Transcripts II

The Theft of the Book of Kells, Kells 1006

Anne:   Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle:   And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:   Happy New Year! Happy New Year! It’s now 2021, which we think probably can’t be worse than 2020, and so that’s something to look forward to. Yay.

Michelle:   The bar is super low.

Anne:   The bar is, indeed, quite low. What was the year..? It was in the sixth century. There was that volcano in Iceland that basically made everything a living hell for a while. So, that was apparently a worse year than this…

Michelle:   536? I mean, it’s really bad when you’ve got to go back 1500 years to find a comparable…

Anne:   Yeah, because the entire globe… I mean, it wasn’t just that our nation was having a bunch of difficulty. Which it was. It was that the entire globe was having to deal with the virus, of which there’s now a new strain which, did you know, is now in Colorado, Michelle? And so it will be coming to us soon, in Albuquerque. Especially because it’s going to be New Year’s, and we’re expecting that there’s going to be this little bump showing up, oh, within the next few days, on account of people not actually staying home at Christmas. And we think probably the same thing will happen after New Year’s, and so maybe we’ll have the new version of the horrible virus then. But I’m signed up for whenever the vaccine is available for me…

Michelle:   Oh, nice.

Anne:   Yeah. In New Mexico you can register, and you tell them if you’ve got any things going on, co-morbidities and whatnot, and so I’m registered. Laura’s registered. And we’ll get the vaccine when we can, and that will be great. But I’m probably not going to be going to my son’s wedding in April. What they’re going to do is get married, and then have, like, a party or whatnot, like, the year after or something. Because, yeah, because virus.

Michelle:   Aww.

Anne:   Well, yeah. But you know, it wasn’t like we’re the only people on the planet who had to change their plans. It was one of those years. Kind of like when there was the volcano. 

Michelle:   I wonder if I’m on the invitation list?

Anne:   To what?

Michelle:  To his wedding. I want to send him a present.

Anne:   No, you won’t be, because it’s tiny. Even when they thought they might be having it, what they were going to do is get married, by a justice of the peace—and that will still be happening—and then they were just going to have a small, a very small, get-together at his father’s house that evening. So that’s what I would have been flying back for. But no, there’s not going to be a big wedding. But you could send him a present anyway.

Michelle:   I’ll make a little note that that’s April.

Anne:   Oh, and our dog thanks you for his present. That was nice. He loves his present. He shares it with his sister so she doesn’t bite him. Works out really well. Thank you from Rhys.

Michelle:   Good.  I like to send things to Rhys.

Anne:    I know. We find it hilarious. Listeners, every once in a while we get a box that’s labeled “Rhys D. Brannen” for “Rhys Dog Brannen,” and it’s always from Michelle, and it’s lots of fun. Like, you know, when he encountered a skunk or, as we say, “bad kitty,” and it was not good, and bad kitty made him quite sad, and so Michelle sent him a stuffed skunk in the mail. Which was a great present except that it actually looks exactly like a skunk, and so I’ll be walking through the house and go “Waah!” You know, because there’s this thing, and I see it in the corner of my eye…

Michelle:   But it allows him to exact his revenge.

Anne:   Yes, apparently so. Yes, yes. It used to squeak. Now it doesn’t. He tore that out, so he’s happy.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   He doesn’t, you know… You don’t get to squeak long, if you’re a toy around Rhys. He takes care of that.

Anyway, so yeah, so, we are True Crime Medieval, and so we’re talking about a crime. And I want to point out, Happy New Year, there’s no murders today! Nobody dies in our recording today. Also no tortures. Nobody’s getting tortured. Nothing. It’s just, like…

Michelle:   And, the stolen object is recovered. So, really, this is an unusual happy ending for us.

Anne:   Yes, it’s our special New Year edition of the crime that didn’t have enormous amounts of consequences, and so yay. But, at any rate, we’re talking about the theft of the Book of Kells, which happened in 1006. 

The Book of Kells, for those of you who like this sort of information, is officially Trinity College Dublin Manuscript #58. So that’s what it is.

It was created around 800 CE, and it might have been started at Iona, and finished at Kells, or it might have been completely done at Iona, or it might have been completely done at Kells, and I think there’s a couple of other theories that we don’t actually know. But we do know that it ended up at Kells, probably taken there to keep it safe after a Viking raid, which indeed is what Kells was doing at all, because Iona had been being raided, being raided, being raided, being raided, and this was annoying, and so they’d been granted some land in Kells, and so they went there because that was going to be safer from the Vikings. And it kind of wasn’t, because the Vikings had been, you know, raiding the coasts, but they started taking the long boats up the rivers of Europe, and Kells is on the River Blackwater, which is a major tributary of the Boyne, and so longboats could go up it, and so Kells got raided a lot also.

So Kells had been founded, and the Book of Kells is created around the same time that Kells is founded. It’s Hiberno-Saxon style, it’s a style which dates from the seventh century. It’s a blend of the two kinds of art. Brightly colored, intricate designs, and we have several manuscripts of this sort surviving, some in fragments, but this is the best-known. Michelle wants to talk about this later.

The monastery at Kells got raided during the tenth century by the Vikings, who were coming up the river Boyne and then the Blackwater, but the monks kept the book intact. We don’t actually know how they did that, but when we were talking about the raid at Lindisfarne, which had happened also, wasn’t there stuff that they had been able to keep?

Michelle:   Yeah. Like the Lindisfarne Gospels. They somehow managed to keep that from being walked off with by the Vikings.

Anne:   Interesting. Yeah, it’s interesting. Now, did the Vikings get lots of other manuscripts? Yep, and we don’t know what they are. But yeah, Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, they survived.

However, in 1006, it was stolen. 

Now, you’re going to read, lots of places, the Vikings stole it. But they did not! And this is how we know it was thieves. Thieves took it, and we know from the Annals of Ulster, the entry—they say it’s 1007 but they have the year wrong—the Annals of Ulster say that the “The great Gospel of Columkille, the chief relic of the western world, was wickedly stolen during the night from the western sacristy of the great stone church of Cennanus [Kells] on account of its wrought shrine.”  

And then they found it later. But more on that… Here’s the deal. If it had been stolen by the Vikings, this is not what that entry would have read. That entry would have said “The great gospel of Columkille, the chief relic of the western world, was stolen during the night when the Norsemen came and slaughtered everybody, and burnt down things, and took the cattle.” See, that’s not what it says. All it says is that some people came and took the book. That’s not what Vikings do. Vikings don’t come take your book. Vikings come and take as much as they can carry. That’s a different thing altogether.

Michelle:   Yeah, and there’s no evidence anywhere else that this was a raid. This is somebody local, seizing an opportunity.

Anne:   And it’s because of the wrought shrine. What that means is the cover. That’s what that means, and that’s what it was stolen for. How do we know this? Because two months and twenty days later—I love the specificity of this—they found it! Under a sod. The bejeweled and golden cover had been ripped off and then the manuscript had been stuck under a sod. So that’s why some of the folios are missing, at the beginning and the end. 

Now, I have some things I want to talk about here. Because, first of all, how did they find it under a sod? What were they doing? Somebody’s walking along, dut-de-dut-de-doo. “That sod looks different! It looks like something is under there! Oh my god! It’s our manuscript!” Or did they get a “Go look under the sod.” How did they find this thing? OK, that’s one. 

Second: Why was it under a sod? What are you doing? You’re, like, “Oh, yay, we have this thing, the hell with all these colored pages, who needs that, we’re going for the gold and jewels, because we’re going to take it down to Dublin and buy some stuff,” right? Or maybe, even, just, I don’t know, someplace on the Boyne. We don’t know. But, “We’re going to take this and we don’t need the manuscript, let’s carefully put it under this piece of dirt?” Because it’s not like they buried it so it couldn’t be found, you understand. It’s just, like, under a sod. So there’s a piece of turf, and there’s a manuscript under it. I have questions, and I don’t think I’m ever going to get any answers, because I looked and looked, and all we know is that they found it under a sod, two months and twenty days after it was taken from the western sacristy of the great stone church of Cennanus. That’s all we know.

Michelle:   This is very frustrating. Because you would think it would be worth coming back and jotting down, “Hey, we found the great treasure of the western world, the great Gospel of Columkille, because Brother Kiernan tripped.”

Anne:   I like that! “Brother Kiernan tripped.” Yeah.

Michelle:   “And then when we looked, this thing he tripped…” Like, it would be worth just giving us a note.

Anne:   A little note. A little note.

Michelle:   A little note as to how that recovery happened.

Anne:   Because here’s another thing we don’t know is, is this under a piece of sod that’s close to the western sacristy of the great stone church of Cennanus, or has this been taken quite some place away? I mean, did they rip the cover off and get rid of the manuscript, or did they run, run, run, run, run, and then rip the cover off and get rid of the manuscript? And we don’t know that either. Because if it’s close to the church then yeah, Brother Kiernan could have tripped over the sod, fell, “Ah, look here it is!” But if it’s not, then there’s another story altogether. There’s this, you know, waitress working at the pub, went out and she tripped over a sod, and she didn’t know what was under it, but there’s this thing, and somebody said, “Oh, you know, there’s this book that’s been stolen from the church up the road.” “Oh! Let’s go see if it’s theirs.” You see, there’s a story here! A story is here, and we know not what the story is, and so I find this very frustrating indeed. Yes.

Michelle:  Every time I think about the Book of Kells sitting in the dirt like that for two months, it just sends a shiver down my back.

Anne:   Yeah, because, I mean, luckily it did survive. I mean, we’re missing some folios from the beginning and end of the book, and what’s left has got to be damaged, at least that first page and that last page, but almost all of it is still intact. We don’t have the jeweled cover. Oh darn. But, you know, that’s not really what we’re after so… so it’s a fairly happy ending.

Michelle:   And we don’t actually have very many of those reliquary-type covers. We don’t have a ton of them.

Anne:   No! Because they get stolen!

Michelle:  They get stolen!

Anne:   And people go and take them. Yeah, we have enough to know what it would have looked like, more or less. I understand. I understand completely. By the way, this is a ceremonial piece. The Book of Kells is the four gospels highly, highly illustrated—hence all the talk about the illustrations—and we think it was ceremonial because there hasn’t been a lot of attention paid to the text, and the text… you know, actual pieces of the gospels are missing.

Michelle:   I know! The canon tables… the canon tables at the front are just decorative.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   The numbers that you would need, in order to use them, aren’t in the text. You can’t use them.

Anne:   But it’s there, you know, because it’s supposed to be there. No, it’s… An incredible amount of work has been done on this. It’s carefully, carefully done. But its purpose is not to be used up at the lectern, and opened, and read. Its purpose is either to be carried around, ceremonially, or displayed, but it is not actually a working text. I find that fascinating.

But so, here you are, making this ceremonial thing. It’s very… Of course you’re going to put a bunch of gold and jewels on the outside. Of course you are. But that’s what makes… That is the only thing that makes it attractive to thieves, because they don’t give a damn about the incredibly interesting illustrations. They don’t care. They don’t care. They want the gold and jewels. So, it’s like you’re setting yourself up to have the thing stolen. But you couldn’t just put a plain cover on it, could you? It’s ceremonial. It needs some gold and jewels. Also, Jesus. You know, you have to do it.

We know that it’s not just us who think it an incredible volume, because Gerald of Wales saw it in the twelfth century, and he wrote about it that the illuminations had to be looked at really very carefully. This is a quote:  

“Fine craftsmanship is all about you, but you might not notice it. Look more keenly at it and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies, so delicate and so subtle, so full of knots and links, with colours so fresh and vivid, that you might say that all this were the work of an angel, and not a man.”

He says he saw the book in Kildare, so either he got the place wrong, or there was another manuscript of this… of exactly this quality. But this absolutely describes the Book of Kells.

Michelle:   I was reading one account that was talking about how the Book of Kells is really the height of bringing together all of these different artistic influences. Because you have the Germanic coming in through the Saxon’s presentation of animals. You have the Pictish dots, doing things with dot outlines. You have ways of presenting people that are coming in from the Mediterranean, from Italy. And there are other gospel texts where you see those, but they tend to be sort of kept in their own lane, like this thing is used over here, this one’s used over here, so the Vespasian Gospels…

Anne:   Uh-huh.

Michelle:   … Do that. But the Book of Kells integrates them, and creates a composite kind of tradition.

Anne:   Yeah, it’s coherent.

Michelle:   Yes.

Anne:   Its illustrations are completely coherent. The text is irrelevant. It’s the illustrations. Yes.

Michelle:   Someone else in the documentary I was watching was talking about how the text is actually hidden within the illuminations. You know, it’s not for reading. You have to know… You have to know what it says before you can even find the words. 

Anne:   Right. The entire point of this book is the illustrations. That’s the entire point. The gospels are what informed the illustrations, but the illustrations… It’s as if the illustrations are the gospel. That they are the word.

Michelle:   I do find this willingness to blame this theft on the Vikings to be very interesting. And I suspect…

Anne:   Well, yeah.

Michelle:   I suspect… I mean, sure, they did. They did a lot, right?

Anne:   Yeah. And they had raided this place. They raided Kells. It isn’t like they never came by, like they never made it up the Blackwater, and so it was a total lie that the Vikings came by. No. They did. They were bad to the people at Kells, yeah. Good, in their sense, but in order to… We have a whole bunch of stuff on the Vikings over at our… On the podcast that’s about the raid on Lindisfarne, so lots of explanation of the Vikings and how they were not doing anything bad, as far as they were concerned, because thieving is really bad, but raiding is not. But you have to go listen to that to find that out.

The illustrations, they are something else. You can still see this. You have to actually see the real pages to actually get the full impact. The facsimiles are wonderful, just wonderful, but the actual real pages, with the colors still there… There’s no gold leaf or silver leaf in these illuminations. Although it feels like there is, there isn’t. They didn’t use that.

So what the focus is, is on… In terms of the art, the focus is on the design and the colors. They were using red and yellow ochres. They were using verdigris, which is a copper that’s turned green. They used indigo, and we used to believe that they used lapis lazuli. They’ve tested it, and they did not. There was no… Sometimes lapis lazuli was used in manuscripts. Not this one.

Michelle:   I think the theft is such an interesting sort of moment in history because the Book of Kells has become… It was, absolutely, you know, they’re talking about it as the treasure of the western world, the great Gospel of the Columkille, so it was a famous book, basically, since its creation, and remained a famous book, but after the Bible, the Book of Kells is the most famous book in the world. Half a million people—not this year, last year, in 2020, but—half a million tourists go through Trinity College every year to see… The idea of a book as a tourist attraction is odd enough, that it’s worth kind of stopping and thinking about that, as a thing. You’ve got the Blarney Stone, and you have the Book of Kells, and these are why people come to Ireland and stand in a giant line and go to see these objects and, you know, to have something that important that has been this important for twelve hundred years, and have this two-and-a-half-month period where it’s gone, and we might not get it back…

Anne:   And then they find it under the dirt! It’s under dirt! Somebody put it in the dirt. How could you?

Michelle:   Oh my gosh. 

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   One of these moments where the world just sort of cracks, right? Because…

Anne:   Right.

Michelle:   Because it could be this footnote of history where, “We had this great book and it got stolen,” and later medievalists are all, like, “Do you think that book really existed, or were they just bragging?” Because sometimes that happens, where places will claim they had something really important. “Oh! It was just here! It was just here! You had to have seen it.” But…

Anne:   “Vikings came by! We fed them some dinner and then it was gone. We don’t know.” Yeah. Yeah, it is. It kind of doesn’t make any sense, and yet… But actually, it’s worth going to see. It really is. The decorations that… I have read that there’s… And I don’t know what page you have to open to it, but there are decorations in there that are so complex that you can’t actually see them without a magnifying glass. Which of course did not exist at the time.

Michelle:   Yeah, it was in Kells until our buddy Cromwell blew through.

Anne:   Yes, it was Cromwell! Yeah, that was Cromwell. So in 1654, they sent the book to Dublin on account of Cromwell’s men were quartered in the church, and Cromwell’s men did lots of damage to places that they were. So they sent the book to Dublin. And then in 1661 it was presented to Trinity College, and it’s been there ever since. Which is why it is Trinity College Manuscript #58. It’s been there, and they have it on display. It was on display in 1976. That’s when I saw it. And you got to see it. When did you see it?

Michelle:   I have not actually seen it in person. I have been to Kells, and gone all over Kells, and there are, or there were, three facsimile editions at Kells, but one was stolen in 2014.

Anne:   Now, see, this is interesting. Like, why would you steal a facsimile of the Book of Kells? What do you do with it? It’s not the Book of Kells. It’s a facsimile of the Book of Kells. You could go home and put it under dirt in your garden, I suppose, and have a little circular moment.

Michelle:   There’s not a whole lot left of the monastery at Kells. The round tower is there…

Anne:   Oh that’s right. They’ve got a round tower.

Michelle:   Their high crosses. And the high crosses are amazing. The base of one of them, it’s… The cross itself does not survive, entirely, but the base is so huge that the cross itself must have been twenty feet tall. Which is huge!

Anne:   It’s very huge. That’s very huge. They got it from Stonehenge, huh? They took it on over.

Michelle:   So there’s not a whole lot. There’s not a whole lot left. There is a little building called St. Columcille’s House, that we thought the tourist book was pulling our leg, because it said, “OK, it’s locked up, but if you want to see it, you have to go four doors down and knock on Mrs. So-and-So’s house. She keeps the keys, like her parents before her.” And we’re like, “Yeah right.”

Anne:   I believe it.

Michelle:   I’m deeply uncomfortable going and knocking on a random human’s house, but we did, and she brought us down and opened the door, and let us go in and see it. It was quite awesome. But, you know, of the actual monastery there’s just not much left because, with the dissolution, and then of course Cromwell went around deliberately stationing his soldiers in monasteries, in churches, trying to be horrible.

Anne:   That’s what happened to Ely Cathedral. It’s why all the faces of the statues are smashed. Cromwell’s men were quartered there. Actually they used it as a stables, also.

Michelle:   But they had these three really nicely-done facsimile editions in different places in Kells, and the one that was stolen was the one in the church, in St. Columcille’s Church in Kells. Another one in St. Columba’s Church, and in the town hall. The one I saw was in the town hall. And here’s the thing, there was nobody but us in the town hall, when we were seeing this, because we there in October, and so it wasn’t the height of the tourist season, and we weren’t at Trinity College, so the pros of seeing a highly-detailed facsimile is that nobody is seeing it with you, and you can spend as much time as you want.

Anne:   Right. Right. Right.

Michelle:   So we kind of did the trade-off of the crowds in Trinity College, and feeling rushed…

Anne:   In 1976, that summer, I was the only one there. So it must have gotten more popular since then.

Michelle:   Yeah, every time we went past, when we were in Dublin, the line was out the door.

Anne:   “Let’s go see a book! We’re all going to go see a book!” You’re right. It’s quite unusual.

Michelle:   The facsimile edition that was stolen is worth fifteen thousand euros. 

Anne:   Why?

Michelle:   I assume because it was incredibly labor-intensive to create. And I think that’s a valuable piece of information, because we tend to not… We think about these things as cultural artifacts, and don’t think so much about their actual material worth. When you start the Book of Kells, you have to start by killing 600 cows.

Anne:   So it’s how many hides?

Michelle:   The Book of Kells required 600 cows. So even before you start, even before you start doing anything, in the early ninth century, you have made a tremendous commitment of resources just in the parchment.

Anne:   Yes. Yes, yes. Wow. I wonder how you financed this.

Michelle:   There is some speculation about that, about whether these kinds of presentation books were sponsored by royalty. We don’t know. We don’t have… The actual written records from the Irish Church at this time are pretty thin on the ground. Thank you, the English. Thanks a bunch.

Anne:   There’s a reason for this.

Michelle:   It’s not because they couldn’t write. They could write just fine. Thank you. Jerks.

Anne:   Yes. For those of you just turning in, we stand, on this podcast, for Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. OK. Moving on. Because we figure people in power? They got power.

Michelle:   So at this point we’ve touched on one of my irritations, which is that sometimes when people write about the medieval past, the tendency to forget that resources cost money, you know? So you’ll be reading stories, and the poor knight in this modern-told story will have fallen off his horse, and these useful, helpful peasants will come and lend him a horse and sword…

Anne:   Oh no they don’t! No they just don’t!

Michelle:   Hold on. They don’t own either one of those things.

Anne:   They don’t have them. These things don’t exist at their house. They have an egg. Would you like an egg? They have an egg.

Michelle:   That would be like somebody now having a car accident outside your house, and you saying, “You know what, just take mine.”

Anne:   Well, that would be… Because you had one, you actually had one. But, you know, they didn’t have one.

Michelle:   No.

Anne:   No. So that would be like somebody having a car accident outside your house, and you didn’t have a car but you conjured one out of thin air and handed it to them. “You can have this Prius, which I just made up.” Yeah, you’re right.

Michelle:  The cultural weight of the Book of Kells is huge, but it’s materially quite expensive as well. When they were creating it, the number… The amount of hours that went into this. You have at least three different illustrators; you have at least three different scribes.

Anne:   The paints are expensive. They’re not using gold and silver leaf, but the paints are expensive. And then of course there’s going to be that whole cover thing. We’ve never seen the cover, because somebody stole it in 1006, but that also was requiring a great deal of money. Yeah, somebody’s got to have sponsored this. It’s not like the monks had… It’s not like they did a little collection amongst the monks. That’s not how this got paid for.

Michelle:   Yeah, it’s really quite an expensive object, and an amazing investment of time, as well as resources.

Anne:   Well, the next time you get to Dublin, mark out… Get in line early and go look. Just so you can see it. Because I think it’s worth it. And it’s a book! It’s a book.

It’s been at Trinity College since 1661, on display, and occasionally they loan it out, but in 2000 they sent one of the gospels to Canberra, in Australia, and there was some pigment damage from the vibrations of the airplane, and so they have to be careful. They have to be really careful about that.

Michelle:   I would not have assumed that it was ever going on loan.

Anne:   Yeah, they don’t ever… There’s four… Now, at this point, it’s bound in four volumes—the four different gospels—and they will… Trinity College will lend them out for events or displays. I mean, it has to be a big deal. It was a big deal, and they sent it out, but there was pigment damage from the vibrations and so, no, that’s not OK.

Michelle:   It’s kind of hard to overestimate the cultural footprint of the Book of Kells. I mean, I know I’m not necessarily a normal human, but there are two objects in my sight right now that are coming from the Book of Kells. I have a wall hanging that is inspired by one of the carpet pages, and I have a print. One of my best thrift store scores, ever, is this professional print—professionally framed image—from the Book of Kells of St. John. I paid nine bucks at the thrift store! Isn’t that great?

Anne:   Somebody got rid of…? Somebody’s aunt died. “Oh, we don’t need this. Let’s give it to Goodwill.” Well, that was a good catch.

Yeah, I mean, as you say, the Book of Kells, everybody knows about it. It’s like, things you know about? You know about the Book of Kells. And if you don’t actually know the name of it, you have seen images from it.

Michelle:   Yeah. I think that people would recognize… Even if they’ve managed to find a rock to live under and haven’t heard of the Book of Kells, they would recognize the artwork that is inspired by it.

Anne:   They will have seen some.

Michelle:  So can I tell you about an archeological discovery that tells us what would have happened to it, if it had not been found?

Anne:   Yes! Please do. So, remember, it was gone under the… What did we say? Sod. We’re thinking that it’s, like, in the bog. Right. So for two months and twenty days…

Michelle:   And there was already damage. But in 2006, a couple of professional peat harvesters found—in their backhoe, in their peat-cutter, the bucket of their peat-cutter—a book that we now call the Faddan More Psalter.

Anne:  And what year was this?

Michelle:   2006.

Anne:   Wow, so fairly recently. Yeah.

Michelle:   Yes! Yes. When I saw this thing, when I was in Dublin—because it’s at the National Museum—the conservation was still… It had just gone on display, because that was 2011. So this is a really, really interesting discovery. I love every piece of this story.

First of all, I love the fact that the two guys running the peat-cutter have had so much stuff turn up in their bucket that they know to recognize it, because I have to tell you what a book is going to look like, after it has been in the ground for a thousand years, or twelve hundred years, is not going to look like a book. It looks like a clump of mud. So the fact that these guys could look down and say, “Hmm, that’s interesting, we’d better call the university.” 

Anne:   That is, actually… Yeah, because it isn’t like… Yeah it wouldn’t have been, necessarily, very recognizable. So it must be that they know what the regular peat looks like, and this had a kind of consistency which was not normal.

Michelle:   Yeah. There are pictures in the little book I bought about it, at the National Museum of Ireland, and the casual observer, looking down at it, would not say to themselves, “You know what, I believe that’s a book that’s been in the ground for twelve hundred years.”

Anne:   Well yay them! Yay!

Michelle:  So good on them for recognizing what it was. But the thing is, you know, it’s bad for a book to be in the ground for twelve hundred years.

Anne:   I think I can imagine that that is so.

Michelle:   The first few folios are essentially alphabet soup, because every piece of the parchment that wasn’t covered with ink, rotted.

Anne:   Whoa!

Michelle:   The acidity of the letters, of the ink, kept it from not rotting.

Anne:   Whoa! And so there’s all kinds of letters, we just don’t know where they go?

Michelle:   Oh my gosh, this is the coolest discovery. I am so excited about this. They have got… It provides the first physical evidence of a connection between the Irish Church and the Coptic Church. Because there’s papyrus in the binding!

Anne:   Oh! Oh! Oh my goodness. Yay.

Michelle:   And, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. It was in a cover, and it’s not a fancy cover like was stolen off of the Book of Kells, it’s just a regular, you know, unadorned leather… Because this is a nice book, but it’s not the Book of Kells. This is a psalter.

Anne:   Uh-huh, so it’s a book to be used.

Michelle:   It’s a book to be used. It has some nice illuminations—which we have because they were on inside folios, and they’re quite lovely—and it’s from the same time period, but yes… Sorry the child came in to provide commentary about how every book is a nice book. But this is a different…

Anne:   Let’s take a little moment where we, here, recognize that my host’s offspring has a contention that all books are essentially good books, because they are books.

Michelle:   Yeah, like all dogs are good dogs.

Anne:   All dogs are essentially good dogs, because they are dogs.

Michelle:   They’re all good boys.

Anne:   Yes. There is a category of “book,” and it belongs in the realm of goodness. OK. Thank you. I just wanted to recognize that. We can move on.

Michelle:   So the thing is, this is not… This is a nice psalter. It has illuminations. It’s from the same time period as the Book of Kells. But this is a working book. Not a display copy or a ceremonial book, the way the Book of Kells is. And it was found— very importantly, because we have very few of these—in what is essentially a medieval Trapper Keeper. It’s a leather cover with three buttons, and a fold that goes over, and the archeologists are almost more excited about the cover than they are about the book, because we have comparables for the book, and less so for the cover.

And it’s not a cover… It’s not an attached cover, it’s more like the little sleeve that you slide it into when you’re traveling. And no one knows how this ended up in the bog.

Anne:   Yeah, because nobody stole it.

Michelle:   No.

Anne:   The thieves didn’t come to steal it. There was nothing to steal. It had nothing that would have attracted anyone.

Michelle:   And it’s complicated to know how it ended up in the bog, because we know from earlier times in Celtic culture that things were put in the bog as an offering. Now, just because they became Christian doesn’t mean they gave up on that. 

Anne:   No. No. No, you still leave milk out for the fairies. I mean, hello!

Michelle:   It’s possible the psalter was ritually deposited as an offering. It’s possible some poor monk lost it, and I’m sure he had a bad day when he got back to the monastery, if he dropped it in the bog.

Anne:   Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Michelle:   They don’t know. They use the passive phrase “was deposited,” because that’s all they know. It somehow ended up in the bog. We don’t know how.

Anne:   Well do we know… Is this… Is where it is in the bog, is this kind of like on the line in between two places where you might be regularly traveling?

Michelle:   Ooh! That’s a good question.

Anne:   Thank you.

I mean, and it may be that there’s places that don’t exist anymore. There may have been houses, you know, because it seems to me more likely that somebody dropped it than that it was an offering.

Michelle:   So here’s what they say about this:

“At the time of the manufacture of the psalter in the late eighth century, non-intensive farm activity was taking place in the area around the bog. From the late ninth century, more widespread woodland clearance took place there. The psalter was placed in a small, wet pool in the bog, within peat that was of about the same date as the manuscript itself.” So that sounds like, “I got dropped.”

Anne:   Yeah, I think that’s what it was. Not because the psalter isn’t a very good offering, but because it doesn’t seem to me like it’s a very good offering at that time. Partly because it is a working psalter. The only reason you would use it as an offering is, like, you might have some personal vow, for instance, but it would need to be a little more fancy to have some kind of ceremonial usage. If you see what I mean?

Michelle:   That seems more likely. And it certainly is not in a part of a bog, right, where there’s no people? Because sometimes when they would do the offerings, they would really go out into the boonies.

Anne:   That only makes sense, doesn’t it? You don’t want to be cutting peat for your home, and discover bog people. Because sometimes there’s bog people in the bogs, and you don’t want to find them.

Michelle:   Bog people are super creepy. It’s too bad that that is out of our time period, because that’s a really interesting set of crimes, you know? “If you’re killed as an offering, is it a crime?” That’s interesting. Philosophically.

Anne:   Yeah, I mean it’s one of the things we haven’t been… We’ve been considering some things as crimes that were not considered crimes in the Middle Ages. As, for instance, the murder of Marguerite Porete. You know? Things like that. Or the murder of all those Templars. Yeah, we consider some things crimes that weren’t, then. 

We have a bog person over in the natural history museum over here, in Albuquerque. We have one. Yay? I don’t know why, but we do. Because the fossils and the dinosaurs, they make more sense. We don’t have any bogs here. We had a vast inland sea, but we had no bogs. At any rate.

So where is that… That’s now held in the museum at Dublin?

Michelle:   Yeah. It’s in the National Museum in Dublin, the National Museum of Ireland. But that’s, you know, what could have happened if the Book of Kells had not been found. It might well have become a find that we came across later, and did not survive really super well.

Anne:   I am so glad they found it. Because it is, it’s a treasure of the world. Yeah. It’s amazing.

I wanted to know about, like, if we wanted to have a facsimile, could we get one? OK, how much is that one that got stolen? How much was it?

Michelle:   So, the really, really nice ones that they have in Kells are worth fifteen thousand euros.

Anne:   OK, do we know what that is American?

Michelle:   Oh gosh, it’s going to be, I don’t know, twenty thousand dollars? I went over to something called facsimilefinder.com…

Anne:   What did you get?

Michelle:   Facsimilefinder.com, for the Book of Kells, does not list pricing. It says, “Request info.”

Anne:  Oh my god.

Michelle:   Which makes me think it’s probably really expensive…

Anne:   I bet so.

Michelle:   … to buy a facsimile edition.

Anne:   There are, actually, facsimiles that can be got. Because, what I did, I went to Amazon. On Amazon you can buy whole lots of different illustrated books that–you know, have illustrations from the Book of Kells–that are more or less affordable. But the reproductions of some of the illustrations are done by Francoise Henry, who did the discussion, and John Kennedy, who took the photographs, and you can find that for about $364, or actually you can also find it for $907, so there’s a big price… So you’re talking about in the hundreds to get that edition. It’s not everything, but it’s many of the illustrations.

Michelle:   I should mention that the whole, the entirety of the Book of Kells has been scanned, and is available for free online.

Anne:   I actually haven’t looked at those online, are they good?

Michelle:   Yeah, it’s not bad. They’ve got the whole thing scanned where you can see it.

Anne:   Do you have to use a magnifying glass on some of it though?

Michelle:   I’m pulling it up right now to take a look at it. It’s through, of course, the Library of Trinity College…

Anne:   Oh, you’ll put the link in the show notes, yeah?

Michelle:   Yeah. I’ll do that. I would not say that it’s the easiest thing in the world to look at, because each page is separate.

Anne:  Uh-huh, got it.

Michelle:   But you can pull it up, you can—what is this word—zoom in? You’d think that would be one I could remember, nowadays.

Anne:   Oh! So you don’t need a magnifying glass, because you can zoom in! Yay.

Michelle:   You can make it full page, and… Yeah.

Anne:   You can print it out and have a really inferior copy of one of the paintings, so that you may peruse it, you know, by your bedside.

Michelle:   This kind of digitization really is a nice development in medieval studies, and this is far superior to microfilm.

Anne:   The ways in which it is superior to microfilm are kind of infinite.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   The lack of headache, for one thing, on the part of the researcher, is pretty paramount. Those were not good days. No, no.

Michelle:   No. This is far superior. And microfilm doesn’t last all that long. 

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   One of the ironies of microfilm is that the Lindisfarne Gospels—and not the Book of Kells, it’s had a hard time—but the Lindisfarne Gospels have survived. Assuming nobody tries to burn it up in a fire, it will last forever. It’s largely unchanged, because of what it’s made on, and how it was made. Whereas microfilm has a lifespan of maybe thirty years, maybe forty years, so the microfilms that they made in the 70s thinking, “We’re going to preserve the Lindisfarne Gospels forever!” are currently crumbling, like all the VHS’ that we all have.

Anne:   Uh-huh.

Michelle:   And the Lindisfarne Gospels are just chugging along, on parchment.

Anne:   Here’s a little sideline, which is kind of related. Back in the first part of the twentieth century up in… This has been going on for quite some time. Dolls were often—that were mass-produced—were made out of bisque or china. Bisque is an unglazed china. And they were very lovely, and they last forever unless you drop them. And I have some of them. They’re very, very beautiful. But the problem is that the kids do sort of drop them, don’t they? And then they break, and so then that’s not so great. 

And so they started making composition… They invented this thing called “composition,” and so that was going to, like, last forever! Because it didn’t break, when you dropped your dolly on the ground. But the thing was… They lasted for quite some time, but the problem was that they’d been made with things like industrial… They had industrial waste in them, and whatnot, and they began to deteriorate. And when they deteriorate, they have, like, the most noxious smell ever. And so I don’t have any composition dolls, because they’re god-awful.

So they were very, very popular, and they were going to last forever. They did not last forever. The bisque and china? Still around unless you drop it. But the composition? I would not want them in my house. Much the same kind of thing is going on with the plastic, the early vinyls, they’re just deteriorating. 

So, sideline. That’s the thing. Sometimes you think you’re like, “Aha! We have a new technology! We will now make this thing and it will last forever!” And you know, kinda not so much. Really, the old stuff was actually working a little better. At least, you know, if you don’t burn the book, or if you don’t drop the doll. Now you know.

Michelle:  But everybody can go look at it themselves. It’s been scanned, and the scans are high quality, so you can go look at it.

Anne:  And we’ll give you the link.

Michelle:  Which is nice, because the facsimile editions… Like, I have an edition that has 48 color plates, but that’s not anywhere near what’s actually in it.

Anne:  It’s not anywhere near. And you also, when you get a selection, you tend to get the things that are most famous or most elaborate. You don’t necessarily get all the pages with the minor, the small illustrations, and that intricate tiny stuff, it’s just gorgeous.

Michelle:   All 339 folios have been scanned, both front and back. 

Anne:   339. 

Michelle:  So you can go see ‘em.

Anne:   Now, do you know the… Do you know that animated film, The Secret of Kells?

Michelle:   I have seen that! Isn’t that delightful?

Anne:   It is very delightful. And that’s available. You can buy a DVD for about thirty bucks, but you can rent it on Amazon for $2.99. And we should put a link in to that, because that is a wonderful little animated film about the Book of Kells.

Michelle:  I didn’t even dip into the fiction, because I got overwhelmed really quickly.

Anne:  Yes, because there’s a lot of it. And usually this is your forte, but yeah, there’s a lot of it, isn’t there?

Michelle:  There is so much fiction that either deals directly with the Book of Kells, like there is a time travel-y book by the… What is his name? McAvoy? R.A. McAvoy. Anyway, that deals with people going back and trying to prevent a Viking raid. And then it pops up in all these other places, and I just said, “Nope.I’m going to go off and read about the Faddan More Psalter.”

Anne:   Yeah. 

Michelle:   Archeology is where we’re learning so much about this time period because, with very rare exceptions, we’re not finding records.

Anne:   Right. There are some things which are in… All of the archives have records which haven’t been catalogued. This is because it is so intense to catalogue stuff, and you need people who can do it. And you’re all the time getting given boxes of things which you don’t actually have time to go through. So there are records, they’re out there, but not from this time period. They tend to be later. Because the stuff that’s earlier, you know, people jump on, take care of, you know, but still there’s medieval records that are still there. I know of some of them, where they ought to be, and they can’t be found, but I know they’re in there someplace.

Michelle:   I mean, I know that we’re scheduled to talk about St. Patrick at some point. Some point soon, actually.

Anne:   Well why don’t we do it for St. Patrick’s Day? Because hello?

Michelle:   Oh! That’s a good idea. And it’s so unusual with him, because we have a bunch of his own writing.

Anne:   We actually have his writing. Yes.

Michelle:   So unusual for the time period.

Anne:   Yeah so we’ll do the kidnapping of St. Patrick early in March. Yeah.

I liked having a New Year’s episode that didn’t have any deaths in it. I guess nobody dies… Well, I don’t know. Did anybody die when St. Patrick got kidnapped? Maybe so. This might possibly be so. But at any rate, nobody died here. And nobody even got punished, because they didn’t know who the thieves were.

You know, it occurs to me that one of the ways they might have found it is if one of the thieves was talking about… If somehow or other somebody heard where the book was, you know? It might have been that somebody talked.

Michelle:   I would not be at all surprised to discover that there are a number of books that, you know, are historical fiction speculating about… Because how could you resist writing that? If you’re interested in the time period, how could you possibly resist writing that story?

Anne:   I just can’t see how, by accident, you happen to come across it, two months and twenty days afterwards. I think somebody had to have talked.

Michelle:   Yes, I suspect you’re right. Somebody had to, you know… And also these are not humongous communities. You know? Whoever stole that, and melted down the gold from the cover? Somebody knew.

Anne:   Yeah. This is a small place. They might have had to get out of town to melt it down. Now, the other possibility is that they had buried it someplace where, actually, someone started farming, and then they found it, and it actually still looked like a book at that point, because it hadn’t been in the bog so long. But just accidentally tripping over it? I liked the image, but I don’t believe it.

Michelle:   Well, when I was in Kells, what I learned is that Irish teenagers have a very conflicted relationship with their tourism industry. 

Anne:   Uh-huh? And what did you learn?

Michelle:   I learned that the round tower at Kells is the favorite hangout place for teenagers to go and smoke and drink. 

Anne:   I am actually very glad to hear that. I’m glad that it is actually a part of… It’s not that I’m really happy about the teenagers smoking and drinking. Whatever. That’s a different thing. I’m glad that it’s actually part of daily life. You know? That it isn’t something that’s so sacrosanct that it can’t be dealt with. 

I like the churches, the old houses, that show signs of generations and generations changing things to fit their own purposes. I like it when things survive enough to where we can see what they were, but I like it when they are… I like it best when they are actually part of our daily reality. And so if the kids are using the round tower at Kells, I say all right. All right. This community… That’s how this community uses it. And it is still of use.

Michelle:   Well, nobody’s ringing bells in it anymore, so.

Anne:   No. No. No. Those days are gone. But it hasn’t been forgotten. It hasn’t been abandoned. That’s lovely. That’s really nice.

And also it’s really good if you’re one of the adults, because you kind of know where everybody is. It’s like, “OK, time to roust the kids.” You know where they are. They’re over at the round tower.

Michelle:   And it’s very… It’s oddly a private place right in the middle of town. Because there’s not any windows, you know?

Anne:   Right.

Michelle:   And although the wooden platforms to go up aren’t there anymore, you can go in, in the bottom, and there’s really only that one little tiny opening, you know, where the door is, to get in there. And so it’s very private.

Anne:   Thank you for that piece of information. I love that. The tower at Kells. Yay.

Michelle:   Where we go and smoke cigarettes.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   And probably complain about the tourists.

Anne:   And get drunk. Yeah, that’s probably also happening. I’ve met teenagers. And have in fact been one, and raised one, and so I’m pretty sure that lots of things are involved, that you don’t want the adults seeing.

Michelle:  There’s so little left, in Kells, but it was one of our favorite places, when we went there, because nobody was there. And so the things that were there to see, you could see without being elbow-to-elbow.

Anne:   Now, and that was because it was October?

Michelle:   It’s both because it’s October, and because nobody goes there.

Anne:   People go to Dublin. And Cork. Right?

Michelle:   Yeah, they go to Dublin. Even when we went to Trim there was hardly anybody there. Now I think that’s probably different now, because Trim really has made an effort to roust up some tourism.

We went on a giant quest, at Kells, because we were told there’s a high cross in a river over by this basically disused cemetery. We did not find the high cross in the river. I’m just going to tell you right now that that little pamphlet in the town hall that claimed there was a high cross in the river that you could still see, we did not find it.

Anne:   You think basically the town sends everybody on a snipe hunt?

Michelle:   Maybe it was there a hundred years ago, and none of the locals have bothered to check. But we did find the cemetery with waist-high weeds, and you had to brave people’s sheep, because you had to walk through their pasture in order to get over to the cemetery with the waist-high weeds.

Anne:   Uh-huh. And what was in the cemetery? I mean, dead people, but what was…

Michelle:   Well, it was supposed to be adjoining to the river with the high cross in it…

Anne:  With the high cross. Yes.

Michelle:   …but that was not a thing we could find. But there was lots of, you know, old graves and stuff, because this was no longer a used cemetery…

Anne:   Obviously.

Michelle:   … and a completely creepy, creepy, creepy, creepy depression into the earth. Like it was going down to a crypt.

Anne:   Yeah, don’t stand on that. No.

Michelle:   My sister is braver than me, so she went down into it. But I could see that there were bones, and I didn’t go.

Anne:   Which sister was this?

Michelle:   It was Mia, of course.

Anne:  Mia.

Michelle:   I did not go down into it, because I’m basically a coward.

Anne:   Well, or sensible.

Michelle:   The little bits of skull were enough for me. I’m not going.

Anne:   Well, did Mia enjoy her trip to the place of bones?

Michelle:   Well, she’s still with us. So. It didn’t take a sharp turn into horror, or anything. I highly recommend Kells, but don’t think you’re going to see too much of anything having to do with the monastery, because except for St. Columbcille’s House, it’s all gone. The round tower and the bits of high crosses, but…

Anne:   Yeah, but it’s in the middle of the city isn’t it? It’s not out…

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   Yeah, that’s what I was seeing. 

Michelle:   One of the high crosses has had… The one that’s kind of down right by the road has had a roof put over it, because it was really getting damaged by the rain. So it’s a fun place because it’s not especially curated. It’s not curated very well, anyway.

Anne:   And that’s hard to find these days. You know, most places you go are really locked up and presented.

Michelle:   But it’s also a hard place to go because everything’s broken. You know? It’s not their fault. I’m not saying that the locals are doing something wrong. I’m saying that Cromwell did a spectacular job, and everything’s broken.

Anne:   I didn’t know that he’d been in Kells.

Michelle:   The little house of St. Columbcille, that you have to go ask the neighbor lady for the key, has an upstairs where people slept that… Climbing up it, first of all, is completely like not… Wouldn’t fall under American standards of safety, because it’s an extremely steep little metal staircase that you have to go up, and then basically come down backward because there’s no way to come down it forward, because it’s so steep. And the space up top, you can’t actually stand up straight. It’s just where people slept. And of course, why would you need it to be tall if you’re just going to sleep there? There’s a couple of little cells up there for sleeping.

Anne:   So do we have any more on Kells?

Michelle:   Oh, I probably talked way more than I needed to about Kells, but…

Anne:   Oh no. I mean, you know, Kells, Book of Kells, anything?

Michelle:   Alex says I should tell you the story about going to all the cemeteries. The first time we went to Ireland, we went with my dad. And my dad wanted to find some Markeys. Right?

Anne:  Of course.

Michelle:    So we were traipsing all over the place, looking in cemeteries, looking for dead Markeys.

Anne:   Right.

Michelle:   We knew that his ancestors had come from County Meath, so we were in County Meath, going to all the cemeteries. And finally, at about the fourth cemetery, we ran into some people who said, “Oh well, you should go talk to Brendan Markey.” And they gave us some instructions, and we went over to a perfect stranger’s house.

Anne:   And asked for the key!  Sorry.

Michelle:   We all waited in the car while my dad went and knocked on the door, because he, you know, really wanted to know. And it was a completely surreal experience because he walked in to Brendan… Brendan was there with his brother Joe. Well, first of all, Brendan opened the door and let him in, which clued us in that we were related, because dad knocked and Brendan answered, “Come on in! Come on in!” Brendan’s brother Joe looked exactly like my dad’s brother, Tony. And when they finally brought us all in, Brendan looked at me and said, “You look like my daughter.”  

Anne:   Wow.

Michelle:  Then they took us off to the ancestral cemetery, that we never would have found, because it’s not used anymore, and it was another completely surreal experience because it was the same sequence of names…

Anne:   Yes.

Michelle:   … that show up in dad’s ancestors.

Anne:   Yes. Because that’s how you do it.

Michelle:   But it was a different branch of the family.

Anne:   The Welsh did that too.

Michelle:   It was completely bonkers. We think that the great-grandfathers must have been brothers, and then they used that same sequence of names.

Anne:   So you don’t know your exact relationship to Brendan? But obviously there is one.

Michelle:   Yeah. It was very odd. It was very strange to have this set of graves with the same names and dates, you know, roughly, of people who I know very well are buried in Illinois. And have them there in County Meath.

Anne:   Cousins. All of them cousins. And aunts. And great-aunts, and -uncles. Yeah.

Lovely. Thank you. I like that story. I like that story. 

Well what are we doing next?

Michelle:   I’m pulling up the list.

Anne:   I made a list and then I lost it so…

Michelle:   Oh, you know what’s next? What we had scheduled next was Thomas Malory.

Anne:   Ah! Yay! OK.

All right. So that’s our discussion of the Book of Kells, and Kells, and Michelle’s relatives.

Michelle:   Way more than anybody really wanted to know, I’m sure.

Anne:   And some other things about Michelle. My problem with the theft of the Book of Kells story is that, in my mind, it pretty much goes like this: There was a Book of Kells, and it got stolen. That’s it. And then there’s the coda: And then they found it. Thank you very much. So we’re glad that we were able to flesh this one out with other kinds of information…

Michelle:   And clear the Vikings of this one thing…

Anne:   That’s right.

Michelle:   … that they’re constantly accused of.

Anne:   Right. The Vikings did not steal the Book of Kells. And so once again we are explaining a thing that everybody gets wrong. 

Next time you hear from us we will be discussing Thomas Malory, who was really very naughty. What did he get put in jail for? I can’t remember.

Michelle:   He keeps ending up in jail because he’s constantly on the wrong side in the Wars of the Roses.

Anne:   Oh, well! That’s kind of not a crime…

Michelle:   He keeps switching sides, and guessing wrong.

Anne:   … so much as stupidity. It was easy to do, because god did it go back and forth! So we’ll talk about Thomas Malory, which will mean that we’ll get to talk about Morte d’Arthur, which is something that we enjoy, and I’ll get to bitch about how most of Morte d’Arthur is actually the Tristan and Isolde story, but we move on from… We’ll just talk about that next time.

Michelle:   We’re heavily on the medieval, this time, as opposed to the true crime.

Anne:   That’s right. We’re doing all medieval all the time, and mostly some bad behavior.

So this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, but with less technology…

Michelle:   In this case, exactly like it. Since the replica was stolen in 2104.

Anne:   That’s right. Yeah, the technology’s pretty much the same. “I picked it up and walked out.”

We’re on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. Please leave a review. We’d really appreciate that. And you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach us all through the webpage. We’ve got contact information there.

And, you can leave comments there! We’d love to hear from you. And if you have medieval crimes that you think that we should discuss, please let us know, and we’ll take ‘em under consideration.

Yeah, Thomas Malory next time. 

Michelle:   That will be a lot of fun.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   I quite love Morte d’Arthur.

Anne:   I have a love/hate relationship with Morte d’Arthur. But more on that later.

So, we’re signing off. Bye!

Michelle:   Bye!

Special Episode! Peter Konieczny from Medievalists.net Explains Con Artists in Medieval London

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  And we’re very excited to tell you that we’re having a special edition of True Crime Medieval. There’s still going to be crime, and whatnot. You know, people are going to behave badly. But we have a special guest. We have Peter Konieczny, from Medievalists.net, and this is very exciting. He’s going to be telling us about medieval con men in London. Hello Peter!

Peter:  Hello! Hello. Thank you for having me. 

Anne:  We are so glad to have you here, because we don’t know a damn thing about con men in London. Do you, Michelle? Do you know anything about con men in London?

Michelle:  No! I’m excited to hear about what he’s finding in the records.

Peter:  I hope to give you some fun stories.

Anne:  All of them are fun. I mean even murder, in the Middle Ages, is sort of entertaining. Way more entertaining than it is now, because it’s so far away.

But, would you tell us about Medievalists.net?

Peter:  Yeah. Medievalists.net. We started it back in 2008, and it’s designed to be the kind of one-stop-shop for anything about the Middle Ages. So, if you want to learn about the news, like, say, archeological finds, we have that. We have our own team of writers, so you can read about things from, like, what a Chinese monk takes on his trips—travel gear—to the Plague of Justinian and its effects on the medieval world. So we have that, and we actually have a few podcasts under our team as well, so we’re big fans of podcasting too.

Anne:  What are the podcasts that you’ve got going?

Peter:  There is The Medieval Podcast, which is run by Danièle Cybulskie. We have Scotichronicast, which is run by Kate Buchanan, and that’s about all things Scotland. And we have Byzantium and Friends, which is hosted by Anthony Kaldellis.

Anne:  We’ll put links to all of those into the Show Notes. Michelle’s in charge of that. I say this, you know, blithely, because I’m not going to be doing it, because she’s in charge of that.

So it was in 2008? What was your impetus for putting all that together?

Peter:  Yeah, I’ve been involved with kind of doing, like, online projects since the early 2000s. I kind of started… I was the website master for the Society for Medieval Military History.

