EP8 Caesar at Hastings

What this episode is about

The content explores the concept of a hardcore history addendum, highlighting the inclusion of various unconventional subjects like 1950s science fiction comic books and social trends that may intrigue niche audiences. The focus is on creating a diverse archive of engaging but narrower topics, ranging from interviews to unique historical discussions and beyond traditional historical narratives.

Key takeaways

• In historical wargaming, time travel is possible—just not in the way you'd expect.
• Cheating in games may reveal more about societal norms than the competition itself.
• Why are ancient armies still relevant? Because the past teaches resilience in strategy and adaptation.
• Comic books and militaries showcase humanity’s quirks, from imagination to historical absurdities.
• Narrow topics can yield surprising insights; even the weirdest interests reflect deeper societal trends.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 1 h 55 min speaking
• Daniela Lily (Guest)

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 15:00: USS Nimitz, Arthur Farrell, John Lynn, Twilight Zone
2. 15:00 – 30:00: Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar, Battle of Hastings, Arthur Farrell
3. 30:00 – 45:00: Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar, Battle of Hastings
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00: Julius Caesar, Battle of Hastings, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00: Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, USS Nimitz
6. 1:15:00 – 1:30:00: Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar, Battle of Hastings, Twilight Zone
7. 1:30:00 – 1:45:00: Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar, Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror
8. 1:45:00 – 2:00:00: Battle of Hastings, World War I, War Remains, Twilight Zone
9. 2:00:00 – 2:00:54: War Remains

Notable quotes from "EP8 Caesar at Hastings"

• Interesting for people who aren't totally into this hobby like some of us have been is why if you have a First World War Army from 1914 totally outclassed to the point of it's…

  about World War I · at 5:32

• It's great right but what you're setting up of course is what everybody really wants to see which is the 1980 super carrier USS Nimitz going to intercept the Japanese fleet on…

  about USS Nimitz · at 10:18

• Have brought the tank it might have made a difference or something like that well of course that's the final countdown ending - don't you want to see the 1m3 against what was…

  about Twilight Zone · at 12:42

• And they've been doing so for a long time in this case its Napoleon and Alexander the Great the book that blew my mind on this was a book it's called the origins of war from…

  about Arthur Farrell · at 13:51

• What if we picked two armies that both successfully invaded Britain my Normans from 1066 that fought at the Battle of Hastings often referred to as the last outside power to…

  about Battle of Hastings · at 28:13

• There's not enough room and that's where we should start this movie how much room do you need in 54 BCE Caesar took five legions across the channel in what the ancient sources…

  about Julius Caesar · at 34:59

• As one of William the Conqueror's so it's pretty darn likely that when William the Conqueror shows up at the British Isles he's commanding the largest number of human beings…

  about William the Conqueror · at 43:29

• Sometimes around here but we're not you know you can follow us by the way at hard core history the war remains folk also have a twitter handle it's at war remains you could…

  about War Remains · at 1:59:57

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Julius Caesar — Person · Primary referenced historical commander in the counterfactual · 14 mentions · first at 28:30
  Central to the episode’s thought experiment: comparing Caesar’s Roman legions (54 BCE Britain expedition) against William’s 1066 Normans to illustrate how pre-gunpowder warfare changes more slowly than modern warfare.
• Julius Caesar — Person · Referenced historical figure (shorthand mention) · 39 mentions · first at 28:30
  Appears as the abbreviated name for Julius Caesar while discussing Roman invasions of Britain and Roman military advantages in organization and scale.
  There's not enough room and that's where we should start this movie how much room do you need in 54 BCE Caesar took five legions across the channel in what the ancient sources…
• William the Conqueror — Person · Referenced historical figure / commander used in counterfactual matchup · 10 mentions · first at 40:40
  Used as the 1066 benchmark commander/army (Normans) in a hypothetical battle versus Julius Caesar to explore pace-of-change and military organization.
• Arthur Farrell — Person · Referenced expert (military historian / author) · 2 mentions · first at 14:03
  Introduced as the author who popularized (for the host) a counterfactual comparison: Alexander at Waterloo, used to motivate the episode’s broader ‘fighting out of time’ theme.
• John Lynn — Person · Referenced expert (historian) · 1 mention · first at 6:38
  Cited to support the argument that culture strongly shapes how armies fight, especially before modern standardization.
  Militaries in history that you get I mean there's a lot of inch books I read one by John Lynn a historian who wrote battle a history of combat and culture and he makes a point…
• Daniela Lily — Person · Referenced collaborator (prior Addendum interview/co-host) · 1 mention · first at 0:27
  Mentioned as part of the Addendum show pattern: prior interview/program collaboration, establishing the feed’s variety before the episode’s main historical thought experiment.
  History experience should we say and so far we've had interviews of Daniela lily and I did a program together we did a sort of a mini hardcore history episode on the sinking of…

Products & tech

• USS Nimitz — Product · Case study · 4 mentions · first at 9:21
  Featured in a hypothetical scenario comparing military technology across different eras.
• War Remains — Product · Referenced work · 3 mentions · first at 1:52:53
  Mentioned in the context of discussing historical military capabilities and comparisons.

Concepts & topics

• World War I — Concept · Historical context · 2 mentions · first at 1:52:49
  Used as a reference point for discussing the evolution of military technology and tactics.

Places & events

• Battle of Hastings — Event · Historical reference · 14 mentions · first at 28:21
  Used as a comparative example in discussing military tactics and historical warfare.

Media & podcasts

• Twilight Zone — Media · Cultural reference · 3 mentions · first at 11:07
  Referenced as an example of alternative history and speculative scenarios in popular culture.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 it's hardcore history attendant so we're finally getting enough of these hardcore history addendum shows out so that a little bit of the pattern I think is starting to establish itself in terms of why it was gonna be because we said at the outset I was hoping to use it as a subsidiary feed for things that just didn't really fit into the big hardcore history um experience should we say and so so far we've had interviews of Daniela lily and I did a program together we did a sort of a mini hardcore history episode on the sinking of the Indianapolis and all those sharks and now I think we will you know put the last piece maybe in place in terms of the strange stuff you might find on the hardcore history addendum feed with an admittedly somewhat perhaps historically goofy show but that doesn't mean it doesn't have interesting elements in it that might be worth examining the point to bigger societal historical trends but

1:04 it falls into the category of these little teeny narrowly focused sort of subjects that once again I figure we'll use in the addendum program I mean it might be boxing it might be punk rock it might be comic books you never know but it's going to appeal more to a slice of the audience rather than a more wide section so I'm hoping that like in five years when you look at the whole archives it'll be full of stuff that you might not care for but other things that you really think is oh that's fun that's really an arrow I like that subject so in 1950 science fiction comic books my favorite today's program I'm gonna start it off with a question and sort of progressed from there if I can you know these things aren't scripted so I don't always know where it goes I mean for all I know I'm starting off with one idea and this will be about 1950s science fiction comic books by the end so we will all see where this journey takes us

1:49 but let me start with inviting you over for a war game with me and I'm talking about old school stuff this isn't computer deals this is we you know we we open up the trays and the boxes and we pull out the miniatures maybe we're gonna have a battle where I'm gonna pull out one tray for myself and you will take out a Second World War German army or Soviet army from 1942 I'm gonna give you another tray in another box and when you open it up you see miniatures from armies from 1914 the start of the first world war so in other words your friend Dan and invited you over for a nice fair war game may the best man win or woman win and I take a middle second world war army and I give you a start of the first world war army it's like 25 years difference that's practically cheating isn't it you stand no chance I like to stack the deck what can I say at this point you would declare this to be unfair site unsportsmanlike

2:57 unsportsmanlike unsportsmanlike conduct and go home if however we decided we were gonna play you know what was always called ancients back in the day that's really anything pre gunpowder we're gonna have a battle from the ancient period and I pull out an army from 1066 you know pull out some Normans the army that invaded Britain and deposed the anglo-saxon monarchy there right 1066 and I give you an army from more than a thousand years earlier you may depending on the army be perfectly willing to fight with it and in fact think that I put myself at a disadvantage what if I gave you alexander the great's army from three let's just say 338 throwing out a number there makedonia pnes against Normans now anybody that actually played war games in the era that I did knows that you were forced to fight battles like this all the time you were forced to fight alternative history battles by the nature of the economics of the hobby

4:10 let me explain and see this is where we go into territory there's a lot of people are gonna go why do we care about this I'll check out another addendum show later and hopefully it's your favorite topic when you do see you later okay for the rest of you and you'll probably whittle down the audience to 1950 science comic book lovers by the end only maybe only like spanish-language 1950s science fiction comic books by the end but in this case as I said every pre gunpowder era war gamer from the 1970s for example except for you total hardcores was a fantasy war gamer because we played twenty five-millimeter first of all folks which meant the figures were relatively big and relatively expensive especially if you were a kid then you had to paint him yourself and that took a long time I mean the whole process involved a loving commitment to an army back in those days lots of money lots of time to build your army what were the

5:05 odds that anybody else was building a historical enemy for your army and the answer to that is it wasn't common usually you'd be fighting two armies that never were anywhere close to each other on the map and were from wildly different periods because what choice did you have right Romans against Knights not that unusual but the interesting question that has the larger impact and is maybe more interesting for people who aren't totally into this hobby like some of us have been um is why if you have a First World War Army from 1914 totally outclassed to the point of it's not even worth getting out the miniatures to fight a 1942 army you know a quarter century difference why can a single period from the dawn of humanity to about the Renaissance be covered in the same wargames rule booklet just for those of you who care war games research rules 4 5 & 6 were the ones we played and if you look at those rules by the

6:11 last of them you have Knights and Egyptian you know fur onic armies in the same rule booklet totally able to fight each other in the tournament oh by the way why is that see that to me is the the bigger societal question because it says something about the pace of change and a ton of other things that are integral to why you get the kind of militaries in history that you get I mean there's a lot of inch books um I read one by John Lynn a historian who wrote battle a history of combat and culture and he makes he makes a point that we all understand what he wrote a whole book specifically pointing it out about how the cultures of all these societies especially when you go back to periods where militaries weren't standardized the way they are now even though culture still plays a role you go look at a military in any country in the world and it looks broadly similar to other militaries I mean we have a sort

7:07 of a standardized thing now you need to do to win back in the day it was much more exotic and militaries could really differ from one to another and especially region to region and so the culture had such an influence on the militaries that it kind of determined at times how they even fought right you might have a military that in terms of technology and weapons and and ferocity and numbers and all these other factors was the equal of its opponent but because of some cultural question they were inhibited or maybe even enhanced how can one not think for example of the Native American practice of counting coup as a wonderful example of how a culture can influence one's warfare is that the smart thing to do from a military standpoint probably not but it's part of the culture and you know you lose something important to the people who are involved if they don't do this and and especially in the earlier

8:03 period you see this in most militaries one way or the other I mean try to figure out why the heck a night is a night when it comes to their performance on the battlefield right you start getting into all kinds of cultural questions because it's not just weapons systems and armor right there's other stuff going on but good luck quantifying it and good luck making a case and you can go back to what the people of the time thought but they were a bunch of by today's standards racist EDNOS ethnocentrism phobes i mean who's gonna believe those guys of course they think there's something special about themselves we don't do that these days of course not of course not now just so you know this is hardly a new idea I'm just deciding to look at it in this particular program but people have been fascinated by this forever I mean how many wonderful movie or TV themes can we remember that play with this idea it's really

