ALEXANDER THE GREAT, AGINCOURT AND... DARTS?

The youth of today wouldn't always have seemed so peculiar

One of my greatest pleasures in the first, drab days of any given January is to sit in front of the television and watch hour upon hour of darts.

I am not particularly proud of this, although it is hardly a dirty little secret either. Darts, as a sport, is not for everyone. In Britain it has a legacy reputation as a jumped-up pub game played even at its elite level by sad, overweight alcoholics. Outside Britain (and maybe the Netherlands) it is barely noticed.

But I like it. I like the fact that it vaguely speaks to medieval archery. I like the comforting thud-thud-thud, the silly costumes of both players and spectators, the excitability of the commentators, and the bathetic razzmatazz.

I feel darts proves that there is inherently no such thing as a sport: the category consists in everything you layer around a rules-based activity. Team/persona loyalties, competitors as characters, statistics, rivalries, crowd hype, a pundit industry. These are the things that make a sport, not the activity itself. Darts illustrates it.

Anyway. Apologies for starting the first of my history newsletters of the year with this stuff - but I there is a historical point and I intend to get to it shortly.

It concerns youth. Youth as an obsession of our times, yes. But also youth as a varying concept across time. What is thought of as young today is not necessarily what counted as young in the past.

I’m interested by that, and I think that this year’s darts world championships is a good place to start thinking about it.

To avoid boring you quite to tears, here’s all you need to know. The big story of this year’s PDC Darts World Championship is the emergence of an exciting new player from northern England by the name of Luke Littler.

As darts players come he’s one of the best. He can throw the sh*t out of those little arrows, and he doesn’t mind doing it for hours on end. He looks the part, too: a clumpy physique and pub tan, rheumy eyes and a diabetic waddle. Not every player in the modern era looks like this, but most of them do, and it’s nice, as usual, to have a stereotype reinforced.

The salient fact about Littler, though, is his age. In reaching the world championships final this week, where he was beaten handsomely by another bloke called Luke (who used to be clumpy, sallow, etc, but seems rather unsportingly to have bought himself a Peloton and shed 4st), Littler made history.

He became the youngest player by some margin to ever have done so. The previous one was in his 20s. Littler is 16.

And this, for the whole week in the UK, has been Big News. Littler has been front page, back page, comment page in all the newspapers. He has trended on all the mind-vacuum scroll apps.

All the questions he has been posed in the media amount to ‘how old did you say you were, my God!’ All the headlines simplify to one message: KID DOES THING!

KID DOES THING

This is, I think, quite normal. News is about unusual things happening, and a young person doing a thing normally only done by old people is therefore news.

But as I have watched my dumb game and read the dumb articles, it has occurred to me to wonder: why do we consider this man to be young at all?

And here, belatedly, I will get to the history. As I have told you many times now, I am writing a biography of Henry V, for publication this autumn. (Pre-orders have just opened here (UK) and here (US).)

The shape of the biography leans heavily on Henry’s youth - which accounts in our terms for most of his life. Henry went on military campaign when he was 13. He was crowned when he was 26. He was dead when he was 35.

Henry V at the Battle of Shrewsbury… artists’ impression

At the age of 16 - the same age that Luke Littler has shocked the world (well, the UK) by throwing some pins very accurately into some cork, Henry V commanded a division of his father’s army at the 1403 battle of Shrewsbury. (Click here to watch the History Hit film I recently made about that battle with Professor Michael Livingston.)

At Shrewsbury, Henry was hit in the face with an arrow. Not a dart - a real arrow, the head of which lodged inside his head. Afterwards he endured a 30-day operation to have it removed. Yes, 30 DAYS. Thereafter he resumed his job of fighting the Welsh rebel Owain Glyndwr and, around the time he was 20, taking effective command of his decrepit father’s government.

This was all quite astonishing. Or perhaps it just seems that way from the distance of six hundred years. At the darts, crowds have been singing ‘you’ve got school in the morning’ when Littler is playing. No one was singing that to Henry at the battle of Shrewsbury. He’d finished his education, which leaned into the classics as well as the martial arts, long before.

What’s more, he wasn’t really doing anything out of the ordinary. Life expectancy, even adjusted for infant mortality, was shorter in the Middle Ages than it is now. Sixteen represented a more proportionally advanced age then than it does today. It wasn’t considered full adulthood - that officially descended at the age of 21 (or by some reckonings, 35, which was the age at which Henry succumbed to his swift and fatal illness on campaign in France.) But there was nothing special about doing adult things at such an age.

For what were the precedents, ancient and recent? Alexander the Great had wept his salt tears at running out of world to conquer aged 24. (To return briefly to darts, Michael van Gerwen, widely considered the greatest player currently active, won his first world title at this age.) Octavian was 19 when he joined the Triumvirate.

In Plantagenet history, Henry II first invaded England when he was 14, and ruled the whole of his empire by the time he was 20. Edward III was 17 when he led the coup to overthrow his mother Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer in 1330.

Richard II was king at ten - not that this worked out awfully well for him. But across the Channel, Marshal Boucicaut, one of the legendary commanders of the French army, who would be captured at Agincourt in 1415, had enjoyed his first taste of battle at the age of 12.

These are mildly remarkable cases, but in their day, nothing more than that. The fixation on youth that is a feature of culture today was rather less pronounced in the Middle Ages.

As the sporting cliché almost goes - if you were good enough, you were old enough. I rather like the thought of that.

I do not pretend to offer any more profound conclusion than that we are weird today, weirder in many ways than any other human society before us. But I do like it when sport and history collide, and when news items jolt up in unexpected ways against things I am writing.

If you have anything more sensible to say, please feel free, as always, to pop it in the comments below.