Anne:  Ah! Oh! We’re jealous. We’re totally jealous.

Peter:   Oh, yeah. Yeah. So when I set that up, that became kind of a big website, in the early days of the website. So I’ve kind of been involved doing online stuff, and I really wanted to create a website for everybody interested in the Middle Ages, and actually to bring scholars and the general public together, everyone that had a passion for the medieval past. I didn’t think it would take off as it did, but over the years it became a place to go if you wanted to learn about the medieval world, and it’s been a lot of fun. So I do that, and I’m also the editor of Medieval Warfare Magazine.

Anne:  Michelle and I, we finished up recently the Albigensian Crusade issue, and we were talking about trebuchets, and our passion for reading about the details of medieval battles.

Peter:  Oh, you should check out Medieval Warfare.

Anne:  Absolutely.

Peter:  Full of battles, full of sieges. People doing bad things.

Anne:  So you’re going to tell us tonight… well, we’re recording at night. Usually we’re in the day, but we’re at night. This is all a special thing. And you’re going to tell us about con men in medieval London. Before you get onto that, how did you land on that? It’s really specific.

Peter:  Well, when I was a humble grad student, I wound up taking a look at the records for the City of London, and fortunately they all were kind of… There were a lot of sets of records— called The Letter-Books and The Plea and Memoranda Rolls— that date from the late thirteenth century all the way to the end of the fifteenth. They have been translated, and put into calendar form. These were publications from way back, like a hundred and twenty years ago. But you start looking at them, and they’re full of wonderful kinds of stuff related to, like, all sorts of social history. And, you know, crime was a thing I was really interested in. I mean, I guess I’m interested in violence and crime. I first started studying about medieval murders in London, and I did some research on that, but as I came across the records you find all these interesting tales of cons and frauds.

Anne:  And these records, they weren’t destroyed in the Great Fire?

Peter:  No, no. No, the London records–like the City of London–their records have survived. I don’t know why they survived the Great Fire but, yeah, they’re still around. You can go to the Metropolitan London Archives and look at the real letter-books. There’s at least, like… They go up until the early modern period for sure, because I think they’re translated up to Letter-Book H, but there are… I think they go up to Z.

Anne:  No, I never had cause to work with them. I was messing around mostly with Church court records in Cambridge, but that sounds like so much fun. So, tell us a story. Tell us a story about very badly behaved people in London.

Peter: I’m going to start off with bakers, because these were the worst people. If you’re a baker in medieval London.

Anne:  That’s really sad to know, actually, that the worst stuff going on in terms of cons is in the bakers. Because you really want to eat your bread! You do! Lots of bread.

Peter:  I know, and everyone has to eat bread, so… But there are a lot of laws about baking, and making bread, because, essentially, if you were, like, the city authorities, you want to make sure everyone can afford to buy bread, so you would put various laws like how much— for a penny—could you buy? So they would say, “All right, this is how much.” Every year they would change the weight of the bread, so that it would fit how much you could buy for a penny. Of course the bakers were always trying to scam their way through that, so they would do things to make the bread weigh more when it came time for the official measurement. So that would be, like, putting things like dirt in it.

Anne:  No! No!

Peter:  Yeah. Or chalk.

Anne:  The chalk I could have thought because, you know, it’s all white and everything. But the dirt… Well, if you’ve got whole wheat, the dirt might not show up too bad.

Peter:  And there was a case in 1388, a baker named John Gibb (sp?), he put a piece of iron in his bread. So they didn’t take kindly to that. But we have all sorts of cases where the bakers are selling underweight bread, or rotten bread. Bakers would move out of the City of London, and send their servants in, so they couldn’t get caught. And they would send their servants to deliver the bread, that way the bakers wouldn’t get in trouble themselves. There’s one record that says… This is an official where they say, “These fraudulent bakers who carry on their business secretly, hiding themselves like foxes.”

Anne:  So if you had a good baker down the street, you definitely stayed with them. You did not go baker shopping. No.

Peter:  Well, you never know who’s going to scam you, because there’s this beautiful scam that they uncovered in 1327. There’s this baker named John Bird (sp?), and what he was doing… He had a shop, and if you had a shop, you could have, also, people come in to make their own bread. Like they could use his oven, and things like that. So people would bring in flour, or the dough, and so John would make sure it was put on this moulding board, where it would be all prepared, right? And the people could prepare it. Now, on this moulding board would have been a small trap to catch mice. So we’ve got a little set of doors that would open and the mouse would fall in, underneath the table into this area, right? So what happened was, one of John’s servants was secretly underneath this table, in this little space, and what he was doing was he was taking bits of dough through the trap door, little piece by piece, and adding it, and taking it away from these customers.

Michelle:  Oh my goodness. You wouldn’t think that that would be worthwhile, but I guess it just adds up.

Peter:  Yeah, so they wound up… Apparently they caught him. Somehow they caught him with the bread underneath the moulding board table, in a pile, all this dough, and so the Mayor and the Alderman started a big investigation, and they wound up catching seven more bakers…

Michelle:  Oh no.

Peter:  … and two bakeresses.

Anne:  Doing the same kind of thing?

Peter:  Doing the same kind of thing. So they sent them all to jail. It was a big trial and then, at least with all the men, they had them sent to the pillory with the dough hanging by their neck.

Anne:  So you didn’t get your dough back. All right. 

Peter:  No, no. And their moulding boards, they took them out and destroyed all their moulding boards.

Anne:  That’s a very elaborate scam, and as Michelle points out, it doesn’t seem like you’d be getting a whole lot. But you’d have to be doing this in great volume. A little here, a little there.

Peter:  Yeah.

Anne:  And then you have a new loaf to sell to somebody, that you didn’t actually have to provide the ingredients for.

Peter:  Yeah, now when you think that they caught ten people all together, ten bakers, and so you would think that it may have been a game by the bakers? To scam the people? Because they certainly could have not been taking that much bread…

Anne:  Right.

Peter:  You know, your servant could have been doing better things than hiding underneath the table, taking bits of dough.

Anne:  Of course.

Peter:  But the city authorities were not happy.

Anne:  Of course, and so what you’re thinking is, is that this was just for fun? That’s amazing.

Peter:  Yeah, that’s just one… I think that’s the funniest scam that was going on. Of course, they were not happy. These people got pretty much a full day in the pillory— which was a pretty tough punishment—but they were allowed to stay in the city, because they made a ruling that said, “Next time you’ll get that and be ejected from the city.” But those were the kinds of trouble the bakers got into.

Anne:  I’m impressed. I’m really impressed with the badnesses of bakers. I really am.

Peter:  So, yeah, bakers. So that’s kind of like one example of that kind of scam or fraud that’s connected to trades, and that’s what you actually see a lot of in the London records, is that various tradesmen are doing practices that you would consider frauds and cons these days. Other examples, like, merchants would be adding dirt to cinnamon.

Anne:  That’s yucky.

Peter:  Taverners would be mixing bad wine with good wine, or adding some sort of coloring to bad wine to make it look good. There are fishermen that would be using illegal nets. In the Thames River there could be fishing, but they didn’t want the little, tiny fish to get caught, so they made regulations on how much the holes of the nets would be. They were supposed to be an inch and a half wide, and they were always catching fishermen with illegal nets and having them burned, those nets. You keep seeing that.

Anne:  So they’re catching tiny fish…

Peter:  Yeah.

Anne:  You can pickle those? You can salt them? What’s the point of getting tiny fish?

Peter:  Even a small fish, people would buy it, right? Who knows, they may have been cutting up the fish too, as well, right? To sell pieces of it? But it was a big deal to try to preserve the fishing on that river, so there were often these people being accused of having illegal nets. That was one thing.

I’ve got another story. There’s a guy from the year 1316, his name was Alan Lasopper (sp?), and he was selling brass pots, but what he was doing, he was buying old pots of bad metal, and then he would put them in the fire and do some work to make them look like they were brass, and he would sell them as old brass pots. People would buy them, and take them back to their own homes, put them on the fire, and they would just melt and turn to nothing.

Anne:  Yeah.

Peter:  So the city authorities were often trying to get the guilds to police these people, right? And say, “You have to make sure everyone’s doing their thing.” A lot of professions had to put their marks… Like, bakers had to put a mark on each of their loaves to say, “This is my bread,” and the same thing with other trades people. And there are a lot of laws about how you have to sell it at a certain place, and there’s a lot of that which is, I think, to prevent unscrupulous people from passing off shoddy workmanship.

Anne:  Did the guilds actually do the policing that they were wanted to do, or did they mostly just step out of the whole thing?

Peter:  No, I think they were fairly concerned with keeping that… Like, when we do have guild records, they are making sure that everyone that’s involved in the profession is lawful, keeping an eye on everybody. So we do have those kinds of records from guilds as well.

Anne:  Quality control.

Peter:  Yeah, quality control. There was that kind of fear of people coming in from outside the city and trying to sell stuff, right? So you were also making sure… Fine-ing people that were selling after hours, or not from their shop. If you weren’t in the market, selling, that could be a big problem.

Michelle:  Like buying a stereo out of somebody’s trunk at a gas station.

Peter:  Yeah, I think so.

Anne:  Ah, I see.

Peter:  The economy could be fairly tightly controlled. Prices… Like, the city authorities often said bread had to be sold at this price, wine had to be sold at this price. Even items that couldn’t be sold…  They had to be made at certain places, and sold at certain places. So there were often those kinds of tight controls.

Anne:  Do you know if those kinds of controls… I’m assuming they would have been also extant in places like York, Cheshire, but surely, small towns… They would have to be places where you were big enough to have actual trade guilds, and not just religious guilds.

Peter:  I think so. I think so. I think the smaller towns, like, you just have less people who probably have… A town might only have two or three bakers involved. I think the worry, there, is people coming from the outside…

Anne:  Right.

Peter:  … and kind of selling, so, again, you might have markets and fairs set up in that way, so you always want to have people looking out.

Anne:  Right. Right, right. Yeah, and there’s notoriously… You get cheated at markets and fairs sometimes. That would make sense. But in a small town you couldn’t, as a baker, get away with horrible behavior, because you really have a very small group of people who know you well.

Peter:  Yeah, I think it’s harder, but the size of bread was something that was used in many places in England. It wasn’t just London, where they had official records. Baking underweight—if you could make ten loaves of bread into eleven—I think a baker might do that, and if it’s just a few, it’s maybe something that they could more easily get away with, right? Because they all worked together.

Anne:  Right. Fair enough.

Peter:  Darn bakers.

Anne:  It’s scary.

Michelle:  It’s not like we’ve stopped doing that. Packages of cereal will go from being 22 ounces to being 21 ounces, and they’re sort of hoping you don’t notice.

Peter:  Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, you have these kinds of wonderful bits of… That’s one type of fraud that I see in records of medieval London. The other one is impostors. 

Michelle:  Oooh.

Anne:  Tell us about that.

Peter: My favorite story is from 1380 and it’s two people, their names are John Ward (sp?)  and Richard Linnem (sp?), and their story was that they were traders that had been waylaid by robbers. Not only did they lose everything, but the robbers also cut out their tongues.

Anne:  Oh really?

Peter:  Yes, so they were begging on the streets of London, and they could show you… They had John’s tongue, which they would carry on a little pincher or a hook.

Anne:  Well I totally believe them.

Peter:  And if you didn’t believe that, it also came with writing, because they had a little bit of writing attached to it saying, “This is the tongue of John Ward (sp?).” Just in case. For the literate people.

Anne:  Well, even if you weren’t literate, because, you know it had writing on it so that made it special, and meant that somebody who could write had written on it, and hey, totally, yeah.

Peter:  They were pretty good, because people could then say, like, they could look into their mouths, and show them they had no tongue, and they could make these roaring noises too. I don’t know if I want to try it, but they could make roaring noises. But apparently, somehow the city authorities caught onto this, and they confessed—so I guess they could talk, because they confessed—and they had to spend three days in the pillory. Yes, three full days. And they were actually kept in jail too, afterwards. We don’t know if they got released.

Anne:  Yeah, they may well have died there. Sometimes people did. But they didn’t cut their tongues out? Because, you know, that… I mean, that they could have done. But they didn’t, huh?

Peter:  The authorities, they were not happy. These guys were pretenders, and they were taking advantage of beggars, doing this, because in the Middle Ages, if you were to be a beggar, it had to be for really good reasons, like an infirmity, and things like that. So that’s one of the stories of impostors that I came across. But there are actually quite a bit of those that pop in, in the records. 

I remember there’s a story about one that pretended to be an earl, like the son of an earl…

Anne:  Oh!

Peter:  … and he had come to London because the King had wanted him to marry one of the Queen’s handmaidens, and he didn’t want to marry, so he fled his area and he was hiding out in London and he was getting people to help pay for his being there. 

You had another pretending to be a hermit that had apparently gone on to travel around Jerusalem, and things like that. You had another pretending to be a physician. And there are a lot of them pretending to be officials. So we have one that was the Taker of the Ale for the royal household. He was caught doing that. Apparently he was going around taverns saying that, “This ale has to go to the King. I’m going to take it, and you will get paid later.”

Anne:  Now, that’s a scam that makes a lot of sense. It really does.

Peter:  Oh yeah, there was another one that he was pretending to be an officer of the Mayor, one of the Mayor’s officers, and his job was to go around to taverns and check to make sure that they were following regulations, and he was apparently taking bribes from these taverners, like twelve pence or sixpence, stuff like that, but he wasn’t even an official, so the Mayor wasn’t happy with that. And another pretended to be a sergeant of the Sheriff of London, and he arrested two bakeresses that had come into London, and made them pay a fine of ten pence to him, and so when, I guess, the bakeresses found out he wasn’t a real one, they wound up catching him. So yeah, a lot of them got sent to the pillory for that. And in some cases made to pay a fine too.

Anne:  What happened to the fake earl’s son? Do you remember, specifically, what happened to him?

Peter:  I know there’s more to the story. It involved… Some of the time we just know that they’re arrested, right? They say, “He is in jail and the Sheriff is to bring him to the council,” like to the guildhall, for a trial. So that’s what we know. But yeah, he tried to convince this, I think, a local merchant, like he was living with him, and sleeping with his daughter, promising to marry her…

Anne:  Because he wanted to marry her way more than the Queen’s handmaiden…

Peter:  That’s right. That’s right.

Anne:  Because, you know, she was a lot prettier, for one thing. Pretty sure about that. Yeah. Oh good lord.

Peter:  In a lot of these cases they’re kind of taking advantage. You know, people in the Middle Ages don’t have ID, right?

Anne:  Right.

Peter:  In a lot of cases you have to trust who was this person, and you can kind of get away with it. It’s kind of sad, because they’re often, like, in the case of the two bakeresses coming into London, right? They don’t know who could possibly be a Sheriff. It’s not like they’re having uniforms on, or things like that. If a person can be wily enough, they could take advantage, and pretend that they’re someone high and mighty.

Anne:  Well it seems to me that you wouldn’t necessarily have to be very gullible to get cheated by bakers, or to think somebody was a sheriff, but I think that, maybe, believing that somebody is an earl’s son who’s hiding out in London, I think that takes some gullibility. I’ll just go out on a limb here. Yeah.

Peter:  I think so too. I think so too. I remember this other case where a guy goes to a clothier’s shop and says, “I’m working for another nobleman. Can you bring the cloth over to the inn where he’s staying and then he’ll buy it all up?” Of course the clothier sends his servant with the clothes, they get to the inn, and he says, “Oh, I just found out he’s gone to Westminster for a few hours. So just stay here, and we’ll put the clothes in this room, and we’ll lock it up.” And of course a couple of hours later the clothes are gone, and stuff like that. So yeah, you know, those are kind of little cons that seem to go on.

Anne:  And they seem to continue. Like pretending to be the earl’s son. I think of Anastasia, the person who wasn’t actually Anastasia. That kind of thing still goes on. “I alone have escaped to tell the tale.”

Peter:  Yeah, I think a lot of it probably involves telling a fancier tale. If you tell the more elaborate story, you can kind of buy into it. Maybe it’s as simple as being able to dress up really nicely.

Anne:  Although you could have a story about why you were also not dressed real great, because you were in disguise, you know. But you would need some way of setting yourself apart, so that you seemed like someone who was of a different class. That’s an interesting… That is really an interesting one.

Peter:  You often wish there was more to these accounts. We don’t have real trial records so, in some cases, the records reveal the person says they did not do it, and they said then there was a trial, and they were found guilty. The records often aren’t particularly super-long, so we don’t get the explanations on how they did it, but at least we do have it. At least we have some of these fascinating little bits of cons, and things like that.

Anne:  Michelle and I had been talking—when we were thinking about all of this—we thought of an impostor. We thought of Perkin Warbeck. And we were wondering whether you would count him in this group of impostors, or whether he’s of a different nature all together.

Peter:  Yeah, I think you count him into the group of impostors, and it seems there’s this little category of people pretending to be kings. He’s one of the most famous ones, and there are some people that believe he was an actual, you know, one of the princes of the Tower, or something like that. But I remember a piece on Medievalists.net about several others. Like, there’s Byzantines… There’s a really good story, actually, about a person pretending to be… He was saying that he was the real John I, King of France, and this was a king in the early fourteenth century, who died as an infant.

Michelle:  Oh yeah!

Peter:  Yeah, yeah, so there’s a story like this, a person out of Italy who claimed that he was switched at birth. Like, he was a real king, but he was switched at birth with a peasant’s son.

Anne:  Of course. Of course.

Peter:  So there’s a great book, it’s called The Man Who Believed He Was King of France by Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri. I would recommend that as a good story of a person pretending to be a king. And he almost succeeded, too, because he actually led an invasion of France, right?

Michelle:  Oh my gosh!

Peter:  He got support out of Italy, so he was able to hire a bunch of mercenaries, but it didn’t get very far. Last we heard of him he was in a jail in Naples.

Anne:  And he believed that… Is it true he believed that he was the King of France?

Peter:  It’s hard to tell. It’s hard to tell. He may have believed it. He got some powerful people to back him up, though.

Anne:  So did Perkin Warbeck. Hard to tell. Hard to tell.

Peter:  One thing, how many people know what a king looks like, right? Or, if a king dies, it’s often just spread about by word of mouth. That’s why, oftentimes, they would keep the body around for quite a bit and say, “Here’s the dead body of the King, just so you know he’s dead, and he’s not going to be coming back.” Because English kings, they get plagued by people pretending, you know, “Oh, this is a pretender,” and then other people make use of him as a way to rebel, or to drop their allegiance by saying, “No, you’re not the real king.”

Anne:  And if it’s someone who’s died or disappeared young, of course who knows what they look like, later?

Peter:  Exactly. Exactly. There was even the story that Edward II, King of England, is apparently not executed but he goes to France and he’s a monk in France.

Anne:  That’s right. That’s right, and Edward III goes and sees him, even. Yeah.

Peter:  Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I think that’s a very common motif, and I think it’s just another case where people don’t have identity. It’s really hard to prove someone’s identity, so that’s one of the big challenges of the Middle Ages, is to know who a person is.

Anne:  And I think there’s also… It seems to me there also plays into it that desire that actually there be the disappeared prince in the Tower, or the dead baby, or Owen Glendower will come back, or King Arthur, even…

Peter:  Yeah.

Anne:  … You know, people will reappear. You never know where they went, and they could have been stolen by Saracens, we were hearing about that today, with Thomas Becket, and Becket’s dad.

Peter:  Yeah, I think especially if a particular king is not good, they are going to think, “How are we going to get rid of this King?” No, his predecessor is still around somehow, right? 

Anne:  Yeah.

Peter:  I’ve been reading about Henry IV, and apparently he had trouble with people claiming Richard II was moving around in Northern England and Scotland. He was really mad. He was executing a lot of monks for spreading that rumor.

Anne:  Well, he’s not there anymore. 

So fraud and impostors. Have you got any other general categories that strike you?

Peter:  There’s a lot of crime in London. I think those, to me, are kind of the big two. I’m actually waiting to get this book that just got published, it’s called The Book of Charlatans…

Anne:  Oh!

Peter:  … I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

Anne:  No, but that sounds wonderful!

Peter:  This is actually in Arabic. It’s in translation. A thirteenth-century guide to tricks and scams, and the author may have actually been involved in scams. He might have been a reformed con artist.

Anne:  So it was a book about how to recognize these scams, or how to do them?

Peter:  I haven’t got the book yet. Literally I ordered it the first day it came out, but it just came out in November. If you’re looking for it, it’s New York University Press, part of their Library of Arabic Literature series, and it’s called The Book of Charlatans. I know one of the scams they’re talking about is how to pretend to be a leper.

Anne:  Do you know how to do that? Just in case we end up wanting to do that, at any point?

Peter:  I will read it, and I might try it. But, yeah, I think, with a bit of knowledge, people can pass off changing hair color, or making their skin look differently, pretending to have a disability, things like that, and kind of playing off people. I think there’s a certain romanticism, even in the Arabic world, for these kinds of con men and artists. There are tales—from even The Thousand and One Nights, right?—where you have people that can fool their way through a crowd. People like to read those stories, so I think that can be a nice possibility, looking for your crimes of fraud.

Michelle:  Titivillus in Mankind draws us in, when he’s talking to the audience, by telling us about all of the cons he’s pulled. “Take a little silver, have a little silver that’s really pure brass, and put some powder on it, and in the darkness it will pass for silver.”

Peter:  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there are books that tell us about magic tricks. We know a few magic tricks. Like, the kind of simple ones that you could do today, right? Like make that coin look like it’s underwater, stuff like that, right? So there’s one manuscript image, maybe you could find it, where a crowd is watching the old three-ball trick…

Anne:  Uh-huh. It’s that old? It’s medieval?

Peter:  Yeah, it’s a three-ball trick, and as the crowd’s watching, another guy is behind them doing a pickpocket.

Anne:  Got it. Yeah.

Michelle:  Is that something you’re running across in the records, a lot? Pickpocketing?

Peter:  No, not really. Not from the City of London’s records. I don’t think that was something that they were particularly concerned over. That was their jurisdiction to say, but they were concerned about violence, people causing trouble with their neighbors, things like that.

Of course, homicides were taken care of by the Coroner of London, which is a royal official, but it was often a Londoner, so that was kind of a thing. But there are a lot of interesting cases we have, in London, of brawls and fights, right? From medieval London.

Michelle:  Of course there are. People end up in the river.

Peter:  There are still a lot of the records that haven’t come out in translation. We do have the London Records Society that works on things like that. The Letter-Books and Plea and Memoranda Rolls, you can find this online through the British History Online…

Anne:  OK.

Peter:  … which is from the Institute of Historical Research in London. They set up a website, and you can look through, and they’ve got searchable records, so it’s really kind of fascinating. So, if you want to take a look, you can find all sorts of little crimes that are happening, and I’d love to go into the records these days because these are summarized, and we know in some cases these are nineteenth-century editors, and things like that, and they have been not willing to write some of the things that they would have found more unsavory.

Anne:  Yeah, the nineteenth-century transcriptions are very problematic. Yeah.

Peter:  But it’s still a lot of stuff. If you’re interested in medieval life, the City of London is chock full of records.

Anne:  I am delighted to know that.

Michelle:  I’m a little surprised about… I mean I’m finding it fascinating, the cheating bakers, because I would not have been surprised if you’d said, “Oh the guys running the taverns are cheating all the time, with the ale.” Because that clearly is a thing. We see that in the plays, in the Chester Harrowing of Hell, the only one that gets left is the alewife, who’s been cheating.

Peter: It might be because the bakers were so heavily regulated that it was very hard for them to make a lot of money.

Michelle:  Oh.

Peter:  A baker isn’t, like, say, a goldsmith…

Michelle:  Right.

Peter:  … that could get really rich, so bakers tend to be somewhere near the bottom.

Michelle:  Yeah. Grocery stores even now are really low-margin.

Anne:  And the thing is, if you’re going to cheat, if you’re going to have fraud and cheat with something that people are imbibing, if it’s alcohol, they are less likely to notice, after a while. You know?

Peter:  True. True.

Anne:  Whereas bread, you keep your wherewithal, actually.

Peter:  So for the city officials, this was something that they had to kind of keep an eye on more and more, I think, because it was difficult to know who was in your city, right? You have so many people coming in from outside, and so many people passing through, that you can’t just put trust in everybody. And you can see that their penalty for most things is a public shaming. The pillory, for the listeners that wouldn’t know, is you’re basically dragged to a kind of a central marketplace and your head and your hands are put into wooden clamps, right? And you’re made to kind of stand there. If you were a woman you got to sit on a little table, on a little chair. And I think John Lydgate, he writes a bit about people that are on the pillory, that it would be an opportunity for people to throw eggs at them. The idea was that you chuck eggs until they’re gilded nicely, I think. But mind you it’s not… it’s a punishment that lasts just, usually, an hour, but it made them foolish, and got people to know, “Hey, this is a guy not to be trusted.”

Anne:  Yeah, so it was uncomfortable, but really more the shaming is the point, huh?

Peter:  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Anne:  Michelle, did you have any other questions that we had left?

Michelle:  Oh, we were wondering… You’ve already mentioned The Book of Charlatans, but do you have other sources, if the audience is interested in knowing more about cons? Or, what is your plan for your research?

Peter:  Unfortunately I’m too busy to actually document… I might make a post about this sooner or later on Medievalists.net, or something like that, but I encourage people to take my research and find ways to get into it. There are some books about crime in the medieval world. Not enough, I think. I think you can certainly find a lot of interesting things to talk about, especially with the City of London. So, yeah, with me, the fun thing about Medievalists.net is I’m bouncing around from one thing to another, and I’ve got a nice big team of writers, and actually I get to learn about all sorts of things about the Middle Ages.

Anne:  Very nice. Very nice indeed.

So is there anything else that you want to tell us about the medieval con men of London, that comes to your mind?

Peter:  I would love to hear their own stories. I’m sure they have good tales to weave about it. It can be fascinating to just see what people made of… you know, what they actually thought about con men and cons and frauds, from a public level. Because we just get the local authority’s view of these things, and they’re not very happy, obviously. But were more people sympathetic with them? Or were cons really frowned upon within medieval society? Because the people are the ones losing their money and getting shafted out of a good pot or a good bottle of wine.

Anne:  But you know, the people who don’t fall for the con, the people, for instance, who did not take in the fake earl, probably enjoyed it a great deal.

Peter:  Yeah, I could see that. A city like London, it’d be a fun story to pass along, of this guy who was pretending… Like, who knows? Who knows the things that people got away with, right? Like, “I’m the Prince of England.” Right? Things like that. And medieval literature has these things. People that pretend to be others. Or try to do tricks. And they’re often heroes.

Anne:  The tricksters. Right. They are. The tricksters.

Peter:  Yeah.

Anne:  But there’s something, though, about the begging. And this is true nowadays, that you have to… You can’t just go and ask people for money. You have to have a reason. You have to be debilitated or, you know, have lost your tongue, obviously. Or you have to be down on your luck. You have to have a good story. There has to be a reason to ask for money. You can’t just say, “You know, I need some money.” So people are paying for a story.

Peter:  Indeed. Indeed. When I talk about these Arabic stories, there’s another one in a book I’m reading right now, also from the same publisher, New York University, called Impostures, and it’s a group of tales. I think they’re from the eleventh century. Basically involving a guy that was a bit of a con man. These are all different kinds of tales of him pulling off tricks. So there’s a lot of fun stuff there.

Anne:  And what form was this in? This is from the eleventh century?

Peter:  The book is called Impostures: Fifty Rogue’s Tales Translated Fifty Ways. It’s a twelfth-century Arabic classic.

Anne:  OK.

Peter:  The author’s name was al-Hariri, and it’s basically this confidence man. They’re all tales on their own, but they all involve the narrator coming across this other guy, and it’s various things. Sometimes he’s a good guy. Sometimes he’s a bit of a trickster. In one case he’s a preacher telling the crowd that they’re all going to go to Hell, and then they all give him money, and then he goes back and takes it and buys some food, and he goes back to his little house, and he’s living it up large.

Anne:  And this was popular literature.

Peter:  Oh yeah. Yeah, this is stuff like… This would be best-selling stuff.

Anne:  I think we love these stories. The bread, for instance, the false bread I’m horrified by, but I really like hearing about. But I notice that I was thinking about my bread, and where I get it, and how I know the bread’s OK, you know. Well this, that, and the other thing. I think we like hearing about cons. I don’t think we like being conned, but I think we like hearing about them, and that there’s some piece of us that believes that we ourselves would not get conned.

Michelle:  The popularity of the Robin Hood legends certainly suggests that medieval people were impressed with… Because he’s always pulling cons. He convinces somebody he’s somebody else, or he convinces them that he’s one of the monks. He’s always dressing up, he’s always pulling some kind of shenanigan.

Peter:  I think we see a bit of that in Canterbury Tales, I think.

Michelle:  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter:  You know, I think people like it when they fool the higher… Like, the nobility? You know, as opposed to… No one wants to get fooled, but if you can fool the King, you get some respect. You get some street cred.

Anne:  Or if you can fool the miller. People like… You can fool the miller into thinking there’s a terrible flood coming so that you can sleep with his wife. That’s also a good story. No, we like cons.

Peter:  I think many people like a good trick.

Anne:  Yeah, and so we punish it when you get caught. You have to be a trickster who gets away with it, but yet we know that it happened. It’s a very, very hard line to walk, I would think. Because if we know the trick has happened, then we might well have caught you and put you in the pillory.

So have we got anything else, or shall I bring it on home?

Peter:  I think I’m good.

Anne:  I think we’re good. We are so happy.

So that has been our discussion, with Peter Konieczny, who knows so much about medieval con men, and has caused us to think about modern ones too. And so thank you so much for being here. It was lovely to have you.

Peter:  Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure.

Anne:  So that’s our discussion, and this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. And this particular episode was one of the examples of absolutely like they are today, but with less technology. Although, I don’t know, the moulding board sounds pretty… That’s pretty evolved.

We’re on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. Anyplace you can listen, we’re there. Please leave a review. We’d appreciate that. And you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find the Show Notes, which are written by Michelle, the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach us all through the webpage. And you can leave comments! We’d love to hear from you, and if you have medieval crimes you think we should discuss, please let us know, and we’ll take it under consideration.

And so, that’s all for us. Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

Anne:  You want to say bye, Peter?

Peter:  Bye!

Christmas Episode: The Murder of Thomas Becket, Canterbury 1170

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen, your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  And it’s Christmas! This is our Christmas episode. We didn’t have a specific Christmas episode last year, because, apparently, we were very foolish and did Gilles de Rais instead, and that was really a Halloween episode, actually, on account of its godawfulness. But we’re having a Christmas episode now.

Michelle:  This is a much better choice.

Anne:  Yeah, because it happened at Christmas. It’s all about Christmas. Now, it’s still murder, you know. You know, peoples’ brains all over the floor of the cathedral. But at least it’s happening at Christmas! And so it’s therefore applicable.

Apparently my parrot is going to be very exercised. He isn’t all the time, but we’re back in lockdown, and so Laura’s working at home, and so the parrot is all excited, because he might see Laura at any moment, and so, therefore, he has to call to her in his parrot voice. She’s not listening, but we might get to hear him. So, if that’s in there, that’s Popper, the parrot. He adores Laura.

It’s snowing here, by the way. Is it snowing where you are? In Maryland?

Michelle:  No, it’s chillier than it has been, you know, hitherto. It’s in the 40s. We generally don’t start getting chilly weather here until into December. We end up, usually, mowing the grass for the last time over Thanksgiving. And, indeed, we did this time.

Anne:  We had snow way early. It was in October. We had a real downfall that you could send the corgis out in, and they could make little snowplow things. Which was very unusual for Albuquerque in October. It’s not a humongous snow that we’re having, but it’s cold! It’s been really cold. We’ve been annoyed. Why is it cold? I’m in the desert, dammit!

So, it’s Christmas, and so we’re going to talk about the murder of Thomas Becket, the saint and martyr, and so that’s what we’re doing. Yay! And we’ve been looking forward to this, because this is one of the things we actually kind of… it’s always in our minds. It’s in the back of your head, always. You know about it, but details! Very different. And so.

Becket was born in December 1119, and he died on the 29^th of December, 1170, so he was 51 years old at his death. And we have this astonishing number of contemporary accounts. Some biographies—a bunch of biographies—and then a bunch of just him being mentioned in chronicles. It adds up to twenty—twenty!—contemporary mentions or biographies.

Michelle:  That’s wild! The number of sources.

Anne:  Unbelievable.

What? “Hear, hear”? The parrot is saying “What’s up with that? Hear, hear.” 

At any rate, lots of them. And he was a Londoner. He wasn’t a peasant, but he wasn’t of high birth. His father was a merchant. He became a wealthy merchant, though he fell on some financial hard times. But he was pretty wealthy at the point at which Thomas was born. Thomas got some education in the schools there, and also he had a year in Paris, but he didn’t have a lot of education in law, at that time, and he never became fluent in Latin. I found that fascinating. Had you known that?

Michelle:  I knew very, very little. I’ve mostly bumped up against Becket in the context of other things.

Anne:  Like, “Let’s go to Canterbury, because we’re the pilgrims?”

Michelle:  Exactly. Yeah. It’s the background thing for so much else of medieval English culture, but it wasn’t one of those things that I ever looked at directly. So it was pretty informative. I learned a lot!

Anne:  Our favorite thing about doing the podcast is we learn so much.

He moved up in the household of Theobald of Bec, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury. First he was his clerk, and then later he was an emissary to Rome—and at that time he did study some canon law—and he served in some ecclesiastical positions, and he finally got recommended, by Theobald, to Henry II, to be the Lord Chancellor. And that was 1155.

And you were telling me that you had heard something else? You had been taught something else?

Michelle:  Well yeah. One of the most interesting bits of this whole thing was finding out that the version of this I’d been told as an undergraduate is basically fictitious. I’d been taught, as an undergraduate in my medieval history survey, that Becket was basically Henry’s drinking buddy, and a fellow knight, and that when the archbishopric came up empty, Henry installed his buddy, thinking that this would be a way to exercise power both over the secular affairs and also, then, to bring the Church in under his control. And that is not true.

Anne:  No. Becket wasn’t a knight, and even at the point at which he became Chancellor, he was already a cleric.

Michelle:  Yeah!

Anne:  No, he wasn’t a knight. As far as we know he did become drinking buddies… but that’s later. He’s Chancellor. Yeah.

Michelle:  There’s a couple of reasons I think this happens, where that particular legend comes from, but we can talk about that later. I started to read the biography of him–that I had found to read–and it was, like, what?

Anne:  Who is this guy?

Michelle:  This has nothing to do with what… I was lied to! I was told lies!

Anne:  Is this not the 1964 movie? Oh my God! Oh well.

Michelle:  I had a really good undergraduate, and then of course graduate, education. And so normally when I’ve been told things, it might be incomplete but it’s not flat-up inaccurate.

Anne:  I’m so sorry, but that was flat-up inaccurate. Just flat… But the thing is, it’s a nice story. You know? The reality is actually fascinating enough, I think. Movies with Burton and O’Toole, it isn’t. C’est la vie.

So Henry II. This is Henry FitzEmpress. Henry was born in March of 1133, and he had been King for a year, at the point at which he made Becket his chancellor.

Henry was King as a result of the end of the civil war between his mother, Matilda—Empress Matilda—who was the daughter of Henry I, and Stephen of Blois… You remember him? He’s the guy who didn’t get on the White Ship, and therefore actually survived everybody drowning?

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  Because he wasn’t there for it.

Michelle:  The biography of Becket, that I read, starts with the White Ship.

Anne:  The White Ship is awesome.

Michelle:  To set up why Henry ends up being… it’s the long-game biography.

Anne:  That’s a very long game. But for those of you who haven’t heard it yet, our podcast about the White Ship, it’s one of my favorites, if not my absolute favorite, because it’s all about the worst teenage drinking party in history. Because usually teenage drinking parties do not lead to civil war, but that one did.

Stephen of Blois was the grandson of William the Conqueror, in other words…

Michelle:  Sorry, can I throw one little interesting tidbit…

Anne:  Absolutely.

Michelle:  …connected to the White Ship, out?

Anne:  Please.

Michelle:  Henry I, the one who… it sets up the civil war because his only legitimate male heir dies in the White Ship, the seventeen-year-old William? Henry I had the most illegitimate children of any English monarch.

Anne:  That he knew of. Yeah.

Michelle:  He had twenty!

Anne:  And he recognized them all.

Michelle:  Yeah, twenty acknowledged.

Anne:  None of whom could become the ruler of England, on account of this whole legitimacy thing, which was way important in the royal patriarchy. Sometimes you have to have civil war because you’ve allied yourself to stupid concepts, but hey.

Michelle:  Charles II comes down in history as a libertine. He only had 14!

Anne:  Loser!

Michelle:  There’s Henry I, flying under the radar, with his twenty illegitimate children.

Anne:  Well Matilda was actually legitimate, and Matilda and Stephen of Blois were first cousins, if you look at your little genealogical charts. You’ve got to go find them, I’m not going to stick this one up there. I gave ya’ll the genealogical chart for the Great Controversy for Scotland, but that was because it was so complex. No, they’re first cousins, and so there you are.

So he was the grandson of William the Conqueror through Adela, who’s Henry I’s sister. And the war had continued after Matilda. The war had continued between Henry and Stephen, and it had finally ended in 1153 with the Treaty of Wallingford where, among other things, Stephen named Henry his heir, over his sons. So that’s how the civil war ended. That Stephen was King, but then he passed the throne on over to Matilda’s son. Great.

Michelle:  And his kid Eustace dies at twenty-four, so it turns out that…

Anne:  This was a good deal. Really, I mean, in terms of governing England it was probably the best thing. Although the civil war, I swear, the civil war had lasted from 1135 to 1153, and England needed a lot of reconstruction, and so that’s what Henry II had inherited. Because Stephen died, like, a year after the treaty, and there you are! With England just completely destroyed. East Anglia, the Thames Valley, the southwest of England, devastated. Coinage was in disarray, because everybody was coining their own stuff. The Welsh and the Scots, not surprisingly, had got a bunch of territory back while all of this was going on. The Royal Forest law had collapsed. It was just really… things were in really bad shape.

Michelle:  And people had seized a bunch of property from the Church.

Anne:  Yes. People had seized a bunch of property from the Church. Which annoyed the Church.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Sideline there: Those of you who enjoy either the books or the TV series Cadfael…

Michelle:  Oh that’s right! That’s right!

Anne:  As I say it. That’s not how they say it in the show but, hello, it’s Welsh. Cadfael is set in the Anarchy—what the Victorians called the Anarchy Period—the civil war. So yeah, that’s one of the things he’s dealing with, is the back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

At any rate, so Henry II inherits that. There’s no more back and forth, back and forth war in England, yay! But there’s just a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be reconstructed.

So, besides warring with the border countries—because he has to get Wales and Scotland into order—and bringing secular issues into order, Henry also—this is another thing—Henry also wanted to take royal government relationships with the Church back to what they had been before the civil war, under his grandfather, Henry I.

The Church had, across Europe, been building autonomy from the secular governments. That had been going on across Europe. And having clergy be subject to ecclesiastical law rather than secular law was a big part of this. A really big part of this. For me, that’s kind of like the kernel of what’s going. That Church power and secular power are being kind of… Iconically, this has to do with legal issues. There’s Church law, and there’s secular law, and one of the ways… Sometimes this wasn’t really in conflict. Like, if you murdered people, in general, secular law! They got you. If you stole things from the Church, Church law! They got you. But there was an especial area of contention, which was that clergy were to be tried—according to the Church—were to be tried under Church law rather than secular law. And this was kind of… this could get annoying. Because, let’s say you had a clergyman who committed murder, and you’re the secular people, and you would like to execute him. Things like that. Maybe torture him first, I don’t know. But execute him and, you know, take his lands away. But he’s a clergyman, so the Church tries him, and they excommunicate him. Yes they do! And take away his benefice. Well, big deal, according to the secular… They really wanted to be able to get him to… You know, No! No! Murder! But he’s a clergyman, and so therefore he’s subject to ecclesiastical law. 

And, not only that, you’d think, OK, well, what? This is some priest. Big deal. No, no! If you’re a cleric, you count as a clergyman. Which means, basically, that all the educated guys—they’re all clerics because that’s how you get your education—that’s like, about a fifth of the men in England, are not subject to secular law. This annoyed the King.

Michelle:  And it has ramifications down to now. Because you ended up with—which I’m sure we’ll cover in another episode—tension in university towns because you had all the students running around, and they’re basically not subject to the same laws that the townspeople are. And of course, to this day, universities have a tendency, when something happens on campus, to want to deal with it internally, you know? If you have somebody accused of something dreadful, they don’t just pick up the phone and call the cops. They usually try to deal with it internally, and it absolutely comes from this habit of being able to basically run their own courts, that is inherited.

Anne:  Yeah, if there’s a fight on campus, well we might suspend you but we don’t necessarily call the police. Yeah. Rape… this is often an issue nowadays on campuses. Like, excuse me, why didn’t you call the police? Well, we were trying to solve it internally. Because we’re essentially medieval, except, you know, for all… No. So it’s that, and the oral defense of the dissertation, are the ways in which the universities are still medieval now.

Michelle:  Regalia. Regalia is fairly…

Anne:  Oh. I’m sorry. Yes. The regalia. Since mine’s made out of polyester I forget that it has medieval roots. Oh yeah, right, regalia. Mine’s polyester, and it has gold braid, because California! It’s really, really impressive.

Michelle:  I don’t have mine anymore. When I retired I got rid of it.

Anne:  Oh, did you sell it?

Michelle:  I sent my hood to somebody else who graduated from the same place, who hadn’t been able to buy it.

Anne:  Because that’s expensive stuff.

Michelle:  Since she was still working, yeah, and might actually be participating in a graduation or some such, and I wasn’t. It didn’t make any sense to keep it here.

Anne:  That was good. That was good of you. It’s expensive stuff.

Michelle:  Kinda is.

Anne:  At some point we’re going to cover at least the Cambridge Riots, because those are fun.

So, Becket became Chancellor. And when he became Chancellor, he and Henry became close friends, although perhaps not as close as Burton and O’Toole, in the 1964 movie, which Michelle will be telling us about later.

And when he went to Paris, in 1158. He went in a procession that was filled with luxurious items. He liked splendid clothes. He liked lavish furnishings. He liked lavish food. He led troops in war. He negotiated royal marriages. He gave extravagant receptions. He was absolutely part of that secular royal culture. And at that time he sided with Henry in conflicts with the Church. All of which sort of made him, from Henry’s point of view, an excellent replacement for Theobald of Bec, who had become the Archbishop. So when he died… and Becket, by the way, did not attend the deathbed of the archbishop who had been so helpful to him, which was really, really tacky but, at any rate, he didn’t do that. But after Becket became Archbishop he wasn’t an ordained priest, he wasn’t a monk, he was just merely a cleric. I think it really seemed, from Henry’s point of view, an excellent choice for Archbishop for someone who would go along with him, who would be connected to him, who would be in with his plans. It makes a whole lot of sense. But what happened is not what Henry, or actually anybody else on the planet, I’m pretty sure, expected.

Becket became Archbishop of Canterbury in May of 1162, and he was ordained a priest in June, less than two weeks later. He then resigned the chancellorship and he changed his lifestyle completely, becoming an ascetic. He did. That’s what he did. No more extravagant receptions, no more lavish clothes, except when he had to wear his archbishop stuff. And no more fancy food. He became his idea of what the Archbishop should be. Too bad for Henry. Oh well. Because he no longer supported the King in his struggles with the Church. Because now he was the Church! He was no longer a chancellor. 

Now you can see how this would make… since nobody expected this. Nobody expected it. 

He took back some lands that the archdiocese had lost. He got in the way of Henry’s collecting money for sheriffs. He excommunicated a royal tenant who hadn’t let him install a cleric in a church, and in October of 1163—so this is, like, a year and a half after he becomes Archbishop—at a council at Westminster, the English bishops stood with Becket and refused to violate canon law despite any ancient English customs, and so the King took away Becket’s honors and… and this is a big deal… he took his son Henry, the young king, out of Becket’s household, where he had been being raised in Becket’s custody. So it’s a real blow, and it’s very clearly the end of the friendship.

But the Pope wouldn’t take sides. And in a few months—this is in January of 1164—the King called the bishops and the main barons to a council at Clarendon…

Michelle:  Because the Pope has his own problems at this point, because there is a German-backed anti-Pope.

Anne:  Where is the German-backed anti-Pope living?

Michelle:  In Germany, I believe. 

Anne:  Silly me.

Michelle:  I don’t know. I didn’t look that up. Frederick Barbarossa has his own ideas about who should be Pope, so he has his own candidate…

Anne:  And Barbarossa, I mean, he’s another incredibly formidable medieval legendary king. Yeah. I think that if I had to go head to head with either—like, I had a choice, Frederick Barbarossa or Henry II—I actually would choose to fight Henry II, even though he is so scary. Because Barbarossa? Even more. Just saying.

At any rate, Henry called the bishops and barons, and there’s a council at Clarendon, and he demanded that the clergy swear to uphold the damn ancient customs of the damn Church, as they had been under Henry I. “Let’s go back.” It’s nicely retroactive. But the bishops and Becket, after there were some threats and whatnot, they finally agreed to the Constitution of Clarendon. OK.

That August, Becket was arrested for trying to leave England for France, without royal permission, which was a violation of the Constitutions of Clarendon. So he was found guilty. There was a court proceeding. He was found guilty of ignoring an earlier court summons, which was brought by a nobleman. And he was found guilty of overspending when he was Chancellor, which I think is sort of unfair because wasn’t Henry having fun too? And he was found guilty of not observing the Constitutions, and he ran. He went into exile in France, at Pontigny. And his clerks and family and servants went into exile as well, and the clerks lost their benefices.

By the way, while he was gone he was still Archbishop, but he wasn’t in England, and so the Bishop of London, who was Gilbert Foliot, took over the Church business. This becomes important later because Foliot will appear again.

So things went on. Went on and went on and on. In the spring of 1166—this is a couple years later—Becket excommunicated a bunch of Henry’s clerks and advisors. The King and Foliot, whom I mentioned earlier, held a council in June of 1166. They sent letters to the Pope and Becket demanding that the excommunication be lifted, and the King also told the Cistercian Order—because Becket was hanging out with them at Pontigny—that he was going to throw the Cistercians out of his lands if they didn’t send Becket away.

The Pope sent legates, and he sent letters. None of them helped any. This went on and on for four years. In late 1167, Henry made some compromises, but Becket wouldn’t agree. This went on and on and on. In April of 1169, Becket excommunicated Foliot, the Bishop of London—you remember this—along with some nobles, some other ecclesiasticals, some royal officials, without any warning, even though the Pope had asked him not to escalate matters. The English bishops didn’t help Foliot, but he was absolved and reinstated by the Archbishop of Rouen.

So Foliot’s an archbishop, and the Archbishop of Rouen reinstates him. OK. And absolves him. So, do remember that. This comes up later.

You were supposed to get a warning before you got excommunicated, but Becket said that this was special circumstances. Foliot said it wasn’t special circumstances. I mean, I don’t know. What the hell.

Then, escalation! In June 1170, Henry, the young king, was crowned King. The Capetians had done this. I mean, obviously he’s not really King, because his dad’s not dead, but he’s been crowned as the next King. He’s like a junior king. He’s going to die before his father does, so this is going to come to nothing, but at any rate he was crowned at this point, and he was crowned by the Archbishop of York, even though it was Becket’s right to do that, because he was the major prelate because he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. And the Pope allowed Becket to bring an interdiction on England, and so this was kind of scary, because interdiction means that, like, the whole land doesn’t get to have any religious things whatsoever, because, it’s like you’re so bad that it isn’t just your King gets excommunicated, no, no! Nobody can do anything. It’s interdict. It’s a very, very scary thing. So the King negotiated with him, and Becket came back to England in July of 1170. Although he re-excommunicated Foliot and some other ecclesiasticals. That was the final straw. It was the last straw. Becket said he couldn’t absolve Foliot because… Becket said that he could absolve two of the three people he’d excommunicated, but he couldn’t absolve Foliot because Foliot was an archbishop, and so he could only get reinstated by a Pope. Although you remember, Foliot had earlier been reinstated by the Archbishop of Rouen. 

So, Foliot appealed to the King, who was exasperated, and he said, at Christmas—this was at Christmas—he said something. He said something, and four of his knights went to murder Becket. And that was on the 29^th of December, 1170. 

So, more on the murder later. Let’s stop now, and consider what it was that he said. Because here’s the deal: We don’t actually know.

Michelle:  It’s interesting to have this one right after the Albigensian Crusade, because these are probably Number One and Number Two Famous Quotes to have come down as having supposedly been said in the Middle Ages. Last time we got, “Kill them all! God will know his own!” And that one probably did get said. 

Anne:  Oddly enough.

Michelle:  But this comes down to us that Henry said, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” And, at least the sources I was reading said he probably…

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  …didn’t say that.

Anne:  No, he didn’t say that. He said something. And we have several versions of it. You remember we have twenty mentions, and we have many contemporary biographies of Becket. Exactly what he said, we do not know.

Michelle:  Yes. I have some information about this.

Anne:  Oh, do tell us the information about that.

Michelle:  “These words,”… Sorry, now I’m quoting from the bio I was reading:

“… generally assumed to have originated with Lord Littleton in his History of the Life of King Henry II, begun in 1767. These words…”

That quote that I just used? “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”

“… were first used by Thomas Mortimer in the opening volume of his New History of England, published three years earlier.”

So it’s eighteenth-century.

Anne:  OK, so that’s the eighteenth-century version of something that got said…

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  … in the twelfth century. OK.

Michelle:  Yes, and it comes down to us as what Henry actually said.

Anne:  It seems reasonable that he said something along the lines of, “How come I’ve got all these people around and none of them are helping me with this guy?” You know. That’s the general structure of what he said.

Michelle:  He’s known for temper tantrums. At one point he gets so angry he starts chewing on straw.

Anne:  Like, a big hunk of straw? Or just one?

Michelle:  It was described as “straw.” It wasn’t clear whether it was one or… I mean, I was envisioning it as kind of a mouthful. Like, “I’m going to chew on this rather than say what I’m actually thinking because I have that much self-control left.”

