‘Blood Cries Afar: The Forgotten Invasion of England, 1216′ is the title of Sean McGlynn’s new military history of King John’s reign. I’ve reviewed it here for this week’s Spectator.
An extract:
One hundred and fifty years after Anglo-Saxon England was invaded by the Normans, Anglo-Norman England was invaded by the French. On 21 May 1216 King Philip Augustus’ eldest son, Louis the Lion, landed at Stonor on the Isle of Thanet, kissed a crucifix, planted it in the ground and began an 18-month war for the English crown. He had been invited to England by a group of barons who wished to replace King John as punishment for repudiating the terms of Magna Carta. The war Louis waged, although ultimately unsuccessful, was a damned near thing.
Sean McGlynn’s new book calls this England’s ‘forgotten invasion’, although in recent years Hollywood has been trying to remind people about it. The climax to Ridley Scott’s recent Robin Hood movie had Russell Crowe mugging about on Dover beach, fighting off the French hordes; Jonathan English’s rather better Ironclad was set around the violent siege of Rochester castle the autumn before Louis’s arrival.
So it is not entirely forgotten. But 1216 is certainly neglected, given the fact that John was the only post-Conquest medieval king besides Stephen to suffer the ignominy of a full foreign invasion. (Edward II, Richard II and Richard III were overthrown by invading armies, but these were all led by returning natives.)
Glynn’s book attempts to right the historical wrong. Again, however, the title misleads. It is only on page 153 (of 241 pages of text) that Louis’s invasion actually begins. The first two-thirds of the book are a military history of John’s reign, beginning with Philip Augustus’s successful campaign to conquer Normandy between 1200 and 1204, then skipping ahead to John’s unsuccessful campaign to retake the duchy, which culminated in the monstrous battle of Bouvines in 1214.
That’s not to say this is a bad book. In fact, McGlynn tells a dashing story with gusto. His section on the siege of Château Galliard in 1203-4 is the best that has been published for a very long time. McGlynn calls it ‘arguably the most dramatic siege of the entire Middle Ages’. That’s pushing things a bit, but the author still summons up the importance and horrid excitement of the battle for Richard the Lionheart’s greatest fortress.
The question that is only partially answered, however, is why John’s reign ended in such disaster. How did he manage to rile the English barons so badly that they would rather have been ruled by a Capetian than himself?
If you want the answer, you’ll have to read the Speccie.
How to get into Cambridge University
If you’re thinking of applying, then this is a useful and illuminating article, which demystifies some aspects of an application and interview process that has often struck outsiders (as well as many insiders) as confusing and opaque.
Extract:
Source: The Guardian
Personal recollection: I interviewed at Pembroke, Cambridge in 1998, and went up in 1999. Having been to a state grammar school with virtually no record at the time of sending people to Oxbridge, I didn’t receive a great amount of guidance about the best way to approach the application/interview process. We did a mock interview with some teachers from the local public school, which I recall being a humiliating failure. Someone told me that the only wrong answer to a Cambridge interview question was ‘I don’t know’. That, pretty much, was that.
My tactics were therefore improvised. I knew I wanted to read History, and decided to apply to Pembroke because, when flicking through the university prospectus, I saw that the admissions tutor was an historian. His number was published in the prospectus, so I telephoned one afternoon, introduced myself and asked a long list of questions about what life at Pembroke was like, how the teaching worked, and whether it was the sort of place I’d fit in.
After that I went to an open day, saw the same admissions tutor and buttonholed him for another long conversation about history and the college, etc.
Subsequently, when I was called for interview, there were three sessions scheduled, each of about 20 minutes in length, one-on-one. The first two interviews were structured around discussing historical essays I’d written in school; but one of them, which started on something like the Weimar Republic, went off-track and we ended up discussing Kurt Cobain and the musical influence of Nirvana on the grunge scene.
The third interview was with the admissions tutor. It was the end of the day. I remember - although this may be fanciful - him emitting a groan when I walked into the room. We talked a bit about college and history and studying, then at the end of the interview he said he wasn’t going to ask me if I had any questions, as I’d asked quite enough previously, and he was keen to get things wrapped up so he could get off to play tennis.
On New Year’s Eve 1998 I received an offer.
Moral: I don’t know that there is a moral here, other than to say that in my case a measure of enthusiastic, precocious lobbying probably helped. Looking back, I suppose that another admissions tutor would have found it all wildly irritating, and life would have turned out differently.
(Sidebar: When I got up to Cambridge I was fortunate enough to be taught a bit by Richard Partington, who appears in the piece I linked to, above. Besides being, evidently, an open-minded and progressive admissions tutor at Churchill college, he is also a very brilliant medievalist, who knows more about Edward III than anyone else.)