8:57 alternative history or what if history that's the category it falls into I've probably mentioned before because it's a perfect example of those movies that are not good movies but because of what they're doing in the movie I'm hooked anyway the 1980 movie the final countdown that's not a good movie but if you like stuff like I like stuff it's worth checking out because the premise is easy to understand you have the USS Nimitz a super carrier when this movie's made in 1980 its state-of-the-art basically this was by the way sort of a half publicity piece for the US Navy so they cooperated but that's part of what made it so cool and so the premise is that the USS Nimitz from 1980 gets in this weird storm that transports them back in time serendipitously enough to the day before the 1941 Pearl Harbor strike and they happen to be right in the vicinity so as they figure out oh my gosh we've been sent back in time and oh

9:55 my gosh it's the day before Pearl Harbor oh my gosh what can you know um you get this wonderful set up that's about to happen as this movie goes on right and and and they lead up to it great I mean there's there's a scene that for people like me is worth the price of admission alone where you see 1980s era jets using missiles to down replicas of zeros and you know this is pre CGI so they're really flying these thing I mean it was it's great right but what you're setting up of course is what everybody really wants to see which is the 1980 super carrier USS Nimitz going to intercept the Japanese fleet on the way to Pearl Harbor right does one 1980s super carrier equal six second world war early second world war aircraft carriers and and corresponding fleet with them I think so but we're gonna find out right as the final countdown goes on but then the storm comes back and takes the Nimitz back to its own time period I

10:52 like to call that time travel interruptus and there's nothing more unsatisfying than not getting to see that battle but there are other television shows and movie plots and premise C's premises that do the same thing I mean who doesn't recall if you're a original Twilight Zone series fan as I am the episode that involved the Army reservists who were on maneuvers on the battlefield where Custer's last stand happened the Battle of the Little Bighorn the plot is also simple these guys have a tank I think it's like a world war two leftover m3 Stuart light tank 37 millimeter three browning machine guns but a light tank right but they're on maneuvers at the site or right around the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and as time goes on they like the Nimitz in the final countdown begin to realize that they've somehow been transported back in time and the Battle of the Little Bighorn is unfolding you know nearby and you know

11:54 more and more clues begin to surface the final clue being an arrow between the shoulder blades of one of these you know 1950s 1960s Army reservists and then at the end when they realize where they are they go back to their tank and they you know going from memory here but I've seen it a million times they go back to their tank and they pull out like their submachine guns or whatever and they run off to the battlefield in order to help and then the next scene is um it's something like the the memorial for the for the people who fell there right and it's got all of you know the custard victims names on a plaque and on the plaque now are added the three names of the modern reservists and it's this you know puzzle and then the last scene is sort of showing their commander as he figures out wow they must have gone back in time in a while they must have died at the battlefield and fought there and

12:39 then the last line is something to the effect of it's too bad they couldn't have brought the tank it might have made a difference or something like that well of course that's the final countdown ending - don't you want to see the 1m3 against what was it like 2000 2500 you know Native American Plains warriors truthfully I don't think it's much of a battle as soon as they figure out they have nothing to penetrate this thing with and as it's mowing down natives I think they're gone I think the morale breaks I think anybody's would but just still want to see it don't you so someday when I make this movie I was gonna write a book maybe it'll be a movie some big I called fighting out of time and it was gonna be these questions I'm gonna do it as a podcast today instead and sort of explore it a little bit but the idea would be to actually have that battle I mean if you're gonna have a great battle why not show it and

13:31 it's it's fantasy and yet its historical at the same time I mean take for example one of the wild ideas that blew my mind when I first heard it and I first heard it in 1985 it was not particularly new even then because it involves two of the great military commanders in history so it is normal for people to compare them and they've been doing so for a long time in this case its Napoleon and Alexander the Great the book that blew my mind on this was a book it's called the origins of war from the Stone Age to Alexander the Great by military historian Arthur Farrell and at the time in the middle 1980s you know I was a to get back to the wargaming thing I had an acumen and Persian army and I had a neo Assyrian army and getting updated information on either one of those was nearly impossible and then in the 1980s little bits of real information began to trickle out again the first real glut of

14:23 information in like 20 or 30 years and this book had some of it so I mean I desperately needed this book but when you get to the last chapter in an effort to make his case that Alexander the Great had brought warfare to a point where it was modern enough so that you could begin to make weird comparisons he tried to reimagine the Battle of Waterloo right early 1800s the Duke of Wellington with his anglo-dutch army on one side Napoleon back from exile you know the comeback kid with his army the Prussians in the distance on the way maybe the most written about battle in human history I'm not sure I think I read that somewhere but if not the most one of the most which is why it gets studied so often by the way because when you have this many accounts from this many angles you can begin to piece things together really well and this is by the way one of the earlier battles in relatively modern history where people

15:16 were able to do that and they did it with real interest especially for the rest of the 1800s because this was the ultimate battle of the Age and a lot of veterans on multiple sides had fought there what Farrell does first is try to imagine how Alexander the Great would have done at that battle if he were commanding Napoleon's army instead of Napoleon so this was part of his effort to show that Alexander would have wouldn't have been daunted by the numbers or the scale or the size of the battlefield or those things because he had relatively similar numbers and battlefield sizes and all that kind of stuff in his day then Farrell goes on however to do the part that just blows your mind if you're a person like me and tries to imagine in order to make a point how Alexander would have done at the Battle of Waterloo in place of Napoleon if he also used his own army instead of Napoleon's French one this seems on the

16:22 surface preposterous you're going to replace early 1800s era Napoleonic French with makedonia --nz from something like the 330s BCE an army that was ancient by the standards of the Roman Empire preposterous but maybe not as preposterous as you might think initially Pharaoh makes an interesting sort of a point and he does it with the usual disclaimers you always have to do with counterfactuals or alternative history for example he concedes that the gunpowder and the sound of explosives and stuff would have a big impact on Alexander's troops and the horses and all that so you take that out that becomes one of those things that you make allowances for you pretend that Alexander's makedonia n--'s had fought gunpowder before and then try to measure how it would go but then it gets kind of interesting because Farrell points out things that you might not consider for example that my first thought you just

17:18 think how are Alexander's men lined up shoulder-to-shoulder in these deep blocks like you know so many bowling pins how are they going to get past all this musketry in this cannons and everything like that but farro reminds us that at Waterloo Napoleon had a lot of infantry formations that were formed up in column deeper than Alexander's and they still got right up to the Dutch lines before the anglo-dutch opened fire with their muskets let's talk about that for a minute there's a famous phrase you may recall that you're not supposed to fire until you see the whites of the enemy's eyes that's because the muskets when you singly are pretty ineffective and inaccurate during this time period but if you wait till someone's right in front of you and you fire a whole bunch of them at once you can do great damage the problem always comes with the reloading because in this time period that's a pretty slow process

18:15 and even if you have ranks fire in sequence so the first rank fires then kneels and begins to reload second rank fire there's still these pauses between the discharge of the weapons between the volleys it's what's gonna happen during that low that's maybe going to make a difference here if the Duke of Wellington and his anglo-dutch forces stand up from you know behind a ridge at 20 yards or 15 yards and opens fire at the makedonia n-- pikemen in front of them they may blow them away they did this against Napoleon's forces and caused terrible trouble right they could blow them away so the same thing would happen no worse than how the French did right but if they don't blow them away remember unlike Napoleonic infantry they're not armed for combat for hand-to-hand combat with a long musket and a knife on the end of it a bayonet they have those fourteen foot long Spears they have them arrayed

19:18 in a formation that makes them look like a hedgehog or a pin cushion the Roman general he was Emilia spaulos described the sight of a phalanx a pike phalanx advancing as absolutely terrifying and he didn't think it could be defeated on level ground if it kept its formation what would that do to the thin lines of Musketeers if they ever got past that initial volley right charged at the Run which they were trained to do between the volleys in the interim yikes and remember unlike the Napoleonic infantry they would be charged into they have armor and helmets they have swords for sidearms they are ready for hand-to-hand combat in fact it's the only thing they do Pharaoh also points out that these skirmishers the people with slings and bows and arrows and javelins fighting as light infantry people that they might do better against Napoleon's forces than they did historically because historically

20:19 they're usually launching their sling stones and arrows and javelins against people who have shields or helmets or armor or all three the de poliana troops have none of those things so they may be more vulnerable than the ancient opponents and targets of the skirmishers were finally you have the cavalry question and this is a big open-ended one because you know you have the involvement of some technology here we talked about technology changing slowly but there's a priest stirrup and a poster of a period when it comes to cavalry and stirrups and how much of a difference that makes is heavily debated I'll tell you this I think you'd probably have and I could be wrong about this I think you'd probably have more good cavalry on the makedonia inside so even if they weren't able to compete person-by-person I think they might not number them and I certainly think that if I'm on horseback with a twelve foot

21:11 nine to twelve foot Lance I'd rather have that than a man on horseback charging with a saber and well that's just me that's a personal preference question isn't it my point is that it's both goofy and fascinating because what does it say about development the pace of change how cultures influence militaries I mean it brings up some very interesting questions like how could an army fighting more than 2,000 years before the one fighting at the Battle of Waterloo have any chance at all at the Battle of Waterloo when you wouldn't stand a chance in hell against me if you were using a 1914 army and I was using a 1942 one you would like to say that it is a simple question of the speeding up of the pace of change that once upon a time change moved rather slowly compared to today I mean for example they were using things like Spears and bows and arrows in warfare from prehistoric times until right around the

22:19 Middle Ages of the Renaissance even after the Renaissance that's a long time with certain elements in place technologically speaking you might argue as many do that when the pace of change speeds up usually dated to around the middle 1800s right middle of the 19th century think us civil war think franco-prussian war in Europe that from that moment on technology speeds up to a point where armies need to stay technologically current or lose and that's not to say that they didn't need to before it just became a much more overriding issue and you see that by the way if you look at any of the major Wars from the 1850s onward there's there's the beginning of the war where there's a sort of shock as everyone's getting accustomed to the power of the new weaponry and trying to learn how to use it and integrate it into systems and all that kind of stuff you see that in each of these wars just this utter shock it

23:14 at at what 10 years or 20 years of change has wrought on the old rules and it's about this time period and I'm not saying that the saying dates from that but that the idea of generals are always fighting the last war seems to be relevant because this is where fighting the last war can get you killed fighting the last war didn't get you killed through most of human history fighting the last war was often the best way to fight the next war especially if you did well if you are a Roman general there's not that much gonna change in your lifetime on the basics of war if you are a general if you're a soldier in 1914 who ends up being a general in 1945 look at all the change that went on in your life so the pressures been on the modern generals right to try to adapt quickly to a pace of change that earlier generals never had to deal with and of course the funny thing is we moderns can relate to their situation more easily

24:13 than we can relate to say the Roman general situation because we understand the accelerated pace of change intrinsically don't we it's such a part of our modern lives that it's become difficult to try to imagine that it's ever been otherwise and yet it's only been this way for a relatively short period of time that to me when you start thinking about how human history has been for most of human history and begins to sound like science fiction that's when you know we live in really interesting times right I mean take for example this pace of change question forget the fact that it can sometimes seemingly move backwards right and knowledge can get lost in certain places at certain times and capabilities can go down like a civilizational stock market and decline forget all that for a second and you know I love those things I mean I can hardly keep from just going off on tangents on those but I do that enough

25:06 on other shows check them out if you haven't already but just focus on all the ramifications that happen in the society when knowledge especially things like technological knowledge when those things stay current for much longer swathes of time I mean here's an analogy it's science fiction but it's more representative of human history than the way we live now imagine if we today we're still using and you guys you know don't give me these notes saying go you wouldn't do it the viruses we would have by now you have no idea imagine we were still using the computers from 1995 windows 95 on every desktop except for you people that have the early apples running around your office but my point being imagined that we are very little changed from the technology of when computers first became something a lot of people had in their homes if you were a person who began using computers back in 1995 or for that matter 2005 think