Anne:  Yes, I like that picture. Let’s go with that.

Michelle:  But he was known for just… you know, he would fly off the handle. And the bio that I read—which is by a real scholar—it’s called Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel and it’s by John Guy. It’s from 2012. He’s a real scholar, but he’s more of a Tudor scholar, and this is him going back into something he finds interesting. And it’s written for Random House—rather than a scholarly press—so it’s quite well informed, but it’s deeply under-footnoted. So he will say such and such a thing, and I’m, like, OK, how can I go find…

Anne:  Where is this? Tell us your source.

Michelle:  And the only time footnotes are provided is for actual quotations, rather than, you know, citing of information that I would like to have gone to find.

Anne:  Oh well.

Michelle:  A little bit irritating. But generally speaking it’s not a bad book at all. Particularly if you know nothing whatsoever about Becket, because it’s very readable, since it’s written more for a general audience.

Anne:  So we recommend it as a readable biography, and not stupid.

Michelle:  Yes, although you will be frustrated if you say to yourself, “Where did you get that information?” And if it’s not a direct quote, good luck with that.

But he says that these four knights, who go off and kill Becket, are not part of Henry’s inner circle. So they’re not there enough to realize that Henry’s just flying off the handle, like normal. They take him seriously.

Anne:  I had not realized that, and that actually matters. That matters a lot.

Michelle:  Yeah, so they don’t understand that this is totally normal behavior for Henry to start screaming like this. Everybody else knows, just stay away from him until he calms down.

Anne:  Right. And then we’ll see what it is. He was quite brilliant, so it wasn’t like he made stupid decisions all the time. This was a thing he said. Yeah. And he was very angry. And Becket—as you can tell by the very consolidated little history that I have just given you—Becket was really annoying. Very, very, very annoying. The re-excommunicating Foliot. Oh for the love of God! Of course… Just stop it. Stop it!

Michelle:  One of the sources for that misinformation that I was talking about earlier—about Becket just being this uninformed bozo who Henry II puts in because he’s his drinking buddy—apparently comes from Foliot.

Anne:  Well, it would, wouldn’t it? Because Foliot really, really was also very pissed at him, all the time. Yeah.

Michelle:  So Foliot wrote up his version of events, but it was lost for a long time, and it was only rediscovered in the twentieth century, and so the first few scholars working with it didn’t realize this guy had skin in the game, and they were taking him seriously, as an objective… just kind of a guy there, recording what he saw, as opposed to somebody who absolutely hated Becket a lot.

Anne:  “The third or fourth time I was excommunicated I discovered that he was really stupid too.”

Michelle:  “This guy knew nothing!”

Anne:  No, Becket was brilliant. Becket was really, really brilliant. And he was really charismatic and, you know, he might not have had an enormous education, but he was really good… he was really good at arguing. He was formidable in his own way. But he wasn’t the King of England, who had a bunch of people hanging around, including four really misinformed knights. Really, really, really misinformed. 

And so they were: Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton. So, all Norman knights, as usual. And we have five eyewitness accounts to the murder. That’s amazing. That’s more than we get for murders nowadays, you know. “How many people saw this? Not me. I wasn’t there.” 

Michelle:  Clearly there was alcohol involved here.

Anne:  I have heard that. Do you have any evidence of that? Because I have heard that, and God knows it makes sense.

Michelle:  John Guy’s biography says that they almost certainly were liquored up before they went in there. And indeed they do not make good choices, because they can’t get him alone, so there’s no plausible deniability.

Anne:  No. The only way in which this murder is effective, is that Becket dies. Other than that it’s a really stupid thing, the entire way. But we’ve got five accounts.

When they got to Canterbury—because this was on the 29^th of December, 1170—when they got to Canterbury, Becket was actually at the Archbishop’s Palace, and the knights wanted to arrest him and there’s, like, no go. Becket wasn’t going along with that. And the monks urged him to get into the cathedral for refuge, because that’s sanctuary, because, as you remember—like, for instance, when we were talking about Robert the Bruce killing John Comyn at the altar, you know—you’re not actually… well, really you’re not supposed to murder people at all, but you’re really not supposed to murder them at the high altar of any church. It’s, like, so wrong. They must have been drunk.

At any rate, so, he went to the cathedral for refuge and safety, because the monks convinced him. The knights burst into the cathedral. “Where is Thomas Becket, traitor to the King and kingdom?” Apparently they said, which seems reasonable to me. And they tried to drag him away, because they actually did want to kill him outside of the cathedral. I will grant them that. But Becket held on to one of the pillars. Oh, I love this picture. So, Becket’s like, “No. Staying here.” And so one of the knights sliced off the top of his head, and then two of the other knights attacked him. He was dead by the third blow.

So, yeah. They did try to get him outside, so that they could kill him outside, but they didn’t manage it.

Michelle:  And there were other… One of the people there, one of the eyewitnesses, in trying to protect Becket nearly had an arm severed.

Anne:  One of the monks, yeah. Yeah. We have his account. Now, does he have skin in the game? Yeah, sort of literally! But yeah, we have his account.

The body was left there, at the high altar, and people collected blood. You know, they’ve got little vials, and they dipped cloth, and they were collecting blood immediately. Immediately is how quick this idea that he was going to get sanctified… That’s how quickly. This was like… he’s a saint and a martyr, you know? And they knew it.

The monks buried him in the crypt that night. They were afraid that somebody would steal the body. And of course it’s at that point that they find out that he’s been wearing a hair shirt, which, you know, had, like, grown into his skin by that point. And now, the story comes down to us that he became Archbishop, he became a priest, he put the hair shirt on that early. We don’t actually know at what point in the trajectory of his being Archbishop he started wearing a hair shirt, but it had been awhile. It had been awhile. Because it was not a tidy sort of hair shirt such as you had just put on. He had been wearing it a while.

Michelle:  There’s a description in the biography that he was also wearing “monastic undergarments,” and I was wondering if you knew what that meant.

Anne:  I do not, actually. Unless what they’re talking about is hair underwear, because I’ve heard, also, that he was wearing hair breeches.

Michelle:  I was not familiar with that term. So, I assume it’s some sort of penitential and uncomfortable…

Anne:  Yes. It’s at the very least coarse cloth, if it isn’t actual hair. Either one is going… it rips your skin off.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  But it’s a way of being continually reminded of the need for spiritual strength, and continually reminded that you are a spirit living in a body, that you have to be paying attention to not trying to live your life in ease. As one was, when one was Chancellor, and going around eating all that nice stuff, you know? So it makes sense as a piece of his asceticism, but we don’t know when it started. But it made a big impression on people, because nobody knew. Nobody knew.

Michelle:  Yeah, I enjoyed the description… I hadn’t heard the description of him holding on to the pillar, so as to not get dragged out, and that was pretty interesting.

Anne:  Yeah, he didn’t intend to die. I’ve seen very courageous stuff, you know, courageous things he said which may or may not be true. I don’t think he was a coward, but he didn’t intend to die. A part of a fierce fight is refusing to be dragged out of the damn church. You know? No. Not going. No, they killed him.

Yeah, I liked the picture… because the pictures are all, like, he’s kneeling at the high altar, you know? Kneeling. But I’m thinking not. 

Miraculous healings started ensuing immediately. The monks opened up the crypt so that pilgrims could visit. More miracles. And he was sanctified in February of 1173.

Michelle:  Yeah, it was a fast-track!

Anne:  Very fast canonization. You could visit and get healed, because he was really big on healing miracles. And you could also, when you were doing a little pilgrimage there, you could buy little bottles of St. Thomas’ water, which was holy water mixed with some of his blood. This was very healing.

Michelle:  I read—not in the biography I don’t think, but somewhere else—that there was such a booming business in those that there was a specific side-gig for getting the little bottles back and melting them back down to reuse them. Like, there was somebody whose job that was.

Anne:  For recycling the bottles for the St. Thomas’ water. 

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  Oh, I love it. 

Henry himself, in 1174, walked to Canterbury barefoot, and visited the tomb and the crypt, and allowed himself to be whipped by the monks because he was so sorry. So sorry. But by that time, the King was back on good terms with the papacy, he’d allowed appeals to the Pope, he’d eliminated some customs that the Church didn’t like. All of Becket’s excommunications had been absolved. So much for that. They all got to, you know, not go to Hell immediately. 

But as to the knights. The knights ran. I guess… I don’t know… Immediately? After they sobered up? How quick was this? I wish I knew.

As someone familiar with the ravages of alcoholism, I want to know how quick did they go to that castle? But they went to the castle that one of them owned, and they stayed there for about a year. Henry didn’t take their lands, but he wouldn’t give them any help. And they all got excommunicated… duh. And they went to Rome to seek absolution, and the Pope ordered them to go to the Holy Land and work there for fourteen years. They were supposed to visit the holy places barefoot, and they were supposed to wear hair shirts, and even after they’d been there, they were supposed to live as hermits all their lives, and none of them came back to England. They all… if they didn’t die on the way to the Holy Land, they died there. None of them came back. So much for them!

In terms of the Church/Crown controversy, I consider it kind of a blip. The Church/Crown controversy had been going on across Europe for quite some time. It would continue. But there was an immense effect on English lay religious life. Just immense and, as I say, almost immediate. Becket became an extremely popular saint. Pilgrimages to Canterbury were a major industry. And doesn’t that only make sense? Because, you know, you could go there instead of the Holy Land. Guess which one is easier and cheaper? But that was a major industry, until Henry VIII destroyed the relics and the shrine.

London adored him, because, you remember, he was the son of a merchant, and so he’s one of the patron saints of London. There were churches dedicated to him across England. And his veneration went beyond England. The Scottish King, William the Lion, had actually known him when he was a child, and so he built an abbey that was dedicated to him. Henry’s daughter Eleanor had married the King of Castile, and the death of Becket impressed Spain, and there’s a church named after him in Salamanca. Becket had known one of the archbishops of Hungary when they were both at school, at Paris, and so there’s a district, in the city where the archbishop was, named after him. It was just, you know, it made an enormous impression. And it continues. The amount of popular art that we have about Becket rivals Joan of Arc, really. It’s an enormous amount.

And I think that there’s… it really captures, I think, the imagination. Partly because you have these two really brilliant, really stubborn, powerful guys going up against each other, and that is… Who have been friends! You know, so that in itself is interesting. In a lot of ways it’s like, later, Henry VIII and Thomas More. That kind of story, where you have people who fall out with the King and do not come to good ends. Death ensues, in both cases.

Michelle:  I found everything about… because it’s such a dramatic story, I wasn’t surprised to find that there is an awful lot of drama about it.

Anne:  Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Because it’s, like, inherent. Inherent in the story. “Let’s go drinking! OK! Now I’m going to put on my hair shirt. Oh my God!”

Michelle:  Yeah, it is so intensely dramatic, it’s not terribly surprising that you end up with dramas, because you have a lot here that is visually… For something that is about whether the Church gets to be its own boss or whether the King is actually the Church’s boss…

Anne:  Inherently boring!

Michelle:  I mean, at one point they’re having this giant, you know… As people are trying to negotiate between them, the sticking point is whether Becket is going to add a phrase when he swears to Henry; “Saving my honor.” Right? “I’m going to obey you except in all the ways that it would go against my honor to do so.” Henry loses his crap about that. That phrase sounds to him like it’s license for Becket to just do what he wants.

Anne:  Well, knowing Becket, yes!

Michelle:  Yeah. But for something that feels, at its content, so esoteric, it’s actually all about these personalities, and how nobody’s backing down, and how you have the shifting politics changing how the people around them are behaving, you know, because Pope Alexander, sometimes he is like, “Yes! Stand up! Don’t ever back down!” And sometimes he’s, like, “Can’t you just work something out? Because I have problems of my own.”

Anne:  Because Barbarossa!

Michelle:  Yeah. And Becket is so frustrated, because the Pope is giving him mixed messages. 

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  So there’s all this drama, right? But there’s also places where there’s not drama, and it’s really interesting. So, there’s all this modern drama. Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes a play about Becket.

Anne:  OK, wait. OK. Wait. Do we have any other plays by Tennyson? They’re not coming to my mind.

Michelle:  Yeah, he wrote Arthurian plays.

Anne:  Oh, I thought he wrote Arthurian poetry. Oh. OK. All right.

Michelle:  Hold on, let me look it up. I didn’t check to see about other plays.

Anne:  Here’s my real question: Does he know anything about drama, and how to write for the theater?

Michelle:  OK, so, I’m going to say I have no idea about that, but he did write three plays.

Anne:  Oh, OK.

Michelle:  He wrote a play called The Foresters which… I have no idea what that’s about. One about Queen Mary, and one about Becket, which sounds, to me, like he has recusant sensibilities, or is fascinated by the Catholic past, or something. His play about Becket was not performed until after his death, but there’s not very much time in there. It’s like 1888 to 1893. But it’s the last role for Henry Irving.

Anne:  And remind everybody; Henry Irving.

Michelle:  You know, this really famous nineteenth-century actor.

Anne:  There you go. Because all our listeners absolutely know who Henry Irving is.

Michelle:  I think he’s mentioned in Cats.

Anne:  Oh is he? OK. In that case, I take it back.

Michelle:  I think that the theater cat talks about having, “I’ve acted with Irving, I’ve acted with Tree.” Which is an interesting connection, right, because Cats is by T.S. Eliot, and T.S. Eliot wrote one of the other Becket plays, Murder in the Cathedral, which I have seen, but it was a million years ago, so I remember nothing. It was being done in a church, actually, in downtown Pittsburgh. So it must have been twenty years ago, probably.

Anne:  So Tennyson wrote a play.

Michelle:  He did! About Becket. And T.S. Eliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral, and then we have a play from 1959—that is the source for that 1964 film, that we were talking about earlier—that is originally written in French.

Anne:  Oh, I didn’t know that!

Michelle:  Isn’t that interesting? There’s no possible way I can pronounce this last name.

Anne:  We let it go. There’s a French play.

Michelle:  Yeah, yeah, there’s a French play.

Anne:  We’ll put it in the notes.

Michelle:  And in that version, Becket has become a Saxon, and so it’s using the tension between the native English and the Normans as a part of the tension between them.

Anne:  OK, so that has nothing to do with reality whatsoever, since he was a Norman.

Michelle:  No.

Anne:  Good God. OK. But, at any rate, so that’s what the 1964 movie is based on, and that’s a hell of a movie…

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  …of course, because it had both Burton and O’Toole in it, so it has a big impact on peoples’ understanding of Becket.

Michelle:  And there’s a play from 1999 that focuses on the killers.

Anne:  No! I would love that! I don’t know about that. That sounds like fun.

Michelle:  Yep, it has a pun in the title. It’s called Four Nights in Knaresborough, and it was staged in London in 1999, and it recounts the aftermath, after the four of them make “the worst career choice in history.”

Anne:  That is so true! It really was!

Michelle:  So he is a lot like Joan, in that, in the land of art, he’s never really left. Despite the very best efforts of Henry VIII. Henry VIII hated Becket.

Anne:  Do you know why? Oh, the Church controversy. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yes. Because Henry II, at one point, was so angry about this impasse with Becket he said, “You know what? I’m done with all of ya’ll. I’m going to start my own Church. We’re breaking off from Rome.” And that whole thing gets stopped in its tracks by the murder of Becket. So I think Henry VIII hates him because, you know, “I wouldn’t have had to deal with this!”

Anne:  It would have been so much easier to have a… yeah, done figured out earlier. Fair enough. Fair enough.

Michelle:  And he goes on a rampage to get rid of anything to do with Becket. So churches are renamed, his name is scraped out of manuscripts. You can only see his name in some of these manuscripts under UV light.

Anne:  I did not know that part. I knew that he destroyed the bones.

Michelle:  He destroys the altar. He burns the bones. He has him declared a traitor, hundreds of years after the fact. And he successfully gets rid of every piece of medieval drama about Thomas à Becket. Because we know that it existed. We know from the records it existed.

Anne:  We have no script.

Michelle:  We have no script. We have some records. We have one record from London. I’m on thebecketstory.org.uk—which is a scholarly, collaborative project to try to have a bunch of information about Becket—and they have this one record from 1518 about a play that was put on about Becket by the Worshipful Company of Skinners.

Anne:  And it makes sense. I mean, of course you’d expect to play in London. Of course. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yeah. And the website thinks that probably it’s just an accident that we don’t have… No, not an accident! It was a deliberate act of getting rid of everything connected to Becket. This one just snuck through.

Anne:  That we have the record, even the record? OK.

Michelle:  Yeah. Some interesting legends grow up around Thomas `a Becket, one which is really fascinating that his mom was a Saracen princess.

Anne:  She wasn’t. She was some London lady descended from Normans.

Michelle:  She was… Yeah. She was…

Anne:  Now what is that about? Why would…? Isn’t that interesting.

Michelle:  So there’s this whole legend that his father was a merchant in the Middle East, and got captured by a sultan, and the sultan’s daughter falls in love with him on sight, and so she helps him escape, but then she decides to come after him, and follows him to London, and is wandering around London knowing only one word of English, which is “Becket,” trying to find him. That is a hilarious story.

Anne:  Not true. And, like, not even remotely having anything to do with any kind of reality such as might exist at all, so yeah. Very good.

Michelle:  But you know what’s really, really entertaining about that legend, from my point of view, is I just read a book called Enemy of All Mankind, that is about a pirate, and that same legend shows up connected to that pirate. Not that his mom was a Saracen princess, but that he was captured and then this princess… you know he’s captured by, I don’t know, a sultan, and the daughter falls in love with him and helps him escape, and then follows him back, and then they get married. It’s the same legend.

Anne:  So this is a moveable feast of a legend, which happens to get connected to Becket.

Michelle:  To Becket.

Anne:  OK. Fair enough.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  It’s a silly legend, but OK. What else? What other legends have we got? You said here were some? That’s your favorite, yeah?

Michelle:  That is the big one. Well supposedly, you know, his mom experienced various miraculous things while she was pregnant, showing what he was going to be. You know.

Anne:  As usual. Yeah.

Michelle:  But that clearly is part of the play, because the record has details about paying, you know, so, “Eighteen pence to Richard Matthew for playing Gilbert Becket and for his clerk both nights.”

Anne:  And so the mom is… yeah. His parents are part of it.

Michelle:  Yeah, so she’s showing up in the play that we have. And it’s apparently being done on a pageant wagon, because we also have a record of them renting a pageant wagon.

Anne:   OK.

Michelle:  In 1518.

Anne:  But do we know it to be… Is it in conjunction with any other plays, or is it solo? Do we have any idea?

Michelle:  It was done at midsummer, so probably there are other plays going on.

Anne:  Surely so. Surely so. Because you have enough time to actually put a bunch on.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:  And London’s got the wherewithal to do it. All right. Fair enough.

Michelle:  Yeah, we don’t know as much about this as I would like. The website says that this was one of the… That this was a civic drama that’s being done on moving carts, which implies that it’s actually not just one play. That you have bits of his life being told, like we have in the other civic cycles, like York.

Anne:  Right. Right.

Michelle:  So that’s kind of a big deal, if Becket has, essentially, his own kind of mini-cycle going on in London.

Anne:  It would make sense that he did.

Michelle:  Yeah. For sure.

Anne:  As a patron saint. Yeah.

Michelle:  But the earliest record we have of a Thomas play is in—and at this point I’m now over with Cliff Davidson’s The Saint Play in Medieval Europe—is in 1384 in King’s Lynn.

Anne:  I love King’s Lynn. This is where Marjory Kempe is from. So what’s going on in King’s Lynn?

Michelle:  We have the chamberlain’s account books, and there’s money paid for The Interlude of St. Thomas the Martyr.

Anne:   OK.

Michelle:  It’s three shillings four pence…

Anne:  That’s a lot of money.

Michelle:  … that was paid for that. And it might have been connected to the Guild of St. Thomas, that had been there for about a hundred years.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  There was a fifteenth-century procession in Norwich that we have records for, focusing on St. Thomas. In Suffolk, there’s for sure a St. Thomas play in 1505. There’s a play in—this one’s kind of interesting because this is after this isn’t supposed to be happening—1539! That’s a year after Henry VIII’s rampage, so these people are bold. They have a play.

Anne:  Where was that? Where was that?

Michelle:  That is in the Suffolk town of Bungay, and that’s in the churchwarden’s accounts.

Anne:  Yeah, we have good churchwarden’s accounts from Bungay, that’s true. Yeah.

Michelle:  And they… that’s… given Henry VIII’s angriness, I’m impressed with their…

Anne:  I am too. Yeah. That shows some kind of courageous dedication. They did not want to give that up.

Michelle:  Canterbury and London are where the biggest… Which makes sense, that those would be the biggest centers for Becket dramatization. Including, at Canterbury, they appear to have a whole big dramatic production. We also have records implying that it was being done on wagons here, although that seems… I’m not sure how that would work because it’s also possible maybe some of it was done in the churchyard? I haven’t quite worked that… The records seemed inconsistent to me, about that. But there’s a record for the stage effects that are really cool!

Anne:  No! And what are they using? What are they using? What did they do?

Michelle:  This is very exciting.

Anne:  It is exciting.

Michelle:  We have lots of records for how much things have to get washed, and the bags for the fake blood, and the fake head, so they can actually chop off the top of his head and have stuff come out.

Anne:  Right. Right, right. Of course you would want to do that. Yeah. 

Michelle:  It’s so gory, and there’s so much record of, “And now we’re having to wash that again.”

Anne:  So you had to pay the washerwomen for the stage effects.

Michelle:  Yeah. And there’s a painted mechanical angel that moves on wires, and somebody was paid for “Turning the contrivance.”

Anne:  Where did they get the mechanical angel? Did they say?

Michelle:  Nope.

Anne:  Did somebody in the town build it?

Michelle:  We have no idea. We’re not fully certain what it’s for, whether it’s being used to welcome him to Heaven. Davidson thinks that what it is—based on a piece of artwork—that it’s the angel coming down to hand off a scroll to the surviving monks.

Anne:  What is the scroll supposed to be saying? Do we know?

Michelle:  Hold on, let me see if I can find the specific artwork he’s talking about.

Anne:  Yeah, what scroll? What are we talking about?

Michelle:  Oh, “Quite possibly the mechanical angel represented this unearthly choir that appeared from the heavens.” So the important… he’s looking at a glass which is now in the Chapterhouse of Yorkminster, in which there’s an angel appearing with a scroll, two monks are grouped below it, with a book on the desk, and it’s… he doesn’t say what would be in the scroll, just there is a scroll.

Anne:  There is a scroll. The angels are giving a scroll that tells the monks something. We don’t know what. OK.

Michelle:  I don’t know. 

Anne:  Like, “Make a shrine.”

Michelle:  We’re lucky to have any of this.

Anne:  We really are. There must have been so much more that doesn’t survive, is what this tells me. 

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  You know?

But yeah, I think the scroll probably says something like, “Now make a shrine and put his holy underwear in it,” you know? Things like that.

Michelle:  The super goriness of at least the Canterbury productions is pretty interesting to me, because we definitely know that from the records, that they are doing a no-holds-barred production. Davidson said, “The wounding of the saint in the head, utilizing the false head worn by the actor, would not have been a scene for the squeamish.”

Anne:  No. It would have been about being gory. And that, I think, holds with not just the stories and the legends, but what happened. It was very gory, it was very awful, and it was quite uncalled for, you know?

Michelle:  And it’s interesting. Henry VIII hating on this so hard, because he participated, you know. Before he brought the Reformation to England, he participated in required trips to the shrine, asking for favor for various things—when he marries Anne Boleyn and stuff—so he’s participating in that, but he is doing so under duress, apparently.

Anne:  I don’t know. Henry was really very devout. I mean, when he turns, he turns, but he really was a devout Catholic before he became the leader of the Church of England.

Michelle:  He goes after Becket in particular.

Anne:  Well, you know how it is. Sometimes when you fall out with someone you really love, or an idea that you really love, you become quite vicious toward it. Kind of with Thomas More? Kind of with Anne Boleyn!

Michelle:  That’s probably one of the reasons he hates Becket so much, is More.

Anne:  Yeah, More and this… Henry spent a lot of emotional and physical energy on repudiating things that he had loved that were no longer of use to him, or that he felt to be betrayals. I mean, I would… Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, hello. Not to mention Catherine Howard who was, like, really not nearly as important, but was… that poor little thing. She was a foolish young woman, that Catherine Howard. But, at any rate, yeah, so I’m not surprised at all. I don’t see it as any kind of odd thing that he would have been someone who, as all the medieval English did, more or less, venerated Becket, and then became someone who reviled him. That makes sense to me. That’s in line with what we know of Henry.

Michelle:  It’s another reminder of how much we lost, because he chose to destroy it.

Anne:  Yes, he destroyed a lot of things. This is true. He destroyed a lot. And then other people came by and destroyed more. Outside our time period. Yeah.

So you were going to tell us… So those are the plays. You told us about the plays. Were you going to talk about the movies? Because then a bunch of the plays, like… because we get tired of plays. We’re in the twentieth century. We want movies. Movies!

Michelle:  I don’t have a lot to say about the… OK, so here’s the thing, I don’t remember Murder in the Cathedral. I started watching Becket. I had meant to do it yesterday, and then I kind of had this moment of, “Wait, hold one second, isn’t there any medieval drama about this?”

Anne:  Oh yeah, so you fell into the medieval drama rabbit hole, which is really actually more…

Michelle:  So then I had to go off and find that, so I started watching some of it and it’s… gosh… OK. So, here’s the thing. I watched the first ten minutes, and it’s not that I wouldn’t go back and watch it, but I’m going to have to be in the right frame of mind, because, in the first ten minutes, it starts with Henry going to Thomas’ tomb and stripping partially naked in preparation… Because this is part of his penance, you know?

Anne:  Uh-huh.

Michelle:  But it ends up being this kind of obviously… OK. So here’s the thing. The film…

Anne:  I’m enjoying this way too much.

Michelle:  The film, as discussed, says that one of the things that’s going on is exploring the tension in their relationship.

Anne: Sure.

Michelle:  Now, it’s becoming clear to me that Hollywood, in the first half of the twentieth century, is dealing with topics it’s not allowed to talk about—much the way Elizabethan playwrights did, about stuff they weren’t supposed to talk about—by setting it in the past and being able to talk about it there.

Anne:  Uh-huh.

Michelle:  So, every time they want to have a homoerotic relationship, they set it in the Middle Ages, apparently.

Anne:  Well there you go. Yeah. Because you’re very far away.

Michelle:  Because this is not the first time this has happened. 

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  It happens a lot. We can… I mean, goodness gracious. That Douglas Fairbanks Robin Hood is eye opening, because it’s not even pretending to be subtle.

Anne:  Yeah, if you put things in the Middle Ages, then it’s OK, because that’s a whole other land of people who are in no way related to us, and not at all like us, and so therefore doing things that we would never do. Ever.

Michelle:  I mean, I’m not, like, prudish. I’m not shocked, or anything. But I was a little, tiny bit shocked that in a movie made in 1964, the very second scene after the first scene of Henry saying, “You remember, we had good times! Why is it that we ended up fighting, Thomas?” And it transitions to the two of them in bed together with a girl.

Anne:  Really good times, Thomas! Great times!

Michelle:  1964 ya’ll? Really?

Anne:  Oh hon. I was around for 1964. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Michelle:  But, I mean, really, it’s Richard Burton, so who doesn’t love Richard Burton? Richard Burton is playing Becket, and I think he probably does really capture the kind of personal magnetism that Becket showed, and brought to bear on all of his relationships.

Anne:  Yeah, Burton’s wonderful.

But, yeah, so, the thing is, could it have been true that Becket and Henry II were having fun times where they were sharing women in bed? It is possible. Do we have any evidence that this happened? No. No, we don’t. Not any at all.

Michelle:  We don’t, and the biographer that I read said that after the tension is happening between them, if there was anything at all they could throw at Becket to try to discredit him, that they would have brought those stories out.

Anne:  Oh sure. Sure, sure. They would have used it. “Besides, what Becket used to do was…” blah, blah, blah.

Michelle:  Right.

Anne:  Although then you would also be talking about the King, so I don’t know if that would have worked very well.

Michelle:  You don’t have to name names. You can just throw mud.

Anne:  That’s true. You can throw mud sloppily rather than precisely. You are correct in this. Yes. Yeah, if you go over to Wikipedia there’s, like, a humongous group of things, ways in which Becket gets translated into popular books and things. Murder in the Cathedral is wonderful. It’s really good. Of course it’s Eliot, so hello.

Michelle:  It is really interesting that Murder in the Cathedral and Cats are written by the same person. He’s such an amazing poet. And, of course, The Wasteland. Oh yeah. Burying the lede.

Anne:  Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday. I love Ash Wednesday.

Michelle:  He’s so good.

Anne:  Well, so. So do we have anything else on this, or have we hit the end of our Thomas à Becket?

Michelle:  It’s not surprising that this is one of the topics that later generations keep coming back to, because it’s a way for them to talk about themselves, right? By talking about it through the lens of the conflict between these two. I mean the content of what they’re fighting about isn’t nearly as important as the fact that you have these two really strong personalities, and that’s something that doesn’t get old. It’s a pretty human conflict, so we keep coming back to it. Although there does seem to be a time period in which nobody is allowed to write about Becket, at least not plays. There is one play that I found, post-Reformation, like for two hundred years? And guess who it’s by? You’ll never guess. I hate this guy. John Bale.

Anne:  No, no! No! Not John Bale! No! No! No! No!

Now explain to our beloved listeners why the hell we don’t like John Bale, because that will not be obvious to many.

Michelle:  So he has a play in which he basically is talking about all the awful things that Thomas Becket did wrong. 

Anne:  Of course.

Michelle:  Yeah. Because his goal in life—he’s a Protestant, a pretty fervent Protestant in the 1530s—and his goal in life is to rewrite all of medieval drama, only to do it properly, from his point of view.

Anne:  Yeah, meaning non-Catholic.

Michelle:  It’s not Catholic, and there’s no confusion whatsoever about who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. So as a consequence his devils are very, very boring, and the plays are boring, because evil is not given a fair shake.

Anne:  Right.  And the thing about evil, if you’re going to believe in things like evil and Satan and demons and stuff, is that, obviously it seems to me, if you are going to believe that evil is seductive and you have to be careful, then evil kind of has to be interesting, and not just boring. Because otherwise people are all, “I don’t care about you. No, I don’t need to eat the cookie. Go away.” No. You have to have some kind of pull. You have to have a real temptation, you know? You can’t just make evil lose out completely. No. No. 

Michelle:  Yeah, I was not… Well, I was a little bit surprised that it was John Bale, but then not, really.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Because…

Anne:  Because it’s OK, at that time, because he’s making it clear that Thomas à Becket was wrong, and not a good person.

Michelle:  But, really, it’s quite a long time before the English are ready to dip a toe back into that.

Anne:  Yeah, the English relationship to drama gets pretty damn vexed, doesn’t it just? Not in our time period. We’re the medievalists. We have lots of drama. We can do this in our backyard.

Michelle:  I did not find any other play after 1538—after Henry VIII went after Becket—I did not find any other play about Becket except for John Bale’s, from there until the closing of theaters in 1640.

Anne:  Except for that one in, what was it, Suffolk?

Michelle: Yes! Yes, yes. The people who are taking their lives in their own hands, that Davidson is listing.

Anne:  So, but not one from then until after…

Michelle:  Which makes the profusion of them that’s happening in the late nineteenth and then into the twentieth century pretty interesting. It gets picked back up and handled quite a lot.

Anne:  I think that that conflict between the two powerful men, I think that that’s of high interest, but I think that, at the core of it, is this idea of betrayal. You know, that it isn’t just that it’s a conflict between two strong men, but that they were once allies. Once they were allies and now they are enemies, and that is… That is a very crucial story for the humans, the story of betrayal.

Michelle:  Yeah, it has to be that, because the actual thing they’re fighting over isn’t that universally interesting. You know, is the Church going to be the boss, or is the King going to be the boss? 

Anne:  Yeah, most people nowadays: “Bored. Bored, bored, bored.” No, we don’t care. That’s really not the point. So that’s why it comes down to us now in plays and movies that focus on character.

Michelle:  So yeah, I learned a lot. I enjoyed finding out about all the stuff that I didn’t know about any of this. Pretty interesting.

Anne:  Next time we meet, we are going to be doing that… We will say, “Now for something completely different.” We are going to have a guest, who will be discussing conmen. Cons in medieval London, which is awesome, and we know nothing about, so we’re really looking forward to talking to him. And that will be coming two weeks from now. But this was your Christmas episode. Merry Christmas! Do not celebrate Christmas by going and committing bloody acts of stupidity in your local church. It’s just not good. It’s wrong.

Michelle:  Well, I mean, really, you’re supposed to stay home, as a general principle.

Anne:  Oh yeah, that’s right! We’re on lockdown. Damn, I forgot.

Michelle:  But even if you were allowed to travel, don’t go to a cathedral and kill somebody.

Anne:  No, just don’t do it. Just say no.

Michelle:  It’s not the thing to do.

Anne:  We had Thanksgiving at home. American Thanksgiving came and went, and we were by ourselves. Did you stay home, Michelle?

Michelle:  We always stay home for Thanksgiving.

Anne:  You know what I like to do on Thanksgiving? And I didn’t get to do, this year? We’re down the street from the Indian Pueblo Center, and I like to go. The Indian Pueblo Center has a big buffet every Thanksgiving, and I like to go down the street for Thanksgiving and give the Pueblo Indians my money. Because that seems to me totally reasonable and, plus, it’s really good food. I get the enchiladas. Laura gets the turkey. Everybody’s happy. But for Christmas, also stay home. I miss my son. I haven’t seen him in a long, long time now.

Michelle:  Aww.

Anne:  Yeah.

Well, so that’s our discussion on Thomas à Becket, saint and martyr, murdered at Christmastime. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We’re on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. Any place where you can find podcasts, we’re hanging out there. Please leave a review. We’d just really love that. And you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, and you can find the show notes there, which are written by Michelle, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can get a hold of us all through the webpage. And you can leave comments there. We’d love to hear from you. And if you have medieval crimes that you think we should discuss, please let us know, and we’ll take them into account. And that’s all for us. Merry Christmas and bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

Albigensian Crusade, Languedoc, 1209-1229

Anne:  Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. Sometimes very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America. Where, for the first time in months, I’m getting to record in my own office because, for some reason, nobody in my household needs this room today. So I’m here, but I have a disapproving cat watching.

Anne:  So, are ya’ll on lockdown? Because we got shut down.

Michelle:  We went back to kind of a lockdown-lite. Governor Hogan started that up two days ago, I guess. Where restaurants have to close at 10pm. So we’re not on lockdown, exactly…

Anne:  Yeah. Yeah.

Michelle:  … but my plan to drive out and see my mom in December is probably not…

Anne:  Oh.

Michelle:  … gonna happen. 

Anne:  I’m sorry.

Michelle:  Iowa and Illinois are both on the list of places you really ought not to visit right now.

Anne:  Right. Right.

Well, for a while, New Mexico was, like, the New Zealand of America, and we were great. Now, not so much, and so we’re, you know, we’re overloaded and so our governor has shut us down. So, unless we’re essential businesses, we’re closed. And so restaurants closed, although you can still do curbside and delivery. You don’t want to eat outside because it’s now cold, because, you know, high desert and November. So no more eating outside.

Michelle:  I think I would like, some day when we’re allowed to travel again, to come there when it’s not summer.

Anne:  Yeah, you were here in the summer. Yeah.

Michelle:  It was quite hot when I was there.

Anne:  Yes it was. 

You know what’s really, really best is the fall. The fall is a wonderful time to come. Yeah. October, really good. Yeah. And then you can drive up and see the aspen. Because we don’t generally… like, we don’t have all that red stuff that happens in, like, New England and Pennsylvania and whatnot, in the fall. We go yellow. The yellow aspen is, like… the whole mountainside will be golden. It’s fun. At any rate. So, here we are.

And, yeah, so, today we’re talking about the Albigensian Crusade. We’re having kind of like a… we talked about the People’s Crusades last time, and they were, like, mobs of people slaughtering the Jews of Europe, and finally, you know, getting decimated on their way to the Holy Land, which they never got to. 

The Albigensian Crusade. Not the people. No, no. This is princes, and it’s Church-backed, and so there’s money behind it, and military forces. Mobs are really bad. You can do a lot of damage, though, with military and horses and things like that. You really can get a lot done. So.

The Albigensian Crusade took place in…not France. It is part of France now, but the Languedoc was not part of France at that time. It was Occitan. It had a different language, which language still exists, although it’s been illegal every once in a while, and they’ve tried to suppress it, but there are still people speaking Occitan, and so you can learn it.

But that’s who they were. They were not French. They were just, you know, they were an area that was, like, south of France. And this took place from 1209 to 1229. The military campaign was an attempt to suppress the Cathars, and that attempt actually lasted from 1022 to 1350, so this is a small piece of time in terms of the Roman Catholic Church trying to deal with the Cathars. More on that later. I will explain them. It’s a small piece in time, but it’s the piece of time that did the most damage to the people who were being Cathars, and actually anyone who was living nearby them, as it happens.

So, 1022, that was the first Church council that condemned the Cathars, and 1350 was the point at which the last remnants of the Cathars were gone, under the Inquisition.

So, I will explain the Cathars. Did you learn all about this, Michelle?

Michelle:  I did end up reading about them. Because I actually had heard, of course, of the Cathars, but I didn’t really know what the actual beliefs were, that were different than standard Catholicism, so I did do some reading about that.

Anne:  Great. So you can add in stuff too.

Yeah, the Cathars were… they were part of a multi-faceted movement that focused on spiritual reform of the Church throughout Latin Europe. That had been going on since the seventh century. It wasn’t like, you know, all of a sudden, in the later Middle Ages, like, “Oh my god! The Church needs reform!” No, no, no, no, no. This has been going on. And really what all of these threads had to do with, were people were having spiritual relationships with God that were not mediated by the Church.

Problematic for the Catholic Church!

So, movements were larger and smaller. Their leaders usually met violent ends. But the Cathars appeared in the Languedoc, so that’s south of France, in the eleventh century. We actually don’t know where they came from, where they originated. It came in from the east, but we don’t know exactly where. There’s discussion of this back and forth. But it was certainly influenced by spiritual movements that preceded it. And one thing that is really, I think, important; we don’t have many of their writings because, guess what? Burning them all and suppressing them. We do have a few, but mostly they were destroyed, so this is another example of a people that we do not know a lot about, except from their enemies. Always something to keep in mind.

But they flourished in the Languedoc, and northern Italy. The Albigensian name came because the town of Albi, in what’s now southern France. They were strong there so, hence, the Albigensian Crusade. And so, here’s what they believed. This is why they had to die… 

What the hell is wrong with the humans? OK. All right. At any rate, so, they had to die for believing these things.

They were dualistic, this is the main thing. Because dualism means that you are seeing the world as kind of caught between Good and Evil, instead of, you know, Good being completely supreme, there’s a kind of fight going on. And there’s this continual, then, opposition between the Good God, who created Spirit, and the Evil God, who created Matter.

OK, let’s think about the implications of this, because you and I are… I’m actually talking to you, Michelle, whilst I am living in a body, and I think you are too, right? Are you not?

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  Matter! It’s Matter. So it’s inherently evil, according to the Cathars.

So, we’re spirits that are trapped in material bodies, and so if we’re going to regain the angelic spiritual status that we had before we became human, we have to renounce the material realm. This is not easy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. This is just not easy because, you know, bodies.

They venerated Jesus, and they called themselves good Christians. They considered themselves to be good Christians. And they thought that Jesus, unlike us, was pure Spirit and he had a kind of… his physical body was, like, an illusion. It was, you know, it was just a pretend kind of thing. And, also, that he’d gotten that from the Virgin Mary, because she also was pure Spirit in a kind of illusion-body.

I love that. I think that so solves the problem of, “Is Jesus God?” You know? “Is Jesus spiritual?” Yes, he is. He’s just pretending in his, you know… he isn’t really caught in a material realm. He doesn’t have to worry about that. I love that. I find that so fascinating.

Michelle:  And, to be fair, even orthodox Christianity has to deal with how could Jesus be a real, full human, but not have original sin. So there’s an asterisk even in standard theology.

Anne:  Oh yeah. It’s a thing that has to get worked out a lot. It’s a mystery! One of the many.

So they considered the resurrection to be an evil idea—because of the whole body thing, and material—and the Cross to be a symbol of evil and torture. Which, actually, I mean… certainly an emblem of torture.

Michelle:  Yeah, I didn’t know, until I was doing the reading for this episode, that the symbol of the Cross, for Christianity, is a fairly new development.

Anne:  How new?

Michelle:  It really is starting to be popularized in the First Crusade, that we covered, tangentially.

Anne:  They’re wearing the Cross…

Michelle:  Right.

Anne:  And so then that goes into the popular imagination.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Fair enough. Interesting.

Yeah, OK, and we’re a little bit down the road, since we’re in the fourth crusade, which is the Albigensian Crusade.

Michelle:  Yeah, we’re just over a hundred years later, because that First Crusade was 1096.

Anne:  Wait a minute. It’s a hundred?

Michelle:  Well, it’s 1096. It’s a hundred and some, because now we’re in 1208.

Anne:  Yeah. OK.

Yeah, they also thought that John the Baptist was evil, because he was teaching baptism, which is a false doctrine, on account of it involved water, which is material and therefore evil.

You really have to think all this stuff through very carefully, you know. You can’t just say to yourself one day, “You know, I think I’m a dualist,” and then just, like, go about your merry way. No, no! You have to think out all the ramifications of all stuff, and they really had.

Michelle:  I was surprised. I mean, I had heard about the heresy, but I didn’t know that it was such an organized… that it had its own Church. That there was a whole hierarchy… I had no idea about any of that. That’s really fascinating.

Yeah, this isn’t, you know, random people kind of making shit up in the woods. This is a really…

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  … organized and long-term.

Anne:  This is an organized religion. Yeah.

Michelle:  There was a whole hierarchy, and churches, and it had been for half a century by the time anybody decided to, you know, get serious.

Anne:  Besides the fact that it was very popular and very organized, the people who were being Cathars tended to behave nicely, and so other people liked them. Do you know what I mean? They didn’t have a whole lot of enemies in the area.

Michelle:  Yeah, and sympathizers. Even if well-connected and rich people weren’t, themselves, Cathars, they really didn’t have a problem with their constituents who were.

Anne:  Right. Right, right. But you can see how, from the point of view of the Church, this was one of the more problematic of the heresies, because it was so organized. It had completely taken over areas of Europe.

Michelle:  I was also pretty surprised by the level of asceticism that is theoretically required.

Anne:  Yeah, also they adhere to the Gospels, but they considered the Old Testament to be evil, except for a few little parts. I don’t even know what they were. And they considered the Book of Revelation to not be about the future, but about the war between Good and Evil that had already been going on. And they considered—not surprisingly—the Roman Church to be completely corrupt. If you believed all these things, how could you not? And so Catholic sacraments were meaningless to them, and in many cases just simply evil. You know, Baptism with water? No.

They had one sacrament, which was the Consolation, which was a short thing and spiritual—didn’t involve any material stuff—it was a short thing. But it took away all sin, and so they often liked to have it pretty soon before they died, so as to know that when they died they would be in really good standing. But you could have it earlier, and live your life as a Perfecti, one of the Perfecti. That’s what you were if you had had this ceremony. And so then you had to, kind of, keep up this high level of renunciation of sin and material stuff. You had to keep that up, you know, the rest of your life. And so, you really had to be very well-behaved. You had to, like, not have sex. And mostly they didn’t eat meat. Mostly because they didn’t like killing. Very ironic in view of what was going to happen to them.

Obviously the Eucharist of the Roman Catholic Church, that was obviously false because the bread couldn’t possibly be the body of Jesus, and also bread. Material. Eh, wrong. And baptism can’t possibly be sanctifying and, you know, at any rate. Eating meat involved killing. They thought that executions were wrong. They didn’t believe in that. And they also thought that having children was problematic and, essentially, wrong, because it meant that there were more people, you know, more souls being kind of caught in the material realm. So they were in favor of celibacy, and once you had had the Consolation, and were one of the Perfecti, you were celibate, because duh.

And they thought that we’re repeatedly reincarnated until we renounce the material realm. Did you know that?

Michelle:  I had come across it in my research for this episode, but I didn’t know it before that.

Anne:  I had not known it before. I knew about the celibacy and the meat and the Perfecti and the not adhering to the sacraments. I know all of those things. But I did not know about the reincarnation.

Michelle:  But their behavioral… I mean it’s really striking to me, though, that they were considered to be necessary for a Crusade to wipe them out, because what their behavioral requirements are, are not so far off of some other kind of out-there Christian sects, right? We’re only a tiny bit ahead, in time, here, of St. Francis, who has some pretty out-there behavioral requirements.

Anne:  Yes. True. But in terms of theology, St. Francis did believe in the sacraments.

Michelle:  Yeah, yeah, it’s the theology, but in terms of how people are living their lives, I mean, this isn’t altogether different than the Amana Colony.

Anne:  And the thing is, if you’re living in a community with people, most people don’t care about what you’re believing. What they care about is how you act. And Cathars are acting great. They’re marvelous. It’s the Church that cares about what they’re thinking.

Michelle:  Which, I suppose, is probably why they were tolerated for so long. Because, you know, as far as the lords were concerned, they weren’t hurting anybody.

Anne:  No. No, and yeah, they weren’t. They weren’t actually hurting anybody, really, except, you know, the reputation of the Latin Church. And, of course, the Church Militant was being harmed. For more on the Church Militant, go back to Joan of Arc episode, wherein we explain it fully. “What is the Church Militant?”

They also thought—and this was unusual—they thought that women were as spiritual as men because Spirit has no sex. And so there were women… that was one of the things about women in the Cathars. You could be a preacher. You could be one of the preachers. You could be one of the Perfecti. The only thing that they thought was that your last incarnation had to be male. I’m not even really clear why they thought this, because it sort of doesn’t make any theological sense. I think that, it’s like, they got caught up in the misogyny of their era, but at any rate, other than that… Other than that, women had the same spiritual footing as men did.

Michelle:  Which is a big deal for the time period we’re dealing with.

Anne:  Yes, because women weren’t allowed to be preachers. Women weren’t allowed to preach. They had to get around it by different ways. A couple hundred years later Margery Kempe will get around it by saying that she’s just, like… the Holy Spirit is just speaking through her, and she can’t help it, so she never gets condemned for preaching. You can give advice. You can give advice.

Michelle:  Hildegard of Bingen, I think, is twelfth century.

Anne:  Yeah, but she’s not preaching so much, yeah? She’s writing. And she’s leading a convent.

Michelle:  When she does have to do anything public she always has the caveat of, “And this tells you how bad the situation of the Church is, that I have to be the one to point this out to you.”

Anne:  Yeah. But you’re allowed to give advice. See, that’s the thing. You’re allowed to give advice, if you’re a woman. You’re allowed to give spiritual advice, you just can’t preach. So please explain to me the difference here. I don’t think it’s always obvious. But, at any rate, yeah, no, the Cathar women were allowed to preach.

Michelle:  And it’s really different for Hildegard, who’s a nun, to be speaking in public than for random secular women.

Anne:  Right. She has some authority. 

Yeah, we have a whole lot of spiritual advice from medieval women. Héloïse writes a great deal. The saints. A lot of the saints write. But no, no going out in the street and preaching.

So, in summation, they led good lives. They were exemplars of good behavior. The popes, the Church councils, bishops, St. Dominic tried to suppress them. No go. So.

In 1208… so the Crusade’s not going to start until 1209 but in 1208 Innocent III sent a papal legate to Raymond VI. We’re going to hear a lot about him. He was the Count of Toulouse, and the papal legate was supposed to go excommunicate him for helping the Cathars.

Michelle:  I’m positive he is related to our Count of Toulouse, Raymond, Count of Toulouse, who showed up in the last episode as one of the people who signed up… Remember when Urban called for the First Crusade, one of the first people to sign up was Raymond, Count of Toulouse, and it must have been coordinated ahead of time? I think this must be his grandson.

Anne:  I haven’t looked at how they’re related but yeah, they’re related. It’s a nice powerful little place, Toulouse.

So, at any rate, the papal legate is supposed to excommunicate him for helping Cathars, which he did, and then he was, like, “Take it back.” At any rate, Raymond had him murdered, so the Pope called a crusade.

He tried to get the King of France—and so that’s going to be Philip Augustus—to help, but Philip wouldn’t help, because he was busy. He was busy with some other stuff. But he allowed Simon de Montfort and Arnaud Amaury to go, and so they got together—those nobles got together a force of about 10,000 soldiers, and whatnot—and they headed from Leon to Albi (hence Albigensian) They went to Albi, Carcassonne, Servian, Besièrs. They got to Besièrs—and so we’re going to talk about this a lot—they got to Besièrs in July of 1209, and they besieged the city. They demanded that the Catholics in the city leave, and they demanded that the Cathars surrender, and neither the Catholics nor the Cathars would do either of those things so Arnaud Amalric, who was the papal legate, is reported to have said, “Kill them all! God will know his own.” And he probably didn’t say that, but Michelle’s about to talk about that. But we remember it anyway. They slaughtered the city. Whether or not you were a Cathar, they didn’t care. They slaughtered the city. They burned it down. They killed Catholic clergymen at their altars. 

Yeah, Besièrs.

You had told me that you actually did some research about “Kill them all! God will know his own.” What did you find out?

Michelle:  I did. I looked at two different sources, both of which are pretty good. The other one that I looked at is a collection of primary sources, which, you know, is useful but doesn’t… it’s hard for a collection of primary sources to have an interesting personality, exactly. 

Anne:  Yeah, because it has an official personality.

Michelle:  Right. Mostly what it is, is an introduction, just in case you’ve randomly picked up a book about the Albigensian Crusade and didn’t know what it was, and you need a little, you know, twenty-page primer before you go off and read a bunch of primary sources that aren’t going to make any sense without it. 

