Helen Carr Audiobooks

The Red Prince: John of Gaunt and the medieval England that made him

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Who is Helen Carr?

Medieval England is the territory Helen Carr has made her own, and she comes at it from an unusual direction. She is a historian and a television producer, having made documentary history for the BBC, Sky Arts, Discovery, CNN and HistoryHit, and she presented the popular Hidden Histories podcast before her first book appeared.

She writes a column for BBC History Magazine and has been pursuing doctoral research in medieval history at Queen Mary, University of London. History runs in the family, and at some distance: she is the great granddaughter of E. H. Carr, whose What Is History? has been unsettling undergraduates since 1961.

Her own approach is warmer than her ancestor’s. Carr is interested in the texture of medieval lives, in retinues and rivalries and what it felt like to hold power in a century of plague and revolt, and she writes for the general listener without ever talking down to one.

Helen Carr in audiobooks

The Red Prince is the book to begin with, her life of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the immensely rich and thoroughly disliked son of Edward III who never wore a crown and shaped the fate of two kingdoms anyway. It was named among the best books of its year by the Times and the Sunday Times.

Carr narrates the audiobook herself, and there is real value in that. She knows exactly which clause carries the weight in a long medieval sentence, and she moves through nine and a half hours of Plantagenet politics without ever losing the thread of the man at the centre.

If the fourteenth century has previously felt like a list of battles to you, this is the corrective. Have a look at the audiobooks below.