26:08 about how competent you'd be on this operating system by now right think about what a guru these old people would be in any of these companies simply because of the hours of experience that had accrued over a long lifetime using the same operating system that you're using today you know as a 17 year old hacker now instead of talking about computers and operating systems imagine if we're talking about web in warfare there's a sort of a physics to the pre-modern battlefield that remains relatively constant over time I mean this is why Arthur Farrell thought to put Alexander in charge of Napoleon's troops because he wouldn't have been daunted by the scope and the scale and all that kind of stuff well the pre gunpowder especially era there are limitations on human and animal muscle power for example space range I mean think about the speed the fastest thing on a battlefield in the biblical era of warfare is a horse the

27:16 fastest thing on the battlefield in the Civil War era of the United States in the middle 1800s is a horse so these sorts of things meant that the realities that generals dealt with in terms of limitations and speed and how things moved in the amount of food everybody ate and all that kind of stuff we're the same for the Romans as they were for you know the Chinese and the Tang Dynasty and this is why if I pull out my 25 millimeter ancients and I'm feeling magnanimous and I allow you to pick which side you want and I pull out an army from 1066 and I pull out another army from 54 BCE so about a thousand years a little bit more apart and I say pick whichever one you want and we'll fight it's a sucker's game if you pick the later army now of course it depends on what the later army is in this case what if we picked two armies that both successfully invaded Britain my Normans from 1066 that fought at the Battle of

28:23 Hastings often referred to as the last outside power to ever conquer Britain and Julius Caesar's Romans who did it in 54 BCE he's often referred to as the first person to do it although there was probably some Celtic person in prehistory that did it first but you know what I mean what if those two armies fought each other instead of the opponent's they actually did now first of all tell me you're not buying a ticket for the movie to watch that play out on the screen I mean I'm going to a movie to watch a 1980s jet shoot down a second world war Japanese 0 I sure as heck I'm gonna go watch legionaries take on you know Norman proto Knights but you know beyond just the geeking out about history this would have a square off has all kinds of interesting overtones concerning the pace of change that I'm not sure you can you know conclusively label in any single direction but just take for example the fact that if those two

29:28 armies actually met it's going to be the earlier army that has the higher level of capability in most of the categories and if you're an ancients fan like I am you may just have already internalized that to the point where you don't even notice it anymore but think about how strange it would be if we said that same thing today I mean what if we could put a man on Mars 500 years ago but we can't quite do that again yet as weird as that would be to us living today there were lots of periods in human history where at least somewhere else in the world there were civilizations that were dead and gone that had capabilities above your own however you want to define that in this particular situation we are defining it in terms of the army that ends up on the field and in this case both of those armies when they're on opposite sides of a battlefield are representatives of the civilization and society that supports them and it raises

30:25 them and it creates a system that results in them I mean for example the Roman system is a highly organized system the British would call it in my world games research rules a regular military you know they are drilled the way our military is they regular pay they have engineers and cooks and logistics people I mean it's an entire operation that goes on generation after generation officers ranks all these kind of things the Duke of Normandy czar me is something that's totally different and it's a reflection of the society comes from first of all it is a rigidly structured society in terms of people's place although not as rigidly structured as it would be 200 years from now and where you were in the society determined how you fought what your role on the battlefield was I mean think about the Japanese and the samurai is that necessarily the best military that country can come up with no but it's the

31:22 one that matches the societal conditions and the hierarchy and all these other aspects of the culture that ends up playing into the military now things are so standardized that a Chinese military or Brazilian military a US military look more alike than different but in the pre-modern era it got really exotic especially place to place and region to region I know I said that already but it bears repeating it's one of the main attractions of the period from a wargaming standpoint because even when you're looking at something like Napoleon's era or the u.s. Civil War I mean both sides are wearing you know uniforms that are relatively similar I mean it's not all that different but you go to the ancients period and you've got I mean there'll be elephants on the battlefield there'll be people in Armour there'll be tribesmen I mean it'll be everything you can think of it's very colorful very different the armies are

32:12 really um there's a discordant field of the whole thing but it's part of the attraction there's a much more rigid standardized way of doing things even by Napoleon's time the kind of soldier that the the early Middle Ages produced is going to be what the war games research rules of my day would have called any regular soldier irregular meaning not that they were that there was something wrong with them but that they were trained differently than people like the Romans or for that matter people like the militaries today you think of a tribal warrior or you think of someone who comes from a hereditary warrior class where training is sort of based on your place in the society a knight an upper class warrior these are people whose training with weapons and fighting is in no way necessarily inferior to someone like the Romans or someone like the makedonia --nz they're just trained differently on a one-to-one level

33:15 they might be superior would you rather face your average makedonia in Spearman or would you rather face a knight on the other hand would you rather face a unit of knights or a unit of makedonia in Spearman I mean once you start talking about units moving together and all that sort of stuff it's a different argument but the armies of the early Middle Ages in Western Europe were irregular armies they were ad-hoc armies meaning they were thrown together for battles sometimes you'd get lucky and have some training the Duke of Normandy famously is supposed to have gotten some training time in before he crossed the channel and a little bit afterwards so by the standards of his day he's bringing a somewhat trained and somewhat cohesive army across the channel unfortunately he's facing a very trained and very cohesive army and trained as an army I was trying to think about how we should structure this movie and try to look at

34:11 it from you know Dan Carlin filmmaker screenwriter showrunner standpoint and if you figure that probably the way the Battle of Hastings happened although there are some dissenters is that the the Normans crossed the channel arrived and they find the anglo-saxons waiting for them on the famous hill nearby Hastings so we're going to assume that the Romans also get there first I mean they were there a thousand years earlier I assume they've had time to set up and in my movie I haven't walked the ground and measured this and thought it out but I'm just going to assume the battle does not take place in the same spot in the movie that it did historically because there's a lot more Romans than there were Anglo Saxons I'm not sure a guy like Julius Caesar is going to be able to deploy his army where the anglo-saxons deployed there's not enough room and that's where we should start this movie how much room

35:04 do you need in 54 BCE Caesar took five legions across the channel in what the ancient sources say were six to eight hundred ships think about that for a minute in your mind's eye and an ancient society doing this and in fact Caesar had his people go to work and produce this fleet over a winter as the winters here by the end of winter you have six to eight hundred ships some of which are capable of carrying lots of horses the English Channel is no picnic no matter when you want to cross it and when in 54 BCE Caesar crossed it he had crossed it the year before the first time the Romans get word of what lies beyond the ends of the earth and you know this misty area that no one actually knows about and you know tribesmen have been going back and forth forever but no civilized man from the Mediterranean has ever gone and explored like Davy Crockett this mysterious land and so in 55 BCE with a smaller force

36:02 Caesar goes over there writes about this we should take a little sidebar tangent moment to point out that if you ever wanted to get started and read some great ancient history you could do a lot worse than starting the Caesar remember this is a guy who's writing his war memoirs in real time sort of surreal eyes like you know someone would do for a magazine today where you get one chapter at a time of the magazine as he's writing it or as his people are writing it and Caesars on campaign here he's part Conqueror part politician on the rise part ethnographer part Charles Darwin in part Lewis & Clark as he goes across and thrills the readers of home with tales of what lies beyond you know the ends of the earth in 55 BCE depending on your view of Caesar either because he was just launching a reconnaissance and always planned to come back or because he underestimated how many people he'd need for the job

36:55 and was sort of defeated Caesar comes back in 54 with a conquest army five legions that's 25,000 men or something probably under strength because let's recall that this is just a little side gig for Caesar at this time he's in the process of conquering all of Gaul and punching the Germans in the nose a couple times during the process I mean that's the big deal the main show this is a sidebar giggy's like that big band that comes into play New York or LA but you know you got to pay the hotel bill so the night before you do something over in Bakersfield or you know Roanoke there's a little irony on two aspects of this Caesar expedition one is that this conquest of Gaul involved in is going to include the very area is that these Normans will come from eventually so Caesars conquering it during this time trade so maybe this is the Normans coming back you know as descendants trying to prevent the

37:53 original conquest of their territory the other thing that's worth pointing out is that the real Battle of Hastings both sides probably approached the battlefield on centuries-old roads built by the Romans that were still better than anyone was producing locally since they left so little irony there in the historical situation of course as pointed out in Caesars memoirs he portrays the inhabitants these Britons as very similar to the Gauls in what's now modern-day France but with their own little cultural differences one they were still using chariots which were antiquated over on the continent by then so running around with horse-drawn chariots and they also painted themselves blue with woad which made them look somewhat different than most of the Gauls on the continent I don't know their me there was so much cultural transmission over the English Channel but sometimes the Garlic tribes in the

38:45 very north of France had a lot of similarities and that's sort of how Caesar kind of saw them similar but slightly different the Romans basically had no problems in field battles with them at all so the Britons resorted to the same tried-and-true strategy that most people do when they can't field a field army that's competitive they go guerrilla and non-traditional and Caesars left trying to deal with what appears if you read between the lines to be a rather vicious counterinsurgency war of the sort you saw all through the 20th century for example and the Romans were very good at these by the way it sounds particularly vicious and then Caesar throws in a few friendly leaders signs a few whatever passes for like deals or contracts or agreements crosses back across the channel and gets back to his main task which is conquer and go on and then going and really becoming the guy who brings down the Roman Republic right so

39:39 a lot of stuff ahead for Caesar no time to mess around in in Britain and it was an easy task dealing with any field battles now we should point out something about field battles because I think in our little comparison here it matters it's easier probably fought more field battles than anybody you can think of from that era famously he's supposed to have fought over 50/50 field battles is so much it's hard to get your mind around compared to the people that are considered to be in his class I mean think about a guy like Alexander the Great you can argue depending on how you want to classify what constitutes a field battle that's a formal battle where both sides sort of line up and get to it Adrian Goldsworthy gives Alexander five field battles it's not unreasonable but compare that to more than fifty four Caesar Caesar's battles were also huge and this matters in our comparison about the pace of change Caesar and again you

40:32 have to allow for exaggeration and all the sorts of stuff that come with these numbers but even if you take the low numbers Caesars battles would all be considered to be very large by William the conquerer standards and that time period now some of you might make a case and I think you'd have a good one that this is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison here because we are comparing a society like Caesars and urban dense civilization of Imperial size and strength to a small feudal territory the Duke of Normandy was in control of the resources manpower and an territory of something that would be too small to be a Roman province in their republic or empire so if you compare them to say the song Chinese in 1066 a similar kind of organized people capable of putting large numbers of organized people into armies and then feeding them and caring for them and all that kind of stuff might be a better comparison that'd be

41:32 an interesting battle by the way worth saying though that in 1066 it's one of those periods where no you don't have any great armies dominating the scene and even the song Chinese are at one of their low points having the traditional Chinese problems with the northern barbarians and it's a particularly bad time I consider to be along with many others I think the Normans are one of the better armies in the period but they're really different there are a few little society taking on a society much more like our own probably than the Norman one was now the Norman Army that William the conquerer brought over has been compared by some people it's not a bad analogy his expeditions been compared to some sort of like a venture capitalist entrepreneurial kind of thing a profit sharing deal where you know anyone who wanted to get in on this you sign up we're gonna go over there it's speculative but if I win and if I become