So that’s fine, but one is Jon Sumption’s The Albigensian Crusade. This is a very kind of straight-forward… you know, it’s a little bit older, at this point, but it’s still in print and it’s still very… it’s not a bad jumping-off point because it was published originally in 1978. It’s not bad prose, but neither is it riveting, page-turning. I’m not going to say it’s unreadable, right? It’s not full of incomprehensible academic terms. Theory words. It’s not full of that. But it is, I would say, dry.

Anne:  And what is the use of a book, said Alice, without pictures or conversation?

Michelle:  The other one is—go here first, it’s fun—it’s called Kill Them All: Cathars and Carnage in the Albigensian Crusade. It’s by Sean McGlynn, and it’s specifically focused on the military tactics…

Anne:  Oh cool!

Michelle: … that are involved in the Albigensian Crusade.

Anne:  Oh cool!

Michelle:  So this was absolutely my favorite source…

Anne:  Oh yeah!

Michelle:  … that I spent time in, because there’s all this detail about the sieges and about the trebuchets…

Anne:  Trebuchet! Trebuchet!

Michelle: … and how long they spent here, and how tall the walls were, and how long it took them to get the trebuchets so that they could find their range and start smacking into the walls. 

Anne:  I love this stuff. I really do. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I love this stuff.

Michelle:  I enjoyed this a lot. He talks a lot about the sources. How we know about the Albigensian Crusade. So he talks about the different sources, but in particular—so we can come back to that, if we want—because he essentially talks about them, the three most important ones, as being almost like embedded reporters, like we were getting in Iraq.

Anne:  Ah!

Michelle:  Where you have people who are with the crusading armies, writing about what’s happening.

Anne:  Huh.

Michelle:  Either immediately or, you know, taking notes immediately and then writing it down afterwards. But it’s really interesting because those are very direct sources. That doesn’t mean they’re unbiased, of course, right? Because the guys that are with the northern crusaders obviously have a really different perspective on it than the southern ones that are being crusaded.

Anne: Right.

Michelle:  But I was very happy that he dealt with the question of whether somebody actually did say, “Kill them all! God will know his own.” Because that was something I wanted to know the answer to. Because I hear a lot of people say, “Oh that can’t possibly be true. That is an after-the-fact legend that somebody has made up.” And sometimes medievalists will talk about it like it was made up to make the Middle Ages look bad.

Anne:  Like you could make the…

Michelle:  As if!

Anne:  Well.

Michelle:  As if with just better PR you could make the Albigensian Crusade OK. 

Anne:  Yeah, no. No. No. “The Albigensian Crusade would have been great if they just hadn’t said that one thing.” Yeah, no. No.

Michelle:  Yeah, you know, it’s that one unfortunate sound bite that really tips it over the edge into awfulness.

Anne:  “How could you tell such lies about what was really, basically, a ten-year party? Getting to know your Cathar friends.” Yeah. At any rate.

So, is it in the primary sources? Did somebody say it?

Michelle: Yes! Actually.

Anne:  Yay! Hurray!

Michelle:  He deals with the fact… he says, you know, it’s one of the most infamous phrases to have emerged from the Middle Ages. For most historians it is entirely apocryphal. Just a colorful phrase invented for dramatic literary effect at a later date. However… and then he tells us the actual source it’s from.

Anne:  Which is what? What, what, what?

Michelle:  The phrase originates in The Dialogue on Miracles by Caesarius of Heisterbach, written in 1224.

Anne:  OK. So, not that long after. OK.

Michelle:  Not that long after it. And my author makes the point that this author, Caesarius of Heisterbach, is a member of the same Cistercian order as Abbot Arnaud, the guy who was supposed to have said this.

Anne:  Yeah, so he’s connected. Alright. Got it. Got it. Yeah, he has some authority. Oh my.

Michelle:  And he thinks that… my author here thinks that Caesarius… he’s not… sometimes this gets talked about as, “This shows up in this chronicle that’s written after the fact by this German monk,” and the implication is he doesn’t know anything about anything, he’s just making stuff up. But my author is making the point that, no, he’s part of the same order. It’s not that long after the fact. There were an awful lot of Germans who came to France to be part of the Crusade. It is highly likely that this guy is much more connected than what he’s typically given credit for. And my author also makes the point that it kind of in some ways doesn’t matter whether Abbot Arnaud actually said that, because that is absolutely what they did.

Anne:  That is what they did. That is what they did, and it makes total sense that they had some authority for it. 

Michelle:  Yeah, my author makes the point that, you know, this kind of slaughter of this many people doesn’t happen in five minutes. This is a coordinated, hours- and days-long event. If somebody wanted to stop the massacre, somebody with some authority, they would have had the time to do it. That this was a planned tactic… well he’s talking about it from the point of view of it being a military tactic. That it is, essentially, terrorism.

Anne:  Yes. Yes, yes, yes. There’s two things going on here, in my mind. One is that the Latin Catholics of the city, in refusing to go along with what the crusaders were demanding that they do, showed themselves to be in league with the Cathars, so therefore they no longer have… you could say that they no longer have the spiritual protection, the idea of spiritual protection that they would have as Catholics, because they had allied themselves with the Cathars. 

The other is—and more on this will become obvious later—it isn’t just that the Church wants the Cathars obliterated. It’s also that France wants the Languedoc.

Michelle:  Yeah. My military historian makes a big point out of this being a two-pronged war. You have the spiritual goal, but you also have this goal of conquest and that, essentially, it is an unholy marriage between two groups of people that have found that their goals will work together.

Anne:  Perfect storm. So why keep the Catholics alive when you have a pretend reason for killing them too, and you want to conquer the area? Yeah, that was Besièrs. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Michelle:  The other thing about that siege that my military historian talks about, that is just mind-blowing, is that it’s really odd to call this a siege because the city fell within about 24 hours of the crusader army arriving. And he thinks… his best guess, based on the sources, is that what happened was the guys inside made some bad choices with testosterone about going out in a sortie before the crusading army had really got themselves unpacked and set up, and they thought they were going to go out there and give them a lesson and try to scare them, but they underestimated how prepared they were.

Anne:  It was Simon de Montfort!

Michelle:  When they went out, when they opened the gates, they got out too far, and then when they tried to come back, they couldn’t get the gates closed.

Anne:  Oh. And so the crusaders just went in and slaughtered everybody.

Michelle:  Yeah. It fell really… I mean, we know for a fact it fell really, really quickly. The botched sortie is the military historian’s read of the best explanation for what’s happening in the sources.

Anne:  Fair enough. Fair enough. But it fell quickly and they just slaughtered…

Michelle:  There’s nothing… I mean, there’s no reason to call it a siege. The city fell before everybody had their tents up.

Anne:  No, they went and took Besièrs. They took Besièrs and they killed everybody.

They then took Carcassonne…

Michelle:  I’m sorry, before we leave this city, can we talk about the fortified church?

Anne:  Yes. Please tell us about the fortified church of Besièrs.

Michelle:  Because this is really interesting. I had no idea that this was even a thing, although now that it’s been pointed out, I should have guessed. The Cathedral of St. Nazaire, in Besièrs, was destroyed during the sack. But it was fortified. It was like a castle. It had arrow slits. This place was under attack so often—the city was—that the church was built so that in a worst-case scenario people could retreat to it and have a defensive position.

Anne:  Now, they… so it was rebuilt after the first siege?

Michelle:  Right, and the one that is there now was rebuilt in the same way. I pulled up a picture of it to look at it, and when you look at it, it still has really narrow windows. And crenellations on the top, which absolutely is not, usually…

Anne:  No, that’s not church-ly. Yeah, no. No.

Michelle:  That’s castle architecture.

Anne:  Yeah, this is the siege… they take Besièrs and the thing is, over the course of the next ten years, there’s going to be a lot of sacking. Besièrs is going to go back and forth, and so that’s what they… so they built the church to withstand that 

Michelle:  Yeah, the one that got built after the razing was built also for defense.

Anne:  OK, wait, I’m confused. The one that the crusaders sacked, was it built like a…

Michelle:  Yep. Yep, and then the one that was rebuilt was also built for defense.

Anne:  So who had been sacking Besièrs before the crusaders came by?

Michelle:  I’m assuming it’s local conflict among the various lords.

Anne:  Well, it didn’t do them much good, did it? I mean, there they were, in this church that was built like a fortress, and they got slaughtered at the altar. I don’t know.

Michelle:  That was a pretty big army, though. The army that was at Besièrs was probably 7000. It’s big.

Anne:  And it was well heeled. They really had… they had a lot of wherewithal. And it was also, I’m sorry to say, very well led. Simon de Montfort is an especially scary military leader. Yeah.

Michelle:  His wife is scary too. Crying out loud!

Anne:  What were you reading about his wife?

Michelle:  Alix de Montmorency is a dangerous human being. She was on board with what he was up to. She showed up at a later battle… he was about to lose until she showed up, leading a contingent of knights, to come and rescue him. 

Anne:  Yeah, you don’t want to mess with this group. Philip could not have found a better horrible leader to send. It’s really true.

So Besièrs was fortified, and it still did them no never-mind.

Well, the crusaders then took Carcassonne, which surrendered that August, and they forced the people… They didn’t slaughter the people of Carcassonne, they forced the Cathars—and perhaps, might have been, all the people—they forced them to leave the town naked. We have that in medieval art, Cathars leaving naked. They then besieged Lastours, and they got kind of hung up there. Lastours fought back. But they took Minerve in July. Simon de Montfort tried to convert the Cathar Perfecti, but there’s no go, so they burnt them all at the stake. But we are told that the process of burning… You know, it takes a while to burn people at the stake. The ones that weren’t burnt yet, walked into the flames. That’s what we’ve been told. Quite frankly, I have no reason to disbelieve that, actually. That sounds like something the Cathars might do.

Michelle:  Yeah, a hundred and forty people.

Anne:  They besieged Termes but the Cathars got away! They actually got away in that November, and in 1211 the crusaders—there had been a little rest and then they started in again—they finally took Lastours, and in May they took the castle that belonged to Aimery de Montréal, and they hung him and his knights, and they burned hundreds of Cathars. They took Cassès, they took Montferrand. They besieged Toulouse, but Raymond de Toulouse held them off, and then he went and liberated about thirty towns from them. So that is the beginning of Raymond de Toulouse fighting back. He’s going to be their biggest opponent.

OK, so, now I have to explain some stuff. Raymond de Toulouse was married to Eleanor, who was the sister of Peter II of Aragon, and the Cathars turned to Peter II of Aragon and asked for help. Peter tried to get Innocent III to stop the Crusade, and Innocent actually ordered Simon de Montfort and Peter to a council, but the Council of Lavaur refused to stop Simon or give Raymond’s lands back, and so Peter decided to fight. Peter of Aragon decided to fight, and so he allied with Toulouse. So, this is how Aragon gets involved.

Innocent denounced him, and declared the Crusade still to be going on, and then, so, in December of 1213, Peter and Simon met at the Battle of Muret, which would be the last major battle of the Albigensian Crusade. Peter II of Aragon was killed. The Toulouse forces were routed. Simon de Montfort occupied Toulouse. Raymond fled to England. Simon recaptured many of the places that Raymond had liberated, and in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council proclaimed Simon de Montfort to be the Count of Toulouse, but also called another crusade to the Holy Land, which sort of decimated Simon’s forces, because people left the Albigensian Crusade to go someplace else. 

Raymond came back from England in the spring of 1216. So, there’s fighting back and forth over various places, and in the meantime Pope Innocent III died. Raymond retook Toulouse, in September of 1217. Montfort besieged it, in 1218. Montfort got killed by a stone that was thrown by defensive equipment, at Toulouse, and we are told that… the tradition is that the women and girls of Toulouse were manning the defenses. Yay. So, we’re told that. I don’t know if that’s true, but we’re told that.

Did you find in the sources who says this?

Michelle:  I don’t think I got quite that far.

Anne:  So we don’t know. We don’t know.

So that was June of 1218. More crusades, more crusades. Prince Louis of France—who was later going to be Louis VIII of France but was only a prince just at this time—led an army, along with Simon de Montfort’s son… You understand we’re getting to the next generation…

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  … of leaders fighting the damn thing?

Michelle:  Yeah, it goes on for so long. 

Anne:  I know. It’s just not good.

Marmande fell in June, 1219, and everybody got massacred. Raymond VII—who’s the son of our other Raymond—he fought back. He retook all of Raymond’s lands by 1222. 1225, the Council of Bourges, excommunicates Raymond VII, the son of our first Raymond. I’m just repeating that in case you’ve gotten confused by the numbers.

They instituted an Albigensian tax, in France, to support more military endeavors. And Louis VIII—who used to be the prince who was fighting but now he’s the king—led new forces, which were the largest forces assembled so far to fight the Cathar allies, since the Cathars themselves weren’t fighting and, you know, it’s the Cathar allies who are. They re-re-re-captured Besièrs, Carcassonne, Beaucaire, Marseilles. No resistance. Avignon resisted for a while, but surrendered. No killings. Louis died and Queen Blanche of Castile, who was regent at that time, continued the crusade in the name of her son. Finally Toulouse was besieged again, the surrounding farmlands were destroyed. Completely destroyed. Livestock slaughtered. Farms burned. Everything plowed under. Raymond was offered a treaty, which would allow him to keep Toulouse, but he had to agree to fight the Cathars and destroy the defenses of Toulouse, and to give the Church all the rest of his property, and to marry his daughter Joan to the brother of the young French king—his name was Alphonse, if we care, which I kind of don’t. And then his daughter’s children would be his heirs, and so France was going to inherit Toulouse.

So, April 12, 1229, the Treaty of Paris, that’s the end of the Albigensian Crusade military phase. But, wait! There’s more. Pope Gregory IX instituted the Inquisition. Ah! Because we had the Crusades, now we have the Inquisition! So that was 1234, and it was focused on heretical movements and so that includes the Cathars, those that are still surviving. So Cathars who repented were… they had to wear yellow crosses. It’s just exactly like… if you want to envision this it’s exactly like the Crusaders’ cross, which was red on a white background. This is yellow on a white background. You have to wear it over your clothes. Sometimes they were forced to go on pilgrimage. Sometimes they were forced to go on crusades. I don’t know how that works, since they don’t actually fight, but whatever. Often they were whipped naked, in the local church, once a month. That would go on for a while. I wish I could tell you how long. I don’t know. Maybe until they were dead.

Non-repenters were imprisoned, and they lost all their property, and if you just completely refused you got burned.

The last of the massacres was in March of 1244, when Montségur, the last Cathar hold-out, was taken by forces belonging to the seneschal of Carcassonne and the Archbishop of Narbonne, in other words, military forces led by churchmen. And at that point more than 200 Cathars were burned, and that was the end of Catharism in any kind of large way. There were a very few people who continued to practice secretly. They got routed whenever possible, and it was over by 1350. 1350, that’s it.

Do you have anything to say there? Because I want to talk also about what the Albigensian Crusade did in terms of the Languedoc culture, but if we still are talking about the Cathars, then…

Michelle:  That’s a long time. 

Anne:  They were around a long, long time.

Michelle:  1350. That’s a long time.

Anne:  They’re gone now. If you were going to be a Cathar now, you’d have to reinvent it. There are no more. It’s gone.

Michelle:  It’s interesting that it’s mostly, you know, the south of France. It’s this area. It’s not really something that makes its way to England.

Anne:  No. Although it was in Italy. It was around, though, in that area, but no, it did not get to England. There’s no Cathar presence in England that I know of.

Michelle:  I know that there was a trebuchet at the siege of Minerve…

Anne:  Oh really?

Michelle:  … called “Bad Neighbor.”

Anne:  Oh was it called? That’s a good name for a trebuchet.

Michelle:  That’s the same name that a trebuchet that Richard I used at the siege of Acre, so apparently this was sort of a popular ironic name for great big trebuchets. 

Anne:  Do you know any other trebuchet names? I’d like to start collecting them.

Michelle:  Ooh! You know we talked about this actually with the Bruce, because…

Anne:  Oh yes! Yes, yes.

Michelle:  … Edward I has a great big… the “War Wolf.”

Anne:  Yes. The “War Wolf.” Yeah.

Michelle:  So clearly it’s a thing to have trebuchets. Of course my war historian—Right? The military historian?— talked a lot about the trebuchets, and how Philip Augustus was a strong believer in using siege engineers, and he paid them really well. He had people in his… not really following but not really army either, because they weren’t directly doing the fighting, who he paid 21 livres a day. Which is a good wage.

Anne:  That’s really good. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yeah. And it was their job to man the siege engines, and also to try to undermine the walls.

The engineering… I got really fascinated by the engineering involved in trying to take one of these castles.

Anne:  Well, if you Google for images of the Languedoc and Carcassonne, you see that this is a territory which is… there’s a lot of mountainous… a lot of these places are built up high, and so have a kind of natural defense in terms of how they’re situated. And so then there’s also the walls, and the man-made defenses, but this is a hard terrain. If you wanted to pick a terrain to defend, this would be a good one to defend. The crusaders were very, very… they had great military superiority, and Raymond de Toulouse, I mean, he did his best.

Michelle:  I think it’s Minerve that had issues with water. A couple of these castles that are built up on the rocks are really defensible, but water is a problem.

Anne:  That had not occurred to me. I’d only seen the layout in terms of the rock. I hadn’t thought of the water. But of course that’s going to be an issue. Unless you happen to have a source of water that’s coming down the mountain next to you. If you’re up above the source of water, that can be problematic.

Michelle:  Right. So, they have cisterns to collect rain.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  And I don’t remember whether it’s this one, or another, because I read about several sieges. One of them… is this the one that’s up on the gorge and they’re having to…? OK, yeah, this is this one. It has a well, kind of at the bottom, and so there was a tower to defend the well, but the besiegers went after that tower immediately, and managed to destroy the well.

Anne:  OK. Oh, of course. Of course.

Michelle:  And so, by that point, they were in some serious trouble for water, and were playing for time. They got a little bit of time when it rained again, is that this one? I feel like that might be a later siege…

Anne:  I’m looking up weather in the Languedoc, and what I’m being told is that the winters are rainy, but it’s basically 300 days of sun a year.

Michelle:  So you would end up with a real need to…

Anne:  You definitely need to conserve your water. Yeah.

Michelle:  I think it’s one of the later sieges where… yes, it’s Termes, where they stall and stall and stall, and then it rains, so they get a little bit more time. Isn’t this the one that actually is a siege, and goes on for months?

Anne:  There actually were some sieges.

Michelle:  Four months. Yes. It’s four months. That’s that one. Yeah, I read about so many sieges, they started being… I started having trouble keeping them straight.

Anne:  And there’s so much going back and forth, you know? How many times does Besièrs get recaptured? Four or five? I lost track.

Michelle:  And the things they do, I mean goodness gracious! The military historian makes the point that, even for the time period, the things that they’re doing to each other are extreme and horrific. There is one incident where Simon de Montfort has all of the knights blinded, except one, who has to lead the rest of them back. You know, the captured knights? And the military historian, who I enjoyed reading, makes the point that one of the reasons that the north of France really, really wanted to take over the south of France is that feudalism hadn’t really taken hold there. There were a lot more… I learned that there was a word that is the opposite of feudalism!

Anne:  And what is it?

Michelle: It’s allodial.

Anne:  Allodial! Ah, yeah.

Michelle:  And it means you hold your land directly, you actually own it. 

Anne:  Yeah, no, the rest of the Europeans wouldn’t have liked that. No, no.

Michelle:  And there was a lot of the south of France, in this area, that was allodial, where you own your land directly, and it made it really hard for the lords to try to get their armies together, because they had to pay them, as opposed to calling on them for feudal service. So Raymond’s hands were really tied. But that also, then, made the area very attractive, not only because it was economically—you know, it’s a rich area—but it essentially meant there’s all this land up for grabs. If you can kill off the person who owns it right then, you don’t have to deal with anybody else.

Anne:  Right. Right, because there are no feudal lords to get in the way.

Michelle:  And indeed, Peter II, getting involved, when they went after Raymond… that’s… what is his name…? There’s one that is… it’s a different lord, but has the same issue of being a vassal of Peter. And he’s young. He was only 24 when they… and he ended up being captured, and put in prison, and dying. They basically put him in prison, and he dies there. He has two names and one of them is Raymond. 

Anne:  And he’s a vassal of Peter’s?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  So Peter’s annoyed. OK. Fair enough.

Michelle:  Right. Exactly. Raymond Roger! Raymond Roger of Carcassonne. It’s not the same as Raymond of Toulouse.

Anne:  OK, no, and I don’t know of him. OK.

Michelle:  And he was only 24. He tries to surrender, when they show up, because they’ve just done horrific things at Besièrs. He tries to surrender, and it’s not clear whether… it’s actually not clear whether he shows up trying to surrender, or whether he comes to a negotiation meeting and they’re just like, fuck it, and grab him, and throw him in prison, right? And go back to the city. You know, whether they betray him, or whether he has actually shown up trying to surrender. But at any rate, he disappears from the scene. They just…

Anne:  No. I knew that they had taken Carcassonne, after they took Besièrs, but I didn’t know the story. Oh, that’s awful.

Michelle:  One of the points that the military historian makes is, this is exactly what John I of England just did to Arthur, and then to the wife and child of William de Braose.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:  So he’s talking about how, you know, they’re all learning these bad behaviors from one another, because essentially what they find out is how much they can get away with…

Anne:  Yes. Yes.

Michelle:  … and then somebody else takes another step. “Oh, well we can get away with that!”

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  It sounded very familiar, actually.

Anne:  What she is talking about, with King John, is that at least twice, that we know of, he put people in prison and let them starve to death, rather than…

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  I mean, then you don’t have to deal with them! You don’t have to have trials…

Michelle:  At some point we’ll have to deal with John and Arthur, because Arthur just disappeared.

Anne:  Yes, this is a potential heir to the throne of England, yes.

Yeah, because we talked about the De Braoses’ when we were talking about… what were we talking about?

Michelle:  Oh, we were talking about the De Braoses commit a massacre at Christmas.

Anne:  Oh yes! We were talking about, yeah, they killed a bunch of Welshmen. How could I forget? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:  The De Braoses were very badly behaved.

I can’t imagine how people would want to be making the Middle Ages look bad. Everybody was so nice. The Victorian view of things. The Crusades were honorable. You know, you could live in that kind of unconscious world, but I just can’t bear it. Can’t bear it.

Michelle:  I found Carcassonne to be beautiful. What an amazingly walled and beautiful city.

Anne:  Yeah. Yeah. I think I’ll put one of the cities up. Because there’s lots of… you know when I have to choose pictures for our website, I get… There are many, many, many pictures of the slaughter of the Cathars, and of the military forces, but I think what I might do is actually go for a landscape this time.

Michelle:  There’s a whole website called “Cathar Castles.”

Anne:  Beautiful place. When we can travel, I want to go. I want to go to the Languedoc.

But, so, here’s the deal: The Cathars were slaughtered, and they got finally obliterated, but the other thing that’s going on here has to do with the politics and also the culture, because the Languedoc had a different language. It was not French. It had a very different culture, and that also, this is the point at which France takes over the Languedoc and Occitan language has become not OK. The Albigensian Crusade caused the French… There were fewer French forces that went to the Fifth and Sixth Crusades, because they were busy messing around in the Languedoc, but this crusade strengthened the French monarchy, since the Languedoc became part of France. The Languedoc called the crusaders, “the French.” The French came and slaughtered them. But this is the place where Courtly Love was invented. This is where the first troubadours came from—the Languedoc—that would go across Europe, of course, but this was the beginning of it.

And the Languedoc was only a piece of the Occitane which also included Aquitaine and Foix and Barcelona, but the Albigensian Crusade was extraordinarily repressive. By the end of the fifteenth century the nobles and the skilled workers were speaking French, and Occitan has been outlawed and repressed since then, but it’s not a dead language, and it’s got fierce proponents, and so it’s one of those things. It’s like Welsh. You can learn Welsh.  You can learn Welsh, and you can learn Occitan. And you can learn Basque. You can damn learn Basque. I want to fight for the oppressed languages of Europe. This has been my stance on this.

It had a major influence on medieval history and French history, in general, and I had, you know… I grew up knowing about it, but the details of it are just appalling.

Michelle:  My military historian does not want to let us all off easy, because what he says is too much is made of trying to say that this was really far outside the lines for medieval warfare. He says this is an extreme, but it is not as unusual as we would like to pretend. That the idea of no quarter, of going in and slaughtering everybody, was not as uncommon as we… we keep talking about that, as modern historians, as unusual, but it actually happens quite a lot. 

Anne:  Yes, it wasn’t the main way of doing things, but it was there.

I believe we discussed Vlad Țepeș…

Michelle:  Yeah. Indeed.

Anne:  … and his slaughter of the Transylvanian Saxons, for instance.

Michelle:  Well and, of course, when we were talking about Robert the Bruce, we talked about Edward I going north and ordering no quarter. Just kill them all.

Anne:  And it will go on down. It’s not like it stops. When we were talking about, “Kill them all, and let God know his own,” I, you know, mentioned Cromwell and his repression of the Irish.

Michelle:  Yeah. There’s a reason that that particular phrase got picked up and remembered, because it applies in so many situations. Edmund Spenser absolutely advocated for wiping out the Irish.

Anne:  Yes. Yes, he did. And yet we read The Faerie Queene anyway, don’t we? But not very much, if we’re me. 

Michelle:  I wouldn’t put anything past him. 

Anne:  Spenser or Cromwell?

Michelle:  Cromwell.

Anne:  Yeah, no.

Michelle:  He deliberately housed his horses in churches, just to thumb his nose.

Anne: Yes he did. He really smashed up Ely. Smashed up the wonderful cathedral at Ely.

Michelle:  The monastery of Kells was pretty well wiped out by Cromwell’s forces stabling their horses, because there is not much of anything left of the monastery of Kells.

I was really struck by the ways in which—since we’re doing this one right on the heels of the other Crusade—you remember we talked about how Urban II, one of his motivations for calling crusade was to bolster the power of the papacy? He absolutely got his wish. By this point, you know, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty years later, the papacy is clearly wielding much more power.

Anne:  Yes, but you know what’s ironic? What’s ironic is that because this crusade bolsters the French monarchy, it will be leading to the Avignon papacy, and so the papacy will indeed be broken, will have its power halved, later on, as a consequence of this.

Michelle:  Yeah, I was thinking about how, you know, in 1095 when he first calls crusade, it’s “Pick up arms and go against those guys over there.” Well, a hundred years later, it’s “Take up arms and go kill people in the south of France, who have done something that annoys us,” but, you know, they’re not Middle Eastern so it’s a little bit harder of a sell, but still not that hard of a sell.

And then a hundred years after that, the French monarchy has clearly learned from all this, so when they decide they want to take out the Templars, it’s now “Get rid of these people that are real close,” and there’s no justification for it whatsoever, but they have learned..

Anne:  They’ve learned to obliterate your enemy. You get rid of them all.

So, yeah, so the getting rid of them all, that’s not unusual, but your military historian is saying that de Montfort’s techniques were, nevertheless, over the line?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  The blinding of the prisoners. What else?

Michelle:  Oh, they just did a bunch of this stuff. You know, the burning of everybody. De Montfort was not at all interested in cutting anybody any slack. He would just as soon get rid of you. But he was a pretty… I mean, he was a brilliant general. 

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Our military historian says he’s one of the best generals of the Middle Ages.

Anne:  Yes. He actually is. This is true.

Michelle:  And led from the front. He absolutely was there in the thick of things, leading his men. Right there. And he apparently chose well, because his wife was just as scary as he was.

There actually were a lot of women involved in this conflict, on both sides. There were… it’s not as surprising in the south of France, but there were women even among the crusaders. There were women who had come with them to try to plead with people, when you were wanting to ask them to repent. So there were women there, you know, moms of some of the crusaders had come along, and would take the role, along with the clergy, of trying to talk people around to give up their heresy. And sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. Scary, scary Alix de Montmorency. 

Anne:  Simon was French, of course, but he was also the Earl of Leicester. He got that later, I think.

Michelle:  And he wasn’t allowed to go and take possession of those lands, because John was kind of afraid of him.

Anne:  John was wicked, but he wasn’t entirely a fool.

Michelle: The son… his son was allowed to take up possession of those lands, but John wouldn’t let him in the country. He was justifiably afraid of him.

Anne: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, Simon de Montfort, Raymond de Toulouse, and their kids.

Michelle:  You know, it’s not that far off of an Anglo-Saxon blood feud, by the time they get done with this.

Anne:  I guess that’s true, yeah, because there’s something really personal about the sons fighting each other also, after the deaths of their fathers, in these wars. I mean, it’s not like… both the fathers die in the Albigensian Crusades, you know, it’s not like they go off someplace else and die. No, no. They die here.

Well, I want to go to the Languedoc now. And, also, I want to learn Occitan. I think that would be good. And I also feel much better about, like, Courtly Love annoys me, but now I’m in favor of it because I am allied with the Languedoc.

All right, well that was our discussion of the Albigensian Crusade, which involved a lot of people behaving very badly. The next time we meet we will be discussing… it will be our Christmas episode and we will discuss the murder of Thomas á Becket.

Michelle:  It’s seasonal.

Anne:  It’s seasonal! Yeah! Christmas murder! Woo-hoo!

Michelle:  Hopefully the Universe will not feel the need to erase everything. I mean, I think we learned a valuable lesson with Gilles de Rais. 

Anne:  Well, we did Gilles de Rais at Christmas… this is for those of you who don’t know this piece of the story. Our last Christmas episode was Gilles de Rais, who was one of Joan of Arc’s generals, and he was really great, and then he became a horrible serial murderer of children. So, that wasn’t good. And also, might have sold his soul to the devil, and we did that as our Christmas episode, which was probably a mistake. And also we said, at that time, that we didn’t think he had sold his soul to the devil, and then the episode got erased, and we couldn’t find it in the cloud, and we couldn’t find our notes, and the show notes got lost, and something happened to the transcript, and by and large, things did not go well.

So we’re going to have a real Christmas episode, because Thomas á Becket got murdered around Christmas time, and we’re not going to annoy any kind of entity which might have sold its soul to the devil, so that we can actually make it through the Christmas episode without having to, like, go through so much stress as we did last year.

Michelle:  I think festive murders are a little thin on the ground, so Thomas á Becket is a good choice.

Anne:  Yeah, well. Well, you know what, there was one that we could have had at Christmas but we didn’t, because it was the Welsh murders which we mention once again because that’s how they got everybody…

Michelle:  Oh, that’s right!

Anne:  … to trust them and come, because the Welsh were all used to getting together. Christmas is when you get together and then you make nice with everybody, and you reconcile and so, “Ah! The English want to reconcile!” So they went over, and then the English slaughtered them. Yeah. So, yeah, we could have done that for Christmas, but we didn’t. But, you know, Thomas á Becket, we saved this. We saved it.

And so that’s all for… that’s us signing off. True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are nowadays, only with less technology. Although the trebuchet is a pretty good piece of technology, just saying.

Michelle:  It’s pretty cool. And clearly required skilled labor, because they got well paid…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  … for running that thing.

Anne:  Yeah. It was good.

So, this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just… Oh, I already said that part. We’re on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. Please leave a review. We’d really appreciate that. You can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, and there you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also get hold of us all through the webpage. And, you can leave comments! We’d love to have comments. We love to hear from you. And if you have any medieval crimes that you think we should pay attention to, please let us know, and we will take them under consideration.

And so that’s us, signing off. Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

People’s Crusade, France and Germany, 1096

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. This is Anne Brannen. I’m your host who’s in Albuquerque. 

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  We’re going to talk about the People’s Crusade and several ones after it. We are recording this on the day after an election in the nation in which we live. And so, we’re really glad to be talking about really, really long-dead people. Aren’t we, Michelle?

Michelle:  I’m on my third cup of coffee. That’s not my normal coffee intake. Usually I’m just, like, a one-cup kind of girl. And then I switch to tea.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s a hard morning. But hey, let’s talk about the People’s Crusade. I mean, that’s better than, you know, doom scrolling and watching the news.

So, we want to talk about the People’s Crusade, and some other People’s Crusades. The first People’s Crusade, that’s kind of one of the names that we give to the first of the popular crusades, because we draw a distinction between the Princes’ Crusades, which are the ones where you have knights, and they’re going off, and they’re gathering their followers, and they’re banding together and they go off to the Holy Land. And they mostly even make it to the Holy Land! And then you have the People’s Crusades, which are made up of, you know, people who aren’t knights. Just regular people, mostly poor, gathering all together to go save various things. I’ll be explaining that as we go along.

None of them ever actually get to the Holy Land, although some of them get a little bit outside Constantinople. Yay. I guess. And they’re not backed by the Pope. They’re just plain old people in Europe who have decided to band together and go slaughter people, for one reason or another. Theoretically, because it has to do with being good Christians.

I think, now, we, at True Crime Medieval, are of the stance that decent Christianity does not involve slaughtering people who are of a different faith. I believe we stand united on this, Michelle? Do we not?

Michelle:  I just… yeah.

Anne:  I mean, the bar is low. The bar is low! But let’s just at least put it there. OK.

Michelle:  Yeah. I think that’s covered by “Treat your neighbor…”

Anne:  Yeah, you would think, wouldn’t you? Yes, I know, but, hey, I gather that that can be interpreted in many different ways.

Well, as we say, we’re talking here about a thousand years of people behaving badly, but there were millions of years before that, and a bunch of years after, where people behaved badly too. We’re just focusing, today, on 1096.

Michelle:  They were really bad. My god. 

Anne:  They were very bad indeed. Yeah, we don’t like them.

The People’s Crusade started in April of 1096, and this was before the proper First Crusade, which was going to start later in the year. And what was going on was that the Byzantine Emperor had asked for military support from the Western Church. The Eastern Church and the Western Church were getting along at the time. OK. And he’d asked for help in his fight against the Seljuk Turks, who had taken a bunch of his territory in 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert. OK. So he wanted some help.

And there had been other calls for expeditions to the Holy Land, but this was the one that took hold. This was when the First Crusade got called.

So, the Pope—who was Urban II, at that time—announced that faithful Christians should take up arms and go to Jerusalem. Now, “taking up arms” and going to Jerusalem is the kind of dictum that really presupposes that you have arms to take up, which mostly you would not if you were not of the noble class. Although you might have, like, sticks, you know, and a knife or so. And so the Princes’ Crusade was going to leave in the summer of 1096, with their armies, but before that, thousands of non-nobles, mostly poor people, left in April.

The Church did not organize this crusade. It was essentially a mob. About five sections of mobs, though it did include some soldiers who had allegiance to Walter Sans Avoir, who was a minor nobleman from the Île de France who did sign up as co-leader with Peter the Hermit. Peter the Hermit was the main leader. He might actually have been called—he was French—and so he might have been Pierre L’Ermite. He might have been a member of the l’Ermite family, people think. But probably not. First of all, there’s no evidence for this, and second of all, surnames didn’t exist. But we don’t really know where he’s from.

Peter the Hermit. 

And he had tried already to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but he hadn’t been able to make it, because the Seljuk Turks got in his way. As they did, a lot, if you were in Europe and trying to go to the Holy Land. They were there. But he was a powerful preacher, and though the Pope didn’t back him, the Patriarch of Jerusalem—this was Simeon II—gave him permission to lead the crusade.

So, he recruited non-noble people, a bunch of people. They arrived in Cologne in April of 1096, and then they started off their expedition to Jerusalem by leading massacres of Jews in France and Germany.

When the plague hit us, we did a podcast about the massacres of the Jews in Europe—in Latin Europe—during the Black Death, but that was later. That was in the fourteenth century. We did talk about the history of persecution of the Jews at that time. What’s going on now—here we are in 1096—is that the Jews in Europe have been persecuted. There’ve been forced conversions. They’ve been exiled from places, and they’ve been murdered, but they haven’t been massacred at this level. This is the beginning of the massacres that would go on down into the Holocaust of the twentieth century.

And it was unexpected. You can see, looking back, how it fits into the bad behavior of the Christians in Europe at the time, but it was actually unexpected. This was mass murder on a scale that hadn’t been seen before.

There were several threads going into the rationale for this, from the crusaders’ viewpoint. The main thing, really, I think, is that they needed money for the expedition. The noble people, who put together the Princes’ Crusade, did actually have some access to money, kind of. Sometimes they had to borrow it. Often from the Jews. Or from the Templars. They might have to borrow, but some of them had money. They were able to raise some money. They were of a different economic status then the poor people of Europe, who did not have money. And getting to the Holy Land was really, really, really, really, really expensive.

Because, first of all, it was kind of far away from France and Germany. And you had to feed yourself the entire way there. You had to get some lodging whilst you were going there. And, at some point, you were probably going to have to rent ships, you know, and that took money. And they didn’t have any money. And the Jewish communities were often wealthy. So the crusaders, who also believed that the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of the Church, could very easily rationalize persecuting them, killing them, taking their stuff. And also it seemed to them that murdering the enemies of the Church who were closer to home really kind of made sense, rather than just waiting until you got to Jerusalem. It’s just a horrible piece of the human story. This is a horrible, horrible piece of the human story.

So, that’s what they were doing.

The Church condemned the persecution of the Jews, as did many of the leaders…

Michelle:  King Henry IV of Germany definitely… He wasn’t there. He was off in Italy, so he wasn’t present when the massacre started happening. But he definitely sent word to stop. But nobody listened to him.

Anne:  Yeah. And the Popes and the Bishops did, and it just simply made absolutely no never-mind. It had no effect. For one thing—and I hadn’t realized it until I was working on this—for one thing, the mobs were on the move, and so the Church officials and secular courts had trouble bringing charges. Although they did get into some trouble in Europe. Before they got to the Holy Land, the Hungarians slaughtered them when the crusaders were causing trouble. They were pillaging villages, but after that they were attacking Christian villages. They didn’t just attack the Jews. They just basically attacked anybody, and if you fought with them, then they attempted to slaughter you.

Now, I wish I knew more about exactly what they were using. Where were they getting these weapons? I do not know. But they were dangerous people, these mobs.

The worst of the branches of this first People’s Crusade was led by Emicho of Flonheim. We were talking earlier, Michelle, and you were focusing on him. He goes by some different names. You might have heard him by something else.

Michelle:  Yes, he is an actual… he’s a nobleman. He’s a count. So he is one of the leaders of this…

Anne:  Mob.

Michelle:  …attack. Yeah. Mob.

Anne:  Really big mob. All over. Going all across Europe. Jesus.

Michelle:  They just kind of go from town to town, wreaking havoc on the Jewish communities that they come across. They try at Speyer, and the Bishop there manages to hold them off, so they only manage to kill a few people at Speyer, but then they go on to Worms and do all kinds of terrible things. The Bishop allows the Jewish community to come into his residence, but he can’t do anything when the mob breaks in and kills everybody. And roughly the same thing happens at Mainz.

Anne:  Yeah, Emicho was a nobleman who led some of the crusades—who led a piece of the crusades—and one of the things that was different about his branch—his mob-ly branch of the mobs—was that they couldn’t be bribed. And the other branches could! You could pay them off, and they would do a little less damage. 

His branch, Emicho’s branch, was focused, absolutely focused on slaughtering men, women, and children. It was a much more intense destruction than even the rest of the destruction going on. His branch is definitely the worst.

Now, his forces were in large part killed by the Hungarians. Yay. And then Emicho went back home. So the Hungarians managed to actually… they were the ones that actually stopped that particular thread of destruction.

Yeah, Emicho went back home. Where apparently people made fun of him, because he hadn’t been able to get to Jerusalem. We don’t hear from him again, after that. It’s not like he goes on to be some kind of great leader of the people. He was a leader of a mob, for a while.

So that’s what the People’s Crusade was doing, for some time. There were five branches of it. Peter the Hermit led his with Walter Sans Avoir. They actually got to Constantinople, after they killed some Hungarians. They pillaged Belgrade. They got attacked on the road to Sofia. They got to Constantinople, and when they left they were ambushed outside of Dracon by the Seljuk Turks, and that was the end of them. And that was the Battle of Civetot, and oddly enough, though Peter told the crusaders that they were under the protection of God, they totally got slaughtered and enslaved! I don’t know how he could have been wrong about this!

And the few who survived, went back to Constantinople and waited for the Princes’ Crusade to show up, and I guess they went off with them.

Peter himself was able then to go with them, and get further into the Holy Land. He was at the siege of Antioch, he was at the siege of Arqa. And eventually he went back to France, and died there. 

There’s a legend concerning him, that he’s the one who introduced the Rosary into Europe, having modeled it…

Michelle:  Really?

Anne:  …on Islamic practices. It’s St. Dominic who makes it popular, but the story is that it’s Peter the Hermit who brings it back.

Michelle:  The book I was reading was talking about how, in our time, we would just think he was a crackpot, right? But his weirdness struck the late eleventh century as a sign of his holiness. He looked like a vagabond, he smelled bad, and he only ate fish.

Anne:  Definitely somebody that we should follow and, you know, go kill our neighbors. Obviously! I mean, that just seems like a reasonable thing to decide. What the hell is wrong with people? What the hell is wrong with the humans? Michelle! Oh my God! They’re so badly behaved all the time! 

OK. I’m sorry. Rant over.

Michelle:  Find the weirdest person in the neighborhood, assume it’s a sign of their holiness, and do what they say.

Anne:  Which is not going to be good. I’m just guessing.

And, as it turns out, he was wrong about God protecting them at the Battle of Civetot, because God didn’t. Unless of course what God was wanting was to take a bunch of the holy people up to heaven to be with him. In which case everything was fine. I don’t know.

Michelle:  And also, the book I was reading—well, one of them. This is Thomas Asbridge’s book The First Crusade: A New History. The Roots of Conflict Between Christianity and Islam. It’s from Oxford University Press. It’s a very nice book from 2004. Highly recommended. Talks about how Peter the Hermit isn’t even especially unique. There’s all kinds of…

Anne:  Oh yeah.

Michelle:  … whacko preachers wandering about, talking about various things. You know who he reminded me of? The guy who got arrested with Marguerite. The Angel of Philadelphia.

Anne:  Oh right! Right! The Angel of Philadelphia. Tell the story, for those people who have not heard the Murder of Marguerite Porete podcast.

Michelle:  She got arrested, and then this guy just rolls up, knocks on the door and says he’s the Angel of Philadelphia, and he’s there to protect Marguerite.

Anne:  That didn’t go so well, really. Spoiler.

Michelle:  No. I mean, he didn’t end up dead. So it went better for him than it did for Marguerite. But nobody believed that he was the Angel of Philadelphia.

Anne:  I don’t either, actually. I don’t think he was the Angel of Philadelphia. I think that’s true.

I think he was one of the medieval crackpots. Like, really believing that they’re led by God.

Michelle:  There’s always a certain percentage of the population that have got a screw or two loose, and how that manifests is really culturally dependent.

Anne:  Yeah, and there’s a lot of people that I don’t think of as crackpots, who are led by God. Saint Teresa is not a crackpot. Saint Bridget of Sweden. Not a crackpot.

Michelle:  Julian.

Anne:   No. Julian of Norwich. Completely not a crackpot. Margery Kempe, she was totally nuts. So, yeah, I have standards. You can judge people by their behavior, whether or not they think God is talking to them.

Michelle:  Well I learned a lot about the First Crusade, which I realized, reading Asbridge’s book, that I hadn’t really had an opportunity to circle back around to the Crusades much, since I was an undergraduate. And there are things that… you know, scholarship has moved on. That was kind of a little while ago that I was an undergraduate.

Anne:  Oh no! You are still young. You’ll always be young to me.

Michelle:  So there are some things that we’ve changed our mind about.

Anne:  And rightly so.

Michelle:  In terms of the research. So I was taught, as an undergraduate, for instance, that one of the reasons–one of the real motivating factors behind the Crusades–was the move to primogeniture. That, you know, the first son inherits all, rather than divvying up the property among your surviving children, because that turns out to be really rough on the property, and it dilutes the influence of families over time.

Anne:  If you are lucky enough to have run into the very entertaining video on the Crusades, which is narrated by Terry Jones, that’s actually the stance that they are taking. That younger sons were disenfranchised, and needed money and things to do, and so they went off and killed people in the Holy Land.

Michelle:  It’s not an illogical perspective. It just turns out to not be correct, as you poke at it further. The next generation of researchers have crunched numbers more and found out that, although that seems like it’s really logically persuasive—that the younger sons, in need of making a name for themselves, in need of creating their own fortune, go off to the Holy Land—when you sit down and crunch the numbers what you find out is that, in order to even set off for the Holy Land you needed to raise five times your annual salary.

Anne:  That’s a humongous amount of money. It was expensive.

Michelle:  Asbridge does some number-crunching, and record-diving, and finds out that the price of land plummets…

Anne:  Huh.

Michelle:  … in 1096, as so many people are having to mortgage their property…

Anne:  Oh!

Michelle:  … to try to go off.

Anne:  Of course.

Michelle:  The Church ends up owning… the crimes are thick on the ground with this one. Slaughtering the Jewish communities was bad. That was bad. And in so many ways reminiscent of what we saw with the Black Death, right? The same kind of things where contemporary historians want to claim it was all the unwashed peasants who don’t know any better. It was not all the unwashed peasants. There were nobles involved.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Like what’s-his-face.

Anne:  Like what’s-his-face.

Michelle:  Whose name has escaped me.

Anne:  Whose name shall not be spoken! We said it earlier. You can go back and look in the transcript.

Michelle:  There are some other really serious and long-lasting crimes in here. Asbridge makes the argument that this is the beginning of conflict between Islam and Christianity that continues to this very day.

Anne:  Mmhmm.

Michelle:  That, basically, they were co-existing before this. That Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands for four hundred years. There was not some kind of just-now crisis that happened in 1095 that required him to call “Crusade!” And Asbridge argues that part of what’s going on is a cynical move on the part of, first, Gregory VII, and then the Pope that follows him, Urban II, to bolster the power of the Papacy. That they had this concept that they were supposed to be in charge of all of Christendom, but actually they struggled to be the boss of about seven square miles around Rome.

Anne:  Right. And so that would mean, then, that the Byzantines’ asking for help concerning their fights with the Turks was a lovely opportunity, then…

Michelle:  Right.

Anne:  … to step in and say, “Yes!” You see that a lot. It’s kind of why the Normans began to own Ireland.

Michelle:  It’s an opportunity, also, to make nice with the Byzantine Church, because just the generation earlier you had had the Great Schism…

Anne:  Mmhmm.

Michelle:  You know, in 1054. So you can kind of suck back up to these people who you want to, really, be friends with again, even though you’ve just had a split between the Churches.

I think a lot of people know about the Protestant Reformation—that the Church splits then—but don’t know about the earlier, and first, split.

Anne:  Perhaps you could explain some things?

Michelle:  Well, OK. So, caveat: Not my area of expertise, exactly.

Anne:  We’re making a living on this, I tell ya. Well, not a living, because we don’t get paid, but we’re surely making a reputation.

Michelle:  So you have the Great Schism, earlier, in which, for the first thousand years of Christianity’s history, you’ve got one Church. But, as it grows, the Eastern side of the Church is really interested in more of, like, Holy Spirit kind of things. It’s more esoteric. Whereas the Western side of the Church is based in Rome. Hard-nosed. Practical. So they ultimately have a split over the role of the Holy Spirit.

Anne:  I love that. So there’s, like, esoteric theology on one side, and the remnants of the Roman Empire on the other? Is that it?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  OK. Fair enough.

Michelle:  Yeah. Basically. But the other thing that Asbridge talks about… I really, really enjoy this book. I know that I get razzed about coming in and saying, “Oh my God, there’s this book!”

Anne:  Well, it’s your job.

Michelle:  I wouldn’t come in and tell you, like, “There’s this book, but it sucks. Avoid it.” 

Anne:  Sometimes you actually do, but we don’t spend a lot of time on it, no. It’s your job to come tell us what to do. Yeah. We’ll go find this book! Yay!

Michelle:  Asbridge talks about how Urban goes through the mental gymnastics of creating the concept of Holy War, which is really incompatible with Christian theology.

Anne:  Yes, it is. Yeah. Really, it is.

Michelle:  He works you through each step of, “OK, first you have to do this.” Augustine set up, first, the concept of justified conflict, and you can go from there to the idea of sanctified conflict.

Anne:  I just want to strangle somebody. At any rate. Yeah.

Michelle:  He also reminded me—very much, and I had not really, kind of consciously thought about that—knighthood itself is in its infancy. So, part of what’s going on is that these guys have a new toy, really. They have created this massively effective way of fighting on horseback, and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Anne:  Yeah, and you’re kind of limited in how much damage you can do in Europe, without people stopping you. Yeah, because there’s all these, like, I don’t know, people make treaties, and there’s these feudal obligations, and people get annoyed if you… It’s hard to make deals with people when you’ve been killing their brothers and whatnot. So. Yeah. So you need to go someplace else and justify using your horseback skills. Fair enough. I believe that.

Michelle:  So, did you know—because this part I didn’t know—did you know that sometimes when people took the cross, instead of just cutting out a cross and, you know, having it on their clothing, sometimes they had it branded on their forehead?

Anne:  I did know that. Yeah. Yeah. And that meant, then, that you were known for all time as someone who had taken that vow. It wasn’t just something where you came and you, like, took your little cross tunic off and, I don’t know, used it as a washcloth, or maybe hung it on the wall or, you know, pretended you were wearing it because you were cold that day. No, no! Everybody knew. Everybody knew how sanctified you were.

Michelle:  I did not know that. And this dovetailed really interestingly with our discussion about Sicily, because this is also essentially a Norman venture. It really is.

Anne:  Oh my God! The Vikings go to the Holy Land. No wonder this is problematic.

Michelle:  I have been asking myself why did we stop calling them “Vikings”?

Anne:  I don’t know.

Michelle:  Because they don’t change their behavior. 

Anne:  It’s the French. They start talking French. And so that’s why we have to call them “Normans.” Yeah. But we’re still calling the “Vikings.” That’s what “Normans” means. “The North-men.” It’s still the same thing. We just don’t translate it into the word “Vikings” in our heads, but it’s the same thing.

Michelle:  It’s the same thing! And Odo was one of them. Urban’s birth name was Odo. He was one of them. He was…

Anne:  Oh! I hadn’t known that. 

