shropshire. Really? There's the Newton apple tree, which is both in the garden of where Newton lived.
But they also took a cutting and made a, I guess, a daughter or a son of,

Speaker 6 they say it's a clone. So I don't know if it means it just is the exact tree.
I don't know what that terminology is, but it's growing outside in one of the colleges at Cambridge.

Speaker 6 And I was reading in Merlin Sheldrake's book. He wrote this incredible book about fungi and how it works in the world.

Speaker 6 And he said that he wanted to grab some of the apples off it because he was interested in making a cider. And the tour guy said, You are not allowed to take apples off this tree.

Speaker 6 The apples are here specifically for all the tourists to see them fall to the ground so they can experience gravity as it was first discovered.

Speaker 6 You're going to be sitting and waiting a long time, aren't you? It's pretty rare you actually see an apple fall off a tree. Pretty cool then to see an apple fall off the tree.

Speaker 6 On windy days, does tourism sort of quadruple

Speaker 6 to the tree? I was, I went to a historically important trees child today on the way to work. Did you? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 Anne Frank, when she was in her hiding spot, she described a horse chestnut tree that was just outside the building.

Speaker 6 And it was in 2005, they found it was suffering from a fungal disease. And so they decided to take cuttings and they planted it all over the world.

Speaker 6 And there's one of them in Highbury Fields, just near my house. Oh, nice.
And you saw that today. Yeah,

Speaker 6 that's amazing.

Speaker 6 Has her one's toppled, hasn't it? I think it has. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Not long ago. It's not long ago.
There's a tree in Windsor Great Park. There's an oak tree in Windsor Great Park that they think has been there since before the Norman Conquest.
So before

Speaker 6 fireplaces. Before fireplaces.

Speaker 6 So William the Conqueror would have passed that tree on his way from the world. Oh my gosh.

Speaker 6 You see?

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 yew trees in churchyards are said to be thousands of years old, right?

Speaker 6 Yes, I think

Speaker 6 there's one that's claimed to be over 4,000 years old.

Speaker 6 They're pretty amazing. I've got a friend who eats yew berries, sort of like does wild foraging.

Speaker 6 And the thing about yewberries is, which people may know, a seed of the ewberry, which is inside the berry, is incredibly poisonous. So, so he spits the seed out.
Absolutely.

Speaker 6 So, I went on a walk with him once, and it was me, another friend, and him. And, you know, my other friend said, All right, I'll taste it, put it in his mouth, chewing around for a while.

Speaker 6 And my friend said to him, And you spat the seed out, right? Like, poor mate, it was like, No, what do you mean? Split it out, spit it out. And it's, yeah, he just sucks the fruit off.

Speaker 6 But if you accidentally swallow the seed, you will die. I think we'd like to just say public service to our listeners: do not eat you berries.

Speaker 6 That's a metaphor for so much of life, isn't it? The sweet, sweet outer layer. The poisonous death-giving fruit within.
Okay, no more of your weird nightmares.

Speaker 6 I know I'm going to workshop back.

Speaker 6 It's interesting that you know about fruit on a yew tree. I've never thought about that because I just think about yew trees as a source of longbows.
Oh yeah.

Speaker 6 They're sort of stretchy and squashy in exactly the right parts, basically.

Speaker 6 There was a famous tree, the the sycamore tree in toll puddle uh where the toll puddle six began and started the friendly society of agricultural labors which eventually led to the beginning of trade unionism and stuff like that the story's very interesting but i'm not going to go into it because the interesting thing is that toll puddle used to be called toll piddle i know i know they rebranded didn't they they rebranded sounds so crap were they embarrassed by toll piddle i think well we're not exactly sure why they rebranded but it seems likely so there was a river piddle that went by this town and the toll piddle is named after there and then in 1934 locals were still calling it toll piddle and a journalist from the daily worker went there and said is this toll puddle and they went oh nobody around here don't know no such name as toll puddle

Speaker 6 and it does seem that maybe because it had to be more respectable and because it's such an important place for the trade union movement that they didn't think toll piddle was a proper so they went with Toll Puddle.

Speaker 6 Maybe Toll Ocean.

Speaker 6 Toll waterfall. Another theory is that Queen Victoria visited and they changed it for her, but we don't really know why.
It might have just evolved that way.

Speaker 6 You can still go and have a picnic underneath the oak tree at the vine, the house in Basingstoke, where Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn used to go when they were lovers. No, just a little screw.