42:27 the king of this territory will parcel it up and you'll get a piece commiserate with the amount of investments you put in and that might mean you know how many men did you bring with you because William the Conqueror is going to conquer the British Isles with an ad hoc army which was pretty much the way that they did things you know at that time and at that place these people often fought a lot a guy like William the Conqueror fought a lot just like Caesar did but most of the battles he's going to have been involved in are going to be very different kinds of affairs sieges ambushes you know looting raiding anti-guerrilla looting and raiding small scale battles just between heavy cavalry I mean a lot of these battles if you look at the history of the early Middle Ages or what used to be called the late Dark Ages now late antiquity you'll see these battles between like you know 500 heavy cavalry on one side and 800 heavy

43:16 cavalry on the other side and they just let the infantry at home and that's a battle in julius caesar's day and at you know in his world that's a skirmish that doesn't count as one of his 50-plus battles but it counts as one of William the Conqueror's so it's pretty darn likely that when William the Conqueror shows up at the British Isles he's commanding the largest number of human beings he's ever commanded maybe by a lot and the numbers are all over the map typical of the era you get some low numbers at like five thousand eight thousands more often the low you get some high numbers at like 17,000 a lot of people put it in the eleven twelve thousand range and it's not quite understood how many of these people are considered to be combatants versus non-combatants both sides have non-combatants the Romans are employing cooks and people who do the armored repair I mean they've got giant cities attached to each of

44:08 these legions basically and every night let's recall they build a camp and the camp to the Normans would look like a giant fortified city and every day that that camp stays in the same place the Romans fortify it and make it more permanent that's one of the things that someone like Williams gonna have to deal with he's got a bunch of as we were saying entrepreneurial partners who are not under his direct command other than by agreement right you can't order them around at a certain point you know you piss off some of these other people because they're gonna be contingents of nobility and and higher class people from France and among the Breton's and these other people that will come over you know Williams got to kind of be you can't be too hard ass can't be too General Patton with them because they're there because they want to be there or because they own the favor or whatever it might be these are the people by the

45:03 way that are going to be something that Williams gonna rely on in this and this encounter if we are setting up the tale of the tape here before this encounter William the Conqueror's army because you know I like the boxing analogies reminded me of like Mike Tyson in the later years of his career he's not very dangerous in any of the other ways that he used to be but he still got this left hook this punch that will just ruin you no matter who you are are you know under the right conditions you will lose don't underestimate you know what the striking arm of William the Conqueror's army can do and the striking arm are these proto Knights let's call them proto Knights because they're not really nice yet when people think of Knights they're thinking of the Knights of the High Middle Ages say the 1300s or the 1400 or maybe even the 1500s these mounted tanks on giant horses who charge with a lance

46:00 underneath their arm in a fashion known as couched these are not them they are on the way to becoming them I like to think of you know because I do I like to think of European cavalry as sort of progressing through stages let's remember it is the Romans and the Greeks who first write about encountering these people north of them and what we would consider to be you know central and western in Northern Europe and the first cavalry that they encounter from these regions that will continue to produce cavalry over these eras I like to call it European cavalry 1.0 it's the Garlic cavalry the various sorts of cavalry although you know probably their great-great great-great-grandfather's that caesar is both fighting against in his wars in gaul in 54 in the 50's BCE and using in his own army during caesar's period they didn't have their own cavalry or not much of it anymore they used what were called auxiliary

46:57 cavalry they used locals they used mercenaries they use people they could hire or people that wanted to fight or people that owed them you know that they conquered previously and caesar will have 2,000 Garlick cavalry with him when he invades britain and when he fights William the Conqueror in our film I considered that to be European cavalry 1.0 I only bring them up at this moment to point out the difference between they and this cavalry of the early Middle Ages these Normans these proto Knights because they're more like European cavalry 3.0 and let's say European cavalry 2.0 the middle one is that Gothic cavalry the stuff from what we used to call the Dark Ages the stuff that was involved you know in in the the latter parts of the Roman Empire and afterwards call that 2.0 and so by this time you have this Norman cavalry unlike most of European cavalry 1.0 these Normans and these French and these

47:55 Breton's all this Western European heavy cavalry made up of generally you know the higher class warriors these guys are all gonna have armor from head to thigh male you know interlocked rings and a lot of neck pieces of it they'll wear the traditional this was really the traditional helmet of the what again they used to call it the Viking era in in European military history you saw it all the time it's a conical helmet like a cone that they wear on their head and then it either has or doesn't have the nose piece the nasal the the strip of metal that follows the nose you know all the way from sort of the tip up to the you know between the eyes and it's one of the more obvious pieces of armor in terms of what it's intended to do I mean you don't have to be very imaginative to just see that oh yeah that's to prevent somebody from slashing across your face sideways with a sword strike one of the major things

48:52 that happened during this period by the way so these Norman and Breton and French proto Knights would also carry what was called a kite shield which looks like a giant teardrop and extended teardrop they carried a 9-foot Lance or somewhere around 9 feet how they used it seemed to depend on the either the man himself or one of many styles because the Bayou tapestry which is an account of the Battle of Hastings which you know people actually made shows a lot of these sorts of you know elements of the battle but they were armed and armored like how they you know rode up and did things and they show these proto Knights some of them are using the Spears in the fashion that they will later on but they're throwing them you know big nine-foot Spears they're throwing them they're using them overhand so it seems like once again we're not quite at this period where later on you're gonna have these medieval knights with the lance

49:43 under the arm you have these proto Knights in addition to that let's not think about them riding these massive scary war horses which will it be something that does happen later on although that might be overplayed but in this period historian John France is one of the people that suggests that these horses might have been a lot smaller than we think in most cases not all cases but most cases I mean he gives a possible size as like 12 hands high doing the measurements from the artwork 12 hands high he points out is you know a Shetland pony is ten hands high so this is not your Knights of the Middle Ages when we and the Conqueror shows up to fight the locals he's fighting a bunch of people who represent the predominant troop type of the you know era that's coming to an end a lot of people used to put you know in the good old days the Viking era ends and the era of the Middle Ages begins at the Battle

50:37 of Hastings as though you could have a moment like that there was such a clean break but that's how it used to be portrayed if you think about all the people to fought of the Battle of Hastings as sort of looking like things from the Viking Age it's not a bad visual image the anglo-saxon forces that William defeated at that crucial battle you know once again the emphasis on English in European history being what it is it was always touted as you know open up most important battles of all human history well nowadays when you rank it amongst all the battles that are out there it's fallen quite a bit but even when I was a kid this was one of these great important battles of all time when William shows up at the site where this battle was fought he finds something like 10,000 of the locals awaiting him on a hill these Anglo Saxons these English these proto English I'm not sure what stage we could definitively refer

51:27 to them by at this point had just come from fighting another battle and people differ as to whether or not this was just sort of luck on William's part to show up when he did good timing or whether or not he knew about all this and was taking advantage of the fact that there was a Viking actually wrong word for it by this period a Norse invasion of the North of the British Isles and the anglo-saxon King the monarchy it went up there they brought the army they raised the troops and they fought these Norse up north and they had one of those battles where it's a glorious victory and they decimated the other side but they really took it on the chin in doing so and then immediately had to run down because news that William had landed and was going to move on London had reached them and so they basically ran down the length of the British Isles to get to the site of Hastings blocking William from his goal

52:21 but the whole army hadn't made it yet they're kind of strung out over the length and breadth they raised some locals but it seems like they were trying to get their act together at the last minute and so when William arrives in the battlefield he looks up and on this hill this famous hill you find the anglo-saxon army what there is of it awaiting him like I said maybe 10,000 people the best part of it are a bunch of people that seem like Viking housecarls they're anglo-saxon housecarls these are professional troops although almost certainly professional troops in the same way that the the core of knights around William of Normandy probably were professional warriors highly trained and skilled and nasty fighters individually but you wouldn't want him marching around the battlefield and drill formation that wouldn't work out but they provide that the core the spine of this army on the hill the rest is provided by a bunch of

53:14 people that range from Fain's which are sort of well-armed upper-class people but not quite as upper classes as the leadership all the way down to what are called the furred and the select furred which at a certain point if you're if you're really bringing up the drags has like pitchforks and that kind of thing and a lot of people no armor no helmets almost everybody tries to bring a shield and they fight in a shield wall that famous formation from the era where everybody sort of gets as close as they can to each other and and provides an almost solid object for the other side to try to beat themselves to death trying to break down which is a little bit how this battle is going to go and if you're a battle of hastings fan you know that and this is going to be so different than what the Normans are going to have to do if they're facing Julius Caesar in the Romans the Normans can just sort of approach the

54:06 battlefield and do whatever they want at their leisure they will control when encounters happen where they happen I mean the only thing these anglo-saxons are going to be able to do is stay in their shield wall on the hill because they only have one type of troop type its infantry there's no cavalry they there might have been some people who rode to this battlefield but they dismounted and fought in the traditional infantry formation there's also no skirmishers so there's no one to go out and and force any action on william at all so if he wants to initiate contact on the left side of the line for a while and if his left does badly they retire down from the hill lick their wounds have some lunch and maybe william says okay you know maybe after lunch we'll go over and tackle her I mean he's got that kind of freedom he's not gonna have that against Julius Caesar in the traditional battle though

54:53 what ends up happening and it's important if we're trying to figure out whether William would win or Caesar would win how the Battle of Hastings actually went because William who probably outnumbered the anglo-saxons would several times attack up this hill he divides his army by the way into a formation that was used by Normans at other times so maybe it was used in this battle that never happened that we're going to have a scholarly analysis of a fantasy battle that we will break down logically you know and scientifically but these Normans would bring three separate groups as part of their army to bring a corps of archers a corps of melee infantry we'll call them and then a corps of divided into the traditional medieval three three types in a corps of this heavy cavalry at Hastings he lined them up sort of in three lines the first group were the archers and Hastings these had self bows

55:47 which are the least powerful to the Romans these would be non impressive but in this period there were not a lot of people using a lot of bows so it might have been unusual and different at other battles the Normans would use crossbows which would be much more effective than the second group that they had were all these melee infantry so think about a we used to sort of call them your your mixed medieval rabble but that's not fair but it would be whatever the person had in terms of protection so it would range from nothing to leather armor to various forms of metal armor some would have helmets some wouldn't almost everybody would try to bring a shield the weapons would range from Spears to sidearms to here's something that I love in terms of weapon continuity there were people using clubs on both sides at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 is there any older weapon than clubs maybe stones and

56:36 the anglo-saxons were throwing stones at the Normans so what did we say earlier the shelf life of experience well how about the shelf life of weapons technology but what ended up happening was the archers were supposed to go in there and start to break up that shoulder-to-shoulder almost solid formation of the anglo-saxons then the melee infantry were going to go in there and batter it down even more the goal to loosen it up and if you could disorder it disorders the phrase we used to use in war game it means if the cohesion of the of the formation begins to break up so there's holes in it and gaps and spaces that other troops can break into especially if they're still in tight formation you begin to fall apart so these melee infantry we're gonna go in there and hopefully take advantage of any problems that the archers had caused and then the next line was going to be the exclamation point that won the

57:26 battle so when I think of a Norman army and I think of why I would want to be careful facing one I try to figure out how I'm gonna deal with these these are the Mike Tyson side of the army apart that you have to be worried about even at the end of Tyson's career when he doesn't have much that you need to worry about you always need to be worried about the potential punch and that's made from these troops especially the Corps of Norman proto nights around William himself these guys are hard to figure and Caesars gonna have trouble with them because they're hard to figure they're sort of the wild card in this army they're heavy cavalry as we said so now this is the setup let's say 12,000 of these soldiers they approach the area around Hastings and their scouts come back to them probably not that far from the battlefield because neither the early middle-aged Europeans or the Romans to be honest we're great at

