James Burke : Connections, Episode 3, "Distant Voices", 2 of 5 (CC)

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Episode 3 of James Burke's most well-known series "Connections" which explores the surprising and unexpected ways that our modern technological world came into existence. Each episode investigates the background of usually one particular modern invention and how it came into being. These explorations are an attempt to locate the "connections" between various historical figures who seemingly had nothing to do with each other in their own times, however once connected, these same figures combined to produce some of the most profound impacts on our modern day world; in a "1+1=3" type of way.

It is this type of investigation that is the main idea behind the Knowledge Web project; whereby sophisticated software is used to attempt to discover these subtle interconnections automatically. See http://k-web.org.

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These heraldic symbols, completed
the separation of the aristocrats from the rest.

Immensely powerful and immensely rich

The armor plated upper crust must have felt

that they had absolutely "got it made".

[Dramatic Music]

By the 14th century the knight was a

massive...expensive...complex,

two ton war machine

and at full gallop

he would annihilate anything coming the other way.
except, of course, another knight.

And then, from out of the valleys of South Wales

came something that was to take away from the
armored knight his four centuries of domination

[snaps fingers] like that!

[King Henry V: We few..]

[we happy few,]

[we band of brothers.]

[for he, today that sheds his blood with me]

[shall be my brother]

[be he ne'er so vile]

[this day shall gentle his condition.]

[And gentlemen in England now abed]

[shall think themselves !accursed! they were NOT HERE!]

[and hold their manhoods !cheap!]

[whilst any speaks that fought with us]

[upon Saint Crispin's Day!]

That was the Shakespearian version of this man:

Henry the Fifth,

talking about the day when everybody discovered

that it was never going to be the same again
for the knight on horseback,

at the Battle of Agincourt in Northern France,

between Henry and the French

on the morning of October the 25th

1415.

It's funny, isn't it, that we all seem to need
big time heroes like Henry.

And yet, you read the Shakespeare - the heavy stuff -

and you come here to Westminster Abbey

and you see the king lying on his tomb,

and the sword he used in the battle,

and you totally lose sight of the fact

that, as a young man of 28 -

well, Henry may have been a dab hand with the magic words,

but he would have been nowhere in that battle if it hadn't
been for the one thing he had and his French enemy didn't.

And I don't mean his princely sex appeal.

Let me tell you what happened,

Henry here,

had, oh, about 8 thousand men.

knocked out with fatigue from
marching nonstop for 17 days in the rain.

About a mile away - across a battlefield of mud -

there were 30 thousand Frenchmen.

half of them, fully armored aristocrats,

who'd been up the previous night
because they'd slept in their saddles,

because they didn't want to get their lovely armor dirty.

They were an arrogant, overbearing, effete lot

[Accent French/smug: "death or glory" and "me first"]
full of

So, when, at about 11:00 in the morning,

Henry had some arrows shot at this mob,

in order to get them to do something - anything

'cos they'd been standing around arguing the toss about who
should be running the French army since 7:00 in the morning

they suddenly upped and charged

straight at Henry - straight across a sea of mud,

straight onto the stakes that the English had put
point up in their path.

And that was when Henry played his trump card.

Didn't you?

He called up the secret weapon
his grandfather had discovered in the mountains of Wales

And when it came into action,

the slaughter was unimaginable.

[Dramatic Music]

That weapon was the Welsh longbow,

and Henry had over 1,000 of them.

In the hands of a master
the longbow would kill at 400 yards.

And in 3 bloody hours,

the French were massacred.

[Dramatic Music]

Many of the French knights had their horses
shot from under them

to fall in the mud and suffocate as the

bodies of their dead companions piled on top of them.

When it was all over,
the English had lost, maybe, 500 men.

The French - 10,000 -

most of them buried here
in a common grave, under my feet.

The longbow did most of that.

It was a terrifying weapon.

And yet...

a generation after Agincourt, they couldn't find
enough archers to muster a company, let alone an army.

The reason?

Well....

because that's the way things go

the reason has nothing to do with Agincourt,

or war...

or weapons...

It had to do with food.

And it had to do with the field the food came from
and the way the people worked the fields,

like these peasants in the Duc de Berry's "Book of Hours".

With 90% of the population on the land,

any development in agricultural technology
would affect everybody.

And, in the 7th Century,

700 years before Agincourt,

Three agricultural inventions came one after the other,

to fundamentally change people's lives.

The first was a new kind of plough.

You see, up 'til then, the plough in general use had been
little more than a -

than a digging stick pulled by oxen,

came from the Mediterranean
where it's still in use today in the Middle East

And, it was good enough for the job of

turning over the light soil in that area.

But up here in Northern Europe,

it got you nowhere.

Soil's too thick.

So, when, around 700 A.D.

this came along

it made a very big impression.

It had wheels,

it had a knife to cut through the sod,

and the ploughshare had a curved board attached to it.

This new plough would cut through anything!

Look.

[Heyah!]

You see what the knife does...

it cuts open the sod
and makes it easier for the ploughshare that follows

and then,

the curved board throws the soil up and away to one side
leaving a clean furrow.

With a team of - say - eight oxen in front of this,

you could farm the thick rich land up here
that no earlier plough could ever have done.

It was bloody hard work but, - it could be done.

So by about 900 A.D., this plough was
opening up the north really fast,

clearing the forests,

producing more food,

and, in consequence,

the population was rising.

[Whoah]

Now, in those days,

this would have had a team of oxen up front
not a horse.

The plough and the oxen were very expensive.

Few peasant farmers could afford the whole deal,

so they formed cooperatives;
each man bringing what he could.

And as they began to work close together,

they began to live close together in big groups:

villages.

That's why villages happened.

So, the first invention was the plough.

The second came towards the end of the 9th century.

The situation was that up 'til then, they were using
oxen in front of the plough and

if you put an ox harness on a horse,

it cuts across under the neck,
and strangles the animal.

The horse collar - that was the second invention -

spread the load on the horse's shoulders
and so now you could use a horse.

Now, a horse will do twice as much work
as an ox because it does it faster.

So, production doubled.

The population rose again.

The third invention took them and their horses
further afield.

Yes, it was the horse shoe.

See, with a shoe,

you can use a horse in all weathers, over rough countryside,
and it'll carry heavier loads further.

So now you had a work animal
and a transport animal.

And by this time, there was plenty to transport
because they were producing so much they had a surplus.

You see, at the same time as all this,

a new crop system came in:
the idea of using 3 fields,

the 3 crop rotation system it's called.

One field is fallow, so the animals can graze on it
and drop manure on it;

one field is sown in the autumn with cereals like
oats for example to feed the horses;

and one field is sown in the spring with legumes:

peas, beans.

Carbohydrates.

Vegetable protein.

This was why they dropped the longbow.

Because when you have enough food
to sell the surplus for cash,

you've got better things to do on a Sunday than
obey the law and practice archery.

People went into business,

they opened taverns,

they even played games.

That's why they couldn't find any archers,
nobody was practicing.

They were too full of beans!

[♪ festive, medieval ♪]

Now, this may look very simple and rustic to you,

but what you're looking at

is the medieval peasant equivalent of
"Thank God its' Friday!"

All the more so, 'cos they'd never had one before -
- a day off - I mean.

Thanks to the agricultural revolution,

and the opening up of new land with the plough

there were actually spare goodies
a peasant could take to market,

and sell, for that amazing new stuff...

...money!

All over Europe, the medieval lower classes
started doing something absolutely unheard-of.