Speaker 6 If you want to really condemn a relationship that you have,

Speaker 6 just think about the tasty fruit with the poisonous

Speaker 6 seeds in it.

Speaker 6 Does it have like Henry Hart? Yeah, it probably does. You know, Catherine crossed out.
Jane crossed out.

Speaker 6 Have you heard of the Sheffield Chainsaw Massacre? Is that the original title?

Speaker 6 This was very recently in the 2010s, and Sheffield Council basically cut down thousands of trees.

Speaker 6 It was really controversial, wasn't it? Really controversial. There was like a 450-year-old Melbourne oak that was cut down.
There was loads of historical trees that were cut down.

Speaker 6 And basically the council signed a contract with an infrastructure company saying every time you cut down a tree, we'll give you some money.

Speaker 6 Maybe they're too old or maybe they're dangerous or maybe they're digging up the pavement so people might trip over it or something.

Speaker 6 And then they got another consultancy to submit a report on how many of the trees needed felling. And there was a big mistake in that second report.

Speaker 6 And so they cut down thousands and thousands of these trees in Sheffield for no reason whatsoever. So it is just gross incompetence.
I'm afraid so, yeah. Have they planted some trees?

Speaker 6 Oh, they will replant them, yeah. Wow, that's bad.
I hope someone's head was

Speaker 6 chopped for that. HMS Victory the other day, and they are looking, they're doing a refurb.
It's like Trigger's Broom, they're basically entirely rebuilding it.

Speaker 6 Where is it? Where is it in Portsmouth? In Portsmouth. And they are using oak from France because there aren't enough old oak trees.

Speaker 6 They just go to Sheffield and say, I know you've got loads of oak, mature oak. You just ran and chopped them down.
So I might have to put them in touch.

Speaker 6 I mean, but France basically is England. We've already.
Hey, we exactly.

Speaker 6 And the curator there was like, kind of come up with this real sophistry about it's great that we're taking supplies from the old enemy. I'm like, look, mate, just to like.

Speaker 6 We're working together now. Yeah, yeah, it's like, it's a shocker.
We don't have enough oaks in this country. Come on, just admit it.
But yeah.

Speaker 6 They used to go around the forests when they were building things out of wood. And they would actually find the trees that were the right shape for the bit that they needed to build.

Speaker 6 So if you wanted something called a knee on a ship, which is a sort of vaguely right-angle sort of bracket, you'd just go that tree's got some that one's perfect, and you'd go and sort of scribble it out.

Speaker 6 And then they'd know to chop down that tree. And then the carpenter would be like, No, we'd have to do much work with that.
Oh, that's great. You could just cut that middle section where it's ready.

Speaker 6 That's so clever, isn't it? That's great.

Speaker 6 So, there's all these images in the 18th century of people hanging these weird sort of cutouts on the side of trees to show the necessary shapes.

Speaker 6 Makes so much sense, doesn't it? Then, did they actually the new forest was just planted for boats, wasn't it? Or not? Yeah, a lot of it, yeah. Yeah, the new forest, so yeah, it's my boy.

Speaker 6 I live there, so I'm avoiding New Forest Max. Forest does not designate woodland as well.

Speaker 6 It's just a legal designation of forests. A royal forest is a piece of ground on which certain different types of law apply.

Speaker 6 And there is obviously forestry and woodland within there, but yeah, no, lots of it's more and more open ground. And that's true of the word forest.
It's not just the New Forest.

Speaker 6 Forest kind of means this league has this legal meaning. That's so interesting.
It's weird, isn't it? So all the ancient woodland in Britain, tragically, I think, has been cut down.

Speaker 6 But so a lot of the trees in the New Forest now were planted at various times of national crisis, whether it was by Henry VIII for a navy or the Georgians or Second World War, obviously, lots of pines, but pit props when they're running out of woods.

Speaker 6 So, yeah. The New Forest does commoning, doesn't it?

Speaker 6 Are you a commoner? I'm not a commoner, unfortunately, because my house is outside the cattle group.

Speaker 6 As I'm often told,

Speaker 6 when I roll about on the common. But yes, so you can put your animals out, which is what most of the country used to be like before the enclosures came.
Yes. All these hedges and fields.

Speaker 6 That's the man. Everyone thinks it's beautiful English scenery.
That's an industrial farming landscape. The man enclosed that.
Oh, no, I'm absolutely enclosure.