58:25 reconnaissance both of them more surprised than you would hope for but probably William get some feedback and the feedback is that up ahead is a much larger army than we expected and they don't look like anglo-saxons now I could not decide if I found it more intriguing to imagine both of these sides coming together in my movie with no knowledge about the other side or if it was cooler to imagine that there'd been some prep right I mean you have a score sheet or you have an advisor or some video on the other side or maybe a caddie like in golf you know the caddie could come up to maybe Julius Caesar who's probably being you know who he is he's probably dictating five letters seducing a woman bad-mouthing a political opponent and listening intently to everything the caddie says and absorbing it this may be by the way the part of this battle that just screws it up for everybody because if you've got a genius like Caesar on

59:30 one side is it really representative of anything you might be able to put Caesar on the Norman side and it becomes a rout just because you know genius is genius but in this case the advisor the Caddy could tell Caesar listen these people on the other side are a little bit like a better armed and armored version of what you're already facing you're facing barbarians these are kind of barbarians I mean they're not trained in any units they don't have a deep organized hierarchical civilization or anything like that there's their army is simplistic but they have those traits that you've become accustomed to seeing on the continent I mean when you run into the Germans Caesar they have that attitude they have that impetus they had they get berserk there's a frenzy there's there's that unquantifiable thing we always talk about and Caesar would be well aware of it they called it the Fuehrer Teutonic as' and Caesars

1:00:24 time but it seems to be something you ran into in Western Europe Central Europe northern Europe and what the heck do you define it as but whatever it was the Normans had a - and for what it's worth the old theory used to be that the Normans had it because they were Vikings basically a couple of generations removed from the old country so to speak those of you who like continuity should note that the way William of Normandy became the duke of normandy was very similar to how the old barbarians got a piece of the old roman empire it was sort of let's call it a farming out of the traditional military responsibilities or maybe you call it privatizing it but when Rome couldn't defend some of its territory from barbarians it used to let those barbarians settle in the territory and the deal was that they had they could live off of it they could settle there they could raise their families or they

1:01:23 could farm it whatever they wanted to do but they had to protect it against the people you know like themselves and they owed their allegiance to you right so they were still it was still you know basically all yours you had just farmed it out the Carolingians in this period right before Hastings had done the same thing they had Viking problems during the Viking eras this area around Normandy was getting hit all the time so the best idea was maybe turn it over to a bunch of Vikings tell him to settle their Christianize them and let them keep the other Vikings out and they'll owe their allegiance to us well as happens sometimes with the Roman Empire these Normans as they were called which was just another word some people used for Vikings Norseman's very close these guys were probably Danish but again not not a hundred percent certain they settled in Normandy quickly forgot that part of the deal that said were

1:02:12 vassals of you and became a thorn in the side of the rulers of France for a couple hundred years while also making their presence felt in a way that defies logic punching way above their weight class for reasons people have speculated upon forever I love some of the adjectives used to describe them energy is one of the words you hear the Normans had amazing energy for 200 years but what it meant was they were fighting and rabble-rousing causing trouble conquering places as far apart as England continental France Italy fighting for and against the Byzantines playing a major role in the First Crusade and eventually what ends up happening to them as they get absorbed in all these societies that they were involved in so into the into the history of England eventually subverted into the history of continental France they their their aspect will become a part of Italian history again foreign against

1:03:05 the Byzantines and in the Holy Land well as long as there was a European crusading presence in the Holy Land the fume of the Normans the stench of the Normans as maybe some of the Byzantine royalty would suggest would linger they had a lot of energy and some people suggested this was because William the Conqueror's I think it was great great great I think three greats grandfather was a Viking and that wonderful Viking berserk frenzy in the war games research rules it was known as impetuous quality that in your rule set nobody knew why they had it but Normans just like Vikings got like a special plus because they had this quality once again what is the rule set reflecting when it gives you that special plus what the heck is that it's that question of what makes a night and night once you get beyond you know the weapons and armor there's something else going on what makes a samurai a samurai it's not just the weapons and

1:04:02 armor so it's part of history that's unquantifiable it's also the part that because it's unquantifiable Julius Caesar needs to worry about as he looks across listens to what the Caddy says continues to woo the woman bad mouthed the political opponent and dictate five letters at the same time and sees this army from the early Middle Ages approaching him first thing he's going to notice being who he is is that it's small he's used to fighting much larger armies than this and there was only three years before that the Battle of the Somme burr happened right across the English Channel you may recall because we did the show where this was included once that at that battle according to Caesar himself so let's imagine that he doubled the enemy numbers but he said the Romans thought that they were in a safe spot once again never the greatest reconnaissance on Rama's part they were also they had the weapons stack their

1:04:54 armor wasn't on everybody was all scurrying around like a bunch of ants building their fort and all that kind of stuff and all of a sudden unexpectedly 60,000 garlic tribesmen come screaming out of the woods charging the completely unprepared Romans 60,000 sounds like a crazy number but let's just say it was 30,000 if it's 30,000 it's still like more than twice as many people as William the Conqueror is going to bring to our you know filmed battle once more we're assuming that Julius Caesar is waiting for these Normans to arrive just like the anglo-saxons were at the Battle of the Sombra three years previously with a lot of these same troops it should be pointed out so Caesars fighting with these people who remember being at that battle when the supposedly 60,000 but maybe closer to 30,000 tribesmen come screaming out of the woods and long story short Caesar and the Romans won that battle so that shows

1:05:51 you the crazy superiority that these supremely organized armies can have over the disorganized ones and I say disorganized I don't mean it intentionally because the funny thing about it is a guy like William would have thought his army was organized by his standards but that's because they didn't do things anymore the way for example the Romans did not in that part of the world that is also a sign about the pace of change in how earlier societies can sometimes have capabilities that later societies don't have now there were contemporaries if somebody wanted to try to be the caddy for William I mean how do you do that it's funny because it's easier to imagine the less sophisticated army than it is to imagine the more sophisticated one if you went to the commander of the USS Nimitz in 1980 and said in the final countdown you're about to face out Merle Nagumo and his six strike carriers from

1:06:48 late 1941 the commander of the 1980 Nimitz is going to go okay I know what I'm up against right it's easy for him to imagine the less complicated technology and tactics and ships a lot harder to go to Admiral Nagumo on the other side and say Admiral you're about to face the USS Nimitz from 1980 it's a super carrier it's only one carrier it doesn't really have any other ships with it but you'll probably have everything in your fleet destroyed before you even see it I mean that's like trying to explain that the HG Welles War of the Worlds aliens are coming let me tell you about what they're gonna be able to do to you it might be a much longer conversation before they understood and the Cadi speaking to Williams probably going to have the same problem how do you explain an army that's more sophisticated than his to him well here's my movies angle on that may or may not be true but certainly could be

1:07:43 these Normans were famous mercenaries and they fought for and against people like the Byzantines you may recall that the Byzantines did not call themselves the Byzantines they called themselves in the time of the Normans the Romans because really as many people point out they're the part of the Roman Empire that never fell the eastern side they're still around centuries later and they never lost the understanding of how to organize troops in a professional regular way right drill them the same way the cadets on the parade ground at graduation at military academies all over the world still March that's how the Romans marched saw the Byzantines marched so maybe the Cadi could go up to William and say you know those Byzantines we talked about those guys that move around the battlefield in complete unison with each other at the commit that can change facing on an order you know remember those guys these

1:08:36 guys fight like that and I always love bringing up Han stillbrook and for those of you don't know Han Stubb rook he's a hard-to-explain guy he's one of those historians that has managed to remain relevant in some ways long after his historical information is is relevant because in all the years since del Brooke lived and he was writing more than 100 years ago the historical knowledge has just changed so much that his information is just wrong but he talks about some of that physics of the battlefield stuff the limitations of muscle power human power animal power logistics all these kinds of things that in a lot of ways especially you know up until you start getting things like vehicles on the battlefield cars and stuff I mean stuff that basically remained pretty constant and he's so skeptical that he's a wonderful piece of ballast to anchor you before you read other people's stuff just to make you

1:09:29 suspicious automatically but tell Brooke talks about the Romans in Caesar's army facing the Gauls which as I said is what he's doing during this period historically and talks about why the Romans are going to beat the Gauls and it has to do with things like organization versus ad hoc sorts of organization this would apply just as much to Williams army as it applies to the Gauls listen to what Dale brook writes though and understand that what the Romans are going to do to this army from the early Middle Ages is they're gonna move on it don't book writes about the Romans and the Gauls quote the superiority of the Roman art of warfare was based on the army organization as a whole a system that permitted very large masses of men to be concentrated at a given point to move in an orderly fashion to be fed and to be kept together the Gauls could do none of these things it was not so much the courage of the

1:10:25 Romans which was in no way greater than their own but the Roman mass power that subdued them and again not that their own mass of itself would not have been much greater but their mass was an inert one incapable of movement it was the Roman civilization that conquered barbarism for imparting the capable movement to a large mass is a work of art that only a higher civilization can achieve barbarism cannot do it the Roman army was not simply a mass but an organized mass and it could be a mass only because it was organized and formed a complex and living entity end quote so these enemies from the early Middle Ages in Europe have a problem and that's that they have the famous choice of this era which is you can stand still and keep your formation intact right you can be the anglo-saxons on the hill you can have your shield wall you can be shoulder to shoulder you can be solid but when people start to move because

1:11:23 they can't they move as individuals it all falls apart now if that happens and the enemy gets their hands on you especially with cavalry you are meat so your choice is we stay here and we don't move and we don't fall into disorder but that allows all the impetus to go to your opponent right you have no way of pressing them that's why the English axis stayed on the hill and never bothered William down at the bottom of the hill the only way they could bother mr. come down they came down he'd killed them the reason you know this is because that's what actually happened in the Battle of Hastings several times these Saxons thinking they were pursuing retreating horsemen broke formation and ran down the hill and when they were strung out all along the hill as individuals the cavalry came back and killed him still undetermined whether the maneuver that made these anglo-saxons so excited they thought

1:12:15 they went one was a feigned flight a planned tactic or whether or not you know they had just kicked the Breton's butts or something like that and they were running away in disorder and just oh you look you got your chocolate in my peanut butter and all those anglo-saxons ran down the hill so we could kill them imagine that let's do that again that's an example of another tactic that probably would not have worked against Caesar so as william approaches this battle in my movie let's imagine what's going to happen here I'm going to think that several miles from the battle around the same time that William is getting word about this strange army that's deployed on a much larger piece of ground than the anglo-saxons historically deployed upon and that its way for them I imagine you'd start getting reports that there were encounters happening probably with light-infantry skirmishers Caesars got we know he's got

1:13:08 slingers and light troops so people with javelins people with maybe bows and arrows and a bunch of other people and they're going to engage the the Duke of Normandy czar me before he gets to the battlefield they're going to swarm around him like mosquitos they're not going to do a ton of damage but they keep you from being able to leisurely just deploy things that your will they are killing you know this guy and that guy here and there they're wounding that guy I mean it's a pain in the rear and it's going to be the beginning of an encounter where the Normans are not going to be given any time to just sort of sit around and think what they want to do and lick their wounds and then leisurely attack later Caesar and the Romans will be on them before they get to the battlefield inhibiting their ability to deploy William really doesn't have any troops capable of doing this unless we want to buy into the theory