Michelle:  He was a French nobleman, and so when he goes… I mean, all the pieces were coming together, right? For this, but then also the Templars, because the Crusades are so strongly a French endeavor, from the beginning.

Anne:  Yes. Yes. Germany’s in there, yeah, but the princes are especially French.

Michelle:  Yeah. He does the speech where he calls for a crusade in November of 1095, at Clermont, in France. He does the preaching tour, specifically trying to haul in French lords. You know, it’s just… I really did not realize how much of a specifically French endeavor the early Crusades are.

Anne:  The Normans had already conquered England.

Michelle:  They’ve just got to go somewhere.

Anne:  Had already conquered Sicily. And, yeah, they needed to go someplace. It’s going to be a while before they go to Ireland.

Michelle:  I will say that the chapter in Asbridge where he’s talking about all of the crusaders that Urban manages to pull together as leaders of his official crusade, it feels like Ocean’s Eleven. Where you have him getting the gang together for the heist.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  And they all have conflict with one another. They have different strengths.

Anne:  Yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I’ll buy that. I like that. I like that picture.

Michelle:  You’ve got the ones that are supposed to be central, and the ones that turn out to be central, right? You’ve got Raymond of Toulouse… Oh, it was fascinating. 

So, yeah, that was funny, but before I got to the, you know, “We’re going to slaughter the Jews on our way past, because we can.”

Anne:  Well, and, the Princes’ Crusade… the Crusades get preached in November of 1095. The Crusade proper doesn’t go until September, because people are gathering their forces, and putting stuff together, and going about it in the kind of way you might if you were a knight, and you had horses, and things like that.

You can see where that fervor would translate to the people. To the lay people. And they don’t really need to gather all their stuff together, because there isn’t any. There’s nothing to gather together. All they have to do is walk on out, as a mob. So that’s why it can go quicker.

Michelle:  And Urban’s not thrilled about this. He very much thinks he’s putting together one kind of operation, and then this whole other thing happens, that doesn’t end up in his control.

One thing that I found really, really fascinating about the research for this, is how much we have in terms of primary sources from survivors of the massacres.

Anne:  We do! We do. We do. And you told me you’re going to give us some. You’re going to read us some.

Michelle:  Let me tell you the book, because I’m all about the book. This is a historian named Jeremy Cohen and it’s called Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade. So he is working on understanding how those narratives both tell us facts about what happened, and tell us how the survivors perceived those facts.

Anne:  Good. Good, good. Good, good. Yeah, because, you know, if we are descendants of Christian Europe, we know what the crusaders say. We heard a bunch about that. We’ve been hearing it forever. I’d like to hear what the communities had to say that they ransacked, as they went on their way to places like Constantinople. 

Michelle:  Yeah, so he talks about how there is a strand of Judaism towards martyrdom, with things like the Maccabees.

Anne:  Oh, one of the things we hadn’t mentioned was that we do know that in the massacres that were happening during this First Crusade, there were suicides.

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:   Of people who did not want to be killed by the crusaders, did not want to be forced to convert, did not want to be tortured. And that there’s a kind of history to this, as you say, the Maccabees.

Michelle:  So, yeah, he is working on discussing how the texts that are talking about this massacre are situating it within that history of understanding that sometimes martyrdom is preferable to converting, to a false conversion.

Anne:  And some people did convert, and then go back to their actual, real practices after the crusaders had gone through. So that did happen also. Yeah, there were different ways of meeting the dreadful disaster.

Michelle:  One of the Jewish chronicles imagines what the crusaders are thinking to themselves as they decide to start slaughtering Jews on the way:

“Even as we set out on a long journey, to seek the shrine of the idolatrous deity and to exact revenge from the Muslims, behold, the Jews, whose ancestors gratuitously killed and crucified him, live among us; first, let us take our revenge upon them.”

They’re imagining what they are saying to themselves.

Anne:  That’s actually very close to what crusaders were saying so, yeah. On the money.

Michelle:  So yeah, it’s… I don’t know.

Anne:  I know that I have heard, but could not find again, laments from the time.

Michelle:  Yes! Yes, he starts his book, actually, with one of the laments. 

Anne:  Let’s have one.

Michelle:   

“I shall speak out in the grief of my spirit before my small congregation.

I shall wail and lament; for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.

Be silent, hear my words and my prayer.

If only he would hear me. The crusaders massed at the gateway

To blot out the name of his remnants.

Small children cried out to him with one voice:

‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one.’”

Anne:  Thank you. Thank you very much.

Michelle:  Yeah, his book is very interesting, because he’s talking about how the question of suicide is a much more vexed one than submitting to martyrdom, and that that is something that’s being struggled with in the Jewish texts… the earlier ones that he is comparing these ones to.

Anne:  Can you elaborate on that?

Michelle:  So, he’s talking about how it was absolutely considered to be an acceptable form of martyrdom to refuse to convert, and allow somebody else to kill you, but the instances that we have of women killing their own children, or families, you know, committing suicide rather than fall into the hands of the crusaders, that that was much more vexed. Because that is not submitting to martyrdom, that is willful death. And that suicide was, just like in Christianity, prohibited in Judaism. So it’s much more difficult… and different Jewish communities, like the ones in Spain, didn’t necessarily believe that that was acceptable, in the way that these ones here in Germany did.

Anne:  Interesting. And so suicide is not, in general, acceptable, but there are times when it is, but killing your children first is not?

Michelle:  No, he’s not saying that they conclude that it’s not, just that that is a much more theologically vexed question…

Anne:  Fair enough.

Michelle:  …than allowing yourself to die, rather than submit to a forced conversion.

Anne:  Fair enough. Though I see it’s kind of formidable practicality. Do you want your children to fall into the hands of these people? Or would you rather be able to take them out yourself?

Michelle:  Asbridge says that the Christian chroniclers were completely appalled by that.

Anne:  Oh, the hell with them!

Michelle:  Yeah, I know, right?

Anne:  Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Because it’s OK if we slaughter them, but not if they kill their children first? What hypocrites. What hypocrites.

Michelle:  But what Asbridge says is that he thinks that that is connected, then, to the development of blood libel, later on.

Anne:  Ah. That’s an interesting thought.

Michelle:  Yeah, I found him to be very interesting, with ideas worth pondering. That he’s asking that…

Anne:  So that the crusaders take the instances, however many there may be…

Michelle:  Yeah. “If they’re willing to kill their own children, they’re going to be willing to kill yours too.”

Anne:  Right. Right, right. And of course it’s completely out of context, because the crusaders were going to be killing those children themselves and so… right. Right. So. Projection. A form of projection. Huh.

Michelle:  It’s distressing, the number of ways in which this is exactly like what happened after the Black Death. 

Anne:  Oh yeah.

Michelle:  In terms of the accusations of poisoning wells. So we have a different chronicle here. This is actually quite annoying, because this is the crusaders faking a death, and blaming it on the Jews.

“They took a ‘trampled corpse’ of theirs, which had been buried thirty days previously, and carried it through the city, saying, ‘Behold what the Jews have done to our comrade.’ They took a gentile and boiled him in water.  They then poured the water into our wells in order to kill us.”

And that is a chronicle that was written in Hebrew, from Mainz.

Anne:  What’s interesting to me—I don’t know if “interesting” is the word—there’s this combination of hot wrath, and cold-bloodedness, and deviousness that is just astonishing, amongst the crusaders.

Michelle:  Yeah, that is very planned. To take a body, drag it through the street, and claim, “Hey! This is what they did!”

Anne:  Premeditated. Yeah, because that’s not hot-headed massacre, that’s premeditated massacre. Yeah.

So that was the first of the popular crusades, and I want to kind of touch on the rest of them, because that wasn’t the only one. Many people will have heard of the Children’s Crusade, which happened in 1212. That was from Northern France and Germany, and it wasn’t actually children. A young shepherd led one of the branches, but it was men, women, and children. It came down to us as the Children’s Crusade. It’s kind of romanticized.

There were two movements that got coalesced into one. The German group was led by Nicholas of Cologne, and they went off, and their purpose was that they were going to convert Muslims. They weren’t going to kill them. They were going to go convert Muslims. Two-thirds of them died on the way through Switzerland. The remainder managed to get on a ship to Rome, where the Pope told them to go home, and they did. But, by that point, Nicholas’ father had already been hung, by people whose relatives had died while they were in Switzerland.

The French group was led by a shepherd named Stephen, who preached and performed miracles, and he and his group got to Marseilles, but it was really hard to get there. And then they went home. And that was the Children’s Crusade.

Michelle:  I don’t know much about that at all. Gracious sakes.

Anne:  Yeah, that’s pretty bizarre.

Then, there was the first Shepherds’ Crusade, which was in 1251.

Michelle:   That’s what you need, over there in the Holy Land!

Anne:  You totally need… Spoiler alert! None of these people are getting to the Holy Land! None of the People’s Crusades get to the Holy Land. And that’s because they do not have the wherewithal. They just simply do not. As we’ve said, it was a really major undertaking. So they have a lot of fervor, but they don’t have any money.

The intent of the first Shepherds’ Crusade was to rescue Louis IX, who was being held in Egypt, and they didn’t think that the French royalty was helping. And so these are French peasants who are going to go save Louis IX. Let’s just think about that for a minute.

At any rate, an old Hungarian monk, who was actually living in Northern France at the time, gathered peasants from the area, and they got to Paris, but they weren’t allowed to go across to the university, because the Queen was afraid that they weren’t controllable. Which they then proved by splitting up, and some went to Rouen and attacked monasteries, and some went to Orléans and attacked monasteries and the Bishop, and some of them stayed in Paris and fought with university students, and then they went to Amiens and attacked the Jews. So, I don’t know. They didn’t get anywhere near Louis IX. 

So what the hell? With that? They seem to have… this wasn’t even about converting the Muslims or attacking the Muslims. This was about, apparently, being annoyed at the French nobility and royalty because they weren’t doing anything about St. Louis. This is who this is, St. Louis IX. 

At any rate they didn’t get to the Holy Land.

All right. The Crusade of the Poor, in 1309. By this time the crusader states had fallen.

Michelle:  Yeah. A whole bunch of Templars are rotting in jail, during this time. Because they’re arrested in 1307.

Anne:  Yeah. They lost Acre. As you know. So the crusader states are gone. Clement V had ordered a crusade led by the Hospitallers to go. This didn’t happen. And the laity was just supposed to be giving money, and praying, and whatnot, but a bunch of them got very excited, and so they went off. They were going to go rescue the Holy Land from having been lost by all the crusaders.

Some of them went to Avignon, because they were going to join the Hospitalers, and some tried to get to the Holy Land on their own. They paid for all of this by plundering, robbing, massacring Jews, and then they got decimated by the Duke of Brabant when they besieged his castle trying to get to the Jews that he was sheltering. So, yay, the Duke of Brabant. I’m glad about that. 

Those that actually got to Avignon, the Pope granted them indulgences, even though they couldn’t go to the Holy Land, and the Hospitallers refused to let them on the ships, and then they went home.

Michelle:  It’s interesting how, when you whip people into a frenzy like this, sometimes they behave in completely unpredictable and unhelpful ways.

Anne:  Yeah, I think mostly bad behavior and unhelpfulness, but unpredictable forms of it. Yeah, yeah.

Second Shepherds’ Crusade, 1320. This was focused on Spain. It started in Normandy, you know. By this time I think we actually are dealing with Frenchmen and not Vikings. I think we’ve gone on beyond that. It’s 1320.

Men, women, and children joined. They went to Paris. Philip V refused to lead them, or even to talk to them, so they liberated a bunch of prisoners who were being held in a prison nearby, and then they went to Aquitaine, and they attacked all sorts of people, mostly Jews, on the way. The Pope ordered them to be stopped, and James II of Aragon warned all the nobles to keep the Jews safe, you know, when they got into Spain. Nevertheless, they killed a few hundred Jews at Montclus, so Alfonso, who was the King’s son, came and arrested and executed the people responsible. 

I actually like that. There’ve been times in this particular podcast when we’ve discussed the naughty Peoples’ Crusaders getting slaughtered by various noblemen, but Alfonso actually arrested them and had trials, and executed them. So that’s actually kind of cool. 1320. Yay!

And the rest went home. The original idea was to fight the Muslims in Spain. It also— like the Poor People’s Crusade before—it really became an attack, actually, on the French nobility and the monarchy. They didn’t actually rescue anybody in Spain. That didn’t happen. They didn’t do that.

So those are the popular crusades, sprinkled throughout the formal crusades, which were bad enough. I mean, the formal crusades are bad enough. The People’s Crusades are just sheer godawfulness. And that’s really on account of not having any kind of leadership, and wherewithal. Any kind of army, or group of people, that has to support itself on the land is going to be really, really, really badly behaved. Because you can’t do it except by stealing. And very often people, like, don’t want you to steal their stuff, and so they fight you, and then you have to kill them. And then, you know, very often there’s people that you just don’t like at all, and so you have to kill them anyway. At any rate. There is no People’s Crusade that actually is well behaved. None of them get to the Holy Land. Just as well, really.

Michelle:  It’s just such a mess. I mean, honestly.

Anne:  It’s a mess. It’s an uncontrollable mess, really. Until we get to Alfonso, the only way to stop it is to basically kill them all, and so, you know… But then you get to Alfonso! Arrests! Tidy executions! Yay! Never knew I’d be in favor of that, but given the circumstances, I’m kind of down with that.

Michelle:  Well, I mean, in some ways it makes sense to me. Right? Because the nobility—the royalty—at this point are trying very hard to centralize authority in the monarchy, and having people going off and doing this stuff, without their sanction, is destabilizing.

Anne:  True.

Michelle:  So they’re not really going to want that.

Anne:  But the only way for any of these groups to get to the Holy Land is to be backed and given resources, and none of them are. Because the resources and the backing are going to the nobles.

Michelle:  I was looking at a description of Peter the Hermit just now.

Anne:   What did you find?

Michelle:  “Even the hairs of his mule were torn out as though they were relics.”

Anne:  Oh God!

Michelle:  So he’s riding a poor, bald mule.

Anne:  Oh God!

Michelle:  People are plucking its hairs. And there are some stories that he had a letter that he claimed had fallen out of heaven.

Anne:  Ah. Yeah. As they do.

Michelle:  Yeah! Telling him what he was supposed to do.

Anne:  Now, that’s interesting, because he really can just have visions, as he did, and tell people what… To actually say there’s a letter? Does he actually show this to anybody? Or is this just a kind of, “Really, there’s even proof! Which I have here! Like, in my tent someplace, but can’t get to at the moment.”

Michelle:  Asbridge thinks that… Because there is also the story of the vision floating around. He is very skeptical about either one of these stories, actually.

Anne:  Oh, you don’t think that actually Peter was saying these things? These come later?

Michelle:  They’re circulating really quickly. In the first decades of the twelfth century. But he is skeptical that these are anything that Peter actually claimed. He thinks that these are people giving these things to Peter to give him some authority.

Anne:  Yes, I certainly, like, think of people as much more authoritative if letters come down from heaven to them. Yes, certainly. Why, I’m convinced! Does he say anything about the Rosary? Does he buy the Rosary story? Or is he uninterested in that?

Michelle:  If it is in here, it’s later than I got to. Because I got to the massacres and then realized what we were talking about. And moved on. Moved on to find the other book about the massacres in more detail. But his assessment, actually, of Peter the Hermit is really interesting, because he says that nineteenth-century historians liked to blame Peter for the whole idea of crusading.

Anne:  Oh really? And not Urban? Not Urban and the Byzantine leader whatsoever, huh?

Michelle: Yep.

“Indeed, for centuries he was actually regarded as the man who had originally conjured up the idea of crusading.”

Anne:  Well, you know, we don’t need to speak really well of him, but we can definitely say that he did not do that. That was not him.

Michelle:  But it’s interesting to me that every time something bad happens, and people realize later that it’s bad, they try to blame the lower classes for it, and not the upper classes. “Oh no, it wasn’t Urban.”

Anne:  It’s either the lower classes or, if you’re really lucky, somebody who’s, like, in a different ethnic group. Oh yeah, no. It’s never the nobles of your group. No. No.

Michelle:  It’s not them.

Anne:  That was our discussion of the Peoples’ Crusade, and because we’re kind of on a roll, the next time we meet we’re going to talk about the Albigensian Crusade. 

Michelle:  I’m sure everybody was much better behaved there.

Anne:  No. They so were not. And, yeah, it’s like, this is the one where the Christians go and kill Christians, because they aren’t the right kind of Christians. Yes. Thereby completely pretty much obliterating the Languedoc culture, because they’re bad. They’re badly behaved. They’re badly behaved. One thousand years of people behaving badly.

Yeah, so we’ll do the Albigensian Crusade next. This has been the People’s Crusade, and this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, but with less technology.

We’re on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Anywhere that you can listen to podcasts, that’s where we are. And please leave a review. We love reviews. That’s so kind of you.

You can reach us at truecrimemedival.com, and you can there find the Show Notes, which are written by Michelle, the transcripts, which are done by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach us all through the webpage. And you can leave comments there. We would love to hear from you. And if you have medieval crimes that you would like us to discuss, please let us know and we will take that into consideration.

Sometimes people want us to discuss things about the Middle Ages that aren’t actually crimes, and so then we have to, like, figure that out. But that’s all for us then. Bye.

Michelle:  Bye!

The Sicilian Vespers, Sicily, Easter 1282

Anne:   Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. Later on, some people will behave badly and forget to push their “recording” button, and then they’ll have to push it again. Hi! 

I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host who is recording—actually recording—in Albuquerque.

Michelle:   And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:   And we are, today, talking about the Sicilian Vespers. The phrase refers to the whole six-week period of the rebellion, but it’s called the Sicilian Vespers, it starts at Vespers, in Palermo, in Sicily. Vespers is the evening service. It starts at sunset.

It started on Easter Monday of 1282. Easter Monday is the Monday after Easter, for those of you who don’t have Church calendars in your heads. And it started outside the Church of the Holy Spirit, which was right outside Palermo, and it was an incident which started the slaughter of Frenchmen in Sicily, ending up four to eight thousand.I’ve seen, actually, numbers ranging like that.

Michelle:   It’s a huge massacre and I’d never heard of this before you…

Anne:   It was a huge massacre.

Michelle:   I swear that I am, in fact, a trained medievalist. But I had never heard of this.

Anne:   We are both trained medievalists. But we want to remind you all that the Middle Ages takes up one thousand years, and since we’re doing Latin Middle Ages, it’s all of Europe. It’s really big. It’s so big. So no, not everything is in our heads. So we like to learn stuff. And so now we’re doing Sicilian Vespers.

And I have so much to explain about the Sicilian Vespers, because you might say to yourself, “Well, why did the Sicilians just, kind of like, all of a sudden, slaughter all the Frenchmen?” Why indeed. So…

Michelle:   And what the hell were so many Frenchmen doing in Sicily in the first place? To be slaughtered?

Anne:   What were they doing? Yeah, why were there that many Frenchmen annoying the Sicilians? I am now going to explain.

So, Sicily is that large island that’s off the lower tip of Italy, and the Greeks colonized it starting in about 734 BCE. Then Carthage—Carthage and Greece were at war a lot—Carthage gained control of most of the island by the fourth century BCE, and then Rome had some wars with Carthage in the third century BCE and there were successes, losses, back and forth, back and forth, but Rome took control of Sicily in 146 BCE, and at that point it was Roman and it remained Roman for a long time. Like, 600 years. So this was very, kind of, I don’t know, restful. And Latin’s the language. All right.

But then, you know, there’s that point where the Middle Ages start, which is when the Roman Empire kind of like falls all apart, which the Gauls were helping with. So the Gauls helped the Roman Empire fall apart, and the vandals took Sicily in 440 CE. And then the Eastern Roman Empire—the Byzantine Empire—took Sicily in 535. And then the Ostrogoths took Sicily back—or the Gauls—in 550. And then the Byzantines took it back in 552, and at that point it became an important Byzantine outpost. Greek supplanted Latin. The Eastern Church rites were used, and so there’s another little rest.

Michelle:   When this change in governance is happening, is that just a change at the top, or are there population shifts happening every time there’s a conquest?

Anne:   There’s some intermarriage, and the language gets affected, so there’s constant changes. At the level of the populace, not as much, no, as at the level of governance. But there is… like, there’s this series of different, not just governments but different cultures taking over Sicily. And the Sicilians… the Sicilians are being themselves. I’m impressed with them, myself.

OK, so, at this point where are we? The Byzantines take it in 552, and so yay. But then, in 826, the Byzantine fleet commander got into some kind of trouble. He married somebody he wasn’t supposed to. A nun, I think. He got in trouble. So he rebelled, and he ended up in exile in North Africa so he got Ziyadat Allah, the Tunisian Emir, to help him out.

So, an Islamic army invaded Sicily, and it took a while, but the Emirate of Sicily was in place by 902.

Things weren’t peaceful, though, because there was infighting amongst the Arabs, and there were revolts from the Byzantine/Sicilians, so the structure wasn’t really strong, which meant that, when the Normans showed up… These are, like, the Vikings that went to France, and learned how to eat nice food and talk a kind of version of French, and then continued to be Vikings by invading various places. When the Normans showed up, the island fell, eventually, to them. They were storming it. The fights were from 1060 to 1091. And of course the Normans had conquered England in 1066, and then some of the Anglo-Viking rebels went to fight against the Normans in Sicily around 1068. I love that part. I had not known this whatsoever.

Michelle:   Yeah, that’s wild! They are conquering Sicily right after they’ve conquered England. I didn’t know that either. Wow.

Anne:   Yeah, I had no idea. I knew that they conquered Ireland about a hundred years after they conquered England.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   I had no idea, until fairly recently, that they were messing around in Sicily.

Michelle:   Huh. I did not know that. They’re pretending not to be barbarians but really, they are Vikings in a French trench coat. Nothing has changed.

Anne:   I have trouble now because I usually think of the Normans as Vikings, and I keep calling them Vikings, which I’m sort of really not supposed to, you know, but… at any rate.

Michelle:   It really… I mean it begs the question about naming, right? 

Anne:   Yes.

Michelle:   How is what they’re up to different than what their predecessors were up to?

Anne:   Well, they’re speaking a version of French. That’s really basically, I think, it. Well, you know, and they, like, I don’t know… everything gets connected.

Michelle:   The castles. The castles are the big difference, I guess.

Anne:   Castles! It’s castles, that’s what it is. Because the Vikings weren’t big on castles. No.

Michelle:  But the Normans built big castles. Big, strong castles.

Anne:   They liked castles. They did. Yeah. Oh, and you had asked me, at one point, why are all these people invading Sicily? Sicily is volcanic, and the land is really, really rich. And also the location. Quite useful for getting to places around. So, yeah, so we all want Sicily.

All right. Where am I? Ah, the Normans. OK. So, the Normans held Sicily from 1060-1091. And they establish the Kingdom of Sicily in 1130, and at that time Sicily was one of the most wealthy and powerful places in Europe.

The Normans brought the Roman Church back, so, so much for the Byzantine Rite. And they brought their version of Latin. French Latin-y kind of thing. And things were great for a while. Ahhh!

But, in 1189, the ruler at the time, who was William the Good—was married to Richard the Lionheart’s sister Joanna—he died, and he had no heir. Uh-oh!

Michelle:   That is never good.

Anne:   It’s not good, in medieval Europe, to die without an heir, because then what you get is pieces of history.

So, the crown, due to various marriages and, you know, births and deaths and whatnot, was supposed to go, at that point, to the Henry who was going to end up being the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI. It was supposed to go to him. But the Sicilian barons didn’t like this. No, no. So they installed Tancred, who was a second cousin to William II, that person who just died. But Henry took Sicily in 1194, when Tancred died.

OK, so at this point, the Germans own Sicily. 

Really, at this point, we should just go lie down for a while.

Michelle:   It was their turn. It was their turn.

Anne:   Apparently! 

So this went on for a while. It’s the Hohenstaufen reign. During which the Muslims who were left in Sicily were repressed. They revolted, and they got expelled, and so they’re gone. So we’re nearly there. We’re nearly to our crime. We’re nearly caught up. I swear.

So, the end of the Hohenstaufen dynasty was in 1266. The papacy had been an enemy of the Hohenstaufens because this was all part—and now we return to some of our earlier podcasts—this was all part of the Guelph and Ghibelline conflict, where the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire were at odds.

Michelle:   Yeah, our very first podcast was dipping into that.

Anne:   That’s right. You can go back to our very first podcast, where we explain a great deal of that because we found that totally interesting. Yeah, what is that? 

Michelle:   It was Big Dog.

Anne:   Big Dog. Yeah.

Michelle:   Cangrande.

Anne:   Cangrande della Scala. That’s who it is. Yes, Cangrande. Yes, he got poisoned with foxglove, and so you can go learn all about that, and why Dante was hanging out. 

At any rate, so, this was all part of the Guelph/Ghibelline conflict, and so the papacy backed an invasion of Sicily, which was led by Charles I, the Duke of Anjou. He was one of the Capetians. And so, then, Sicily was conquered by the French. That’s what the French were doing there. And so that started in 1266. OK.

Michelle:   He’s got to be related to our notorious villain Philip IV, who keeps showing back up.

Anne:   Well, he’s Capetian, so yeah.

Michelle:   Yeah. I don’t remember whether he’s a brother or an uncle, but he’s got to be related to him.

Anne:   There’s got to be some relation. The Capetians! Oh my god!

Michelle:   Right.

Anne:   OK, so, the French are there. And they didn’t… I’m sorry to tell you that they were not good at governing Sicily. Charles taxed the Sicilians really, really heavily. He was trying to pay for the Crusades, and whatnot. The nobility had no share in the government and also, apparently, they were sort of snooty. I don’t know. I don’t know. They were bad.

So, that brings us to our crime. The French had annoyed the Sicilians very badly. 

At sundown on Easter Monday, at the Church of the Holy Spirit, which was outside Palermo, a Frenchman insulted a Sicilian woman, and there was a riot, and four thousand French people were killed within six weeks.

Now, we have differing accounts as to exactly what happened. Two thousand people, by the way, were killed that first night. Just on that first night, two thousand Frenchmen were killed. I think this we’re in agreement on. That was in Palermo. It goes on outside the city later, and then more people get slaughtered.

So we have different versions. The Sicilians were gathered at the church. Fair enough. Because you have to go to Vespers, and it’s Easter Monday. But, Lent is over, and so they’re celebrating, and Frenchmen came by, and either they started drinking with the Sicilians, or they came on over to the Sicilians to check for weapons. Different versions. 

If they were checking for weapons, they started fondling the breasts of the women, and so the Sicilians got angry. Or, if they were drinking with the Sicilians, one of them dragged a young, married woman out of the crowd. He either raped her or intended to rape her. If that’s what happened, either her husband stabbed the Frenchman or she did, although it may be that none of this happened at all, and that the Sicilians organized and planned a revolt. Whatever. This happened. Something happened at Vespers in Palermo in 1262 on Easter Monday, and a bunch of Sicilians killed a bunch of Frenchmen.

Michelle:   That’s an awful lot of people to get killed in an unplanned uprising.

Anne:   Yes, it is. And there’s this business about the bells. The bells start ringing for Vespers. If indeed what’s going on is everybody’s there waiting for Vespers, the bells start ringing. But, if what’s going on is that this is organized, what happens is that the bells start ringing for Vespers, and that’s the signal.

Michelle:   That sounds like, yeah, planning. There’s a piece of this that sounds kind of made for movies, you know? So, the idea that there’s a plan that when the bells go… I mean, that sounds awesome.

Anne:   Yes, it does. But it doesn’t show up until later. It’s not one of the earlier versions.

Michelle:   Bummer.

Anne:   But that’s the thing. You and I both, immediately, “Well that’s the version that makes sense! Let’s have a revolt!”

You know, on the other hand, it’s also true that if you have pushed people far enough, they will riot and revolt ,and it’s very clear that there was organization really soon. Either there was organization that started this, or there was organization really soon. And so it may be that some very astute political minds took hold of the situation and moved it on out. But the business about, you know, “The bells are our signal,” that doesn’t show up until later.

Michelle:   That’s too bad. Because that’s pretty cool. But yeah, it’s a little bit screenplay-y, to make me think that it could be real.

Anne:   Well, and the whole, “One of the Frenchmen insulted one of the Sicilian women.” When I first saw this, that’s when I’m, like, “Oh really?” Because that’s not enough. You know? I figured there was something physical involved. But, that also… I don’t know. 

All of it seems both probable and improbable. But what we do know is that, then, a bunch of Frenchmen got slaughtered.

The Sicilians attacked the Frenchmen with rocks and weapons, depending on what they were carrying, and all of the Frenchmen outside the church were killed. And when the bells started ringing—whatever the connection is—members of the group then ran through the city, calling on the men to rise up against the French, and that night all the French people in Palermo—men, women, and children, and also, like, Sicilian women who had married Frenchmen—were slain in their homes. They went into the inns that the French people were frequenting, and at the abbeys and convents religious people were dragged on out and if they couldn’t say “ciciri,” they were killed.

This means “chickpea,” but this is the sign. “Ciciri.” If you can say this right, like a Sicilian, then they didn’t kill you. And apparently French people can’t say this whatsoever. Now I am not clear why this is, but I figure that I must be saying it wrong myself, and that were I to be in Sicily at this time, I would be killed that night, for I could not say that word. Because I think I’m saying it, but obviously I must not be. 

Michelle:   So, does that piece strike you as real, or does that strike you as made up after the fact?

Anne:   Both. It’s not unusual to have a kind of a way that you tell who’s who. The French people in the town, that’s one thing. But people who are all wearing the same habit? How do you tell? You’ve got to have some kind of way of knowing who they are, if you’re intending only to slaughter some of them. So, it seems reasonable.

It also seems reasonable to me that it got added later, because it’s a lovely little detail. Ciciri!

The revolt spread to other cities, and all of the island was taken back, except for Messina, which actually held out for another six weeks. But, by the end of April, it also had revolted. So, that was the end of the Vespers.

I want to keep going, though, and sort of explain what happened because, like, OK, “And then the end of the Sicilian Vespers! All the Frenchmen are dead.” All right. But here’s what happened. The rebels asked the Pope to recognize them as a free state, answerable only to the Pope, but the Pope refused, because he was in allegiance with Charles, and he ordered them to obey Charles, which they didn’t want to do. So they went to Peter III of Aragon. His wife Constance was the daughter of the former King of Sicily, that’s what the connection is, and she’s the only heir of Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was actually free at that time. Everybody else was captive in various places. At any rate, so, they go to Peter, and Peter had already put an invasion fleet together, before this all happened, telling the Pope that he was going to use it against the Islamic people in the North of Africa. So he was actually ready.

So he was ready. So he invades, and he’s acclaimed as the King, Peter I of Sicily, at Palermo, that September. Charles tried, but he wasn’t able to take the island back. So, at that point, Catalan and Aragonese were the languages of the court. The people spoke Sicilian. And Sicily remained Aragonese until 1479, when Aragon and Spain were combined. So then it was Spanish until 1738, and then it was Bourbon, until 1860, when it was merged with Sardinia, and then that became the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. That’s how long the Sicilians have been Italian.

Michelle:   Wow.

Anne:   Wow indeed.

Michelle:   Not very long.

Anne:   No, in my mind, 1861 is, like, yesterday.

Michelle:   Yeah. I mean, that’s contemporary with the American Civil War, so…

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   Which really wasn’t that long ago.

Anne:   No, they’re… yeah, no. It wasn’t that long ago at all. 

Yeah, so, the Sicilian Vespers. This is kind of like a piece of a long history of invasions of Sicily, and different governments in Sicily, and the Sicilians getting annoyed here and there. But that was the most spectacular.

Now I need to quash a rumor, because the Mafia started this rumor, and it is untrue. The Sicilian Vespers are not the beginning of the Mafia. No. The Mafia didn’t exist at all until the nineteenth century. Italy wasn’t able to rule Sicily effectively—it was on the edge of things—and so the Mafia rises up. And they say they’re connected to the Sicilian Vespers, and they use the term, but they’re not. It’s like, no. No. No, they weren’t.

But this rebellion, it survives in art. If you google “Sicilian Vespers,” and click on “images,” you can see this enormous amount of images—mostly from the nineteenth century—of, you know, the Sicilian Vespers, and Sicilians slaughtering Frenchmen. It’s really quite effective. And there’s a couple operas, there’s plays, there’s novels. And the phrase… because, see, there’s Italian security forces, fighting the Mafia, use the phrase “Sicilian Vespers Operation.” There’s bands… you know.

So, the Sicilian Vespers. That’s what that was.

So with the crime… There might have been a crime to begin with, which was assaulting a woman outside the church in Palermo, but then there was a crime which was slaughtering all the Frenchmen in an act of really bloody rebellion. Very, very bloody indeed.

Michelle:   This sort of thing just doesn’t usually work. We see all kinds of rebellions, but they’re just not usually effective.

Anne:   No. The Peasants’ Revolt in England led to absolutely nothing, in terms of rights for the peasants, or anything. It comes down in history as an idea, but it didn’t get anything done whatsoever.

Michelle:   One thing I didn’t know, until the reading that I did for this, was that this conflict in Sicily, where the Pope really strongly allies himself with the French, is the beginning of what results in the papacy spending time in Avignon. That he so strongly allied with the French, at that point, that they end up in France for a while. Yeah, I didn’t know that.

Anne:    Oh, OK. All right. All right. And that’s an offshoot of the Guelph and Ghibelline conflict. OK. So that’s how we get to Avignon. All right. Thank you. Thank you.

Michelle:   So, this all was really interesting. It was stuff I didn’t… I didn’t know any of this.

Anne:   How often do we say this?

Michelle:   I know. I really actually did go to school. But the thing is, when your focus is on England, all the stuff that’s happening in the Mediterranean is kind of peripheral.

Anne:   Except when Chaucer goes to Italy. That’s, like, an important piece of things. Yeah. Boccaccio! Yeah. Boccaccio meets Chaucer, yeah.

Michelle:   Englishmen, every once in a while, go to Italy and have adventures, and come back and tell about them. But it’s, you know, it’s pretty far from England.

Anne:   Well, yeah, unless William the Conqueror has invaded your country, and you have to go to Sicily to, you know, fight the Normans, because you lost in England. Yeah. But it’s far. Yeah, this was fairly new. I had known, like, tiny pieces of the history of Sicily. I had not known… I had not known how vexed this was.

Michelle:   I really did not know how central, to all of the quarrels that are going on, Sicily was.

Anne:   Yeah. It’s connected to everything. 

Michelle:   Just astonishing.

Anne:   And the Sicilians got tired of it. I mean, as one would. I mean, because people come… “Here’s a new language!” and there’s a new culture and, plus, “We’re changing the Church and we want some money from you,” and “What are we getting out of this?” ask Sicilians. Really, basically, a bunch of bother, is what. And so, if you were as badly behaved as the French were, they’ve had it. Up to here. They’re done.

Michelle:   I wonder if that made any of the later conquerors be a little bit more judicious in their taxation.

Anne:   Well, I don’t know about the taxes, but I do know that things kind of calmed down. They were Aragonese for quite some time. And then they’re Spanish. You know, it’s like, things get a little calmer.

Michelle:   So, this is the part where I confess that my research went to hell and gone.

Anne:   It’s Michelle goes down the rabbit hole time! We need a little theme for this, because you are so rabbit-hole-oriented. You truly are.

Michelle:   I just went where the reading took me, and this time it didn’t take me anywhere near what I was supposed to be learning about. 

Anne:   Well I’m glad that I could tell you all about Sicily, because there you go.

Michelle:   Thank God you knew, because what happened was, I started to try to track down what the actual sources were for this, and what I found was two things. OK, one is that there is a chronicle, an actual chronicle, from 1414.

Anne:   So, that’s, like, 150 years later.

Michelle:   Yes, so how the hell is that a useful source? But the guy who wrote it is really interesting. His name is Leonardo Bruni. So, I went down the rabbit hole of learning about Leonardo Bruni, because he apparently is thought of as being the first modern historian, and he advances this division of history into the Classical, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, and I thought that was just… because I kind of had that in my head as being a later thing.

Anne:   Well, yeah, because Gibbon… Gibbon really makes that…

Michelle:   Right.

Anne:   Well, Gibbon’s the “Dark Ages.” But he dates the Middle Ages from the fall of the Roman Empire?

Michelle:   Yep. And he is building on… Petrarch has this idea that you had the classical times and then you have dark ages now, because we have fallen off from the golden ages. But Bruni is the one who says, “No, no, no. There’s three periods going on. You have the Classical, you have the stuff in the middle, and you have us, which are rediscovering and rebirthing the Classical.”

Anne:   “We’re good! We’re good! We are back! We are retro! We are retro classics!”

Michelle:   So he has a giant discussion of something called the History of the Florentine People. It’s a twelve-volume history. It’s absolutely…

Anne:   You didn’t read all of this, did you?

Michelle:   Oh god no. Partially because my sad adventure, this time, is that nothing is available digitally. Unless you’re willing to go to the pirate site calling itself a library known as the Internet Archive.

Now, if you’re not paying for the materials, you are a pirate site, whether you call yourself a library or not. So, I have problems with that. So I didn’t do anything with that.

Anne:   We have standards over here, at One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. We wish to not be in that group, as much as possible. 

Michelle:   Yes.

Anne:   So, we say “no” to the pirate sites, where we can get all this wonderful information that people haven’t actually paid for, and so that’s not fair. Oh well. At any rate, you didn’t get to read Bruni, which you would have done if you had found him.

Michelle:   Yes, I would have. I did find a synopsis…

Anne:   Oh goody.

Michelle:   … of what Bruni has to say, but it’s not very long. So here it is:

“Most of the events described in Bruni’s History aren’t really momentous enough that they would be still widely remembered today or be considered as having a big influence on later periods.”

The guy… sorry, we don’t even really need that… the blogger is talking about how, for the whole of Volume Three, he hadn’t heard of any of it except for the Sicilian Vespers, and he says that:

“…Bruni doesn’t use the term ‘vespers’ to refer to the uprising, nor does he imply that they started at that time of the day;”

So that kind of implies that those things have, you know, trickled in later.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   Or that he didn’t think they were important. 

“…but he does describe a curious sequence of events that directly precipitated the uprising, namely…”

And now, I am quoting the blogger who is quoting Bruni:

“The Palermitans”—apparently is what you do if you’re from Palermo—“were holding a festival outside the city when the French came up to check them for weapons, and on that pretext began fondling the breasts of their women.”

So Bruni is one of the sources for the stuff you were talking about. So that’s cool. So Bruni. That was fun. 

And then I went down this other rabbit hole, because they kept citing a book called The Sicilian Vespers, by a twentieth-century historian named Steven Runciman.

Anne:   Yeah, this is the main study.

Michelle:   So, the thing is, Steven… first of all, you can’t get hold of the book, because it’s from 1958. You can either order it, used, and wait three weeks for it…so that was a bad thing. It’s not available digitally. And it’s been reissued from its publisher, but it’s a print-on-demand, so that also takes three weeks. However, it was reissued in a lot of volumes, and I went and I read book reviews of it, from the time that it came out, and generally it was reviewed really well. So it was very frustrating to not be able to get hold of that book.

So, I have absolutely no idea what sources Runciman was using…

Anne:   Right.

Michelle:   But because Runciman talks about things that Bruni does not…

Anne:   Yep.

Michelle:   Right? He’s got a lot more detail about it, but I have absolutely no idea where it came from. However, I did learn a lot about Steven Runciman, which was really interesting, because he was a hoot and a half.

He was born in 1903, and he died in the year 2000. So he lived to be 97. So, first of all, that’s really awesome. And, he is primarily known for a three-volume history of the Crusades, where he is the first western historian to take the point of view that they were a bad idea.

Anne:   So blessings on him! Because they were a horrible idea. Oh yay. So he’s the one who starts off that train of thought.

Michelle:   Yes.

Anne:   Yay! So he’s one of our heroes.

Michelle:   And it’s super difficult to tell… I’ll say it differently. The assessment of his work is mixed.  Because he doesn’t spend most of his life… he spends about ten years… because he’s actually Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman. He’s noble, right? He’s the second son of a viscount.

Anne:   Uh-huh.

Michelle:   And so after his grandfather dies, he leaves his academic position and goes off and becomes… now that he’s independently wealthy, he goes off and travels the world, and becomes an independent historian.

Anne:   Huh.

Michelle:   So, sometimes the people not liking his work kind of sound like they’re just being snobs. It’s so difficult. The assessment of his work is really mixed. Some people are saying, you know, it’s really great, and some people are like, you know, this was just basically an amateur.

Anne:   Right, but… so, yeah, it’s so frustrating, the position of independent scholars in general. So, at that time, also… because he had been an academician, is what you’re saying?

Michelle:   Yeah. He spent ten years working at Trinity College, in Cambridge.

Anne:   OK, so he’s not an amateur.

Michelle:   No.

Anne:   You don’t, like, all of a sudden become an amateur historian because you have left academia. Hello! Hello! Like, here we are!

Michelle:   Some of the pushback is probably just, you know, younger scholars needing to make their mark. Some of the pushback is really, like, this scandalous, you know, “He doesn’t like the Crusades? What the hell!” That would have been a big deal in England in the 1950s, to be saying that.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   He calls the Crusades, “The last barbarian invasion.”

Anne:   Yes! I love that! Absolutely. Absolutely.

Michelle:   He was also gay, which doesn’t help, in terms of people assessing him, you know, properly.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   But here’s my very, all-time, favorite story that I found out about him. This is a hoot. Do you remember back to when we… in the Hugh Despenser episode there were the people from Cambridge who hired the sorcerer, and they were going to kill…

Anne:   Yes. It wasn’t Cambridge. It was Nottingham.

Michelle:   Coventry! Coventry!

Anne:   Coventry!

Michelle:   John of Nottingham. Yes.

Anne:   John of Nottingham, and it was Coventry.

Michelle:   He was in Coventry. OK. Steven Runciman, when he was at Eaton with Eric Blair, who would grow up and be George Orwell…

Anne:   Right.

Michelle:   The two of them… there was another boy who was mean to them, that they hated. So they were both interested in the occult. They made… and this, I swear to you, is real. It’s in a George Orwell biography. They made a little wax figure of the kid they didn’t like, and they broke its leg. And they were appalled that two weeks later he broke his leg, and then six months later he died of leukemia.

Anne:   I’m sorry. That’s very sad.

Michelle:   I know! But, what happened was that word got around, among the other kids…

Anne:   Oh my god. Yeah. As it would.

Michelle:  They kind of gave these two a wide berth.

Anne:   Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Michelle:   For the whole rest of their time at Eaton.

Anne:   So this is twice now we have heard of death occurring after people have little wax figures, and do things to do them.

Michelle:   George Orwell gets scared shitless of the occult.

Anne:   I totally get that.

Michelle:   And he swears off and has nothing to do with it for the rest of his life. But Runciman’s like, hmmm…

Anne:   “Ah! There’s something here! Something’s going on!”

Michelle:   He stays interested in it for the rest of his life.

Anne:   Does he do any more things with wax figures? That we know of? Like, just to study. Just to study.

Michelle:   He has his very own biography, which—again, alas—is not available digitally, or I totally would have read it. 

Anne:   Yeah. Because he’s going to be… so he is a hero of True Crime Medieval. On many levels.

Michelle:  Hold on, I will tell you the name of the biography, because it’s delightful. It is called Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman.

Anne:   So we should all go find this.

Michelle:   And this is a new biography. This came out in 2016. Which appalls me that it’s not available as an ebook. What the hell? Make my life easier here, people. 

Anne:   No. There’s nothing in here about easy. Well this is lovely, thank you. Because I knew Runciman was the main scholar for the Sicilian Vespers, but I did not know the rest of the stuff about him.

Michelle:   And he was a humongous distraction. So, I learned a lot…

Anne:   Of course he was.

Michelle:   … about Steven Runciman, and nothing whatsoever about the Sicilian Vespers.

Anne:   I thought for sure—since there’s a couple plays and operas—I thought for sure were going to get the dramatic side of the Sicilian Vespers.

Michelle:   Yeah, sorry. I got the dramatic side of Steven Runciman.

Anne:   Well, if you’re interested in hearing the Sicilian Vespers operas, there’s stuff on YouTube. Maria Callas was in it. Yeah, because Verdi—this is Verdi—Verdi does an opera called The Sicilian Vespers.

Michelle:   That is just really, really fascinating. I’m always astonished to discover enormous, humongous things that I have never heard of.

Anne:   Well, and I do opera. I go to opera a lot, and I’ve never gotten to see this. But, you know, usually—well, not this year—but I go to the Santa Fe Opera, and they always have a world premiere, or at least an American premiere. So I get to see new things. But there’s always a couple of warhorses, you know. Like, how many times have I seen Madame Butterfly? Lots. Tosca? Lots. You know, that kind of thing. But I’ve never seen The Sicilian Vespers. It’s not widely performed, even though it’s Verdi.

Michelle:   I can understand, though, why the Mafia would want to claim it as an origin story. 

Anne:   Yes, because by the time the Mafia comes along, it’s Italy. OK, fine. You know, so, and then, “Here’s our story. Our origin story. Where we fought against the French,” because the idea was that the Mafia was providing the protection and things that the government couldn’t do. At any rate, so, yeah. You can see why it would make a very good origin story.

Michelle:   I really would have liked to have seen Runciman’s book, because I really would have liked to know, you know, what sources do we have that’s closer than 1414. Because that’s a big, long time period for stuff to be developing. 

Anne:   “The earliest narrative…”

I’m reading from… I have gone to Wikipedia to answer this question. 

“The earliest narrative source for the Vespers is the Sicilian language Lu rebellamentu di Sichilia, written perhaps as early as 1287. It credits John of Procida organising the overthrow of the French and portrays him in a positive light.

And then there’s a couple of Guelph histories, later, from Tuscany, which look like they might be relying on the lost source of the one I just mentioned. They stress John’s involvement. John of Procida. Yeah, there’s stuff about the organization. It does show up earlier.

There’s a couple of Florentine chronicles, but these are these later ones.

Yeah, but even the early stuff we have, it all contradicts each other. As to exactly how things started, and to when the organization period took over.

Michelle:   That’s something we’re kind of running into a lot. We had that… particularly when it’s something that’s really fraught. We had that with Robert the Bruce…

Anne:   Exactly what happened to John Comyn when Robert the Bruce…

Michelle:   “Who started it? Whose fault was it? How did this happen?”

Anne:   Totally depends on who the chronicler is, and what their allegiances are. 

Yeah, so that’s our discussion of the Sicilian Vespers, and the massacre of the French who happened to be on the island. You know, and we don’t know exactly what happened, but we know that the French were behaving badly, and then we know that the Sicilians had a revolt, and exactly what started that, and how it got organized, we don’t know. 

But it was a very important revolt, and it actually ended in Sicily having a small amount of freedom. They weren’t allowed to create a free state, but they were able to get some help from Aragon, and they ended up with a ruler that they wanted, for a while, and it was agreed that they would have some freedoms when Philip took over. So that was that.

But it’s not the Mafia.

Michelle:   I didn’t know that was a thing.

Anne:   No, it’s a thing. And it’s not the Mafia. So just stop that. Everybody stop that. 

Michelle:   And that reminds me of the Templars episode, where everything is trying to connect back up to the Templars.

Anne:   That’s right, “Everything is from the…” No. The Sicilian Vespers were a successful rebellion, but they aren’t the start of a whole long series of rebellions, they’re basically… they’re Sicily. They’re Sicilian.

Michelle:   So, the rebellion isn’t the crime. It’s the inveterate slaughtering of everybody.

Anne:   Yeah. So let’s be clear about that. If, indeed, one or more of the Sicilian women were being manhandled, and/or raped, that was a crime. That was absolutely a crime. But we don’t really know that. We do know that there were a whole bunch of dead French men, women, and children. Not just the people who were governing, just the people who were living there. And so that was the crime. It was the slaughter, the massacre of the French citizens of Sicily who were there, you know… I mean, does it make sense that it happened? Yeah. But it was bad.

So that’s our discussion of the Sicilian Vespers and, you know, when we did the ghosts we forgot to say what we were doing next.

Michelle:   Oh.

Anne:   Or I forgot to say what we were doing next, because I think it’s my job.

So, next time we meet up with you, we will be discussing the People’s Crusades, the French and German People’s Crusades. The Crusades are not the crime, what the people did in France and Germany, that’s the crime. So, we’ll be back to the Crusades. So, that’ll be nice. 

Where’s my…? Oh, I got… oh, here it is. I don’t know, this is the most discombobulated I think I’ve felt in a long time, and I really think it’s the time. I mean, I think it’s because it’s just nuts around here. By “around here,” I mean the United States.

This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, but with less technology. You can find us on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. Anywhere you’re listening to podcasts, we seem to be there. 

Please leave a review, because we’d really appreciate that. We enjoy those so much. And you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com. And you can find there the show notes, which are written by Michelle, the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach us all through the webpage. And you can leave comments! We’d love to hear from you. And if you have medieval crimes that you’d like for us to discuss, please let us know, and we’ll take it under consideration.

One of my connections has asked us to… for an episode that discusses the armor that Henry IV had made for his cat, and I’m not sure what the crime is, so I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get that in, but the armor is really quite fetching, and so it’d make a great picture.

Michelle:   I wonder if… there probably is a crime in there somewhere.

Anne:   There’s probably a crime, and if there’s a crime we’ll talk about the armor made for the king’s cat.

So, that’s all for us. Bye!

Michelle:   Bye!

Halloween Episode: Arche the Miller and his Drunken Buddies Pretend to be Ghosts, Cambridgeshire, England 1592 

Anne:   Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle:   And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:   And this is our Halloween episode, in the year 2020. The year 2020, basically, has sort of been an entire ghastly year so far.

Michelle:   This is exciting though. Last year we didn’t do a dedicated Halloween episode.

Anne:   No, we didn’t.

Michelle:   So this…

Anne:   Did we do a dedicated… no. We didn’t do a dedicated Christmas either. We had Gilles de Rais, and that was really problematic, and messed all our stuff up for a while. So we’re having a dedicated Christmas too.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   So that’s good. I like that.

