Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.

Today I'm very happy to be chatting with Helen Castor. She is a British historian of the medieval and Tudor period and also a BBC broadcaster. She's taught history at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of numerous books and most recently one of the best books of last year. She published The Eagle and the Heart, the tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV.

Helen, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. So Richard II and Henry the Fourth, they're both born in the same year, namely thirteen sixty seven. Just to to frame it for our listeners, could you give us a sense back then what was it that English government sort of could do, and what could it not do? What is a government like then?

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