1:13:55 which is probable though that the Breton cavalry he has could skirmish I'm not sure you want to have a bunch of basically proto Knightly skirmishing cavalry out there against the Romans but you can do it if you want to remember Caesar himself has cavalry mm Golic cavalry famously European cavalry one point oh I'm thinking and you know sometimes these battles if you read the ancient accounts sometimes they'd be these skirmishes ahead of time that sort of let one side feel out the other and a lot of times it had to do with cavalry because they were still mobile maybe Caesar has his mm garlic cavalry or some of them skirmish a little bit with some of these early middle aged proto Knights and sees what happens but if he does he's gonna see that uh I don't think we want to encounter them close up so maybe the Gauls skirmish which some people have suggested that that's what they fight like anyway but

1:14:43 no one knows but if I'm the Cadi around William the Conqueror giving him advice I'm gonna tell him that you're gonna feel better if you can see that cavalry because if you don't see the mm Gallic cavalry you've got to worry about where they are if you're Julius Caesar you might send that cavalry on a wideout flanking maneuver you know out of view and then right when the battle reaches it's crucial point they come crashing in you know from behind you or something turning the tide or maybe Caesar has them make an even wider out flanking movement and they go and they sack the Norman camp in the rear where all their stuff is the non-combatants are maybe the Treasury is oh maybe Caesar goes even farther around the flank than that goes all the way to the coast burns the ships that Williams gonna need to get home if you don't see the mm garlic cavalry you better be thinking why you don't see them

1:15:40 Williams army is divided into the three sections as we said the core of archers the core of melee infantry and then behind them the heavy cavalry in three lines the Romans are in a traditional formation understand that the Romans built this army that happened in Caesars time and this is the height of the Roman army of the legions so right from before seizures you know maybe his uh maybe his relative Marius is the guy that you date this era from - about the - mid 200s maybe is the height of the great legionary armies in the same way that the Norman army really relies on the the power of this Norman proto Knightly cavalry to do its business the Roman Army's about the Legionaries in this stage some armies have lots of different things they can you know hit you with and sting you with the Normans are about the proto Knights the Romans are about the Legionaries and that's why in my movie it's going to be those two

1:16:32 elements coming together that are going to decide things this isn't gonna be something where oh the skirmishers decided it or that or the cavalry were on the flank decided in this battle you're going to have what you didn't get in the final countdown' or that Twilight Zone episode you're gonna get to see legionaries against Normans now the Legionaries during this period represent sort of a cross-section of the soon to be Roman Empire remember this is the end of the Republican in the same way that the cultures of these feudal societies determine how their militaries look and operate the cultures of societies like well the late Roman Republic do - it influences for example how these commanders behave they're jockeying for political position in Rome and things like what the old newspapers are saying or the equivalent the scuttlebutt in Rome about your conduct on the battlefield matters so it influences

1:17:26 your conduct on the battlefield these really in the in the width and breadth of the history of the Roman army this is a Roman army in transition from the era where you know how much money you had determined you know which ranks or what type of troops you were on the battlefield - one where these are after Caesars time not that long after Caesars time are going to be professional state-run forces of long serving professionals they're not quite there yet they're on their way these are volunteers who are recruited but they often sort of reuptake route Minh tab unsafe ight with the general for a while because they become attached to them in a financial and prosperity sense in some cases to their allegiance becomes to these generals so they stick around by the time Caesars fighting in Britain in 54 BCE some of these units and troops have been fighting with him for quite some time some of them have been

1:18:22 involved in you know skin of their teeth battles in Gaul in previous years so this is an experienced veteran force and the Romans got very good when their soldiers have been serving for a while the Legionaries are all heavy infantry and heavy infantry during the pre gunpowder era their job is to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the other side so usually to break the enemy's main battle line because normally you're fighting you know the major portions of armies are infantry not always but usually the Roman legionaries have been called by some the best pre-modern heavy infantry that ever were I don't know about that specifically but I think if they're not in your top three you're insane they are all armored by this period the armor being provided by the state they are equipped with weapons provided by the state they're run and they have factories that create this stuff and the quality is high the metal

1:19:17 quality is high for example the standardization is high in the standardization allows the army to be trained in ways that some of these tribal or early armies from the Middle Ages they don't have the same kind of standardization right you want an axe at the battle you bring your axe you want to sword you bring a sword but it makes it tough to coordinate the Romans are all are the Legionaries are all armed the same so their tactics can be standardized first of all they are at ground zero a swordsman they have a big shield by the way that covers you know about 3/4 of their body big ol heavy shield though because you're not supposed to be moving around dodging and weaving your job is to run into the enemy head-on with that shield you're gonna hit him with the shield first you got a sword that is one of the great swords in history if you've never held a good recreation of the Gladius it's worth your time if you're a fan of

1:20:08 history like I am and the sword changed over time started as a Spanish sword did so much damage against the Romans they adopted it and it would it would get longer and shorter and change its shape and have various versions Julius Caesar's version is actually a little longer than the one that will come in the famous impacts about Adrienne Goldsworthy puts it at like 2 feet 6 inches so a little longer than you might think for a Roman sword but not like the one the Normans carry usually the Normans have a wide variety of course because they're not standardized the one thing you notice when you pick up a Gladius of any kind is its its weighted nests it's not a heavy sword swords are generally lighter than most people think anyway but it's weight balance is such that it feels like a cleaver you know like you could swing it in about halfway down your swinging motion the sword itself helps pick up steam but it's

1:20:58 really the point that does the majority of the damage it's got a point that just is meant for just puncturing through things like armor and the Roman training generally insisted that they run up to the enemy's battle line shove the big old shield in their face and stab upward with this sword into the guts of the opponent because as the manuals pointed out a slashing cut rarely kills but a stabbing wound even an inch into the enemy is often fatal weird as that may sound right an era before medicine you pierced the viscera and somebody's probably going to die good chance of it anyway let's let's qualify that remark especially if you're using Roman medicine the Romans of course had another weapon for which they were famous the pilum the pilum is a heavy heavy javelin if you've ever held it it's a it's another interesting weapon and you look at you just kind of it's it's sort of ingenious a variation like most of the Roman

1:21:59 weapons of something they encountered once upon a time and then decided they could make a better version themselves and then standardize it basically and and Adrian Goldsworthy says it's a myth that they were deliberately built to be flimsy at one point so that it would Bend because we all grew up thinking that you know these had a long tip and then when they were thrown the weight of the handle would bend the pilum downward so if it was sticking in your body or your shields or whatever you had this thing that was impeding you goals really says that's a myth which sort of implies that it was just bad craftsmanship nonetheless these heavy javelins are a whole different animal than the lighter ones you throw it's a distance although the Romans had those too but these things were much more like the Duke of Normandy muskets where in your head you may be thinking that they're shooting real far away you know at things but

1:22:50 they weren't in the Napoleonic era because they weren't that accurate you had to fire a lot of them at short range and then they started mowing people down what's the same principle sort of with the the heavy javelin the heavy throwing weapon is what the war games research rules used to classify it as that's in line with the the equivalents were like Frankish throwing axes I mean heavy throwing weapons were nasty because they mess up your unit right and they're thrown in volley so imagine you and a bunch of your friends get together line up in shield-wall formation because that's a good one for people you know that haven't trained together you think oh let's just get together form a solid body will overlap shields you can kind of work that improvise that and it works okay if you don't try to move so you imagine you're in that formation and these Romans come up and they fought during this time period in cohorts a

1:23:40 cohort is about 480 men on paper but if we're going to be historical about our fantasy battle here and you know I like to be rigorous in my logical breakdown the fantasy battles then I think you've got to say that these are probably under strength units by now I mean after all caesar's been fighting in france right and it's been nasty so i think let's just cut our or 80 paper strength down to 350 and now you have to imagine that these people are in blocks if you could view it from the Goodyear blimp looking down the Roman cohorts that's what they're called of 480 men on paper are like little rectangular blocks on the battlefield their normal tactic is especially against infantry that when they're about 15 yards or something this could vary they unleash a volley of these heavy javelins so imagine in this case 350 of them at an opponent and then they take advantage of the disorder created by

1:24:41 that I mean if you and your buddies are in your shield wall formation and 350 heavy javelins come at you all in one volley how long does it take you to open up your eyes again and be ready and gird down again and get ready for something how long's with the time period because the Romans are then going to charge right on top of the volley of heavy javelins and try to take advantage of what that volley did to you with these swords as a cutting machine that's how they did it so in this battle this fantasy battle as it begins I'm going to think that William moves I'm gonna say he moves because if he doesn't move Julius Caesar will kill him one of two ways either he will just if the Romans sit there they will be building stuff and he will have like fortifications built if William sits around for too long you wait three days it's going to be like you know World War one in the early Middle Ages so I don't think

1:25:37 Williams gonna sit there and let the Romans do that I also truly don't think Caesar would even bother I think if the enemy showed up their seizures going to to force them to do something and I think those skirmishers will be the reason that it happens go look at a video on online of rioters and by the way I think that that and I could be wrong about this this is just my own own belief but when I look at these videos of really big riots the ones with a the authorities come out in shields that might be like Roman shields and they get in formation I think that looks very much like what a pre-modern formation might and when you see them up against sometimes these crowds that are sort of chaotic and moving like a swarm of bees and they come forward and backwards I think that's both what skirmishing and what a lot of earlier battles must have looked like when we talked about the physics of warfare I think you're

1:26:27 getting a pretty good idea when you look at those videos finally some of them have horsemen that charge into the mass the authorities bring in cavalry they charge into the mass of the protesters and again I think you're seeing you know elements of muscle power and range and how horses interact with people that might give us a clue better than some of the other sources in terms of things we can visualize especially better than movies and TV and that kind of thing about what the physics of warfare might be like and I think if Cesar's got a couple thousand let's just say five thousand skirmishers in front of Williams troops as they try to sit there they're gonna be pretty badly stung by the time this battle even starts I especially think his archers are going to have had trouble because shooting at these skirmishers is going to prove fruitless I mean they only have so many arrows do they really want to waste them

1:27:17 on a bunch of unarmored guys dodging and running and moving around and trying to not get hit by their arrows who they want to save them for you know the troops that they really have to use them against I'm gonna suggest that they save them and I'm gonna think that when that happens they're gonna lose a lot of people in the process and you're not going to be able to keep the skirmishers off you when these archers approached Caesar's ranks and unleash their arrows I don't think the arrows are going to do anything the Romans have formations where they can create their shield wall of their own but the Romans famously have a roof to their shield wall what's called the testudo the tortoise formation if Caesar wants to he can just have his troops on a command create this formation where they look like a box of shields these little self bows that the anglo-saxon era Norman infantry are using are probably as weak as anything

1:28:12 the Romans have faced I mean remember the Romans have faced bows from the east where they're fantastically powerful composite bows these would not damage the Romans and so I see the archers in a shooting all their arrows running out not having much to work with so they do what they did his store at the Battle of Hastings and after shooting their arrows retiring behind the melee infantry you know this group of mixed early Middle Ages infantry that then move up and try to deal with the Roman legionaries now this is where we can have some fun do they move up and try to deal with the Roman legionaries because if they move their formation is probably going to be disordered do they really want to be disordered against these formations in front of them that looked like blocks of marching men in unison I don't know maybe it depends on you know what the people in charge of that unit the historical commanders

1:29:08 running things want to do I don't know but if they want to maintain their formation they're going to have to stay in place if they stay in place these legionaries are going to move around them they're going to outflank them so that they're going to be surrounded at least on one side maybe on both sides so you see the problem that these untrained troops in these units have they can't move and they're fighting people who can so either you have at some point a bunch of disordered melee infantry running into the Legionaries and running into that storm of heavy javelins followed by the swords disordered and out of formation and without cohesion in which case they'll get killed or you see them maintaining their cohesion but getting outflanked in which case they'll get killed so I don't see the infantry from this period causing the Romans any trouble it'll be just as easy and they're probably less of them than what