So, for our Halloween episode, we want to discuss medieval ghosts, and of course we have to start with a crime, because we’re a true crime podcast. That’s our main thing. You know, the medieval stuff? That’s just, hey, whatever.

And so we’re starting with a crime from Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, in 1592. Now we know, we know, we know, this is outside of our mandate, but this is such a great ghost crime that we wanted to keep it. So we’re going to start there.

So in 1592, Arche, a miller, got dragged before the church court because he… first of all, he was a drunkard. He was drunk all the time, and wouldn’t take the communion, but the main thing was that he was so drunk the night that the wife of John Swan died, that he pretended to be a ghost, with a bunch of other companions, who were also drunk and pretending to be ghosts, and they went over to John Swan’s house.

Now, John Swan was the churchwarden, and he had been giving Arche the miller a bunch of trouble about being drunk and everything, and his wife died, and so a bunch of drunken guys went to pretend to be ghosts. And also the man that served them all the ale and got them so drunk, he was also presented before the church court. And that is our crime.

Now they never show up to say they’re sorry. They don’t do their penance. They’re supposed to have penance, and they’re supposed to pay a fine. They don’t. They just remain drunk. Arche actually moves to a nearby town, where he then, a few years later, gets presented to the church court for being a drunkard. That’s what he was. He pretty much was a drunkard. So that is our crime.

Michelle:   Imagine my shock that a fair amount of alcohol was involved in the decision-making process to go and harass a grieving…

Anne:   A grieving widower?

Michelle:   By pretending to be his dead wife’s ghost.

Anne:   Or some kind of ghost.

Michelle:   Which is not classy.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:  At all.

Anne:   No, it’s not classy.

So we’re going to discuss medieval ghosts, because a big question here is, like, in 1592, when you pretend to be a ghost, what do you do? Because we’re very sure you do not put a sheet over your head and go around going, “Wooo Wooo.” We don’t think so. We think that’s a much later development. But we have done our research, so that we can explain to you how to pretend to be…

Michelle:   I learned a lot! I didn’t know any of this stuff. I learned many things.

Anne:   We love it when we learn things! And we’re going to share them. And so then you, too, can go and pretend to be a medieval ghost, if this comes up. Which, I don’t know, it might. I don’t know if you need to be a medieval ghost. 

Yeah, 1592. The reason we know this, these are Elizabethan church court records, and the reason they exist… because you don’t find this stuff being written down in the Middle Ages, because the Church didn’t care. But it cares now, because there’s been a Reformation, and there’s been this time period where, basically, at any given moment you could be executed in some ghastly manner for believing something which was OK to believe a couple years before, but wasn’t OK now. At any rate, things are calming down, but in order to get them calm, what we have is a sort of church police state, where the church wardens are supposed to turn people in for all kinds of things. And because an enormous amount of my life has been spent sitting and reading church court records, I can tell you that the main problem in the church court records is fornication. That’s it. Fornication. That is the main thing.

Michelle:   I’m so shocked. 

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   I thought that nobody had sex outside of wedlock before the invention of the Pill. Isn’t that a narrative we’ve been told?

Anne:   Well, you also got in trouble for having babies out of wedlock, but that was, kind of like, on account of the fornication. So you got turned in for fornication and the baby, if you had a baby, because people knew you were fornicating with somebody outside of marriage. That’s the main thing. That’s the main thing.

The second thing, after fornication, is not going to church, because you were supposed to go to church. And, naturally, some people didn’t go to church because they were still Catholics, why would you go to the Church of England? So they were recusant, and that was a particular category, but most people who didn’t go to church, didn’t go to church because they were drinking and having dances. My favorite was this guy who got turned into the church court for not going to church because he was pulling his cow out of the ditch. Now, please! Are you supposed to really leave… But that’s the Elizabethan police state for you. “Leave your cow in the ditch and come to church because… Also, don’t get drunk and pretend to be a ghost.”

Michelle:   Yeah, the Elizabethans essentially invent the modern concept of surveillance.

Anne:   Yes they do. Yes they do.

I used to be able to tell when people came up for Masters’ exams, you could tell the ones who had been in my classes because they would refer to this time period as, “The Elizabethan Police State.”

Yeah, my students. Thank you, my students! You are correct!

At any rate, yeah, so, Arche the miller and a bunch of his cohorts pretended to be ghosts. There would still be the medieval idea of ghosts. It hadn’t, like, morphed into the sheets. 

So, we’ll now explain medieval ghosts. You ready?

Michelle:   Sure.

Anne:   Early medieval ghosts were actually helpful. That’s what they were, they were helpful. Because they were the souls of the dead who had traveled to Purgatory, and they had an enormous amount of information. Some of this information was about Purgatory. Not a great place to be, but better than the Hell part. And some of this information was about things that affected the living like, you know, where was money, and stuff like that.

So, in the Middle Ages, the early medieval ghosts are very helpful, and they show up a lot in stories, and sermons, and paintings, you know, telling people all these useful things. And so that’s what they are. But there were also people who were in Purgatory because they’d died suddenly, and they hadn’t had their Last Rites, and they’re wandering around, and so they need for the living to have various rituals, mostly Masses, to help them get out of Purgatory, because it’s going to be a while otherwise.

So, the ghosts sometimes have something to share, and sometimes have something they want, and sometimes both.

Michelle:   I was doing some reading about why Purgatory emerges as a theological concept in the Middle Ages, and it has to do with—partially because of the dead walking, that sometimes you have the spirits of the dead walking, but sometimes you literally have the dead getting up out of their graves and coming to give you a hard time about something or other, if they’re annoyed with you—and so Purgatory emerges as a concept where the Church can basically say, ‘We are protecting you from that. There’s this place where they go. They can’t just wander the Earth. They’re corralled, basically, and we can help you mediate with them.” So it helps alleviate something that, apparently, was really scary.

Anne:   So the dead were showing up a whole lot and bothering people, before this?

Michelle:   Apparently. Or at least there’s lots of stories of revenants coming back and scaring the crap out of people.

Anne:   So maybe you hadn’t seen them, but you’d heard the stories, and it was totally scary.

So, even those who had died with Last Rites sometimes needed help getting through Purgatory, and so the creation of Purgatory leads to this commemoration of All Saints and All Souls, so that’s what Halloween is… the evening before All Saints, and then All Souls is the next day after that, because the saints—All Saints—those are the people in heaven, or the souls in Heaven, and All Souls, those are the ones that are in Purgatory. Now, I want to point out that nobody in Hell is getting prayed for, because you can’t leave. Once you’re there, it’s over. No, no. You can get out of Purgatory, you can not get out of Hell. Unless, unless, unless… there’s that point where Jesus comes after he’s crucified, before he rises, where he goes to Hell and he takes some people out, but that’s then the creation of Limbo, which no longer exists. This is very complicated. You have nothing to say about Limbo?

Michelle:   I mean, not really.

Anne:   Not really.

Michelle:   I mean, the Harrowing of Hell is interesting because it works… OK, this is the part where we get to talk about drama…

Anne:   Yeah! There’s always a part.

Michelle:   Because the Harrowing play is a really rewarding play, because you’ve just watched about seventeen plays, you know, if it’s the York Cycle. You’ve just watched about seventeen plays of Jesus putting up with a lot of suffering, so the going into Hell and kicking ass is pretty awesome. It’s a very rewarding moment, narratively, you know, between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. It’s very rewarding to see him going and dishing it out to the devils who didn’t see it coming, and everything about it is, like, “Oh finally!”

Anne:   Yeah. He smashes down the doors.

Michelle:   It’s a victory we can understand, you know, as humans, because the other victory, the putting up with suffering and then the Resurrection, that’s a spiritual victory. But the Harrowing is, “OK, yes, we’re going, we’re knocking down the gates, we’re dragging out the people who shouldn’t have been imprisoned there.” Every piece of it is much easier for us humans to understand. And it’s a lot of fun to stage.

Anne:   Yes, it is. Because the little demons are all, “Owte, harrowe! Owte, harrowe!” You know, our favorite? And there’s the smashing down things, and there’s saving the very, very well-behaved prophets and whatnot that get taken out of Hell. It’s very good.

Michelle:   And the devils are all blustery, and awesome villains.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   “He could never get in here, our walls are really strong!”

Anne:   Yeah, and he does because, you know, hello!

Michelle:   “A prynce of peasse shall enter therat wheder ye will or none.”

Anne:   And then he does, he goes right in.

Michelle:   Yes!

Anne:   Yeah, yeah, so there’s, you know… there’s these various levels of things, and these ideas of what happens to you when you’re dead, and the boundaries between all these places are not necessarily really clear. And the humans who are wandering around on Earth, being all human, have kind of sliding ideas about all this, but the bottom line is, if you’re in Heaven, you’re a saint, and you can show up in a vision and that’s all very well and good. And if you’re in Hell, you’re basically hanging out with the demons, and so that’s that demon-land, it’s a whole different thing.

But, if you are in neither place yet, you could be just wandering around, and you could come to visit, and sometimes you do. Yeah.

Michelle:   And scare people.

Anne:   And scare people. So, then what do ghosts look like? Now, later on, you know, there’s the macabre skeleton ghosts. They start showing up in the thirteenth century, and they’re a memento mori trope. You know, “Remember your death.” They show up, reminding you that you are not going to be on the Earth, living, forever. There’s going to be a terminus ad quem. You’re going to be getting out of there. 

So that’s what the skeletons do. The ghosts look like humans. Because that’s what they are. They look like humans. They are paler, sometimes. We know this. For instance, in Chaucer, we’re told that the monk is not pale like a ghost, very specifically. So, they’re paler. And sometimes they’re actually being tormented while they’re walking around, which is both a kind of emblem of what’s going on with them—could you say prayers or sometimes help them make amends? If they’ve been stealing things, you have to go find the stuff that’s stolen and give it back. You can help them that way. Or you say prayers for them—But they’re also a reminder that you yourself do not want to be stealing, and whatnot, and you definitely want to repent, and everything, so that you do not end up kind of wandering around the back roads of York, you know, with nails stuck in your head, because that’s no fun, really.

Michelle:  So is this where we would like to talk about the Orderic Vitalis? He has shown up before, in one of our episodes, and I was racking my brains trying to remember.

Anne:   Yeah, where does Orderic show up?

Michelle:   This is the part I haven’t… I never did get it tracked down, but I know he popped up, for one of us, in one of our other episodes. I know we’ve talked about him before.

So, he retells a story. He’s living in the late eleventh, early twelfth century.

Anne:   He’s in Normandy.

Michelle:   He’s in Normandy. He’s a Benedictine monk. When I was reading about it again, I remembered having read this before, that he gets assigned to write the history of his monastery, and he just starts writing the history of everything.

Anne:   I remember him. Yes. 

The history of all things. We love Orderic Vitalis. And so this includes this lovely ghost story.

Michelle:   So he tells this story, and it’s really, really fascinating. It’s sometimes… I mean I haven’t, myself, gone and done the research to confirm this, but sometimes what he wrote down gets talked about as the first written-down—it’s obviously not the first ghost story—

Anne:   No.

Michelle:   Like, that would be completely bizarre. But one of the first ones that’s written down. And what’s really fascinating to me about it is how much like A Christmas Carol it is.

Anne:   Yes, it is actually. And I don’t think that Dickens would have known this, but there’s a particular kind of structure to it which…

Michelle:   Yes!

Anne:   … is very satisfying, makes a lot of sense.

So, let’s tell the story.

Michelle:   Yeah!

Anne:   Not the whole thing, because it’s, like, humongously long, but the bones of it.

Michelle:   So, the story he tells is supposedly contemporary to him, right? And he has a very specific date. It’s supposed to have happened in January of 1091, to a priest named Walkelin.

Anne:   The dead can come and see you at any time, but there’s some times, in the Middle Ages, when they’re known to show up more often. The beginning of the spring, the beginning of the autumn, and Christmas through Yule. So that’s what this is, because it’s an easier time for them to show up. Yeah. Or, if you’re the Green Knight, you could show up then too, but we’re not in the Green Knight, we’re in the ghost…

Michelle:   So the priest has told Orderic this story, about he got called out late to minister to a parishioner. And the moon is bright. He can see what’s going on. He hears noises and assumes that there’s an army of Robert de Bellême, on their way to besiege Courcy Castle, so he assumes that’s what’s going on. He is frightened that this army is going to go by and see him, so he tries to go hide behind some trees, and his way is stopped by a huge man wielding a club, who doesn’t hurt him but doesn’t let him leave the path either, and then he watches this procession pass.

And the giant isn’t threatening him so much as not allowing him to get tangled up in that procession of the dead going past.

Anne:   Yeah, that’s what’s going on. He keeps the boundary for the dead to go by.

Michelle:   So he sees all these different dead people going by. He sees, you know, women… and they’re being tormented in some way, because of what they’ve done in their lives, which is what kind of was reminding me of A Christmas Carol, where Marley shows up and he’s got the chains…

Anne:   Right. Right, right. Yes he does.

Michelle:   That was the specific kind of point of contact for… but Dickens has memories of the Middle Ages before that. He’s got a different… Nicholas Nickleby has a theatrical troupe that could as easily be a sixteenth or fifteenth century theatrical troupe as a nineteenth century one.

Anne:   Yeah, so the being tormented, in much the way it always has something to do with what their crimes were, because the ladies… and he recognizes a bunch of these people! These are people he knows.

Michelle:   Yeah, that reminded me of Dante.

Anne:   Yes, very much of Dante.

Michelle:   Where Dante is putting specific people in Hell, who he had a reason to dislike.

Anne:   There’s a crowd of women who are riding on women’s saddles that have red-hot nails in them, then the wind lifts them up and they drop on the red-hot nails and these are all—and they’re crying “Woe! Woe!” As one does—and these are all women who were fornicating! Later on, later on, they will end up in the church court records in England but, you know, at this point they just are being tormented in Purgatory with red-hot nails on their nether parts.

Michelle:   There’s priests and bishops in the procession. They call out to Walkelin for help, but he can’t do anything. There’s a really kind of touching moment. There’s a knight who wants him to take a message to his wife and children, and the priest says, you know, “I can’t be doing that. I don’t feel like this is something I should get involved with.” And the knight gets mad at him and slaps him!

Anne:   Yes.

Michelle:   And he’s rescued by the spirit of his brother, the priest’s brother, and the brother explains that he’s having to walk around in his armor and carry his sword and, you know, that’s part of his torment, which was very interesting to me because that connected back, for me, to what happened to Hugh Despenser the Elder. Remember him being hung in his armor?

Anne:   Right. They hung him in his armor. So that the armor… having to go around in the armor itself is a torment, which says a lot about warfare, doesn’t it?

Michelle:   The brother tells him—because at first he doesn’t recognize him—but the brother tells him, you know, things that the priest feels like only his brother would know, you know, shared experiences and stuff, and convinces him that it’s actually the spirit of his brother. Because any time you’re getting involved with a spirit, it’s always possible it’s a demon who’s just trying to trick you.

Anne:   Right, you have to be very careful.  Yes.

Michelle:   Yeah. And the part that was really touching was when the brother explains to Walkelin that when Walkelin had become a priest and said his first Mass for the departed, their father was released from Purgatory, and the brother was allowed to stop carrying his shield. So he still has to wear his armor and stuff, but progress is being made.

Anne:   Progress is being made. Yeah, it’s not an eternal kind of torment. It’s a thing from which you can be released. And there’s also this family tie, that, you know, this continues. It’s not like this stops.

Michelle:   I found this story fascinating, because we think of ghost stories as being, you know, a singular ghost coming to us, and this is this whole crowd, and it reminded me of the danse macabre. They really think about things community-based, in a way that we don’t. We think about things for how it affects an individual.

Anne:   It also reminded me of the riding of the sidhe, you know, the fairy host.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   And I’m reminded of Orfeo seeing the fairy host and his wife in with it, and following them in through the rock into fairyland. The beings from elsewhere travel together quite often, apparently.

Michelle:   I had never heard of this before I ran into this. I obviously had read other bits of Orderic Vitalis’ history, since we’ve dealt with it elsewhere. Maybe this was The White Ship? I’ve been racking my brains trying to remember where it popped up before, but I definitely remember having read about this historian before. But this particular piece, where he says, right in the middle of his contemporary history, “Oh by the way, this thing happened,” this I had not run into before.

Anne:   Yeah, and the thing is, it is contemporary history. Because one of the things that happens in the life of a community is that sometimes somebody has to deal with the dead. They show up. That’s what it’s like in the Middle Ages. Yeah. So here’s our story. Yeah.

Michelle:  He got slapped by a ghost!

Anne:  You get slapped by a ghost, yeah. And the mark is on his face, yes, the mark of where the ghost slapped him is a kind of token of the actual reality of the ghost. It’s a kind of, like, spirit, revenant… there’s not a real clear line here. Because we’re like, “There’s ghosts, and then there’s zombies,” and we’re clear that these are different things but they’re not, necessarily. They can be much the same. 

Yeah, and his brother tells him, “Pray for me, and in a year after Palm Sunday, I will be released.” That’s how long this will take. And he says, “Consider your own state and take care,” you know, “Mend your life because you’ve got some vices, you don’t have long. And don’t tell anybody about this for three days.” I have no explanation for that. Do you have an explanation? I have no explanation. But three days! After that, you can tell.

When the priest gets home, he’s ill for a while. And this is something that happens. You see it quite often in the medieval ghost stories, is that after an encounter with a medieval ghost, you’re ill. You don’t die, but you’re ill for a while. It takes something out of you. It’s not an easy thing.

Michelle:   Yeah, I thought that was really interesting too, that he has to go home and sleep for a week after having had this run-in with the dead.

Anne:   And then he’s in good health for fifteen years, you know. And then he tells his story to Orderic. And Orderic says, you know, “I saw the mark on his face. He told me the story, I saw the mark on his face.” So, hearsay, but, from someone who was told the story directly, and there was a mark on his face, so, evidence. There you go, evidence.

And we’re told, “I have committed the account to writing for the edification of my readers so that the righteous may be confirmed in their good resolutions and the wicked repent of their evil deeds.” So that’s what’s supposed to happen with a ghost story. That we are supposed to take the ghost story, and change our lives. And that reminds me very much also of A Christmas Carol.

Michelle:   A Christmas Carol. The ghost story of Christmas.

Anne:   Yep, the ghost story of Christmas. One of the best. But there’s a long, long history… you remember in The Turn of the Screw, that it starts out as a Christmas story. That at this time, in the winter—The Winter’s Tale is another one, from Shakespeare—that it’s at this time that you tell the ghost stories. And that has a long, long history to it, because it is at this time that, quite often, the dead show up and talk to you. So then you have a story. Christmas ghosts.

I have The Monk of Byland.

Michelle:   Ooh, I don’t know that at all! Tell me about that.

Anne:   Yeah, so that’s from Normandy, in the late eleventh century. This is later, from Yorkshire, about 1400. There was a monk at Byland Abbey who wrote down, I think it’s twelve ghost stories that were kind of like fragmentary. But there’s a bunch of ghost stories. Yeah! And so they give a nice little picture of various ways of thinking about ghosts. They’re all clearly connected, because it’s ghosts. And so I’ll tell you a few of them. I’m not going to tell you all of them.

So, there was a tailor who was walking along, and he saw what looked like a crow— maybe it looked like an injured crow—but there were, like, sparks that were coming out of its sides, and so the tailor crossed himself, and then the crow attacked him and the tailor prayed, and then the crow turned into a dog and then the tailor said, you know, “Speak!” and then it turns out that, in life, the dog-crow, this sparkly dog-crow, had been a human who had been excommunicated for some kind of thing he did, and so he needed absolution. He needed one hundred and eighty Masses to be said for his soul. 

There’s something about… I’ve always been enchanted by, like, the mathematics of redemption. Like, how many Masses do you need to get out of Purgatory for having done thus and such? At any rate, he needs one hundred and eighty, and if he does that, if the tailor gets, you know, one hundred and eighty Masses said, then the ghost will tell him how to heal himself, and otherwise his flesh is going to just rot away. This is ghostly extortion, but whatever.

So the tailor goes to the priest who excommunicated him and the priest is like, “No! I won’t!” And it’s like, “Oh please! Please! Please! Because I don’t want my flesh to rot,” and so the priest says OK, and so the tailor goes to all the monasteries in York—this is 1400, let’s take a little minute, that’s a lot!—so he goes to all the monasteries in York and he got one hundred and eighty Masses, for the soul, and he goes to the same place to meet the ghost and then the ghost shows up as a goat. So, sometimes you don’t actually, as a ghost, look like human. Sometimes you’re, like, shape-shifting. At any rate, so he shows up as a goat and then he turns into a fire…

Michelle:   Whoa!

Anne:   I know! And then the ghost tells the tailor to bathe in the river, and rub himself with some special rock so his wounds would heal. And then the ghost went away to Heaven, and the tailor got sick, as one does. That’s it. That’s that story.

There’s something, like, completely bizarre about all these stories. You’re like, “Really? OK.” So we have shape-shifting ghosts, we have extortion, and we have, like, having to go all… I mean the tailor didn’t even know this guy. He’s not connected to him. He has to go all around York getting Masses, just because he happened to run across the crow in the road. That’s the entire thing. That’s it.

OK, here’s another one.

Michelle:   OK.

Anne:   The Rector of Kirby was named James Tankerlay—so we actually have a name of somebody here, just like we do in Orderic’s retelling of the story, where you actually know some people who were… this is James Tankerlay. He rose out of his grave, and he visited the woman that he’d been having fornication with, and he blew her eye out. I don’t exactly know how this works, but OK.

Michelle:   Whoa!

Anne:   All right. And then the abbot was disturbed by this, so he had the ghost’s coffin dug up and thrown into the river, and this almost killed the oxen who were taking the body around, because they were so scared, but that’s the end of that story.

So they don’t even do anything for this ghost, they just throw his coffin in the river. And why he’s blowing the eye out of the woman he used to be fornicating with, I do not know. There’s some lovely things… these stories, they’re just like little things that happened. They’ve got no real context to them. They leave more questions unanswered than answered.

Here’s another:

This guy once was wrestling and it was the ghost of a monk and he won, wrestling the ghost of the monk. I believe we’ve had a kind of trope like this from the Bible, but OK. At any rate, so, wrestling the ghost of a monk, and he won, and so the monkly ghost—or the ghostly monk—told the man where he had hidden some spoons that he had stolen. And it’s not just your regular spoons, which would be wood, It was silver spoons.

Michelle:   Hmmm.

Anne:   Yes! And so the man went and got the spoons and he took them back to the Prior that the monk had stolen the spoons from, because it wasn’t even like the monk was going off someplace and stealing silver spoons. No! It was in the abbey! The monk was in the abbey, and he stole spoons and hid them someplace, and then he died. The Prior forgave him, and so then the monk’s ghost was OK, and the man who had done all this for him got ill, because one does.

Michelle:   One source that I read retold a story about two brothers who decided that they would leave their belongings to the monastery, but when the one brother died, the other brother, the living brother, changed his mind and said, “No, I’m not going to give you my brother’s stuff.” And so the abbot goes to the law and says, “Hey, we were promised this inheritance when Brother #1 dies,” and the court said, “Well, we don’t know what we’re going to do about it. He’s not here to testify.” So the abbot goes off to Brother #1’s grave and says to him, you know, “I’m sorry to bug you when you’re dead, but do you think you could come and testify to your wishes in this matter?” And the dead body gets up and comes with him to court, testifies, freaks Brother #2 out, to where he says, “Yeah, OK, that was in fact the plan. Not only do I agree with it, but you can have my stuff when I die too.” And then Brother #1 calmly goes back to his grave.

Anne:   You know, Purgatory’s really useful, isn’t it? Because, you know, if somebody was either in Hell or in Heaven, you couldn’t summon them like that. They’ve got to be more accessible. That’s the thing about Purgatory. People are more accessible.

You want another one?

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   So there’s this guy—he actually has a name too, his name is Richard Roundtree he went on pilgrimage. So he went on pilgrimage and so one night, while he was on the pilgrimage, he saw another ghost procession and at the end of the procession there was a baby, who couldn’t walk. It was, like, rolling along, you know? Like, he was rolling along, like, in a stocking. He was in a stocking. He was rolling along. And Richard stopped and said to the child, “Who are you?” And he’s Richard’s son. Because you know he’s left his wife home, when he went on pilgrimage.

Michelle:   Oh.

Anne:   So, he’d been born prematurely, and he died, and then he got buried, and he didn’t have a name and he hadn’t been baptized, so he had to, like, roll around behind the ghost horde, until they happened to come across his dad, who was on pilgrimage.

I tell you, the amount of chance that gets worked with these stories.

So Richard gave him a shirt, and he baptized him, you know, which you can do. You don’t have to be a priest. If you need to, you can baptize people. Then the baby walked with the procession and when Richard finally got home he talked about this with his wife, and the midwife confessed to having buried the child without having it baptized. But Richard divorced his wife anyway. I’m not real sure why. Because she hadn’t actually been part of that.

Michelle:   That feels more logically consistent…

Anne:   It really does.

Michelle:   … than a couple of the other ones.

Anne:   Except for all the chance bit. “Hi dad!”

Michelle:   You know, they’re not fooling around with that whole, “You’ve got to be baptized,” thing.

Anne:   No, they’re not.

Michelle:   One of my sisters was born very prematurely, and of course the priest wasn’t there yet, and my parents’ doctor was also Catholic, and he baptized my sister with her own amniotic fluid.

Anne:   Absolutely.

Michelle:   Right there. Yeah, because, you know, if you’re born two pounds in 1978, they weren’t assuming you were going to live.

Anne:   No, you have to be baptized. At any rate, yeah. Richard Roundtree’s child got baptized, so then he could walk.

Now, I don’t know if then he gets to leave Purgatory, which really I would think he should. The whole, like, just being able to walk with the horde doesn’t seem to me like much better than rolling around behind it, but what do I know? I don’t know.

Michelle:   So do you want to hear about cruentation?

Anne:   Yes.

So, those were some medieval ghost stories, but we wanted to discuss some medieval forensics, because there is actually a method by which you can find out who murdered somewhere. Take it away, Michelle.

Michelle:   So, I ended up, in my research, in this cul-de-sac of cruentation, which I had heard of but I hadn’t really thought about, in any sort of deep and meaningful sense.

Anne:   What is the word?

Michelle:   Cruentation.

Anne:   Cruentation. OK.

Michelle:  Which, apparently, is the noun for, “When a murdered body bleeds in the presence of its killer.”

Anne:   It’s nice that we have a word for that. I mean, you know?

Michelle:   I was unaware we had a word for it. See, I knew that this was a literary trope, OK…

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   … over the years, because we run into it all over the place. I mean, the tour de force place for it is in Richard III where—we’re circling back to Shakespeare. He shows up all the time, which isn’t surprising given that he’s living right after the Middle Ages. A huge chunk of what he’s writing about is the inheritance from medieval culture.

Anne:   Yeah. They didn’t wake up one day and say, “Thank God the Middle Ages are done!” I mean, no, that wouldn’t happen, actually, until Gibbon so, you know.

Michelle:   No.

Anne:   Quite some time.

Michelle:   So, in Richard III, the Prince of Wales has died and his widow is walking with his dead body on the bier to his burial, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester—who is not yet Richard III—shows up, and the body starts to bleed. Right?

Anne:   Right.

Michelle:   And Anne knows that that means that Richard, Duke of Gloucester is responsible for the death of her husband. And of course what the scene is doing is showing us his amazing powers of persuasion, and of talking, because we go from there, with her saying, “Oh my God, you killed my husband!” to her agreeing to go on a date with him.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   He manages to talk her around.

Anne:   In one of our Princes in the Tower episodes, I think we discussed Richard and Anne. They were old childhood friends. They’d known each other all their lives.

Michelle:   So I knew that it was a literary trope. We saw it in the Nibelungenlied, when we read that earlier, with the Brunhild episode. Hagen comes into the presence of Siegfried, who he’s murdered, and the body bleeds. It shows up in Chrétien because Yvain—remember, he’s killed that knight—and then he comes into the castle but he’s wearing the ring, making him invisible, and so the knight’s household are freaking out because the body is bleeding, and they know what that means, but they can’t find the murderer.

Anne:   Right.

Michelle:   Because Yvain is invisible. So it’s showing up for a really long time. In fact, Alex and I were talking earlier, and he was telling me that this is still a trope. So some of the pop culture that he reads and watches, that I don’t… it shows up still in video games, it’s in horror movies. I think there’s an echo of it, for sure, in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart.

Anne:   Yeah. That is an echo.

Michelle:   So what I didn’t know was that it has a real-life presence in medieval crime fighting.

Anne:   Because really… no. Just no. Really, no. OK, please explain how this works.

Michelle:   So it wasn’t ever in the legal codes but it was a thing that could happen at trial, and it is all over Europe.

Anne:   Oh really?

Michelle:   In Anglo-Saxon culture, it’s called “the bier test.” You could, as the family of a murder victim, demand that the suspect be brought into the presence of the body, and see what happens.

Yeah, it’s really fascinating. The first evidence that we have for it is in the thirteenth century, but I was reading… primarily I’m working from a chapter that is in a book called The Body of Evidence: Corpses and Proofs in Early Modern European Medicine, and there’s a chapter in there about cruentation. I’ll put that in the Show Notes so other people can go look it up. I had to look up how to pronounce that word, by the way.

Anne:   I had never heard that word, but I’m glad to know it.

Michelle:   So the author of that chapter says that, you know, we have all these instances of it in the thirteenth century, but the way it’s talked about implies that it’s been around for a while. So it’s not coming up out of nowhere in the thirteenth century. He, though, connects it to all of these other kinds of bodily things that are happening in this time. You know, this is when transubstantiation is emerging as a theology. It’s when the stigmata—saints getting the stigmata—is coming in as a thing that can happen to demonstrate your holiness. And when you have this emphasis on really, really gory crucifixion art. So he is arguing that this is all of a piece, this emphasis on the body.

Anne:   The body and an intersection with the spiritual otherworld, because transubstantiation is that the bread is the body of Jesus, that it’s the same thing, that it becomes the same thing, which is this spiritual concept but that has become translated into this three-dimensional world that we live in. And the same thing with the stigmata, the spiritual idea that you’re connected to Christ, but you start bleeding in the parts of your body where his wounds were. Interesting.

Michelle:   He cites a practice in Germany, and I had never, ever heard of anything like this. So here I’m going to quote, because it’s gross: The custom of cutting off parts of the victim, “drying or even smoking them, waiting for them to bleed in the presence of the murderer.”

So, apparently, in Germany, for some part of the Middle Ages, there was a judicial practice of the family members keeping a thumb or an arm or something and holding on to it, just in case the murderer wanders into their house.

Anne:   But you have to smoke it because otherwise it’s going to rot.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   So you preserve it, but it bleeds. It’s going to bleed if the murderer shows up. Hmm.

Michelle:   Yep. Yep, you have to keep it “exposed in the family home until the relatives had done it justice.”

Anne:   Well that sounds like a charming household decoration.

Michelle:   Oh yes.

So, my favorite, favorite piece… well, there’s a lot I loved about this chapter, but one of the really surprising pieces to me is how long this idea, of the body bleeding in the presence of the murderer, hangs out as a thing we take seriously in a court of law. It is hanging on at least from the thirteenth century into, in some places, the nineteenth century.

Anne:   No! What places?

Michelle:   Isn’t that fascinating? In the more sort of rural parts of Europe. Just fascinating. I was all over this.

Anne:   OK, so I have a question here. It’s clear, so far, that we have this forensic method where you discover a murderer by waving pieces of the dead person’s body around, and that this is considered to be a thing which is true and can be used in court. Do we have any court cases where this shows up and is used as proof?

Michelle:   Yes.

Anne:   Oh no! No!

Michelle:   But, the author of the chapter is very clear that it would never be used as the only piece.

Anne:   Oh. OK.

Michelle:   It’s part of a set. You might use it as justification to torture the suspect, so if the body starts bleeding in the presence of the suspect, then you say, “Aha! We have probable cause, we’re going to torture this person.” And usually you get a confession.

Anne:   Yes you do. Oddly enough. Because torture.

Michelle:   They’re convicted on the confession, not on the body. So what’s really awesome about this is that it hangs out for a really long time because it’s not considered to be strictly a miraculous occurrence. There are medieval theologians and philosophers and natural scientists who are trying very hard to figure out what the physical explanation for this could be. They have all sorts of awesome theories. 

So, it’s not considered… you know how, like, there’s some sorts of judicial ordeals where the idea is that God is just going to directly intervene?

Anne:   Sure.

Michelle:   So it’s not considered to be like that. They’re working really hard to try to figure out whether there’s a perfectly logical explanation that does not require a direct miracle.

Anne:   It’s scientific. This is actually scientific. Yeah.

Michelle:   I know! This is why it keeps going even with the Protestants. Because it doesn’t rely strictly on…

Anne:   Right.

Michelle:   … the miraculous. So one of the theories that they have is that—and I found this very fascinating—that when you kill somebody, the victim is so desirous of revenge that, like, a certain amount of their living heat hangs out in their body waiting for the moment to demonstrate, with that last little bit of energy, who the murderer is.

Anne:   Ok. All right. So it’s not supernatural. It has to do with the energy of the body. Some of it gets reserved because of this impulse to have justice. OK.

Michelle:   One theory is that, if you kill somebody, a little bit of your soul gets stuck in your victim, and so when you end up back in the presence of your victim, that little bit of your soul, like, makes itself known, over there in the body.

Anne:   Right, it has to bleed because it’s trying to get out and come back to you. I made that part up.

Michelle:   It makes perfect sense.

Anne:   I like that one better than the trying to keep some energy so that you can have revenge, because I think mostly when people get murdered, revenge is not what’s on their minds. I think mostly, from what I can tell, it’s like, “What the hell?” But anyway.

Michelle:   And of course there were other natural scientists who were like, “But it still works for people who were killed in their sleep so, duh, it can’t just be for people who were awake and want revenge, because you didn’t have time to wake up and want revenge. So that’s dumb.”

Anne:   Right. That makes no sense.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   There’s a different theory that is coming up with a natural cause that says that when you kill somebody, there is a necessary exchange of part of your spirit and theirs.

Anne:   A kind of connection.

Michelle:   Yes. When you come back into their presence, the bleeding is happening because the swapping back is happening.

Anne:   The connection. Yeah.

Yeah, I love it that there’s this very strong impulse to figure out what the science is, what the rational explanation is, for this thing which clearly somebody… has anybody ever actually really seen this? Or did they just believe… Again, it’s like the ghosts. Do the revenants actually show up in your life? Or have you just simply heard stories?

Michelle:   Yeah, it’s absolutely delightful because it’s one of these things where it feels like it ought to be true…

Anne:   Uh-huh.

Michelle:   You know? It’s so compelling as a concept that even though we really do know better…

Anne:   No.

Michelle:  … there’s a desire for it to be true…

Anne:   Mmhmm.

Michelle:   … and so there’s a desire to make it work.

Anne:   So we have cases where somebody at least says they saw the body bleeding when someone walked in the room, and so therefore we can torture them. Where else does it show up actually as evidence?

Michelle:   It gets used in Anglo-Saxon, this bier test. You can demand that… and of course some of the natural scholars are like, “Well, actually, really what’s going on here is that you do this because you want to observe how the suspect…” It’s not so much that the body is going to bleed, it’s that you bring the suspect in and see how they react when they’re confronted with the actual corpse of their victim.

Anne:   Especially if they believe that it’s going to bleed. It doesn’t necessarily have to bleed if what they’re doing is getting ready for it.

Michelle:   Yeah. The more hard-nosed scientists are saying, “Well, that’s really what’s going on here.” Is that you’re going to scare the suspect into revealing their guilt.

Anne:   So this is a really pervasive and powerful belief being used to find out who has done this horrible, bad thing. On into the nineteenth century, you said?

Michelle:   Yep, in some places. And because it wasn’t… here’s a quote:

“The status of cruentation as a not necessarily miraculous phenomenon rendered it more compatible with the juridical and medical-philosophical sensibility of the early modern era, especially once, with the Protestant Reformation, many began to be highly suspicious of miracles and punctual divine interventions in human history.”

And I think that part is really fascinating because even by the end of the Middle Ages there’s a lot of skepticism about the trials by ordeal, but because this can have this kind of semi-naturalistic explanation, it hangs out, and nobody’s getting executed on the basis strictly of…

Anne:   Just tortured! Alrighty then!

Michelle:   But it’s being used as a piece of evidence to build a case.

Anne:   Yeah, and what it is, is a witness.

Michelle:   Yes. The body is being used as a witness. There’s actually another article about ‘bodies that speak’. Now that one is in a medical journal that is in the 1960s and it’s basically saying, “Yeah, this is ludicrous, but people believed it.”

Anne:   Yeah, I think you and I are agreed on this point. This is a thing which does not happen. Especially the bleeding part, which, you know, is, like, in terms of actual forensics… because one of the things that kind of you don’t do after you’re dead is bleed, you know what I mean?

Michelle:   But it’s this great case of medieval scientists trying to think really hard and think logically about things, because there’s all this argument about, “Well how long can the body be dead for it to actually still work? Because of course after it’s been dead for a while things are going to dry up, you can’t possibly expect it.”

Anne:   Well, unless you smoke it and put it in your living room and then apparently it works just fine. This makes no sense. You can’t smoke it! At any rate. Whatever.

Michelle:   But scholasticism just goes to town, trying to make this make sense.

Anne:   Well, it seems to me that… so the scholasticism is… the scholastics are trying to figure this all out. That makes sense. But it seems to me that the actual foundation of it is completely connected to what we’ve been talking about, which is that there’s really not this big separation in between the land of the dead and the land of the living, and the spirits of the dead and the spirits of the living. There’s actually a great deal of communication, usually brought in by the dead, but sometimes the living go and find them, but there’s actually communication, and this is another form of that communication. It’s akin to the showing up and saying, you know, “I am the ghost of so-and-so and I want you to go and put my silver spoons back on the table.” It’s like that. Making things right in the living world from the standpoint of being dead.

Michelle:   Yeah, I think that’s true. I think that the belief that the body will bleed is a belief that the dead can still tell you things. Still communicate with you.

Anne:   And that they want to.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   Yeah, and this is about justice. This is not about, “Please help me so I can get out of Purgatory.” This is about, “The wrong was done by that person!” Yeah, so the dead have all kinds of things to say to us, apparently.

Michelle:   This was an interesting topic because it pointed out to me a bunch of things that I was constantly seeing in the background of medieval texts, but not really kind of ever focusing on and thinking about directly.

Anne:   Yeah, because it shows up in literature so much, but it turns out to be pervasive throughout the culture. All those cultures, throughout Europe.

Michelle:   Yeah, the idea of the body being able to provide witness, but also this idea of the dead being able to show up and chat you up.

Anne:   For various reasons. But always there’s something… there’s something, always, apparently, that needs to get done. Because that’s the thing. The living can do stuff in the living world, and the dead can come and tell them what to do. That, apparently, is the deal. Yeah.

Michelle:   One of the sources that I read talked about the Jacobean revenge tragedies…

Anne:   Oh, yeah, where the ghosts show up all the time! Yeah.

Michelle:   … as manifesting Protestant anxiety about the loss of Purgatory. Because once you have the Church no longer negotiating and, like, guaranteeing that they’ve kind of got those spirits under control, they could just be running rampant again.

Anne:   Yeah, nobody is saying Masses for the dead anymore. Yeah.

Michelle:   Certainly something is going on, in the early seventeenth century, with those revenger plays, because they are so common.

Anne:   Oh, I do love me a revenge tragedy. Which is why I am such a big fan of Sons of Anarchy. Which I’ve seen all the way through, I think, like, three times now. And now that I’ve mentioned it, I think I’ll go watch Sons of Anarchy again. Because there’s this whole justice thing going on. I mean, justice in the midst of crime. It’s very… I don’t think anybody actually bleeds when, you know, any of the murderers show up, but there’s a whole lot of information from the dead in various ways. Yeah.

Michelle:   In fact I saw an article—that I couldn’t get a hold of, because you have to have university access and, you know, retired—that was talking about the Croxton Play of the Sacrament in this context, which I thought was really kind of fascinating too.

Anne:   Because… so we’ll explain… in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, the Host—which, because of transubstantiation, the consecrated Host, which is actually, of course, the body of Jesus—bleeds when it is pricked with knives.

Michelle:   Yeah. I kind of was, like, “How the hell have I been a medievalist this long, and kicked this thing… “ You know, I’ve clearly run across this stone for decades and never really picked it up and looked at it. It’s just been here.

Anne:   Yeah, I knew it was there but I didn’t really think about it. Yeah, and as to ghosts, I mean, like, how common the stories of ghosts are, I really had not known. And they are so unlike our ghost stories. They are not like… except for things like A Christmas Carol, they are not our ghost stories.

In the medieval ghost stories, if ghosts are showing up in order to frighten you, it is to frighten you in order for you to make your life better, so that you do not end up like them. It’s really very clear.

Michelle:   That is a really interesting part of Christmas culture that has dropped out fairly recently. Because there is a Christmas carol that talks about… not Dickens’ but you know “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”? One of the lines in it is about “scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.” And that’s… we’re within a hundred years of that, so it’s very interesting that well into the nineteenth century you have that as a part of Christmas. 

Dylan Thomas’… there’s a story from A Child’s Christmas in Wales, and he talks in there about Christmas stories, ghost stories at Christmas.

Anne:   Well you know, we have something that’s related, that gets watched over and over and over, every Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life. Where it’s not a ghost, it’s an angel…

Michelle:   Oh! Yeah!

Anne:   … but the angel cannot get its wings. It’s the same kind of idea.

Michelle:   Yeah.

Anne:   The dead cannot actually change until something happens in life. And it’s all about living your life better, and actually recognizing what’s real. Yeah. Christmas. Christmas ghost stories.

Michelle:   Kind of funny that we… at least I think it’s kind of funny that we put together this episode thinking this was going to be the Halloween episode, but it turns out it could have been the Christmas episode!

Anne:   Yes it could have been. They do the same thing.

Michelle:  They do so much with ghost stories at Christmas.

Anne:  They do. But the ghosts can show up other times too.

Michelle:   And I thought I had really reckoned with the ways in which Shakespeare is medieval, in his head. But this changes Hamlet for me, really.

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   Yeah. Hamlet and Richard III. He is… sixty-five percent of his brain is medieval.

Anne:   It’s just around the corner.

Michelle:   Yeah, he saw medieval plays in Coventry, as a little boy.

Anne:   Well, that’s one of the reasons that you have to end up, you know, like, with your Church police state. Because you’re trying to make a jump that you haven’t quite made yet.

Michelle:   And it’s super not clear, in something like Hamlet, how much of what he builds in there he builds in because it’s a useful literary device, and how much because he thinks it might actually be real.

Anne:   Yeah, that’s true.

Right, because the bleeding… you know, the ghosts come and tell you stuff. This is… it’s just really very close to us. It’s very close to us. And even if we’re a human who has not actually seen ghosts, or talked to them, we have very likely had dreams where our dead say things to us. The humans tend to believe that there’s this connection in between us and our gone beloveds, and also our gone tormentors. The connection doesn’t leave us.

But I don’t think that bodies bleed when the murderers walk in. I don’t believe that.

And I also don’t think that the ghosts go around in giant hordes with little babies rolling around behind them. I’m not there either, I’m just saying.

Michelle:   To be fair, a lot of the thinkers in the Middle Ages didn’t think so either, but they were trying to work out, “Is this even possible?”

Anne:   So many people say it’s so. You know. But it’s a common enough idea that you might well, if you were really annoyed at the church warden, and his wife had died, and you got really drunk, you might well go over to his house and pretend to be a ghost. Because everybody knows… they didn’t have to explain what they were doing. Everybody knew what they were doing. They were pretending to be ghosts.

And so we come down, we come back to Hinxton, in 1592. Arche the miller pretending to be a ghost. So, Michelle, what do you think they did? Because all we’re told is that, “He did counterfeit himself a spirit.” You know? In other words, he pretended to be a ghost. What did they do? They did not put sheets on their heads and go, “Woo woo!” That’s right out.

Michelle:   Well, I will admit that, A) I do not know. But I will guess that they powdered themselves to make themselves pale.

Anne:   They might have done that. Depends on how drunk they were, and how much… if they were going to, in some way, make themselves look like ghosts, they would have to powder themselves to be pale. Yeah, we don’t know. We’re guessing here. But we… so we do know that ghosts are pale.

And what did they do when they got there? Did they just, like, wander around and look in the windows? What did they do?

Michelle:   I don’t know, do you know? This was your record.

Anne:   Oh we don’t know. That’s all the information we have. But what we do know is that these particular ghosts, these fake ghosts, the counterfeit ghosts, are going over to the house of someone that annoys them. And we know that the province of ghosts is to try and get the humans to pay attention for some reason or another. So they might have gone to frighten John Swan by pretending to be people, you know, people in Purgatory who had met his wife. “Your wife is here and she’s really upset!” That could be it.

They might be pretending to be ghosts who want something from John Swan. “Your wife is here, and she’s really upset, and she says that you should leave Arche the miller alone and start dragging him before the church court.”

But they must have been saying something. Because that’s what the ghosts do. They talk to you.

Michelle:   Yeah, it’s… I guess I’m back to Dante, you know, because his interaction with the people in Purgatory are so informed by this in a way that I hadn’t really… I hadn’t really made that connection before. 

I mean, this is honestly why I am a medievalist, right? You can learn and learn and learn, and you never run out of things to learn. I adore Shakespeare, but I went once to a Shakespeare Association of America and decided I could not do it. It was too claustrophobic.

Anne:   No, so, what they did, they might or might not have powdered themselves, but if they were going to make themselves look like ghosts, that’s the way to do it. The only way to do it, really, as a medieval ghost, is to make your self look paler. 

They went over to the house and somehow or other… so, what they were doing is they were being spirits from Purgatory who were clearly in some kind of torment, and were trying to make John Swan feel bad about his wife who probably they were intimating was in torment too. Now she wasn’t with them, because she was dead. So she actually was dead, and they were not, so she couldn’t actually show up in the counterfeit horde of the dead. They had no baby rolling along behind them either, as far as I know.

Michelle:   That is just one of those moments of, you know, delightful medieval logic. You know?

Anne:   I know! Yeah.

Michelle:   Because medieval thinkers are really actually pretty logical most of the time and trying to think through the logical consequences of what it would mean to be a newborn who also has to try to hunt down their dad in order to get a name and get out of Purgatory? Like, you obviously can’t walk. Hello. 

Anne:   Yeah.

Michelle:   It’s very logical.

Anne:   Yep.

So that’s our crime. Arche the miller and his buddies got really drunk, and they went to pretend to be ghosts, and that was easy to do because everybody knew that ghosts showed up sometimes, and so everybody knew what it was like. All you had to do was pretend to be one.

Michelle:   Do we know anything about the reaction of the person in the house? I mean, did he have one hot minute of, “Oh no!” Or was he like, “Oh, good night nurse, guys, really?”

Anne:   We have no idea. All we know is that he hauled them up before the church court, because he’s the churchwarden and that’s one of the things they do. So if you wanted to be caught being drunk and pretending to be a ghost, this would definitely be the house to go to, because that’s what he does. He takes you to the church court.

Michelle:   This would make the best play. 

Anne:   It would. It would be very good.

Michelle:   The best one-act play.

Anne:   It would be very good. Yeah. No, John Swan was really annoyed. We do know that. But I do think…

Michelle:   Gee! Why?

Anne:   We know that. But here’s what I really think. We don’t know, because it’s not in the record, but what’s in the record is that John Swan has been dragging Arche the miller before the church court a great deal. I think he knew exactly who it was. I think that he was sitting there in grief and mourning, and a bunch of drunk guys came over to his house, going, “We’re really upset because we’re in Purgatory!” and, you know, I think he knew who they were. They just… and he turned them into the church court the next time that, you know, the inquisitors came by.

Michelle:   It’s so spectacularly tacky, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that can happen in small towns when people are up each other’s nose all the time, which, you know, I know about from having grown up there. And you would, in fact, decide, “You know, this is my time.”

Anne:   Yeah, yeah. You’re going to go play a prank. This is going to be hilarious. It’s going to be so funny to go over to John Swan’s house and be like… It’s like TP-ing his house, but they didn’t have any toilet paper, you know? Like, “Ha, ha, ha, John Swan! Let’s go get John Swan!”

Yes, Henry Calton is also turned in for, “Calling diverse men together the same evening that John Swan’s wife departed, and gave some of them drink more than sufficient so that it was reported that one Arche, a miller, was so drunk that he knew not what he did.”

So that’s another piece of it. This has been done in a blackout, I say as someone who is quite familiar with… like, he didn’t remember it the next day.

Michelle:   It’s just… what would have been sufficient? 

Anne:   This was more than sufficient.

Michelle:   What would have been sufficient?

Anne:   Sufficient drink is as much that you drink before you go to pretend to be a ghost at John Swan’s house. That’s how much that is. You know you’ve gone over the line, but you don’t know what the line is until you go over it. But this is quite common with alcohol, so there you go.

Michelle:   This is one of those great moments of, OK, this is a crime in the time we’re talking about but, you know, really, now, it probably wouldn’t…

Anne:   No.

Michelle:   It probably wouldn’t be something you would get prosecuted for. You might…

Anne:   No.

Michelle:   The police might come and take you home. 

Anne:   Yes. That’s right.

Michelle:   Because you’re being a nuisance. But you’re probably—you might get invited to sleep it off overnight in the cells—but you’re probably actually not going to be, you know, arrested and prosecuted with anything.

Anne:   Well, you wouldn’t have been… it wouldn’t have been done in the actual Middle Ages either. This is… in those senses, the ghosts that they’re pretending to be are medieval ghosts, but the law is Elizabethan. There is a time period wherein you can get arrested and prosecuted for this, and that’s what that is. Welcome to the Early Modern Police State.

So, I believe that’s our Halloween episode.

Michelle:   There we go.

Anne:   So, Happy Samhain to everyone.  Have a good new year. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today—let’s think that through, do people go around getting drunk and pretending to be ghosts? I think maybe they do—where the crimes are just like they are today, but with less technology.