Speaker 6 And you see hedges.

Speaker 6 Oh, God, I love hedges.

Speaker 6 We don't mind it. We don't mind those.
That's true. Yeah, so you can still go and you put your pigs out there when the acorns fall.

Speaker 6 Yes, I think because there are various rights you have, and you have to live in the right house. I'm so sorry that you're outside the castle.

Speaker 6 What a traumatic episode this has been today. Yeah, I know.
Dan's there with his pigs in his front room going up. No, it's so sad.

Speaker 6 you've opened up something because my wife is desperate to be a corner and we have we have failed so anyway so

Speaker 6 i think we need more because house prices in the new forest have gone up quite a lot so quite a lot of people are buying these houses that have the right of commoning but they are not interested they're not real commoners

Speaker 6 that's right you're darn right um i'm going to test for you on the rights that you'd have as a commoner then you've got the right pasture which as you said is grazing your ponies cattle or donkeys you've got the right of sheep which is grazing your sheep i think are you allowed to pick up firewood

Speaker 6 firewoods. Firewood, yes.
I actually think that they sort of give you firewood because they don't massively want you chopping it down anymore. But yeah, it's called Estevers.

Speaker 6 Yes, that's right, Estavas. Estavas.
The right of turberry. Yes, what's that? Is that turbid? Turbots, like the fish.
The right of catching turbots in the forest.

Speaker 6 No, it's the right of cutting turfs for fuel. Yes, it's turf, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 6 Yes, turf cutting. Not a good idea nowadays, but yeah.
No, you're not supposed to do that anymore, actually. And actually, the right of turning your pigs out is called mast.

Speaker 6 Is that mast? Yeah, apparently, turning pigs out to um yeah, it's funny that time of year, there's just loads of pigs all over the roads, and you've got a lot of fun as funny, yeah.

Speaker 6 When the acorns fall, and what I didn't get is, yeah, when the acorns fall, the pigs are supposed to eat them because they're poisoning other stuff.

Speaker 6 But surely the pigs, so with the pigs rushing around as a horse goes towards an acorn, a pig bits in underneath them, like yo, mate. If I try and eat a youberry, he's like, grabs it out of my hash.

Speaker 6 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 6 If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on various social media accounts.

Speaker 6 I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland, James. My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.
And Dan? The history guy. On Instagram.

Speaker 6 That's just who he is.

Speaker 6 Shout out the history guy.

Speaker 6 On Twitter, on various platforms. Nice.
And Anna, to get us as a group? You can go to no such thing on Twitter or No Such Thing as a a Fish on Instagram or you can email podcast at QI.com.

Speaker 6 Yep, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there.
There's a link to our upcoming tour. Get some tickets for that now.

Speaker 6 And also join Club Fish, which is our behind the scenes area where we post lots of bonus content.

Speaker 6 Most importantly of all, check out all of Dan's stuff, the History Hit channel, as well as Dan Snow's History Hit Show. We've been on it.
I did an episode with Dan all about mysteries of history.

Speaker 6 You, James, and Anna, you did a sporting episode recently. Yeah, we did, which was better than Dan's.
So

Speaker 6 that's not what I've heard from Dan himself. So

Speaker 6 not true. Not true.
He didn't say that. He didn't say that.

Speaker 6 But yeah, do check that out. It's all available wherever you get your podcasts.
We will be back again next week. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.

Speaker 6 Welcome to quite a good sport, the very first episode. So what are we talking about today? Well, today we're going to talk about the great spot of rowing.

Speaker 6 And we're going to speak to Imogen Grant and Eve Stewart who are two of our Team GB medal hopefuls for Paris.

Speaker 11 I thought rowing was a stupid sport.

Speaker 6 It's cold, it's wet and you have to get up really early, you get blisters on your hands and you can't see where you're going.

Speaker 6 We are going to be chucking in a few interesting facts that we've learned along the way because Adolf Hitler was seething from the stands in the despotic way that he does.

Speaker 6 Our moustache twitching away. And we will be trying our hand on the River Thames to see which of you and I is going to be the greatest rower.
Okay, we're ready to do the first time trial. Ready? Go!

Speaker 6 This is a pretty steady start from Anna. Now she's really getting her rhythm.
We're actually going at a proper pace

Speaker 6 and we're approaching the finish line, the red boy.

Speaker 6 Who will be victorious? The only way to find out is to listen to episode one of Quite a Good Sport.

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