1:30:03 Cesar's been dealing with on the continent in Gaul historically the problem of course and the crux you know the money seen in this in this film is going to be how Caesar deals with the unquantifiable you know Norman Mike Tyson punch that can lay you low at the Battle of Hastings after the melee infantry retired not having been able by the way to break the anglo-saxons on the hill it was the turn of the heavy cavalry I would see the same thing the heavy cavalry coming and trying to deal maybe with one of these cohorts that seemed a little exposed maybe the asked one on the front lines and they were set up often in a checkerboard formation so that you would have one covering another and they they had a reserve so unlike most of these armies from the early Middle Ages who didn't have a reserve there were people behind the front of the Roman line in case somebody broke through or in case somebody surrounded you you have to you

1:31:03 have to create a new front you take someone from the rear and a cohort from there and you make then the new front line on the edge on the flank so maybe the Normans see the best place to strike at the front in my movie of the line at the at the edge and they come barreling in and I have to try to figure out now how I want to interpret you know the physics of ancient warfare the best account I ever heard of the questions involved that experts have you would think we would understand this right I mean it's crazy to think we don't was the one that historian David Nicole gave in the Osprey book on the Normans it's a rather introductory book but I had never seen anybody do such a great rundown of the major questions involved and and he's doing it in terms of discussing the Normans specifically but it applies to all pre-modern battles you just don't know how they fought the very common questions about what happens

1:32:02 when two groups of people blocks and men run into each other we wish we knew any of these things that's why when people say Dan what would you do with the time machine I always said I want to be in a hot air balloon a hundred yards above one of these ancient battles just so I can see how the whole thing works here's what historian David Nicol sort of sums up some of the major questions here and when you hear it you kind of go wow yeah that is a lot of stuff to not really understand how it worked and by the way several of these words I'm not going to cut up the narrative with it but they're in quotes because for example a word like cavalry shock tactics which is something you'll hear people use is an implicit belief right there that that's what cavalry did so some of these words are in quotation marks and he writes quote only recently have historians used psychological techniques developed during and after

1:32:54 the Second World War to probe the probable stresses faced by men and animals in pre-industrial warfare what for example was the reality of medieval cavalry shock tactics against disciplined or at least determined infantry were infantry more afraid of horses or of the men riding them did cavalry fear archers more or less than they feared other cavalry what happened when charging cavalry met disciplined infantry in ranks and at what speed did they come into contact what affected the impact have on any second rank of cavalry or on the further ranks of infantry what happened when two forces of cavalry on the move met head-on and how closely packed were such units when they collided how in fact did cavalry passed through other cavalry or ride down infantry clearly he writes the results of combat were intended to be more predictable than the results of a suicidal accident unfortunately he says

1:33:54 medieval illustrations of battle often portray what looks like the split-second prior to a violent encounter rather than realistic combat end quote so does this heavy cavalry charge into the Roman legionaries like driving a car into a crowd of people or is that more of a you know one of those tragic accidents Nicole was talking about maybe they come up and they throw their Spears the way it shows in the Bayou tapestry and they wait to see if that has any effect and if it breaks the formation a little bit then they can you know charge in there with swords and stuff like that they may ride along the front of the infantry and just spear them as they go by in sort of a spearfishing fashion or Nicole's suggests or theorizes that it's possible that the horses of the Normans were trained to push as it's called and that the Normans would go up and with their spear tip essentially touch the spear tip onto the enemy's shield or

1:34:56 human body and sort of jostle it and if you have 40 50 60 guys against the front lines doing this jostling at the same time well he says was the anglo-saxon formation at Hastings jostled to death maybe he said jostle to defeat but he was just sort of theorizing there and who doesn't love that I know I do as I'm theorizing about this situation I can't help but think that whether or not the Norman or the other heavy cavalry here are gonna crash into the Roman ranks whether or not they're gonna ride along the front like their spear fishing for legionaries or whether or not they're gonna do something like throw these Lance's and wait for some effect to happen so they can charge him with swords I think they're gonna have to deal with one immediate thing that's going to be sort of the you know the judgement moment here is how do they handle when at some point they come too close or decide to charge into the Legionaries and they get

1:35:55 what did we say an under strength cohort so we'll say 350 of these heavy javelins thrown simultaneously in a volley you know tossed at their face forget about the men by the way think about what that does to the horses the horses of the European cavalry at this period are not armored the men are but the horses aren't even if they were I'm not sure it makes a ton of difference that is a storm of Steel ancient style doesn't it sound like you'd have this awful train wreck 15 yards 10 yards in front of the Roman frontlines as everybody fell on top of everybody and then the rear ranks fell over them and then when that mess is screaming and writhing one second after the collapse then the 350 to 480 Romans in that cohort charged with their swords so I'm thinking 90% chance that's how it goes here's the problem the Normans like Tyson late in his career still have a puncher's chance the possibility exists

1:37:03 that with whatever it is that unquantifiable thing that always gets them applause in the war games rules I grew up playing based on contemporary accounts and people's attitudes at the time of although you know bias as they were and what not even the Byzantines who couldn't stand the Normans called their charge irresistible so how did how do you model that in your wargames rules so maybe it's irresistible to the Legionaries too you don't become a person on the world stage the way the Normans were people on the world stage for a couple of hundred years without having something special who the hell knows what that is but it was a battlefield quality and I'm suggesting that like the salute kids at the Battle of magnesia the Roman cohort that first gets hit by these cavalry breaks the Romans by the way the Legionaries had famously throughout their history faced heavy cavalry really heavy cavalry on multiple occasions and

1:37:57 multiple different kinds of heavy cavalry they faced as I just said the salute kids who were like Alexander the Great successors and they were fully armored men on fully armored horses those are called cataphracts by the way and the Romans would develop their own cataphracts to imitate them the Romans faced the Parthian 's and the sassanids both of whom used cataracts they faced thus our nation's a step people like the skid thien's and the Huns and those kinds of people who also rode fully armored horses and had fully armored men and used the cantos a big long lance and the Legionaries never liked facing them but did pretty well they did break the left flank supposedly of the Romans at magnesia and the cataphracts tried to raid the Roman camp in the Roman camp being like a castle almost gave them too much trouble in other words um despite the occasional problems that the Romans had with this cavalry by and large they

1:38:53 dealt with it and I think they would have dealt with the Norman knights too even if that first cohort ran because as I said the Romans are going to have a reserve there's going to be another cohort that's going to move up and move on the Normans as they're pursuing this other you know so imagine what this looks like on film they've just they've splattered into this one Legion the 480 or so men are now running there's a it's devolved into a million little battles one Norman on two fleeing Romans you know and it stretched out over a long space and then a a unit of formed men marching in formation like a block marches right up to that and then just tears it up and Mike Tyson super punch that you have to worry about was out boxed there are other things Caesar could have done by the way if you think about the way the Byzantines used to handle the Normans they fought the Normans for real didn't

1:39:47 like it didn't like facing any of the Western European cavalry but they had all sorts of ways to beat them most of them involved around boxing them not fighting them starving them they said they had all these wonderful qualities that made them like Vikings and at the same time they were like children in other respects tactically unsophisticated not willing to put up with much hardship I mean I think the strategic on specifically says that if they run out of wine the army will go home and so the Byzantines often just sort of refuse to actually settle down and fight them and they would often just go home but when they did fight them they also had all these little stratagems on the battlefield one of the most caltrops a good way to think of caltrops is like tacks that somebody would throw on the floor in front of a doorway so that when someone walked in the doorway all of a sudden their bare

1:40:34 feet they've got tacks everywhere these are like tacks for horses and oftentimes the Byzantines would set up a whole zone of these things in front of their infantry formations so think about like a a 50 yard by 50 yards square you know ten yards in front of the front lines when the Normans of the Frankish cavalry or whatever it is charge they hit those tacks and the same thing happens to the cavalry that we imagined happening when 350 heavy javelins hit it right they fall apart into a car crash and you can either counter charge them or in the case the Byzantines probably just shoot them down from there we also should remember that it's at this point that it's very possible in my movie that the 2000 Golic cavalry the European cavalry 1.0 that would never want to face these Norman proto Knights head-on arrive to face them when the Normans are least capable of resisting when their routing when they're running away when

1:41:29 they're trying to escape when they're in ones and twos and all of a sudden the 2000 cowboy just sweep down on the battlefield spearing down everything if they haven't already burned the Norman camp or the ships to have them go home unlike the real Battle of Hastings which took all day nine a.m. to sundown and which the normans office almost lost on a couple of occasions during the day I don't think this would take too long and unlike that battle had the Normans lost I think a lot of them would have gotten away because those infantrymen would not have been very good pursuers I don't think many of these Norman's get away this time I think the Garlic cavalry and all the light troops meet the Normans on the beach trying to get away and you have an ancient version of the Dunkirk battle from 1940 in the Second World War but this time this side trying to get away by the skin of its teeth doesn't make it

1:42:23 I think Julius Caesar in my movie walks up to William the Conqueror and offers him a drink in his tent before he has him executed then again maybe he wouldn't Caesar was known for his clemency after all especially if his clemency would get him something on the other hand I prefer to think about him treating William the Conqueror the way he treated somebody like the garlic leader there kangana Rex put him on ice for a while save him for the party and then when we eventually have the triumph for this whole region not just this one little area we'll bring him on display with the other malcontents March him down one of the main streets in Rome so everybody can jeer at him and give me credit for defeating him and then we'll have him ritually strangled with the rest of them William the conquerer ritually strangled by Julius Caesar it has a ring to it doesn't it especially if you're Roman but let's not be too

1:43:22 trusting of the pre-fight analysts the pundits the prognosticators who suggest that this Roman victory over the Normans is a foregone conclusion because you know sometimes the puncher wins the closest analogy maybe you can find for an actual battle between Normans and Romans is when the Normans fought the people who still called themselves Romans the Byzantines how about the Battle of de rocky I'm in 1081 that's one of those battles where there's an interesting ironic twist that all you fans true fans of the of Hastings already know about in this case you have an army let's just politely say it is far off the highs of Byzantine strength and power and the Byzantine state in this period and the Norman state in this period put together don't equal a tiny percentage of Julius Caesar's late Republic power but it makes him a better match against each other and they met at the Battle of Durham in modern-day Albania amongst the

1:44:28 Byzantine army is a famous unit that's been around for a long time by this time period they're called the Varangian guard Varangians another word usually used in the east for Vikings Viking is more of a vocation than an ethnics ethnic term we should point out but the Varangian guard used to be composed of all those swedes and people like that who fought with battle axes and looked a lot like Vikings to us by this time period they're using what's left of those kinds of people I love the way from a hundred years ago a historian like Sir Charles Oman probably would have put it I'm putting words into his mouth but he was one of those guys that would have been very comfortable saying that the Middle Ages began at the fields of Hastings when the Viking system of warfare of infantry using battle axes and and going into shield walls was decisively defeated by you know the mounted Knights now of Europe who will

1:45:19 rule the roost for several hundred years something like the Battle of dirac IAM and 1081 would be something like you know the final appeal of the Viking Age being denied when the results of Hastings are confirmed a guy like Oman might say because what happened at the Battle of durock ium is the Byzantines were using mercenaries and auxiliaries just as the Romans had in this case some of them were refugees from the Battle of Hastings much of the Varangian guard in 1081 or anglo-saxons and the ironic twist from the Battle of Hastings is not only are there anglo-saxons who fought at the Battle of Hastings at the Battle of Durham they're once again fighting Normans in fact Normans where it's very likely there were some people who fought at the Battle of Hastings - this is like getting a second crack you know Frazier Ali won this is Frazier Ali - and just like the first fight though the anglo-saxons