Actually, I don’t really think we need more technology for this. This is a very low-tech crime.

We are on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, any place you are listening to podcasts. We’d love it if you left a review. We’d really appreciate that. And you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, and you can find the Show Notes there, which are written by Michelle, the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach all of us through that webpage. And, you can leave comments. We love to hear from you. We love comments.

And if you have medieval crimes that you think we should discuss, please let us know. Because it’s a thousand years, and it’s all over Europe, and people were behaved badly all that time, and a bunch of it got written down. So we can find it.

So that’s us, saying goodbye. Bye!

Michelle:   Bye!

Robert the Bruce Kills John Comyn, Dumfries, Scotland 1306

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  And we can’t tell you how glad we are, this particular week of our recording, to be talking about the long-ago past, because the current present is annoying us. So we move on.

Today we’re discussing the murder of John Comyn by Robert the Bruce on February 10, 1306. 

It takes us back to… Edward I is going to get involved in this and I just don’t know… you know, I don’t know if we’ll ever have… one thousand years of people behaving badly seems to center a great deal around Edward I of England and Philip IV of France, and I just don’t know what to tell you. We just keep coming back…

Michelle:  Well, the two of them do a hell of a lot of bad things together. Oh, yeah, that’s a good reminder. We sometimes use bad language. Sorry.

Anne:  Oh yeah, right. Disclaimer! If you are under thirteen you should not listen to this until your parents or your guardians or your grown-ups of some sort listen to it and say it’s OK, and if you’re in charge of people under thirteen you should listen to it first because, since we’re discussing medieval crimes, sometimes they are very dreadful. Not, actually, in this case, there’s just some stabbing. But our language is often very bad, and that’s just how it is because we’re just, like, saying our words and some of them aren’t good.

So that’s our disclaimer.

Michelle:  At some point we’ll tell the story of the first recorded use of the F-word in English.

Anne:  Are we going to tell that?

Michelle:  At some point. We don’t necessarily have to do it now, but I happen to know it and it’s quite funny.

Anne:  No, well, the thing is, it’s not actually part of a crime, is it?

Michelle:  Um, well, it’s in the record, so kind of. But we’ll save it for another time.

Anne:  OK. We’re saving. You have to just keep listening to us to find out when we tell you about that.

Michelle:  Yeah, please come back later.

Anne:  Oh! By the way! Just this morning, our 25^th podcast episode went live, and it was the anniversary. We’ve been doing this for a year. So thank you so much, if you are one of our listeners. We are enjoying this no end. In fact I think it’s mostly where my sanity is coming from, as it exists in the year of 2020. The godawful year from hell.

Michelle:  Yeah, apparently, as far as anybody can tell, only the year 536 was worse.

Anne:  Yes. Yes, and that involved, of course, a volcano in Iceland, right? That covered the earth with ash and led to the second ice age?

Michelle:  Yeah. It was super-bad.

Anne:  Yeah, so it’s probably not much like all the fires across the globe, huh? Yeah. Probably not. Everything’s fine. Let’s talk about the year 1306.

Robert the Bruce and Comyn met in Greyfriars church in Dumfries, and they started fighting, and Bruce stabbed Comyn before the high altar, which is really bad and got him excommunicated. Bruce’s supporters then stabbed Comyn as well, and so that’s the murder. But the issue was the crown of Scotland, and it’s going to get really, really involved, and so, you know, buckle your seatbelts.

Michelle:  My favorite, favorite piece about him killing him at the altar is that Robert the Bruce had a particular devotion to Becket.

Anne:  I did not know that! Oh!

Michelle:  Isn’t that awesome?

Anne: So he must have been really angry to do that bad thing.

Michelle:  I know!

Anne:  Well, there were decades of going up to this, which I will now explain, because that’s my job. I’m totally going to explain this. And Michelle told me, before we started recording, that she had to stop reading it because it was too much. Yeah?

Michelle:  Oh man. I was trying to make sense out of all this, and I would have had to have read a dozen more books before it started to make any sense at all. I mean I read two, and it just… oh man.

Anne:  It made sense to me. It made sense to me and I’m going to share this, and I only hope that I can be clear about it. So here we go.

What was going on had to do with the issue of who was going to wear the crown of Scotland. And Edward I was the foundation of this piece of the problem, although it had started earlier.

In 1290—so this murder is in 1306, so 16 years before—the crown was vacant because the ruler of Scotland, who was Margaret, the Maid of Norway—on account of being born in Norway, and the daughter of the Norwegian King and, you know, a Scottish princess—Margaret had died at the age of nine. She had become Queen at the age of three, but we’ll get back to that. She died at the age of nine and there were thirteen claimants to the throne. There were only two really, that mattered, but Edward I kind of got others to get in on this.

The regents…because of course she was a child, wasn’t she? She’d been theoretically Queen of Scotland since she was three but really, as we know, children are not that good at making good decisions and so she had no frontal lobe capability yet, and so there were regents. They were called the Guardians of Scotland, and they asked Edward I to arbitrate because there were all these claimants and they needed arbitration.

OK, I want to make a little segue here. So, we have a bunch of claimants. Guardians want an arbiter. They choose Edward I. Now you might say to yourself, “Wasn’t this pretty dumb?” But it’s only dumb, really, in retrospect. I will explain.

By that time Edward had already, in 1274—which was two years after he became King—invaded Wales under the pretense that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd hadn’t paid homage to him, and he took Wales. He put down a series of rebellions. He made his son Edward the first Prince of Wales in 1284, built bunches of castles, so within ten years he had subjugated Wales. Got it?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Now we move back to Scotland. Alexander III, who was the King of Scotland, died three years later. OK. So that’s when the three-year-old Margaret, who was his granddaughter, was the only clear heir. So the Scots nobles agreed. The Norwegians—because that’s her dad and his people—allied with Edward who planned to have Margaret and his son Edward, who would later be Edward II but at this point was just Edward, Prince of Wales, marry because that was going to solidify English control of Scotland. Fair enough?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  So, Margaret, at the age of nine, sailed to Scotland to be Queen but she died en route. Too bad. So she’s dead. And so then there’s all this problem, and so the Scots choose Edward I to be the arbiter of what’s called the Great Cause—this is in capitals—which is trying to figure out who’s going to be the leader of Scotland.

At that point the English and Scottish relations had been peaceful for a long time. It seemed like the English claims to Scotland were over. Edward was intelligent, he was well educated, he was a legal expert, he was internationally respected. So it wasn’t actually an obviously bad decision at that point. But, it was a bad decision precisely for this reason of this business about the legal expert stuff, because he was able to require the Scots to recognize him as their feudal overlord because they were asking him to be a judge, and at the royal level, being a judge meant being an overlord. And he was a legal expert. So does that make sense? Does that make sense now as to why the Scots stupidly called in Edward to be the judge, and then told him that he was their feudal overlord? It was really, in retrospect, such a mistake. But we’ll get to that later. Is that making sense so far?

Michelle:  It points up the complexity of feudal relationships.

Anne:  Yes!

Michelle:  You might remember one of the things that happens with Edward II is that he does not want to do homage to Philip IV for his holding of Gascony over there.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  So you have the English crown having this holding in France that they have to do feudal obligations to the King of France for, but now the King of England wants to do the same thing to all of Scotland. It’s really… when you’re taught feudalism you’re taught it as a very careful pyramid structure, but it’s more like interlacing.

Anne:  Yeah, and even at the non-royal level, you could swear homage to several different overlords, many of whom then went to war with each other, and then what do you do? So it was a very sliding sort of thing, but Edward was an expert in these little ramifications.

Michelle:  He was absolutely an evil genius.

Anne:  He was brilliant! We hate him, by the way. We hate Edward I. We hate him.

Michelle:  For sure.

Anne:  But he was brilliant. He was just brilliant. He was very good at what he did, which was, you know, things like subjugating the Welsh, the Scots, and the Jews, and sending them out of England. He was really good at being an evil genius. But, at any rate, so yeah. So he’s going to be arbiter. So far, so good. So far, so good. Nothing bad is happening yet.

They chose 104 auditors to decide the Great Cause, and they were chosen by Edward and Bruce and Balliol. The Robert Bruce that we’re talking about is not Robert the Bruce. It’s his grandfather, I do believe. 

Robert Bruce and John Balliol, they were the main contenders. And so, along with Edward, they all chose the auditors.

Michelle:  And he’s called Robert Bruce the Competitor, because he is in for the crown.

Anne:  And you will see it spelled Robert Bruce and Robert Brus. It’s really slide-y at this point. By the time you get to Robert the Bruce—which is really supposed to be Robert de Brus, at any rate—he’s Robert the Bruce who is the murderer of our little podcast today. It’s spelled “Bruce” but before that it shows up variously.

OK, and civil war had been looming because Bruce and Balliol were both rattling swords, you know, and so they called in Edward, and there you go.

Now, I’m going to explain—because I find this hilarious, and that’s me—I’m going to explain how these thirteen claimants to the throne had claims to the throne.

Michelle:  Better you than me.

Anne:  I’m so good at this. And I often threaten that I’m going to put a genealogical chart in the show notes. I’m going to use this as our picture because this is just too much. Although it may be that I can find a really nice picture of Robert the Bruce stabbing Comyn and, you know, probably done… my guess will be it’s in the nineteenth century. I’ll go look. How about using both? Because this chart is hilarious. But, like, for people like me. So.

Oh, and by the way, Robert the Bruce, who stabs John Comyn? They’re third cousins.

Michelle:  OF course they are.

Anne:  Of course they are. Because the whole problem here is that everybody’s related. All right.

John Balliol was the descendant of David I—King David I—through his grandmother. Robert de Brus, who is the contender and the grandfather of Robert the Bruce, also descended from David. One generation shorter, but through a different line.

John Hastings descended from David—the Earl of Huntingdon, not the King—through a younger daughter. And he was one of the descendants.

Floris V of Holland was descended from Henry, the Earl of Huntingdon, David of Huntingdon’s father, through a daughter.

John “the Black” Comyn descended from Donald III, an uncle of King David, through a daughter.

Nicholas de Soules descended from an illegitimate daughter of Alexander III.

Patrick Galithly, son of an illegitimate son of King William, the father to Alexander II.

William de Ros was a descendant of an illegitimate daughter of William.

William de Vesci was a grandson of a different illegitimate daughter of William.

Patrick Dunbar was a descendant of yet another illegitimate daughter of William.

Roger de Mandeville was a descendant from… wait for it… yet another illegitimate daughter of William.

Robert de Pinkeney was descended from an alleged illegitimate daughter of Henry the Earl of Huntingdon. We go back to him.

Eric II, King of Norway, was the father of the dead child-queen Margaret, and the son-in-law of Alexander III. So you know.

None of these really held any water except for Bruce and Balliol, so they had actual reasonable claims. But Edward I had encouraged people to come forward, which is why they ended up with 13 claimants to the throne. Because usually you would just not even bother. I mean, really. “I’m descended from somebody who might be an illegitimate daughter…” No. Just stop it.

Michelle:  Unless you’re a Beaufort. In which case…

Anne:  Oh stop it with the Beauforts! For those of you who are just tuning in now to us, Michelle does not like the Beaufort line, descended from John of Gaunt, who were illegitimate and got made legitimate by saying that they would never try to get the throne, only they did. And indeed they did get it, because Henry Tudor.

OK. At any rate, by allowing the three-year-old Margaret to take the throne, the notion that the throne went to the firstborn had been kind of tacitly agreed upon, so it wasn’t an issue of female or male, but going to the first born. Primogeniture.

Robert de Brus, the contender, argued that though he descended from a younger daughter of King David, the line was shorter and that made him closer by proximity of blood. These are both… given the circumstances, these are both very good claims. Since the circumstances are that there’s no real clarity here, as you will see by the chart which I will put up.

Edward I chose John Balliol on November 17, 1292, with the agreement that his son Edward, who was going to be Edward II, was going to be the heir to Balliol. And it’s important to note here that the majority of the Scots nobles supported this, including a bunch of auditors that had been chosen by Bruce. Fair enough?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  So now is this all making sense so far?

Michelle:  Yeah. Yeah, no, I followed this. I didn’t bother looking up all the different, you know, thirteen claimants.

Anne:  Oh, I was fascinated. Because I was like, thirteen claimants? Are you kidding me? How does this work? And now I know. And now you do too, if you were taking notes. All right. Balliol was King from 1292 to 1296, when the Scots were defeated by Edward who invaded because they’d made an alliance with France—and so basically that’s an excuse—and the English took Dunbar Castle and John abdicated.

There were, after that, several rebellions—William Wallace, for instance—but there was essentially no king. It was an interregnum. The Guardians were the nominal rulers. Edward rode herd. So there was no king, at that point. When William Wallace resigned as Guardian, in 1298, Robert Bruce and John Comyn became joint Guardians. So that’s our John Comyn, who was a nephew of Balliol, by the way. That’s how he’s related.

Michelle:  Right.

Anne:  Like anybody cares. But they didn’t work well together. Surprise! And Comyn and Bruce both got replaced because things weren’t working well. 

OK, in February of 1304, John Comyn, once again Guardian, surrendered to Edward, and Wallace was captured and executed in August of 1305. Now these… I’ll get to the wars later, as to what was going on. Because there’s several different lines here. What’s going on with the kingship of Scotland? What’s going on with the wars with England and Scotland? What’s going on with Comyn? Trying to follow them all.

Our Robert the Bruce, by 1305, had a great deal of land of Scotland. The Bruces had been rising in power. He had some in England, and he had a very deep belief that he should be king. 

In 1306 John Comyn—our John Comyn, who’s John Balliol’s nephew, as we said— made an agreement with Edward to surrender his claim to the throne in exchange for Bruce’s lands, should Bruce rebel. So that’s a little tacky. Bruce at that point was in England and he got out of England before Edward arrested him, because Edward was just going to arrest him for no reason, he wasn’t rebelling at that point. Just, why not? Because you’re Edward I! You just do things! And he got to Scotland and that was when he had the meeting with Comyn. He accused him of treachery, and they had a fight, and he killed him. So that’s the background to Bruce murdering Comyn. 

Comyn had… I think Bruce is… Bruce really should not have stabbed John Comyn in the church, but really things had not been going well, and Comyn basically kind of peremptorily threw him under the bus, like, “I’m going to throw you under the bus in case certain things happen.” And Bruce nearly got arrested, and history tells us that he wouldn’t have been well treated (see William Wallace). Are you following this so far?

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  OK, so at that point Bruce took Dumfries, which is where he had murdered Comyn. Six weeks later he was crowned King of Scotland, so the Scots at that point were behind him. He was defeated in June at the Battle of Methven, and his brother and other followers were executed at Kildrummy, and his wife and his sisters were imprisoned and then… so what year am I in? This is… tell me again? This is 1306. OK. And then in 1307, Edward I died.

Michelle:  That changes things.

Anne:  Yes it did. It changed things. At least for a while.

Bruce destroyed Comyn lands in the North, and he took control of Scotland, north of the Tay, and over the next eight years he took back English holdings in Scotland and raided England. He was fighting guerilla warfare, which the English weren’t so good at. And wouldn’t be in the colonies either, as we know, but still.

And then in 1314 was the Battle of Bannockburn where Bruce defeated Edward II. It was a really great moment, actually, in Scottish history. And then he had further invasions of England and Ulster… did you know about the Northern Irish stuff?

Michelle:  Ooh! I knew that the connections were there because Robert the Bruce’s wife was born in Northern Ireland wasn’t she? The second wife? Elizabeth?

Anne:  Might have been. I’d have to go look and see. 

Michelle:  Because, anyway, her family had connections there.

Anne:  Yes, and so he invaded Ulster, and he had his brother crowned King of Ireland. That didn’t last but, you know, he had really large intentions. 

He died in 1329. Not from leprosy. You’ll see this written over and over, that he died from leprosy. That comes from English chronicles. The Scots never said it. There was never any hint that he did. Plus, we found his bones and there’s no sign of leprosy, so we actually don’t know what he died of, except that we do know it wasn’t leprosy. So stop that. Everybody stop that. But he was ill, and he died at fifty-four, and so then there’s going to be more of Scots history, but that’s what had happened with him.

I want to go back to Comyn, to give some background for him. The Comyns had supported John Balliol in the Great Cause. They were related. Well, everybody’s related but they were more closely related than… how do you figure this out? Because it’s not like you can say to yourself, “You’re my cousin, I’ll support you,” because just like feudal overlords you’ve got 94,000 of them, and they’re all related.

When war broke out between England and Scotland in 1296, the Comyns attacked Carlisle, which at that time was held for Edward I by Robert Bruce the father of Robert the Bruce, so the Comyns had been—like Balliol—had been working with England. Comyn was imprisoned at that point, but set free after the first war was over. He took service with Edward, but deserted when Wallace rose up, and he went to Paris and made an alliance with France, and so then he shifted.

After Balliol was defeated and abdicated, the Comyns lost power, and Bruce killed him early in 1306, and subdued the Comyns, allied the Scots, and Bruce held parliament in 1309, so at that point he really had managed to bring things together.

Michelle:  I like that John Balliol manages to gather the nickname “Toom Tabard” meaning “empty coat,” because he’s so bad at this.

Anne:  The empty coat, the empty tabard means that the royal badge was stripped off him. Yeah. It was just, like, torn off. Like when you tear epaulets off, you know, of people that are misbehaving in the French Foreign Legion. That kind of thing. Yeah.

Yep. Toom Tabard.

Yeah, so we wanted to talk about… because, for one thing, I find this, I don’t know there’s a piece of me that just finds this hilarious. Because, you know, do you have badly-behaved kings throughout Europe in the Middle Ages? Yes, you do! But actual, like, stabbing somebody in the church? I just don’t… that’s… OK he wasn’t King yet but still. That’s just so, kind of, overt. 

Michelle:  Even Despenser didn’t do this. You remember? Hugh Despenser…

Anne:  That’s right.

Michelle:  … slapped somebody and went for him in the church…

Anne:  Yeah, but didn’t actually stab him.

And to be truthful (we have to be truthful) I don’t think Comyn died from Bruce stabbing him. Bruce’s supporters then went and stabbed him some more, so he died at some point in there, with the stabbings, but exactly which knife did the damage that killed him we do not know. But this was Robert the Bruce. I mean his supporters wouldn’t have been stabbing him if he hadn’t started it. So yeah. Robert the Bruce killed John Comyn in the church at Dumfries.

Michelle:  I say that he didn’t actually stab him but I’m thinking maybe he did. I’m trying to remember. Hugh Despenser did so many terrible things…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  … that it’s hard to remember. I know that he got fined ten thousand pounds, but of course he didn’t actually pay any of that.

Anne:  No, and he didn’t get excommunicated. 

Michelle:  No.

Anne:  Bruce was excommunicated, so. 

I mean you’re not supposed to have a fight in the church. You’re really not supposed to stab somebody in front of the high altar. It’s not just that it’s sacred ground, it’s that it’s ground that is supposed to be safe. It’s sanctuary. You go and stand in front of the high altar and you’re safe from anything, except apparently Robert the Bruce, if you have pissed him off. I guess Comyn was not, you know, all apologetic about having tried to hand him over to Edward I.

What will happen eventually, you know, there’ll be this… Robert the Bruce will die at 54, you know, and eventually Edward III will come along and Scotland will again have trouble with England, but this is why Robert the Bruce is sort of revered, or at least admired. He’s an important piece of Scottish history.

And William Wallace was Guardian there for a while.

Michelle:  Yeah, that was interesting. If I had known that, I had forgotten that William Wallace actually had that position.

Anne:  Yeah, Wallace wasn’t just a guerilla fighter. Wallace was an actual Scots power. He was one of the powerful men in Scotland.

Michelle:  It’s so difficult to know what actually happened in the church because we have all of these different accounts, basically.

Anne:  Where are these accounts coming from? Did you look this up?

Michelle:  There’s two different books that I read. One is kind of a classic from 1965 that is still known as being the measure for Robert the Bruce scholarship. It’s called Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland and it’s by G.W.S. Barrow. And then the other one is called Robert the Bruce: King of the Scots by Michael Penman. This is the newer one. And both of them talk about the different chronicles and the poems, because one of the things that’s kind of interesting about Robert the Bruce, that makes him hard to deal with, is that his mythology grows so quickly. And we have these poems that are being written within decades, right?..

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  …of his lifetime so it’s very difficult to sift fact from fiction. So you’ll have some of these accounts saying he panicked, but then his guys went in and finished him off, and then other things saying, “Well, you know, Comyn was going to start something so he just kind of preemptively dealt with it.” So some people will blame it on Comyn. It’s very interesting. There is a Wyntoun’s Chronicle from 1420 which, just as a sidebar, I think has a really early instance of “y’all” being used in it, because Robert the Bruce, the Penman book, starts with a quote from Prior Andrew Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle, circa 1420, and the passage that he cites right at the beginning is:

“And to record maire of this taill It nedis nocht now, for ye alhaill May find it in the Bruss buke.”

Anne:  “Ye alhaill.”

Michelle:  “Ye alhaill.”

Anne:  Yeah. And “the Bruss buke?”

Michelle:  That’s the big poem.

Anne:  Ah, I see. OK. Which is not the same thing as a chronicle. And what witnesses were there, other than… there must have been Comyn’s… Comyn would have had men. It wasn’t like Comyn showed up, and Bruce showed up with a bunch of people. That wouldn’t have made sense. Although then I don’t understand, if that’s true, why they wouldn’t have been fighting back. Yeah, what witnesses have we got? I just don’t know. So there’s a bunch of supposition and perhaps some lying on the part of people that…

Michelle:  Well that’s our other thing, right? We have English chronicles and we have Scots chronicles, and then we have poems.

Anne:  Even if I was just going to say, “Well, Scots chronicles, that would be good!” I would still have to know who were the chroniclers and which side of things in the Great Cause were they on, because it’s not like there’s just a Scots/English divide, there’s a bunch of Scots divide.

Michelle:  Supposedly in one of the sources he comes out, saying, “Oh my God, I wounded Comyn,” and his guy says, “I’ll go make sure.” Roger de Kirkpatrick. “I’ll go make sure.”

Anne:  “I’ll go make sure.” I like the specificities of that. It’s not just a guy. It’s, like, “Roger Kirkpatrick.” Maybe that came down in the Kirkpatrick history. It would be nice to know. “The time our granddad helped stab John Comyn.”

Michelle:  Well we have all these chronicles, but do we believe many of them? Because they weren’t there, and there’s reasons to tell the stories in particular ways because if your dude ended up king, you need to sort of make this OK. Our discussion of this murder would be different if he had lost the Battle of Loudoun Hill or if he had lost the Battle of Bannockburn. This would be a different conversation. But because he won those things and he ends up as a pretty effective king, then we have to kind of retrofit the murder into something that is acceptable.

Anne:  If he’d been the Scots equivalent of Edward II, then it would be obvious that he had just, like, stabbed somebody because he had a temper fit, and really it was wrong. But no, we have to say, “There has to have been some provocation!”

Michelle:  So supposedly his heart gets taken—after his death, obviously—

Anne:  His death from not-leprosy. Yes.

Michelle:  His heart gets taken with James Douglas into battle and thrown ahead of them.

Anne:  Is this true? Is this a true thing?

Michelle:  Supposedly.

Anne:  They didn’t bury him?

Michelle:  Well his body was buried but the heart…

Anne:  Oh, the heart. Oh OK. All right. OK.

Michelle:  They often bury the heart different.

Anne:  Yes they do. As we know. Yeah. OK.

Michelle:  So supposedly James Douglas takes the casket containing Bruce’s heart with him to Spain, in a crusade against the Moors in Spain, and hurls the thing ahead of them saying, “Go ahead brave heart, I will follow you.” So supposedly this was his nickname before it was William Wallace’s. Take that with as much salt as you need.

Anne:  OK. Just a second. As I’m looking this up because this is just too much. OK. Yes, OK. I’m quoting here from Wikipedia:

“In 1329, as Robert Bruce, King of Scots, lay dying, he made one last request of his friend and lieutenant, Sir James Douglas. The King charged that, after his death, Sir James should take his embalmed heart and bear it with him on crusade, thus fulfilling the pledge that Bruce had been unable to honor in his lifetime.”

On account of being so busy in Scotland, I suppose.

“The chronicler Jean Le Bel…”

So that’s who’s saying this.

“… tells that Bruce wanted his heart taken to the Holy Land and presented at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The poet John Barbour says merely that Bruce wished his heart to be carried in battle against God’s foes.”

Michelle:  John Barbour is the one with the big poem.

Anne:  Big poem. The Bruce.

“The projected campaign in Spain offered Sir James the ideal opportunity for the latter. In the spring of 1330, armed with a safe conduct from Edward III of England, and a letter of recommendation from King Alfonso XI of Castile, Douglas set off from Berwick and sailed to Flanders.”

Long stuff. Blah blah blah. “The Scots party.” Yada yada. Nothing in here about the heart being thrown at anybody but… oh wait. “The siege.” Here we go. “King Alfonso… the siege… the battle.” This is too funny, and I had not known this. “Robert the Bruce’s heart.” La la la. All right, here we go. “Robert the Bruce,” blah blah blah:

“His guts were buried in Cardross…”

So you could embalm him.

“The rest of the corpse was sent to Dunfermline, but his heart was removed and embalmed separately and…”

This says nothing on what happens to the heart. Nothing.

Michelle:  Well, I’m finding the story on englishmonarchs.co.eu, which, you know, you’ve got to be careful of because sometimes the English tourism sites are a little going for interest… it’s saying that:

“Douglas, in the thick of the fighting and deserted by his Spanish allies, threw the heart of the Bruce deep into the melee, bidding it “Go first as thou hast always done.” Douglas himself was killed in the ensuing fighting and his body was returned to his native Scotland.

Anne:  Well, that’s awful.

Michelle:  So I definitely find the story all over the place, I just didn’t poke around looking for the origin of this.

Anne:  Yeah, I don’t know what the origin is, but I’m having severe doubts.

“Bruce has been revered and romanticized for more than 600 years as a symbol of Scottish identity…”

I find on the historicenvironment.scot. 

“…so when a casket supposedly containing his heart was discovered at Melrose Abbey in 1996…”

That was a real big deal.

Michelle:  So it’s on bbc.co.uk.

Anne:  Well, in 1921 they took the heart out of the casket and took pictures of it. So I don’t think it got thrown at people in Spain. I don’t think it did. No. And in fact what we’re told by independent.co.uk is that he wanted his heart buried at Melrose Abbey and didn’t say anything about, “Please go throw it at the Moors.” So.

Michelle:  So the reason that’s sort of fun is that in the fictional versions that we get—the movies I’m going to talk about later—

Anne:  Oh good.

Michelle:  James Douglas is always shown as just about crazy, so that story goes along with the presentation of James Douglas as brave to the point of insanity.

Anne:  If he was throwing something at the Moors, it wasn’t actually Bruce’s heart. He was just pretending. But I don’t know. The whole thing, it just sounds so made-up. I love these stories though, you know, because they get invented and they’re great stories, and they get passed down as, like, absolute truth. “And then they took a giant black bull’s head and slammed it on the table.” No, they didn’t. They didn’t actually do that either. No they didn’t.

Michelle: They’re great stories because they tell us something about what is needed. What we need out of these figures.

Anne:  Yeah, and we seem to need more than they actually are in some kind of not just romantic way but some kind of dramatic way, and really, you know, Bruce’s life is dramatic enough. I mean, just the Battle of Bannockburn and stabbing Comyn, that’s enough really. Although actually I like the escaping from Edward I too. That’s good. No, you really don’t need to be tossing his heart around for a bunch of drama.

Michelle:  I waffled about calling this a murder because we don’t know enough about the scenarios, what actually happened, you know?

Anne:  We don’t know if it’s self-defense?

Michelle:  Yeah, we don’t know whether Comyn started it, we don’t know whether one of them broke the prohibition, as they almost certainly both did, to not show up with weapons. We just don’t know. It’s so less clear-cut to me than some of the other things we’ve looked at. This looks like an Alexander Hamilton/Burr sort of situation where Scotland wasn’t big enough for the two of them, and it was going to happen sooner or later.

Anne:  It was going to happen sooner or later. Luckily for Scotland it wasn’t a giant battle. One person died, in this particular conflict, and that’s much less than often happens, so there’s that. We don’t really know what happens, but it’s called a murder and so there you go.

Michelle:  I will say that when you read biographies of Robert the Bruce, it’s handled differently than when you read the biography of John Comyn.

Anne:  This is only right. This is so human. Poor Comyn. Comyn, ambushed and killed by that wicked Robert the Bruce! Poor Robert the Bruce, forced to kill another Scotsman in order to save the country! Yeah, I can see where these would be very different.

Michelle:  Yeah, point of view matters a lot.

Anne:  Doesn’t it just.

Michelle:  So you want to hear about the movies?

Anne:  Yeah, I was about to say, how does this come down to us?

Michelle:  So there’s a whole lot of historical fiction, there’s a lot of poetry. There’s a lot of poetry in particular about Bruce, which is really fascinating and not at all surprising. That’s kind of a Scottish thing. But there are some movies, and I ended up focusing on that because there are two that came out at nearly the same time, just recently. 

Anne:  Yay!

Michelle:  Yeah, so those are really interesting. If you’re a brave, brave soul you can go back to the 1990s, into the way-back machine (I didn’t), but you could go watch Braveheart because…

Anne:  No! No! No! Because it’s not just like… No! First of all it tells lies about William Wallace, who was, like, an actually great person and not… Lies about Edward I, lies about Edward II, lies about… No. It’s just a lying liar film from Liarland, really.

Michelle:  Oh my gosh, it’s so bad. It’s so very, very bad. The very next movie… the very next year, sorry, a movie comes out in 1996 called The Bruce, which you would hope would be better but it turns out that really the star of that film is Edward I. Because Brian Blessed, who’s playing Edward I, is so much more compelling than the guy who’s playing The Bruce, so it’s sort of a miscast film because the guy who’s playing Robert the Bruce just can’t do the sort of screen presence that Brian Blessed… You know, Brian Blessed is, I think, probably a smoother… I don’t know, Edward I has always struck me as being pretty rough around the edges. I guess maybe hauling his kid around by the hair…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  … made me think that. Whereas Brian Blessed is this scary-smooth, articulate bad guy.

Anne:  Well, I would go along with that. Edward I was extraordinarily intelligent and extremely educated and so that… and very bad! So that would make sense. Plus, it’s Brian Blessed! If Brian Blessed is playing somebody passed out on the floor, he has more weight on the screen than anybody else. He’s just so compelling. So I’m going to have to go watch this, even if it glorifies Edward I. I have to. Because Brian Blessed. So that’s called The Bruce?

Michelle:  It’s so bad. I’m telling you right now. Just be warned. I didn’t recommend go watching it.

Anne:  I understand you. I will not hold it against you. I will not.

Michelle:  Because you’ll want to throw things at the TV when what everybody is wearing is the fifteenth century…

Anne:  Oh god no. No.

Michelle:  … rather than 1307. 

Anne:  No! No!

Michelle:  Everybody is running around in full plate armor.

Anne:  No! No!

Michelle:  I’m like, what the hell?

Anne:  No! No!

Michelle:  It looks like they borrowed everything from a recent movie about Agincourt, and used that. Plus, I’m pretty sure it actually starts with the scene about throwing the heart. I’m pretty sure it actually starts with that. So anyhow, I don’t recommend going and watching either one of those, except you can go to YouTube and watch the one clip of Brian Blessed as Edward I saying, “Give them no quarter. The laws of chivalry are revoked. Fly the dragon flag and kill everybody you find!” That’s pretty awesome.

Anne:  That’s pretty awesome. Yeah, so awesome, even for those of us who hate Edward I, we’re like, “Oh yes! Yes! I will fly the dragon flag!”

Michelle:  Holy crap!

Anne:  Which he’d stolen! At any rate, OK. No. We move on. Wait, Wales! No! I go back to Wales! I hate him! I hate him! OK. Sorry. Had a little fit there. I’m back.

Michelle:  The better ones to watch are the ones that just came out. Netflix’s Outlaw King, that’s literally the title of this thing, which dropped in 2020, and an indie film called Robert the Bruce that released in 2019. So they’re really interesting films to put up against one another. The Netflix one is kind of your standard costume drama. There’s a lot of battle scenes. There’s a lot of mud. It’s not atrocious. There are pieces of it I like. One of the pieces that I like is that up until the very, very end, the presentation of the future Edward II is light-years better than in Braveheart.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  He’s very strong. He’s very strong-willed. And you can tell that what he wants more than anything in the world is to impress his father.

Anne:  All of these things were true.

Michelle:  Who utterly is not able to be impressed.

Anne:  No, because… he’s probably not really a psychopath, but sometimes I wonder.

Michelle:  There’s a very short but kind of nice scene with a trebuchet.

Anne:  Ooh! I love a good trebuchet scene!

Michelle:  You know the Edward I Warwolf that he used at Stirling?

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  There’s that. One of the pieces that I really like of this film is Robert’s brothers, because four of his brothers die over the course of his fight to claim this throne and they… this movie deals with those losses.

Anne:  Oh good. Good.

Michelle:  And I like that part. 

Anne:  There’s a way in which Bruce gets kind of disconnected from his family and the Bruces were powerful and very close. And, by the way, you know that Robert the Bruce was trilingual? He would have read and spoke Anglo-Norman, he would have spoken Scots, and we know he read Latin.

Michelle:  I didn’t know that consciously, but that makes sense. He’s, you know, an educated nobleman.

Anne:  So the Anglo-Norman and the Latin, that’s, like, of course. But also the Scots. He spoke Scots-Gaelic.

Michelle:  There are a gazillion people in this movie. It’s so interesting because it’s absolutely huge. Costume-wise it’s not bad. I mean I still would like to see a medieval era-set film in which poor people know how to hem things.

Anne:  I know. What? What? What? I think it’s because it’s this kind of like visual thing that reads “poor” to us, you know? If you’re going around with frayed clothing.

Michelle:  Well it makes no logical sense, because it is not in fact easier to shear sheep, spin the thread, weave the cloth, and make a new shirt than it is to hem the one you have.

Anne:  No. And plus, if you don’t hem, your clothing falls apart very quickly, and if you have one shirt, you don’t do that. You hem it. It’s just ridiculous.

Michelle:  So you don’t do that. You take care of it. I have just consciously set that aside. Nobody is in a kilt as far as I can tell. As far as I can tell they are not using bagpipes in the score, which I was listening to, because we’re also too early for that. So that’s kind of cool. There’s just a gazillion people in it, is the thing, and so it’s very different than the other one.

There’s an absolutely horrible scene where the future Edward II has Robert’s brother hanged and drawn. Four of his brothers are killed and it’s just… it really brought home that part of Robert’s story. Now they do handle the murder of John Comyn in here, but the way they do it is they’ve agreed to meet at this church and they… you know, Robert says, “OK, I’m trying to get up a new rebellion,” and Comyn says, “I’m not going along with you and not only that, I’m going to rat you out to Edward.” And that’s when Robert kills him.

Anne:  Which is fair enough except Comyn had already ratted him out to Edward, which is why he was there because he had escaped from England. But OK.

Michelle:  The film is worth watching for James Douglas, because he is a complete crazy person in here. He shows up at the beginning—the film opens with all of them being forced to swear homage to Edward I, and James Douglas comes and says, “You took my dad’s land,” and Edward I says, “Your dad was a traitor,” and he says, “But I’m not! And those are my lands. I need them back!” And Edward I says, “Don’t ever come back here, I don’t want anybody to ever mention the name Douglas to me again.” So later on, at the Battle of Loudoun Hill, James Douglas manages to find, in the battle—because it’s a movie—Clifford, the guy who now has his lands?

Anne:  Uh huh.

Michelle:  And he’s slapping him with his sword, just playing with him before he kills him, going, “What’s my fucking name?” And he doesn’t kill him until Clifford tells him his name.

Anne:  Yes, that sounds like fun. Not true, but a lot of fun.

Michelle:  It’s a bloody film, I’m just going to be honest. There were times I was watching it between my fingers. I did also like the moment where James Douglas, in a different battle, loses his sword and pulls somebody’s mail coif off and starts using that. He starts, like, using it as a.. I don’t know what kind of weapon substitute.

Anne:  Just whatever comes to hand.

Michelle:  What do you call it? He’s holding on to it and swinging it like a mace. And being fairly effective, to be honest.

So this one, this one is a very kind of, you know, standard, big budget… it’s sort of infamous because there’s a scene of full-frontal nudity with Chris Pine who’s playing Robert, so there’s that, I suppose. I wouldn’t watch it for that. It’s a very brief scene.

Anne:  So we’re not talking, like, Vikings here. Your Viking show that you love so dearly?

Michelle:  Yeah, no. There’s not nearly… no. There’s a gratuitous sex scene. There’s an attempt to make his relationship with Elizabeth, his second wife, into something romantic, which is kind of sweet although probably not realistic.

Anne:  Yeah, maybe? I mean… no, I mean some people had some… I mean just because you were noble or royal and had to marry for power, didn’t mean that you didn’t actually occasionally have a relationship with your spouse that had some, you know, romantic elements to it, it’s just not…

Michelle:  I would call it a very serviceable sort of historical costume drama.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  I do like the presentation of Edward II right up until the end, and it’s interesting because it ends with the Battle of Loudoun Hill, which I found really, really interesting because of the fairly meticulous description of the strategy that’s involved. That they have the land in the middle where they’ve got the pikes, and then it’s boggy around the edges, so they’re using the land as part of their weaponry, which I thought was really interesting. I looked it up to make sure it was true, that that piece is true.

In that battle, ahistorically, Robert the Bruce and Edward find one another and fight, and Robert has the opportunity to capture Edward but lets him crawl out of the mud for the humiliation purposes of having his own men and having Edward’s men see this, and it was like, no, this would never have happened. If he had had the opportunity to capture him, as indeed almost happened at Bannockburn, he would have captured him.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  So that is kind of a moment of, “Eh? No.”

Anne:  Romanticized battle is what that is. That’s silly.

Michelle:  Yeah, so that wasn’t happening. The handling of Edward I’s death is really kind of cool because he dies en route to Scotland. With his dying breath he has a hold of his kid saying, “I never pictured you being able to lead men into battle and I’m not sure you can pull it off, so here’s what I want you to do. When I die, I want you to boil my body and take my bones with you into battle.” And as soon as he’s dead, Edward the prince turns to the attendant and says, “Bury him. We’re moving on.” And the attendant says, “Shouldn’t we honor his wishes?” and he says, “No, you honor mine.” So that’s kind of a nice moment.

Anne:  Well, Edward II was very bad at being a leader, but he had actually been tested in battle fairly early. So. Although it is true he had been so trying to impress his dad.

Michelle:  There is one little, throwaway reference to Piers Gaveston, so that’s cool.

Anne:  Oh yeah? What is it?

Michelle:  Right at the beginning, the Prince of Wales decides to… after Bruce has had to, you know, swear fealty to Edward I, he decides to harass the Bruce by challenging him to a sparring match, and basically, like, “You guys all think you were tough shit, but you’ve all been forced to submit so ha, ha, ha.” And he just says, “Piers, hand him a sword.” So it’s set up that there’s a little bit of personal rivalry between Robert the Bruce and Edward II. So that’s interesting. 

The reason I wanted to talk about these two films together, though, is not only that they came out at the same time. It’s that the approach is so different. This one is this humongous costume drama, and the other one is this tiny little independent film that is just about the time period in which Robert is forced to go into hiding.

It is a tiny little independent film. It appears to be a labor of love. I think it’s an attempt to redeem his work in Braveheart, I’m just going to be honest, because it’s the same actor who played Robert the Bruce in Braveheart, but of course he’s much older now, right? Because in Braveheart he’s being played as really young, obviously, because the actor was young at that point. But he’s much older in this film. 

The scope of this film is much smaller and it’s actually not really Robert the Bruce’s story. It is the story of the family who helps him survive while he’s hiding. It’s their story. But it starts with the murder of Comyn. It starts with this story that Robert the Bruce and Comyn had agreed that one of them would take the throne, and the other one would give that one his lands so that they each get something. But we see Comyn’s man hide a sword in the chapel where they’re going to be meeting. It’s presented as treachery until we get this interruption where the actual main character of the movie is telling this as a story to her children, and the son objects. “Oh that’s not the way I’ve heard it.” The son says, “I heard that it was the Bruce who attacked first.” And she says, “Well, who’s telling this story?” So this movie is so much more about how… it’s a story of how, when you’re one of the common people, your interactions with your leaders are basically through stories. You don’t really know about them.

Anne:  Yes, and you need the stories to create a reality that you’re willing to live in.

Michelle:  So it’s… this one is so much more about the reality, but also how that reality is bound up in a story.

Anne:  Which is lovely. Especially since, as you were saying, the chronicles tell us such different things! And the poems! It’s like, we don’t know, and so we have to make it up. And we make it up depending on what it is we’ve learned, and what it is we understand about the people involved, and that will have come from different stories.

Michelle:  I probably should have said, way at the beginning of this discussion, that this was totally going to be a spoilerific discussion, and if you don’t want to know, it was time to fast-forward ten minutes or something.

Anne:  But it’s theoretically historical films, how can you have spoilers? I mean, really?

Michelle:  So there’s a big one for this second one.

Anne:  Oh, there’s a spoiler? OK, spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! There’s some kind of piece of history that we didn’t know yet. OK.

Michelle:  The made-up focusing lens for this one, about the family that is helping him, is that it’s actually really her story, Morag, the woman who is… and it is about everything that her family has lost in these wars. So it’s a way of focusing the loss. We learn, pretty slowly over the course of the movie, that her husband was killed fighting for Robert the Bruce, both of her brothers… she’s raising these three kids and we find out very slowly that only the youngest is her kid. The other two are a niece and a nephew, and they are the children of two of her brothers who were also killed fighting for him. She’s been told by the kind of local witchy woman that her son, the one who’s eleven at this point, the youngest, her only child… that she’s had a vision of him fighting with Robert the Bruce and dying, and the movie is about this woman helping him anyway. Even though she knows. And it’s such a different film, because it’s not really his film. He shows up, but it’s far more about Morag making the decision to help him, even though she knows it’s going to cost her. And we find out, at the end of the film, that this whole thing is her sitting by her kid’s grave, re-telling him these stories that she’s told him many times. It actually is a very effective film. It’s not, like, perfect. Did you hear me screaming yesterday about when he tells… when Robert the Bruce is recuperating at their house and he tells the little boy to go peel some potatoes for his mother? Did you hear me scream? Because that’s how loudly…

Anne:  No! No! No! No! For the love of God.

Michelle:  That was disappointing, because a lot of the other pieces, I thought, were pretty well put together. The handling of… you know, their costumes aren’t bad. There’s a handling of a different story about Robert the Bruce, about the cave and the spider, that I thought was very effectively handled in here. The story about the cave and the spider is that while he’s recuperating he is in this cave, and he sees a spider trying to spin a web and it keeps falling off and having to get back up and try over again, and from that he learns this whole being a king thing is going to be really difficult, he’s going to have to try some more. And they have a poem that they put in this film that, if it comes from somewhere else I can’t find it, but it’s a poem that they end up weaving throughout the rest of the film:

The spider’s web must be spun /

The king’s delight must be undone / 

The lost soul’s journey must be won / 

The song of justice must be sung

Now, in a different part in my life, I would react differently to that, but that floored me, watching that. I was watching that within a day of RBG’s passing, and it just flattened me.

Anne:  Uh huh. It’s been a hard week.

Michelle:  It’s been a rough week.

Yeah, it ends up being a movie about losing and losing and losing and having to get back up and fight again, which turns out to have been a very timely sort of thing for me, watching.

Anne:  Yeah, so I think I will go find these. That sounds good to me.

Michelle:  So I was really only going to focus on the indie one because I thought it was just really lovely, but I think that it is interesting paired with the other one because how reluctant he is to go back and fight again is much clearer after we see all his losses in the other one. And I did read a really fascinating blog post about these films that was basically asking why aren’t there more and better films about Robert the Bruce? What the hell?

Anne:  And what… did they have a conclusion?

Michelle:  They had a couple of thoughts in terms of, you know, whose history is it? Right? Because this, this one, is an indie film that almost didn’t get released in Scotland, and partially because the movie chains are all owned by English companies that don’t really want…

Anne:  No, really? These many hundreds of years? Really?

Michelle:  The last referendum about independence was very close. 

Anne:  Well, I guess that’s true.

Michelle:  And then this blog post was reading the reluctance to release this movie as not really wanting to encourage that referendum to be done again and go the other way.

Anne:  Right. 

Michelle:  So I’ll include that. People can go off and look at that for themselves, but it is very, very interesting to me that that blogger thinks that what we think of as being really ancient history could, if it’s stirred, be utterly relevant to right now.

Anne:  Quite relevant. Yeah.

Michelle:  There are a ton of poems about Robert the Bruce and the spider. I’m not even going to deal with any of them. There is one very, very funny one that is from the spider’s point of view where he’s just like… it’s a modern poem, like within the last ten years, but it’s written in Scots, and it’s all about, you know, “I was just in the cave, minding my own business, trying to spin a web, and this guy came in and watched and it seemed like it cheered him up.”

But yes, Robert the Bruce and the spider is a very popular subject of poetry, which I thought was interesting.

Anne:  Yeah, it is. Well, you know… I mean I remember as a child reading, someplace, that story about the spider. It’s ubiquitous. But of course I read a lot of, like, Victorian literature. I was, like, nuts. Yeah. Because, I don’t know, when did that story even start? I mean, Victorian England seems to me. “Robert Bruce and the Spider.” Hold on…

Michelle:  And I will say that the Chris Pine film, even though it is much more of a kind of… it’s not full-on heroic, right? It does have all those losses. The end music over the credits is not at all triumphant. There’s one song, the “Land O The Leal,” right? “The land of the Leal.” Is the one and then the second one is “Scots Wha Hae Wi Wallace.”

Anne:  “Scots Wha Hae Wi Wallace.”

Michelle:  So it plays… both of those are the songs over the credits, and they’re both very sad and mournful songs. So even after he’s won, the movie is saying, “Man, the cost was bad.”

Anne:  Well, it’s a really difficult period in Scots history. You know, there’s the infighting amongst the Scots, and then there’s the having to deal with the English, and it’s just a really, really hard time, and much the same thing happens in Wales. The infighting amongst the Welsh, and the having to deal with Edward.

Michelle:  That’s a really interesting piece of the indie film. The English are basically not present. It’s a movie about the Scots trying to decide what they’re going to do, and focusing on it much more as a civil conflict.

Anne:  Oh, my friend. I am going to tell you where the legend of Robert Bruce and the spider… yes I am. Oh hon, you could guess this. Sir Walter Scott.

Michelle:  Oh! Oh, for real?

Anne:  Once again Sir Walter Scott is telling us charming romantic lies that then come down as history.

Michelle:  Yeah. We could have completely guessed that.

Anne:  It’s Scott. We could have guessed it. And we found it online. 1828. I was thinking it sounded kind of Victorian. “You know, this sounds Victorian.” Yes! Yes, it is.

At any rate, Comyn got killed, and he definitely got killed by Robert the Bruce. Whether or not it’s murder, unclear. Exactly how it happened, unclear. But he got killed by Robert the Bruce, and it was a long time coming. Long time coming, and not helped at all by dragging Edward I into the whole damn thing.

Michelle:  So how does this compare, for you, to the Wars of the Roses?

Anne:  Oh, the Wars of the Roses… hold on, let me think. The Wars of the Roses were much deadlier. The battles were larger and fiercer. The whole thing went on longer. This was… Scotland… one of the things that happened is that Scotland did not actually descend completely into civil war. You know, there were some skirmishes but the Wars of the Roses was, like, generations-long civil war, and that was a difference. That was much, much bigger. The constant Scottish losses are going to come later. Flodden and, you know, around that time. This is bad, and it’s true that it’s affecting the commoners because of course they’re having to fight in one place or another, but it’s not as bad as it’s going to be when the English come back.

Michelle:  Yeah, I was thinking about the Wars of the Roses while I was reading about this, partially after having watched the indie film, because it focuses so much on the ways in which this is civil conflict, and I hadn’t thought about it as being something that might parallel the Wars of the Roses, because I had thought about it as being attempted conquest from the outside.

Anne:  Right. No, it has a lot of similarities, because it’s the infighting amongst the nobles, but the Wars of the Roses actually kind of wiped out some noble families. That’s not what happens here. I mean the Comyns lose their lands, yes, but they’re not destroyed. John Comyn is destroyed! That’s actually true. No. So it’s more contained. 

And it’s interesting to me, the whole move to get Edward, you know, to get this educated, legal expert from outside who has some connections—because it’s after all his son who was the fiancé of the dead little queen—to come and arbitrate. It’s this kind of move to try and settle things without there being bloodshed. You know? OK, there’s these two claimants to the throne, that both actually have good arguments. How do we work this out? It’s actually nicely balanced and sane, and gives Edward a foot in, which is really very sad.

Michelle:  But in some ways what happens to Scotland here is they’re getting caught between the millstones of Edward I and Philip IV, who are struggling…

Anne:  Oh, that’s right. Because they try to make that alliance. Yeah, they make that alliance with France, and Edward doesn’t like that. No.

Michelle:  Yeah, Edward I and Philip IV strike me as the unstoppable force and the unmovable object.

Anne:  Yes. And they’re both completely ruthless, and very good at what they’re doing.

So, that’s our discussion of the death of John Comyn, whatever the hell happened. And the next time we meet will be our Halloween Episode, so we’re going to be discussing ghosts. We’re going to focus on an incident which is actually just outside of our time period, because it happened in Cambridgeshire in 1598, when some drunk guys pretended to be ghosts and therefore got hauled before the church court. But we’re going to take the opportunity to discuss ghosts in the Middle Ages. What people thought. So that’s what we’ll do.

Yeah, because there was a crime, which was pretending to be ghosts and going over to the church warden’s house where his wife had just died. That was a crime. And wrong. It just gives us the opportunity to have a Halloween Episode, so that’s what we’re going to do. 1592. Not 1598.