1:46:16 in the Varangian guard it if you believe the sources pursuing what they thought was a defeated foe once again just like it Hastings blows themselves out like a bunch of horses who have run too far and too fast loses their cohesion and gets their rear and handed to them again famously they're supposed to have tried to take refuge in a nearby church which the Normans proceeded to burn down killing them all welcome to norman history by the way the ironic part about it is they were supposed to be pursuing a beaten foe because the byzantines had managed to blow away a whole flank of Normans and Norman knights so this should have been the beginning of the end they should have been able to to wrap around them in a Halfmoon sort of fashion and just begin to roll up the enemy army but what saved them is the proverbial big punch when the Norman knights charged again supposedly at a joint in the line so if

1:47:11 you think about the Byzantine front line having a left wing and a right wing in the center there are joints or hinges between you know a wing and the centre they're supposed to have charged at one of those wings maybe again physics a battle thing in in small groups that just continually scared the hell out of the people they were running into remember the Byzantines considered the Norman charge irresistible and the funny part about that is just like a boxing match where psychology comes into play and they used to say if you were going to face a Tyson or a George Foreman or a Sonny Liston that you could be so intimidated that you were beaten before you even crawled into the ring if you read or hear or there's a reputation going around the scuttlebutt here in the military barracks that the norm in charge is irresistible and all of a sudden you see them coming at you how much of that becomes a forgone psychological

1:47:59 conclusion and remember when you're talking about group psychology as opposed to some somebody who maybe can toughen it out in the ring you're only as strong as your weakest link how many people in your formed formation lined up like bowling pins have to decide that listen the first people who run away here are going to be the people who survive how many of them have to decide that they're gonna flee before the whole formation melts I had a gun pointed at me once I always wondered how I'd behave and it was ridiculous situation because the police officers just ran at me I was in a crowd of other people and just said with it we had to run away but the gun was blocks away I mean there was really no danger at all but I've never forgotten the sense of contagious panic that took over instantly I always wondered how I'd behave but I always assumed I'd have some time to think about it instead it

1:48:44 just takes over remember the Greek god of panic is the ruler of battlefields and it doesn't take a whole lot to spark a collapse and it looks like at the Battle of Jericho the Norman charged at the hinge in the Byzantine line again if that's correct and you believe it is supposed to have caused the entire senator just sort of collapse so before we look at the paper and decide that these legionaries will automatically obviously beat the Normans let's account for the fact that sometimes you know the same reason my wargames research rules gives that's plus one to Normans Vikings ancient Chairman's and early Celtic people or whatever it is you never know what they might you know what sort of rabbit the Normans might pull out of a hat I guess when we try to look at this in terms of my movie I think that's the kind of thing that's gonna have to be included in the director's cut and of course you know me being a capitalist

1:49:39 there'll be an extra charge for that if you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar dan and Ben would love to have it go to Dan Karlin comm for information on how to donate to the show for the latest news information and thoughts from dan make sure to follow his history feed on twitter the address is at hard core history so I just heard the audio that you just heard and my first reaction afterwards was we'll see that's why we have a hardcore history addendum feed you would not want a narrowly targeted show like that on a more broadly based program like the big hardcore history one right I'm hoping as I said that in five years when you look at the archives it's a bunch of stuff maybe you don't care about but hopefully a few of them are really hitting your sweet spot I mean if you're a pre industrial military history alternative history fan this show probably just totally tickles your fancy right what a

1:50:48 tickled mine so I hope you enjoyed it those of you who stuck around I do have a few announcements to make the cynical amongst you may consider them nothing more than a cheap excuse for why the next big hardcore history show is going to be late I would argue with that because I don't think it's a cheap excuse I think it's a good excuse those of you who are familiar with the old Ed Sullivan Show act with the guy who used to spin plates and he'd have like five or six spinning plates on these canes or sticks or rods or whatever they were and of course you know the plates will start spinning at some point and well I had all these plates successfully spinning for a while and then they all started wobbling at once and well the next hardcore history's Big Show supernova in the East will be a little late I guess is what I'm saying but I have a good reason why and I think you might like this stuff and it's

1:51:37 multiple things right like I said multiple spinning plates the first one was I was fortunate enough to be involved in the Jordan Peele reboot of The Twilight Zone series and you know what a Twilight Zone fan I am there's a lot of this show that's got some basis in that I'm sure genetically you know early developmentally speaking it was a remake of the famous William Shatner in the plane with the gremlin on the wing episode and it was revamped so that there's a podcast involved and you'll never guess who they chose to be the voice in the podcast and not only did I get to be in this remake of a show that you know I think its formative important in my formative development I got to be Rodman Edwards was the name that was the host of the podcast well that's Rod Serling's name Rodman Edward Serling so that was really cool one of those opportunities that you just have to say to yourself well I don't care if

1:52:35 this takes some time can't turn this down by the way my thanks to the producers for thinking I'd be good at that gig now in addition to that the long awaited much-anticipated virtual reality project that I've been working on for a while is here the World War one experience we call it war remains by the way it debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival not even quite a month ago I don't think and it's getting rave reviews I guess is the only way to say I mean you know I'm not a big self promoter although I'm gonna have to learn in the near future I guess but it looks like people like it you know me I always with everything I do think about what I would have done differently and my main complaint about war remains is it's not long enough why can't it be as long as a podcast why can't I have you in my virtual reality experience for six hours I will transform you but there might be some counseling involved afterwards so

1:53:30 you know more responsible and intelligent people talk to me back from the ledge on that but I've been working with some really really good folk and they've made a really cool thing I mean the sound was done by Skywalker I mean okay who do you want doing your sound brandon Oldenburg an award-winning creative artist put this whole thing together and if you're in a room with him and you watch him start drawing on the board you just sit there and go holy crap Madison Wells was in charge of this whole thing and they're doing movies now so I mean it was a really cool group of people to work with and what they put together was we could we call it a taste a taste of the trench warfare in the the reason we call it a taste is because the first thing you have to acknowledge even trying to do something like this is it's nothing like the real thing right cuz you're not gonna get hurt there's no you know you're not gonna come back with

1:54:21 a leg missing what we always try to say though is it's nothing like the real thing it's just more like the real thing than anything you've been exposed to yet and there were some really interesting meetings during the creative sessions for this whole thing where you ask these really interesting questions one of the questions was relating to how we form a mental conception of things like war and we try to imagine if you had never seen a war movie or modern or like World War 2 war for a portrayed on television if you'd only read about it or only heard a radio report of it or something like that how much different would your mental visualization of what that looked like be the the motion picture version of let's just say second world war combat allows you to get a much better idea of what it visually and audibly sounded like right what a better impression of what it really was now is that anything like it really was not

1:55:19 really asking I mean you know war on the ground is war on the ground and watching the movies watching a movie but it's more like a book it's more like war than a radio broadcast and this virtual reality production is more like the first world war than anything else you've seen that's all we can say about it my goal from the very beginning was to get as close to realistic as possible there is a problem with that and this was one of the second big questions and conversations that happened during the creative meetings how close do you want to simulate a negative human experience because we're all curious about this but we don't want to get our legs blown off and we had to sit there and try to figure out how uncomfortable to make it because you can already miss Skywalker could turn up the sound and blow your eardrums out right but who wants to pay to get a ticket for that and yet I had one of my military history four

1:56:13 professors used to yell at us all the time and it took me a long time to realize he wasn't yelling because he was a Yeller he was yelling because he was half deaf because he was an artillery guy in war during these periods were a lot of these big guns are firing people's hearing gets damaged so if you want to have an experience more like the veterans should we damage your hearing I was probably on that we should damage your hearing side the more responsible people talk to me out of that but you could see what an interesting dilemma it is if I was promising to take you into a virtual reality experience of you know 18th century dentistry and it'll seem real I doubt you're buying a ticket for that right so there's these interesting questions that come up about how real you want to make it and you know and you're trying to hit the sweet spot of people because some people are gonna be really hardcore and can handle more and

1:56:58 some people are gonna be really softcore and need less so how do you know where is the sweet spot for people and we thought about it something like you know jaws when I was a kid you went to see the movie Jaws I mean it was so at the time it was so scary that it scared people from going to see the movie and yet at the same time it created this attraction where you kind of wanted to see it I kept telling the guy as we were doing this with and I liked everybody we work at the flight school guys I mean everybody um I kept telling them that this is exactly the kind of thing I want to go to and so I kind of had that in the back of my mind the whole time and what would I like to see one of the things we didn't do is we consciously didn't come up with a story or a person to follow we consciously didn't try to tell you how to interpret what you were seeing and we had discussions I was talking about

1:57:47 people like Ernst younger you know from the storm of Steel book where he didn't have the the typical reaction that you get in books like All Quiet on the Western Front where you get this terrible anti-war feeling from all the waste and all the carnage and all that which is pretty typical but there were people that felt differently about it right it had a whole different take on it so we focused more on the experience itself and figured that you would have a chance afterwards to sort of take it all in and decide how you felt about it and how you interpreted and what sort of lens you saw it through I hope you like it I hope you get a chance to see it um there's a lot of fun and it's creativity on a really wild level when you add the virtual reality aspect to it my thanks to everybody involved Brandon Ethan all you guys Clint Kisker I'm forgetting everybody but you know I'll have time to thank everybody

1:58:39 finally um there is a book that I've been working on for some time but you know me not long enough it's been interesting working with deadlines again as I tell you that the next big hardcore history shows going to be delayed that's not something you can get away with in the literary world so it's been interesting working with deadlines again and I just want to say that um it was really interesting consciously knowing that things were not going to be as easy to do as as people suggested but you know that that means I think I consciously or unconsciously wanted to do this opportunity so there will be a book for you in the not-too-distant future I don't have a final name for you yet nor do I have a release date more will be forthcoming on that but the majority of the heavy lifting is over again it probably delayed the next show a little bit I hope that when you know all the spinning plates are taken

1:59:31 together you think it was worth it and folks we've said this before I know it sounds like pandering but it's really the way I feel I understand that none of these opportunities are here except for the podcast and and the listeners so thank you I appreciate your patience you're the best crowd in the world when it comes to that we've got you well trained don't don't we but you know I've missed y'all it's nice to be back I don't really feel like I was gone but sometimes we feel like we're off the air sometimes around here but we're not you know you can follow us by the way at hard core history the war remains folk also have a twitter handle it's at war remains you could hashtag more remains to and when the book gets a little farther along and I have more to report there will be updates we are currently working on supernova in the east part 3 it's under way don't worry I don't know when it's coming out but I never do

2:00:24 because after all one of the wonderful benefits of this podcast and your indulgence is that I don't have to work around any hard deadlines we can just focus more importantly that it at least meets my minimum you know quality standards and I can almost guarantee you the next one will and hopefully it won't be too far in the distance so hopefully there'll be another hardcore history addendum show before too long nice to talk with you all again

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP8 Caesar at Hastings"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Daniela Lily (Guest).

What is "EP8 Caesar at Hastings" about?

The content explores the concept of a hardcore history addendum, highlighting the inclusion of various unconventional subjects like 1950s science fiction comic books and social trends that may intrigue niche audiences. The focus is on creating a diverse archive of engaging but narrower topics, ranging from interviews to unique historical discussions and beyond traditional historical narratives.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

11 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Julius Caesar, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Battle of Hastings, USS Nimitz, Arthur Farrell. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP8 Caesar at Hastings"?

The episode runs 2 h 1 min; the transcript is about 22,386 words in 131 timestamped sections.

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