So, this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We’re on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Please leave a review. Oh, we’d love that. We need the reviews in order to kind of like get noticed by the algorithm bots of robot intelligence. See, we have a goal. Because at this point, if you search “medieval” on any of these places, we actually kind of show up on the first page. Yay. We want to show up if you search “true crime,” which we do, on um… what is it? We show up if you search “true crime,” is it Stitcher? Do you remember?

Michelle:  Yes, but not at the beginning.

Anne:  But not at the beginning. But it’s in there someplace. At any rate, we’d like to show up, if you search “true crime,” and so we need more reviews for that.

You can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, and you can find there the show notes, which are written by Michelle, the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach us all through that page, and you can leave comments. We’d love to hear from you. And if you have medieval crimes you think we should discuss, please let us know. And we’ll think about them. 

Yeah, so that’s us for now. So we say goodbye.

Michelle:  Bye!

Out-takes:

Anne:  That was fun, actually, even though it did have Edward I in it. It was the first time we had, like, Edward I at that piece of things, you know? Because we’d been doing Edward I later. You know, so that was kind of nice.

Michelle:  There are really funny things in the Netflix thing, but one of the laugh-out-loud, hilarious, totally not historically accurate moments are when they bring him word of Robert’s uprising, he stands up and screams, “I am so sick of Scotland!”

Anne:  That is pretty funny.

Michelle:  And just before the Battle of Loudoun Hill, James, you know the crazy Douglas dude?

Anne:  Uh huh.

Michelle:  Brings the challenge to Edward II and… oh crap, who was with him? Whoever that lord is who was also there at the Battle of Methven. They’re playing him as a basically crazy person, and the lord just kind of rolls his eyes and says, “These people!”

Anne:  Scots. What’s interesting to me is that what Edward was doing—Edward I—what he was doing is like he’s essentially trying to take over the entire island, so I get that. But partly I’m like, why? I mean I understand the Scots had been ravaging England, but they hadn’t for quite some time, nor had the English been… I mean, there had been peace. There had been peace. He used the Great Cause as an opportunity to get his foot in the door again, and it was three years after he had used the pretext of Llywelyn ap Gruffud having failed to pay homage, or refusing to pay homage, or whatever the fuck, some kind of, again, overlord whatsit, to take over Wales. And build all those castles. I mean, it’s this humongously expensive thing and actually it didn’t have to happen. It really didn’t have to happen. They didn’t need… did they need the Welsh lands? Did they need to take Scotland? I mean they didn’t do in Scotland what they did in Wales, which was to establish a bunch of Anglo-Norman little fiefdoms. They didn’t do that. They did that in Wales. Why? Why? Why not just leave Wales alone? Yeah, so he might well have been sick of Scotland, but it was his own damn fault.

Michelle:  I, you know, have a love/hate relationship with movies that are set in the Middle Ages….

Anne:  I know. Me too.

Michelle:  … because some of them are dreadful, but I also like seeing how they embody things. And see what they do with them. Because there’s these three different ones that supposedly focus on Robert the Bruce, and then they tell such different stories.

Anne:  We’ve talked about this before, that one of the things that you and I both really respond to, as medievalists, is seeing what it is that the Middle Ages means to people now. Why is it that you would focus on this? Why? Why make that perfectly godawful movie about William Wallace? I mean, besides the fact that you’re Mel Gibson. Because there was a lot of money on that. Or, on the other hand, why make a film that focuses on the common people? Although that reminds me, actually, of… god, what’s his name? That medieval… not the medievalist, the military historian that completely changed military history? John somebody or other. The Face of Battle was the name of that book?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Yeah, where what he does is focus on what was this like for the soldiers, and that completely changed military history. It’s that kind of thing. Or Marc Bloch…

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Who did the same thing with the Middle Ages. You know, like, what happens if you focus on down? What happens if you look here? What is it you see?

Michelle:  And I particularly enjoyed, in that indie film, the focus on women.

Anne:  Yeah! A focus on women as not being just things that you marry or rape or get to feed you some dinner.

Michelle:  You know, Morag is trying to hold it together, and she’s ended up raising all three of these kids. She’s lost all the men in her life. I didn’t even talk about the fact that her husband’s brother is horrible. He keeps coming around saying, “You should marry me,” right? And he’s very pushy. He just wants to step into his brother’s position, but he’s so different that she doesn’t want him, and she’s very, very vulnerable but she’s never weak, so it’s such an interesting… it takes this thing that really is a dude story and says, “What’s this like for all these women?” Whose men go off and get killed and leave them to, you know, raise all these kids, and are vulnerable. You know, she’s always vulnerable, but she’s not weak.

Anne:  Yeah, those being different things. I meant to ask you why is it she continues to support Bruce?

Michelle:  She supports him because her husband did. She loved her husband.

Anne:  You know and that, frankly, that’s very… that’s a real common kind of thing. I mean, and you see it, like, amongst the southerners in the Civil War, you see it amongst… you see it in, like, you know you were talking earlier about the Hatfields and McCoys, I mean you see this. “My family has done this, and I will continue to support.” That’s a thing that the humans do.

Michelle:  And at the end, when Robert decides, “I’m going to have to go back and keep fighting, because I can’t just…” he tells her, like, “I just want to disappear. I just want to stay here with the kids and you, I want to disappear, I want to be part of your family.” And she’s like, “That’s baloney, you can’t do this. You’re king. You have to go. You have to go back and deal.” He takes them with him, and takes care of them, and this is all made up but it’s a way of focusing both what’s at stake for him, but more importantly what’s at stake for them, the people who follow him, who aren’t lords, or whatever.

Anne:  Yeah, because the Great Cause is all about the Scots nobles trying to figure some stuff out.

Michelle:  I saw different evaluations about how much Scotland is thinking about itself as a country at this point.

Anne:  Yeah, because, I mean this is one of the things, actually, that Edward I, I think, did was cause Scotland to think of itself as a country. Caused Wales to think of itself as a country. Which in some ways was not so difficult because they were speaking different languages, you know. It’s like, the Anglo-Normans show up it’s like, “What the fuck are you? Who are you? Go away!”

Michelle:  One of the very last things we see about him in Braveheart is he goes back to his dad and says, “What the hell?” and his father says, “I was just looking out for us.” Right? “I made a deal with Edward because I was looking out for our family,” and he tells his dad, “I will never be on the wrong side again.” It’s one of the last things we see of him in there. I didn’t go back and re-watch Braveheart, but I did watch the clips that Robert the Bruce was in. First of all I couldn’t remember… it’s been a gazillion years since I saw it… like, “It’s the same guy who played Robert the Bruce? I don’t remember it at all!” So I had to go back and watch the clips with him in it.

Anne:  “I will never be on the wrong side again.” Yeah.

Michelle:  “I will never be on the wrong side again.”

Anne:  And that was, actually, I mean, that was one of the issues, you know? That the Comyns and the Bruces were ending up on… you know, making deals with Edward? You know? In order to get your family… it’s just like oh, Jesus Christ. I mean that was stupid. I have decided…

Michelle:  Angus Macfadyen.

Anne:  Oh, OK.

Michelle:  I had to look up what the actor’s name was. Angus Macfadyen.

Anne:  I’ve decided that actually asking Edward to arbitrate the Great Cause was not necessarily stupid, although it shared a profound lack of foresight and way too much trust. But making deals with him later? No. That’s just no. And Comyn did. Comyn made a deal with him in order to get Bruce’s lands, and do I think Comyn should have gotten murdered in the church? No. But I do think that that was pretty bad, and that actually did happen, and Robert the Bruce escaped.

Michelle:  The Chris Pine one is pretty interesting in terms of how it shows the Scottish church. Like, “What are we going to do? He just killed somebody in the church, he should be excommunicated! But we’re not going to, instead we’re going to crown him and say it’s OK.”

Anne:  Now he actually did get excommunicated and then later they, you know… but they crowned him while he was excommunicated. But that’s too complex, you know. I mean I really can understand you’re having come across all this and going, “Oh my god no!” No, no, no, no, no. But it makes sense now, yeah? The 19 people?

Michelle:  I mean, I finally kind of boiled it down into my head to, all right, you’ve got the Comyns and you have the Bruces, and they both think that they’re the first and second best claimants to the throne, they just disagree as to who’s one and who’s two.

Anne:  Right. This is basically true.

Michelle:  And that that’s where their fight is coming from. And that one of the other really big problems is that you have this absentee king, after he’s captured in battle, John Balliol, theoretically they have a king but they don’t really have a king…

Anne:  Uh huh.

Michelle:  … because he’s not there and he…

Anne:  Because he’s not there. Yeah.

Michelle:  … he ends up in France…

Anne:  And he abdicated.

Michelle:  But Edward keeps holding out the idea that he’s going to restore him, making it really difficult for either the Comyns or the Bruces to get support together because when it looks like they’re going to, Edward says, “Oh, but I’ll bring him back. Your real King. I’ll allow him to come back.” So he ends up living out the rest of his life in France, getting no help whatsoever from Philip IV.

The Viking Raid on Lindisfarne, Northumbria 793

Anne:  Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  At the moment, in Albuquerque, we are having very high winds, and so the computer goes in and out, and that might actually affect our day. We’re having high winds because the cold front came in, so it was summer before and now it’s not, because that’s what it’s like, living in the high desert. You never know. What’s it like over where you are, Michelle?

Michelle:  We have not got the cold front yet. We’re supposed to get it tomorrow.

Anne:  Ah, so you’re still in summer.

Michelle:  Yes, it’s still very hot and humid here, but in the next day or two we’re supposed to get the cold front and it will go down into the 70s.

Anne:  It’s been killingly hot here, this summer. People say, “Well, you’re in New Mexico.” Yeah, it’s high desert. We’re a mile above sea level. We’re as high up as Denver is, and so we get heat in the summer but it’s very seldom up in the 100s and even so, at night it’s really nice. Well, that wasn’t what this summer was like, so much. It was really hot.

Michelle:  So when you bake there, you have to use the different baking instructions?

Anne:  Oh, it’s so complex! I have this whole little thing, which is taped on my refrigerator, which tells me what to do to cakes, if I’m making cakes. Only, because the sun comes in, because my kitchen faces west, it fades it out. Because, again, desert. So it fades so I have to keep re-doing it and making it so that I have the instructions about, you know: You do things to the oil, you do things to the liquid, you do things to the sugar, and you do things to the temperature, and you do things to the baking time. But if you are making a cake from a mix, you’re in trouble. 

Michelle:  Ooh.

Anne:  Yeah, because you can’t change all those things, can you? Oh yeah, no, we’re a mile high. You have to do things. Continually going, “Oh wait! This has to cook longer. Oops! Wrong temperature.” That kind of thing. Yeah, we’re not medieval, we’re much more ancient than that.

Michelle:  I didn’t realize that.

Anne:  That we were so high up? Yeah, because we say “high desert” and that kind of goes by people’s minds. We have this idea, “Ah, you’re in New Mexico, it’s really hot!” Well yeah, not so much. We get snow. You’re like, “Snow? In Albuquerque?” Now, to be fair, I do not get as much snow as my brother does, because he’s up on the mesa and I’m down in the valley, and the valley is some kind of like different eco-thing and so, yeah, I don’t know. Whatever.

Michelle:  Well, let’s just be honest that most of us know about Albuquerque from Bugs Bunny, so we’re not dealing with real information.

Anne:  Yes, and Bugs Bunny, if I remember this correctly from what it looks like, is probably in Arizona. Were there saguaro cacti in Bugs Bunny? Those things with the little arms that go up to heaven? Those cacti? Because they’re not in New Mexico. They’re in Arizona. Just saying.

Michelle:  Not so much that he’s ever in Albuquerque, it’s that he explains that that’s how he got lost.

Anne:  Oh yeah, he gets lost underground going to Albuquerque. I think he puts his head up at some point…

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  And he’s supposed to be in Albuquerque, but it’s not Albuquerque. No, nobody knows anything about Albuquerque except us. We graduated from high school and we went off to do various things and one of my friends went to Harvard. People were all the time saying to him, “Ooh! New Mexico!” So he lied and they believed it. “Yeah, I had to ride my horse to high school, you know, and fight Indians.” And they believed this all. He had a picture of himself from some Halloween thing where he actually was wearing a cowboy costume, and he used to hand that around. Oh yeah, you can just lie. And you know that when I applied to the doctoral program at Berkeley, they sent me a form to fill out as a foreign student? You knew that, right?

Michelle:  I have heard about this. Being by DC here, we have incidents every once in a while where somebody applies for a passport and they get booted because they’re told, “You’re a foreign citizen.” From New Mexico.

Anne:  You’re in New Mexico. And if you are anywhere else in the country and you’re watching the weather for the nation, people stand in front of New Mexico. New Mexico does not exist. But we’re here, and we’re blue! We’re blue in the middle of a bunch of red states and so that’s us. Oh yeah, I’ve got stories about New Mexico. At some point it’ll come up. I’ll get to tell you… New Mexico, in the Civil War. What we did. But not now because that hasn’t got anything to do with anything, as usual, and I move on. Fair enough?

Michelle:  Cool.

Anne:  Yeah. We’re high desert.

Now that we’re going to get to what we’re actually talking about, we’re talking about the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, Northumbria, in 793. This is traditionally what’s called the beginning of the Viking Age. The Vikings had actually been around before that, and had been raiding before that, but this was such a shock that it just really took the imaginations of the other Europeans. And it really is the beginning of concentrating Viking raiding. So, that’s what we’re talking about.

Michelle:  And certainly in England and Ireland, you know, who are writing the records that we read.

Anne:  Yeah, to be fair. Yeah, so this was the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, which is still the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and the island hadn’t been populated much at all. St. Aidan founded a monastery there in 634, which is only, you know, like 150 years before this raid. Saint Finian built a timber church. It became a base for Christian missionaries around England, and St. Cuthbert became the bishop in 685— though he died in 687— and so his relics were there, and this was wonderful. The oldest historical English writing, which is from the beginning of the eighth century, is a Life of St. Cuthbert which was written at Lindisfarne. So it was an important monastic center.

And also early in the eighth century, The Lindisfarne Gospels were written and they were illustrated, possibly, by Eadfrith, who would later be bishop. They’re now at the British Library, they are “Cotton Manuscripts Nero D IV” and you know, Michelle— probably we’ll tell our listeners, but you know— where all this business in the Cotton manuscripts about Nero, for instance, comes from, right?

Michelle:  Right, that was Cotton who appears to be extremely important in saving early medieval… because he also is where we have the Beowulf manuscript…

Anne:  He is.

Michelle:  And the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight manuscript. That was the shelf, and he organized the library by having busts of various Roman emperors.

Anne:  He did. So this was on his Nero bookshelf, D IV. And so the British Library still uses Cotton’s numbers. Yeah, he collected a bunch of stuff. He was in Cambridgeshire, I do believe.

Michelle:  Medievalists owe him a debt because he saved a bunch of stuff.

Anne:  Well so The Lindisfarne Gospels are down there, and I’ve seen them. Sometimes the British Library has them on display, and I’ve seen them once. Northumbria is annoyed by this because they want them, but wouldn’t they just? This happens a lot in England, that London gets stuff.

At any rate, in 793, when the Vikings raided, they had already been raiding England earlier, but this was the one that made a big impression, and so we have here… this is from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, talking about the year 793:

“Her wæron reðe forebecna cumene ofer Norðhymbra land,” 

In other words there were foreboding, terrible omens that came over Northumbria.

“⁊ þæt folc earmlic bregdon,” 

It scared everybody.

“þæt wæron ormete þodenas ⁊ ligrescas, ⁊ fyrenne dracan wæron gesewene on þam lifte fleogende.” 

So there were storms and there was lightning and there were dragons of fire, flying all over in the air. (This was bad.)

“Þam tacnum sona fyligde mycel hunger,” 

So after these signs there was a bunch of hunger.

“⁊ litel æfter þam,”

A little bit after that

“þæs ilcan geares on .vi. Idus Ianuarii,” 

On the sixth ides of January… although scholars think that this is a mis-writing and it was actually, like, in June, because…

Michelle:  Yeah, June 8^th?

Anne:  …January is not… yeah, don’t really be riding around on your little boats.

Michelle:  They were so stressed that they wrote down the wrong date.

Anne:  Yeah, that’s what it was.

“earmlice hæþenra manna hergunc adilegode Godes cyrican in Lindisfarnaee þurh hreaflac ⁊ mansliht”

So wretched, bad, nasty, heathen men came and ravaged God’s church at Lindisfarne and “mansliht,” killed a bunch of people.

Michelle:  Mmhm.

Anne:  Mmhm.

They were sad.

You have one from Alcuin, yeah? Who was at Charlemagne’s court?

Michelle:  Yes. He wrote, in a letter to the King of Northumbria, after the raid: 

“Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race. Nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold the Church of St. Cuthbert, splattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments. A place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples.”

In later letters he talks about how some of the monks were killed, everything they could get their hands on was stolen. It’s a wonder that The Lindisfarne Gospels didn’t end up somewhere else.

Anne:  And we don’t know why this was. Did they hide them? They didn’t know the Vikings were coming. Had they lent them out to Durrow or something? We don’t know. We don’t know.

Michelle:  They took some people back, as slaves, of course, and Alcuin is trying to figure out whether it’s possible to get a hold of the people who took them and try to get them ransomed back.

Anne:  Mmhm. Did he have any success with this?

Michelle:  Not as far as I know.

Anne:  This was the heart of Northumbrian Christianity, and Christianity in England, and it was such a shock. They took St. Cuthbert’s relics with them. You were telling me, Michelle, it wasn’t all of St. Cuthbert’s relics? It was some of them?

Michelle:  Yes, not all of them. They have some of them still that they take with them. When they finally, after 100 years of raids, give up and go to Durham in… it must be 200 years of raids because in 995 they leave Lindisfarne, they throw in the towel because they’re right there! It’s really easy to hit them. And Lindisfarne’s a tidal island…

Anne:  Sometimes you can walk there and sometimes not.

Michelle:  Right. Sometimes there’s no escape at all, you can’t possibly get through the water to get back to the mainland.

Anne:  It’s like Mont Saint-Michel in that way.

Michelle:  Exactly. So in 995 they—whoever is left—pick up and they move to Durham, and after the Norman Conquest some of the monks from Durham come back.

Anne:  That’s nicely ironic.

Michelle:  It’s actually one of the—I thought this was really interesting—it’s one of the first monasteries to be suppressed by Henry VIII.

Anne:  Oh really? I didn’t know that.

Michelle:  It’s still, by the 1530s, such an important site…

Anne:  Ah. Of course then. So you have to suppress it. That would make sense.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s one of the first ones that’s suppressed and, you know, the ruins that are there now aren’t with our time period at all.

Anne:  No. No, no. They’re much later. No.

Michelle:  Yeah, they’re from the twelfth century.

Anne:  Yeah, and are ruins anyway.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  On account of the suppression.

Michelle:  I think it’s the Benedictines who come and establish a priory.

Anne:  Oh, that’s sweet. I like that. I enjoy the Benedictines no end.

Michelle:  But there is still a semi-operational church there, which is kind of cool, because there’s a community of about 500 who live on the island, you know, in a village, and they have a functional church, and there’s a vicar. It’s kind of cool. And at least according to this book, by a former vicar, they get given a facsimile edition of The Lindisfarne Gospels.

Anne:  A facsimile edition of The Lindisfarne Gospels, with, like, facsimile gold on the cover or something?

Michelle:  Yeah, when they become the Vicar.

Anne:  Oh my god.

Michelle:  And according to him—this is a hoot—according to him, in 1995—this is David Adam, by the way, his book is called The Holy Island of Lindisfarne—on the twelve hundredth anniversary of the raid, so in 1993, a whole bunch of pilgrims come from Norway to do penance.

Anne:  That is darling. “We’re sorry! We’re sorry!”

Michelle:  “Still feeling bad about that. We wouldn’t do it now!”

Anne:  “No, we so wouldn’t! We wouldn’t be doing that thing now. No.” The Vikings.

Yeah, you know I spend some time in Norway on account of having had a Norwegian grandfather, and you don’t actually hear a lot about the Vikings, in general. Although when I took my little child with me, it was during the one year of his life that he was blond. He was born with black hair and that came out and he was blond, and then that came out and then he had brown hair, which he still does. But he was blond that year, the second year of his life, and we went to Norway for a family reunion. I had knit him a little Setesdal sweater so that he would fit in with everybody, and besides I knit. I was making a Norwegian sweater. And we went to the longship museum and when we came in the guard said, “Ah! A little Viking!” I mean, so, there you go.

The one time in Drew’s life he was a Viking. But they don’t really… I mean, it’s this thing that, “We are Vikings, we have been Vikings, but we don’t talk about it a lot.” That’s just where it’s at.

Michelle:  Vikings kind of grabbed the imagination in the nineteenth century and really have not left, which… maybe there aren’t as many conspiracy theories connected to them as the Templars, who we talked about last time, but they’re definitely a piece of medieval culture that people think they’ve heard of. As opposed to, say, anchorites, that when you drop that on an undergrad they’re like, “What on Earth? Seriously now? They go into a room and somebody walls up the door?” They look at you like you’re making that up.

Anne:  Yeah, for a while they do, yeah. No, but people have heard of Vikings. Although, as we will be discussing, they have probably heard some wrong things. But, whatever. As usual. Because, nineteenth century. The nineteenth century was really big on the Middle Ages, and they made a bunch of stuff up, is what they did.

Michelle:  Holy smokes did they ever!

Anne:  OK, by the way… the horns! The horns on the helmets? Wagner. It comes from Wagner. It didn’t exist. Just saying that. Now we move on. Just let it go. OK.

Michelle:  Yeah. No, that’s a big one. They did not do that. Although their helmets are pretty cool.

Anne:  Yeah, but they’re quite functional, is the deal, and ones with horns on them aren’t, although they look very nice on the operatic stage, which is really where they belong.

Michelle:  You have to be able to see them from the mezzanine, so…

Anne:  You do! You do. Speaking of which, the Santa Fe Opera has survived the plague, I got a notice the other day. I was so bummed because the season got completely… it was gone! And they were going to do The Magic Flute, which I love, and they were also doing the world premiere of M. Butterfly, which is an opera, based on the play which is based on the opera Madame Butterfly, and it was so meta. I was so looking forward to this. But it didn’t happen. But they survived, you know? Those of us that had tickets donated our money. They survived. You know, they didn’t… they said it actually wasn’t as bad as 1967 when the entire theater burned down in the middle of the season, so hey, OK. Santa Fe Opera.

So where were we? Oh yeah. So, we were talking about the Vikings and the desecration of Lindisfarne. And here’s one of the problems. Because this was such a holy, holy, important place, obviously God had willed this destruction… I mean, God and the saints didn’t stop the Vikings, did they? So there was some reason. And I’m glad to tell you that they were able to figure out the reason. Sicga had murdered King Aelfwald and then killed himself, and then he got buried at Lindisfarne a year or so before the raid, and so that’s the explanation. I’m glad to be able to explain to you why the Vikings were able to attack Lindisfarne, even though it was so holy. Did you know that part?

Michelle:  Well, there’s always one sin or another you can hang this stuff on.

Anne:  Thank god! Thank god, because otherwise you would have to completely change your entire belief system, wouldn’t you? And I don’t know, talk about proximity, and tides, and stuff like that. I don’t know.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s… you know, it’s interesting because Lindisfarne is in some ways really remote, but it’s not so remote that they can’t go over and consult with the local king…

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  Because, you know they’re there because King Oswald had invited Aidan to come and found a monastery there, so they’re remote enough that they can do their holy business, but they’re also close enough that they can come and advise the King, which is an important piece of what they’re doing. And it just apparently never occurred to anybody that that remoteness that kept them kind of safe from the Anglo-Saxon world made them vulnerable once the Vikings decided to take it on themselves to start stealing things.

Anne:  Mmhmm. Yeah, no, the Vikings weren’t expected in a lot of ways, and we’ll get to that. Yeah. I have some stuff to say about that.

The Vikings that raided Lindisfarne were probably from Norway, although the English talk about them as Danes. But that’s because the English are calling all the Vikings, Danes. They were probably from Norway.

Michelle:  It’s not like they showed up and handed over a business card.

Anne:  Why not? Why not? 

Michelle:  “Raids by Ragnar.”

Anne:  “Hello, we’re the Norwegians.” My people, is who it was. We’re sorry. We’re so sorry. We’re sorry about this. Yeah, so they were Norwegians. And at Lindisfarne they laid waste to everything. They polluted the holy place, they dug up the altars, they seized all the treasures, they killed some of the brothers, they enslaved some of the brothers, they drove some of the brothers out naked—I’m not clear on why this is—and then they drowned some others. You know, they were awful. And so this is when the Viking Age begins, with all this shock. This is the shock that starts the Viking Age for the rest of Europe.

Michelle:  And of course the deal is that it’s their victims that are writing the histories.

Anne:  Yes, because the Vikings were highly cultured—despite whatever idiocy you’ve been reading, they were highly cultured—but they did not have a literature. We have sagas, but they date from after… not this time period, a little after. They had runes, you know, they had writing, but they didn’t have an actual literature, and so they weren’t writing down what they were doing. Other people, who were their victims, wrote it down and so we have to always take that into account. Luckily there’s a great deal of archeology, which has explained a great deal to us.

Michelle:  Oh man, archeology has been such a boon to understanding this time period, and particularly places like Scandinavia where they’re not having records until much, much later.

Anne:  Right. Yay, the archeology.

No one expected that Lindisfarne was going to get plowed under. One of the things that happened was that Lindisfarne was really… that was a really great lucrative raid and so that signaled to the Vikings what good business there was in raiding. It was just, “Ooh!” They were from southern Scandinavia – Norway, Denmark, Sweden – and from the late eighth century to the late eleventh century they raided the coasts and rivers of Europe, and they went as far as the Mediterranean, North Africa, the Middle East. They went to Iceland, they went to Greenland, they went to Finland.

They founded communities across Northern Europe, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and the islands all the way across to North America. They would become the Normans, they would conquer England. They were advanced technologically. They had an alphabet, they carved runestones. They had no literature, however. And the longships were built for both exploration and warfare. The thing is that they were quick and they could negotiate shallow water, this made them really, really good for raiding because you could come on in and get out of the boats and go kill people, you know, you didn’t have to have special little boats to carry you over to kill people.

Michelle:  Yeah, you could go up the rivers. Iona, similarly to Lindisfarne, you know, got raided a bunch of times, and so when they finally threw up their hands and moved to Kells, in Ireland, they thought they would be safe. But the Vikings were able to go upriver and hit them in Kells too. 

Anne:  They were so scary. They really were. They had a three-tiered social structure. The thralls, at the lowest level, they were the slave workers, and we still say “enthralled,” it’s where the root’s from. The karls, which were the free peasants, and the jarls which were the wealthy landowners. Women could inherit property, they could be the head of the family, in the absence of male relatives. After the age of 20, an unmarried woman was legally her own person. They could divorce and remarry; they could cohabit and have children without marrying. Children had full rights whether they were born in or outside of marriage. This is much like it was in Wales. And they traded throughout the known world. They were all across the known world.

So we’ve said already, because they didn’t have literature, we depend on outsiders for the information, but the later sagas tell us that they made a distinction between theft and raiding. Theft was bad, raiding was fair. There’s a place in one of the sagas, for instance, where a leader and his band of people are being held hostage someplace, and they manage to get out and on the way out they steal a bunch of stuff. They take stuff with them. And then they think better of it because that’s bad. That’s thieving. So then they go back and they set the house on fire and that’s OK because that’s raiding, and, you know, it’s all out in the open.

There’s this business about the openness of it. Raiding is… people know you’re doing it, and thieving, that’s underhanded. Isn’t that amazing? 

Michelle:  They’ve got an interesting culture. The history of scholarship on Vikings is just as interesting, of course, as the Vikings themselves, right? Because we go through these periods, right? So when we’re first dealing with them we’re pretty well taking the chroniclers’ word for it about what they were like, and then there’s this whole wave of scholarship that is trying to do this corrective of really emphasizing that they were traders, too, it wasn’t like they only ever just raided. You had all these really important, you know, trading routes, and that if you looked at the amount of territory that the Vikings controlled it’s as if… if they were all one organized group it’s an area as big as the Roman Empire was, but of course it’s being controlled by all these smaller groups. And now of course we’re back to another corrective of, “No, really, they did kill people.”

Anne:  They did, actually. But they also settled, that was the thing. They… so I love it that they made a decision… they didn’t just come and steal your stuff because that was wrong, they came and had raids and so you had… you could fight back, you know? So that’s fair. I mean you mostly didn’t because they were, like, so good at what they were doing, but you could fight back. And would, later, when you were Ireland and… or if you were Wales. They didn’t manage to get a foothold in Wales because the Welsh kings just weren’t having it.

Michelle:  And that’s what happened to them in Newfoundland as well. The native peoples there gave them enough grief that it was no longer profitable.

Anne:  Right. Right.

Michelle:  And they picked up and left.

Anne:  Raiding was a thing that happened in Scandinavia. The Viking Age is when they moved that outside of Scandinavia, and it was practiced by young men, older men were supposed to settle down and raise a family. This was a young man’s game. And we don’t really actually know why they turned their attention outside of Scandinavia. There’s a lot of theories but we don’t really know. People said, at one point, that it might be due to over-population but there actually is not evidence of that. Might have been from the trading routes opening up information about goods and people, that kind of makes sense to me. It has something to do with the new sailing technology, the keels and the sails added to the longships so they were even more formidable than they were. And it’s also possible that the custom of the powerful men having wives and concubines and basically taking up all the women might have had something to do with the young men going and making names for themselves, at the very least, so that they could impress the ladies back home. Could have been. But we don’t actually know. But we do know they started it, and Lindisfarne is where we started off.

Michelle:  They end up very involved in the early medieval slave trade.

Anne:  Yes. Yes, the biggest slave market was at—in the Middle Ages—was at Dublin, wasn’t it?

Michelle:  Probably. I’ve seen statistics that by the end of the Viking Age, after 300 years of taking people, stealing everybody they could get their hands on from Ireland and taking them back to Norway and taking some to Turkey and selling in the slave markets there, that ten percent of the population in Norway was Irish.

Anne:  So I’m Irish on my Irish side, and I’m Norwegian on my Norwegian side and they’re both the same thing. Fair enough. I can live with that.

We wanted to say something though about… mostly we were going to talk about Vikings but we did want to talk about Lindisfarne some, and talk about the Celtic Church. The Celtic Church is distinct from the Roman Church, or of the Insular Christianity as distinct from Western Christendom. Christianity arrived in Britain at the first part of the third century. The Roman connection to Christianity, which started under Constantine in the early fourth century, came into Britain with the Romans, and then the Romans left in 407 and the Christians withdrew to Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany. Over time the Roman Church became the Christian Church in Britain, but the Synod of Whitby in 664 Romanized Easter dates and monastic tonsures and so, and over time the Roman Church kind of like won out over the Celtic Church, but Lindisfarne is part of that construction.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s Cuthbert who moves them over to Roman practice.

Anne:  Was it Cuthbert? I didn’t know that. Oh Cuthbert! And yet he’s our saint. OK.

Do we have anything else to say about Lindisfarne? I don’t know… Lindisfarne and the Celtic Church? Do you have anything else on this? I’m all about the Vikings this time.

Michelle:  Yeah, I mean, Celtic Christianity is important because since Ireland wasn’t ever part of the Roman Empire, but they were evangelized, it happened differently. It wasn’t something that came in with a governmental structure.

Anne:  Oh like, yeah, the way it did with the Romans. OK.

Michelle:   Right. Irish Christianity is this whole different kind of thing in the early Middle Ages. You have… it’s structured around monasteries rather than parishes, there are monasteries all over the place. I mean, this is one of the reasons why, on this go-round, I was surprised to read about everybody’s shock at the raid on Lindisfarne, because Lindisfarne isn’t Skellig Michael. Skellig Michael, you know, the little monastic island off the coast of Ireland where they’re intending to go and nobody’s ever supposed to see them again. Everybody knows this, by the way, because it was used as a site in the most recent Star Wars movies where Luke Skywalker…

Anne:  Yeah, and it’s pretty! It’s really pretty.

Michelle:  Can you imagine how much money they had to pay, to use Skellig Michael as a filming site, by the way? Anyhow, it’s not that. You know, Skellig Michael, when they go off, they’re intending to not come back.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  But when they go to Lindisfarne, it’s far enough but not so far that they can’t come back. There’s much more contact…

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  … with the powers that be.

Anne:  Mmhm, it’s not a hermitage. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yeah. And I guess I had sort of kind of put them in my head in the same category and needed to sort them out in different categories.

Anne:  So the Celtic Church is one thing in Ireland and another thing on Britain?

Michelle:  Yeah, because Ireland wasn’t invaded by the Anglo-Saxons, it didn’t have those problems, and so they sent…

Anne:  No, they get invaded by the Normans!

Michelle:  Oh man, oh man! I know it’s a total coincidence that the Pope who authorized that was the only Englishman to ever be Pope. I’m sure that had nothing to do with it.

Anne:  Yeah. Totally. Nothing to do with it. Ever. Yeah, whatever.

Michelle:  So they sent missionaries to what is now Scotland and so, you know, England was Christianized, re-Christianized, after the Anglo-Saxon invasions from the south, from Canterbury, and from the north, by the Irish, and so you have this conflict just really built in because… And the things they fight about! I mean, they’re going to make us cross our eyes, right? Because in the same way that when I try to explain to my kids why it was such a big deal between the Catholics and Protestants a generation ago, they look at me and their eyes are just glazing over because none of it matters to them. But, you know, the same kind of thing here, right? The tonsure, the Irish tonsure is weird, right? Where you kind of draw a line over the top of the head from ear to ear and you shave in front of that and leave it long behind it?

Anne:  Yeah. Yeah, it’s a precursor to the mullet, really.

Michelle:  It is the mullet from hell, yeah. So, you know, that’s different than the kind of Roman tonsure, which is what we normally think of with the bald spot on top that’s been shaved.

Anne:  And how they calculated Easter was different.

Michelle:   That’s different, yeah.

Anne:  It matters! It matters when Easter is. I mean, you know, if you’re going to be a unified Church you’ve got to be celebrating Easter at the same time, obviously.

Michelle:  Yeah, the Synod of Whitby had to happen, if I’m remembering correctly, because the King followed one kind of Christianity and the Queen followed another and so the King and the Queen weren’t celebrating Easter at the same time.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s a big difference between Constantinople doing one thing and Rome doing another. If you’ve got the King and the Queen you really…. It’s not good. It’s the same house, really, you’ve got to figure it out. Yay the Synod.

Michelle:  I think the Lindisfarne Gospels are my favorite of the really famous early medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Anne:  So over The Book of Kells? You would choose them over The Book of Kells?

Michelle:  I would. The Book of Kells is clearly, you know, the more famous one, but the Lindisfarne Gospels has that translation that is written in, interlineated into English, and I just love that. This is where we have some information about it. There’s a little note written at the end of the volume by a priest named Aldred, about 250 years after the Gospels were created, and he’s the one who gives us the name, right? 

“Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne Church, originally wrote this book…”

How on Earth he knows that I have no idea.

Anne:  That’s why we say this may be true, because really…

Michelle:  Two and half centuries later. Yeah.

Anne:  … We don’t know. Our story is! Our story is that Eadfrith did this.

Michelle:  … “originally wrote this book, for God and for Saint Cuthbert and, jointly, for the saints whose relics are in the island. And Ethelwald, Bishop of the Lindisfarne Islanders, impressed it on the outside…”

So he made the cover.

Anne:  Uh-huh.

Michelle:  “…And Billfrith, the hermit, forged the ornaments which are on it on the outside and adorned it with gold and gems and also with silver-gilt pure metal.”

Anne:  Well that’s a good job for a hermit! Where the hell is he living? He’s got some little forge there?

Michelle:  “And Aldred, unworthy and most miserable priest, glossed it into English between the lines with the help of God and Saint Cuthbert.”

Anne:  Thank you God and Cuthbert! That was awesome! I do like the Old English translation in there.

Michelle:  I love the translation into English partially because, you know, you’ll get a hold of scholars of later time periods who want to claim about how, you know, the earliest translation of the Bible into English is Wycliffe but the really, really important one is in the sixteenth century, because this is the Protestants, you know? Blah, blah, blah. Whoa, hold on. Lindisfarne Gospels!

Anne:  Lindisfarne Gospels. Yeah. So they’re the first translation of the Bible into English. Go Lindisfarne! And it survived the Vikings. We don’t know how that happened, but it did.

After Lindisfarne, the Vikings went and raided Jarrow. I think that was, like, the next year or something. But they were repulsed at Jarrow and their leaders were killed. And then all the crews were killed. The ship landed, like, at Tynemouth and they all got killed. So they didn’t raid England for another forty years after that. Which is kind of nice. But in 865 they went into Northumbria again. They captured what is now York – Jorvik – Viking town. And they establish the Danelaw. You’ve been to York, right?

Michelle:  You know, I haven’t. I’ve only ever been to England once. I’ve been to Ireland more. Because I want to. But I haven’t actually been there. I’ve been to Ireland several times but only been to England once.

Anne:  York is wonderful and one of the things they have is the Viking museum, the Jorvik Viking Centre, and they have—I don’t know if this is still going on because, for one thing, there’s been a horrible plague, as many of us know— the way it’s set up is you have a little ride and it kind of takes you through Jorvik and they have smells. They don’t have as bad smells as there would be, but they do have some smells, so that you can smell what it was like. You can go all the way through Jorvik and then you can purchase little souvenirs. It’s quite nice.

You know, there was a lot of controversy about the smells when this thing opened.

So they established the Danelaw and the Danlaw is the area of Britain which was run by the Vikings, and that ran from the southern border of Northumberland down to the Thames, and so therefore included London. And over on the east it went to the sea and in the west it went to Mercia, so there’s basically a line in between London and Chester that is the western border. It’s pretty damn big. But in Scotland they held the isles, which actually didn’t become part of Scotland legally until 1468, and they didn’t take Wales. They had some small settlements, but Welsh Kings kept them out, Rhodri Mar in particular. Yay.

They raided Cornwall but they didn’t take it. King Athelstan of England took it in 963. They raided Ireland and they built an encampment at what would be Dublin— “dubh linn,” black pool. They were the Kings of Dublin from 853 to 902 and then they came back in 914 and they regained Dublin and they established settlements in what would become the early large towns in Ireland; Waterford, Wexford, Cork, Limerick. And starting in 980 the Irish Kings starting subduing the Vikings, ending with Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 where Brian, his son, his grandson, were all killed but the Irish won, and that’s really the end of the Viking Era in Ireland.

They settled in Northern France, and established Normandy which means “The Land of the Norsemen.” Rollo the Viking’s descendant William of Normandy would later conquer England in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. They raided the low countries in Francia and set up bases, but they didn’t settle there in large numbers. They raided Spain and Portugal, but they didn’t settle there. They raided Italy and as Normans they conquered Sicily. They settled on the Baltic Coast and inland on the rivers on into Russia. They settled Iceland, they settled Greenland, they settled briefly in Newfoundland which they called Vinland, and their trade routes ran from several ports on the coast of Scandinavia, routes going to Constantinople, Jerusalem, Baghdad, the Caspian Sea, the Silk Road, and in Constantinople, in the Hagia Sophia. This is one of the things we were really excited about talking about – there’s some graffiti! There’s some Viking graffiti from the tenth century, mostly. Yeah. One of them says “Halfdan,” in other words “Halfdan was here.” One of them is a full sentence. These are runes cut into the stone. “Arinbárðr cut these runes” and then there’s some carvings of ships. Yeah. So they made it to the Hagia Sophia, where they desecrated the walls by making graffiti. Yay.

Michelle:  The trade routes were just amazing. There was a fairly recent discovery of a grave of a Viking woman and one of the pieces of jewelry she had, had been made by King Tut’s jeweler.

Anne:  You’ve got to be kidding me! I did not know this.

Michelle:  No! Isn’t that amazing?

Anne:  Wow.

Michelle:  I mean, it obviously didn’t come directly from King Tut’s jeweler. It had, you know, gone hand to hand to hand to hand, but it’s been traded and it has come up there. Their trade routes into Russia, they were trading for silk, you know, because silk is very warm and so you want it.

Anne:  Yeah, silk’s good. And it’s not nearly as cumbersome as wool, so it’s a good… silk is good in the cold weather.

Michelle:  My super favorite thing to do to students before I retired, of course, was to talk with them about how we have this idea of Vikings as being these big hairy barbaric dudes, but really they were super concerned about hygiene and loved silk underwear. Because, you know, the second most common thing that we find in Viking digs are combs.

Anne:  Right, because they had to comb their hair a lot. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yeah. It’s actually one of the things the chroniclers are complaining about, that these guys show up and they bathe all the time and so it’s not bad enough that they’re taking our stuff, our women at looking at them saying, “Hey, why can’t you be more like Olaf?” And we don’t want to bathe all the time.

Anne:  No, because that’s annoying.

Michelle:  Not a piece of this is fair.

Anne:  Not a piece of it! They steal all your stuff, they impress your women and then… and what they were doing was establishing trading hubs wherever they were raiding. They’d come and steal all your stuff and then they’d establish a trade route, and sometimes they would settle there. Mostly, mostly it was the young men who were settling and then marrying into the people who were living there, although the Shetlands were so close that it was whole families who were just moving on over. The Vikings show up! With the kids! Hi guys! Hi! “Arinbárðr cut these runes!” Yay!

Michelle:  Pretty sure that the Orkneys spoke a version of Norse for hundreds of years.

Anne:  Yes they did. It’s so close to Norway.

Michelle:  The most common thing in Viking digs… you know this, right? It’s game pieces. Because the armies, you know, when you’re not working, you’re bored, and so you want to play a game, and they had a board game called Hnefatafl, “The King’s Table”…

Anne:  Hnefatafl…

Michelle:  Where you practice… it’s essentially a board game about raiding.

Anne:  Of course. Yeah. So it’s like Monopoly. Yeah, which is a board game about capitalism.

Michelle:  Yes. Yeah, the Vikings are the original corporate raiders. They’re all about profit.

Anne:  So they have a board game to celebrate their society.

Michelle:  And you can get apps to play this board game. I have an actual kind of material version of it that I bought at the Irish National Museum…

Anne:  Of course you do.

Michelle:  … It’s awesome, and my kid kicks butt at it. Don’t play Hnefatafl with Mark.

Anne:  Totally not going to do that. No. Yeah.

Michelle:  But what you learn… the way it works is that one side is the attackers and one side is the defenders and it’s not like chess, it sometimes gets called Viking Chess but it’s not like chess where, in chess, you have even sides? 

Anne:  Mmhm.

Michelle:  Because chess is another medieval game.

Anne:  Mmhm.

Michelle:  But this, you know, is in Scandinavia before chess comes in, and you don’t have even sides in Hnefatafl. You have the attackers and they’re in the middle, and you have the defenders around them and what it’s teaching is how quickly a raid can go sideways.

Anne:  Oh really?

Michelle:  And how…

Anne:  And so it’s not all about… you go to Lindisfarne and just knock everybody down…

Michelle:  No.

Anne:  It’s that you might show up at Dublin.

Michelle:  Hnefatafl is about what you do when the raid goes sideways and how…

Anne:  Very interesting.

Michelle:  And how you get the King back to the ship.

Anne:  Interesting.

Michelle:  It is such a hard game to win, as the attackers. The lesson of Hnefatafl is that once the raid goes sideways, you are completely screwed.

Anne:  Well that’s interesting because… so it’s not like it’s a celebration of raiding in that if you are the raiders, you win?

Michelle:  It is a cautionary tale about not getting yourself trapped between where you are and where the ship is. If you let the defenders get in there, you are screwed.

Anne:  That is very interesting and you’ve got… so you’ve got it in hard copy, because you bought it, but you also know some apps?

Michelle:  There are apps where you can download now and play.

Anne:  Can you put the links in the show notes? Put some links in the show notes so that we may all play this Viking game and learn how to make our raid be a profitable one rather than getting axed.

Michelle:  Unfortunately the lesson for you as the Viking low-person in the crew is that your job is to die to get the King back to the ship.

Anne:  Yes. Your job is to die. Fair enough.

Michelle:  Because you can get him back to the ship most of the time, but a whole chunk of his crew has to be willing to die to make that happen.

Anne:  Yeah, but they are, so that kind of works. Very interesting. Very interesting. 

Yeah, so the Vikings attacked Lindisfarne and all hell broke loose and then there were a few hundred years of the Vikings raiding all over the known world, and some of the unknown world, which they found, and establishing trade and doing trading all over and then they stopped.

And in the same way that we don’t know really why they started, we don’t know really why they stopped, although there are some things that were going on. Europe, especially, was having more centralized governments and so, you know, there were stronger defenses. The cities were fortifying themselves so, in the same way that the Viking technology for the ships caused them to be better raiders, the cities’ technology for fortification caused them to be more easily defended. Some of the monasteries moved inland, you know, like away from the rivers, obviously. And— and this is most interesting to me—Christianity might have been involved. 

Now, when I read this I thought, “Oh really?” because we just finished talking about the Templars, and the Christians are all big on, kind of, raiding Jerusalem when they get there, so what this has to do with Christianity wasn’t entirely clear to me. But we have evidence from one of the later sagas, the Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa, King Ólafr tells Björn that “raiding violates God’s law,” so it’s possible that along with the technology and along with the governmental changes and societal changes, there was also the issue that raiding itself seemed like no longer such a good thing to be doing. I find that very interesting.

Michelle:  I think that there is more official condemnation from the Papacy about Europeans enslaving one another, so it’s also possible that that chunk of their profit portfolio was no longer as profitable.

Anne:  Mmhm.

Michelle:  I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the largest unexcavated Viking site in Europe is in Ireland, it’s up by Annagassan which is, of course, an area I know really well from having written about it.

Anne:  And what was the book that you wrote? You get to…

Michelle:  Oh, do I get to plug my book?

Anne:  You get to plug the book. Plug the book.

Michelle:  So I co-wrote a historical novel about Linn Duachaill, the monastery of Linn Duachaill and how it got raided and destroyed by the Vikings in 841. It’s really interesting because it was a sister-city of Dublin, because the same Vikings that went to Dublin, went to Linn Duachaill and they stayed there for about 70 years and then decided that because it was tidal—you know, you’re on the Bay of Dundalk and it goes out for too much of a part of the day and you’re stuck—so they abandoned the site. But what that means is that there’s a ninety-acre site under the field and unlike Viking Dublin where it’s just been built up and built up and built up and built up, this became farmland after, because the monastery was never rebuilt.

Anne:  Mmm.

Michelle:  And it’s just sitting there waiting for them to be able to raise enough money to do a nice excavation.

Anne:  Oh that will be fun. That will be fun.

Michelle:  And stuff turns up. Whenever the field is plowed people go and field-walk.

Anne:  Yeah, because there’s stuff…

Michelle:  Because stuff makes its…

Anne:  Every spring you plow the fields, you plow the fields and then you kind of walk along looking for stuff. It’s like, part of the plowing.

Michelle:  One of the interesting pieces, because of writing that book… I have a co-author on it, by the way, her name is Jess Barry…

Anne:  And will you put a link to this in the show notes?

Michelle:  Sure. 

Anne:  Of course you will.

Michelle:  I wrote the chapters from the Irish point of view, and she wrote the chapters from the Viking point of view, but what happened was when we started the book the Linn Duachaill monastery site was still lost. But it was found while we were in the process of writing the book. So I got to go visit it. It was awesome. I got to go see the site… there’s nothing there.

Anne:  But you got to see the place where something was.

Michelle:  I got to see where it was, but there’s nothing there. The monastery was probably made out of wood, you know, and it totally disappeared.

Anne: Right, so it’s gone. It’s gone.

Michelle:  Yeah, there’s nothing there.

Anne:  Even the stone places can be taken down. The woods, they just go.

Michelle:  And particularly when Vikings show up and burn them.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s over. It’s over. I like to go to the places where things were. It reminds me of, like, in Pittsburgh when I would be watching the news, it was very common in Pittsburgh for reporters to show up where nothing was happening to show you that this is the place where something had happened. Like they’d be in an empty parking lot saying, “Yesterday there was someone who got robbed,” Oh, did they? You know? There’s nothing in this picture. Nothing is in this picture.

Michelle:  Pittsburghers are infamous. I love you Pittsburgh, I lived there for a long time. But they’re infamous for giving directions with things that are not there anymore.

Anne:  Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Michelle:  Go down Forbes Avenue and then turn left where the Dairy Queen used to be. Well, I didn’t live here when the Dairy Queen was there.

Anne:  Yes, I don’t know where the Dairy Queen was. Yes.

Michelle:  So I don’t know where that is.

So I have a couple of media recommendations.

Anne:  Oh media! Oh, that’s right. We need to take it on in to the twenty-first century. What we got? What we got?

Michelle:  So there’s a brand-new, hot-off-the-presses, just-came-out-a-week-ago, new history of the Vikings by Neil Price, it’s called Children of Ash and Elm:…

Anne:  Ooh! I like that title.

Michelle:  … A History of the Vikings, and it’s been very well reviewed. And the pieces of it that I’ve read so far are very good.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  There is a fairly new book by Tom Shippey who is, in most of his scholarly life, a Tolkienist, but of course he started out as a medievalist.

Anne:  Yeah, because one does, yeah.

Michelle:  His book is called Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings.

Anne:  Ooh!

Michelle:  And he is at some pains to push back against the idea that these guys were peaceful traders. He actually wants to argue that there is a really interesting and distinct culture at this time among these peoples that makes them basically a death cult.

Anne:  Really? Because they were trading. They were trading. He doesn’t think they weren’t trading? We know that they were.

Michelle:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anne:  The trading is just, kind of like a sideline to being a death cult?

Michelle:  No, he’s saying that for those 300 years you have this culture that is just ending up in this self-reinforcing cycle about fighting and dying and, you know, being willing to just do whatever you need to do. He’s working a lot with the sagas, and so part of it is that relationship between literature and real life.

Anne:  Right, which is always vexed.

Michelle:  They’re telling each other, you know, or reinforcing this idea that this is how you behave. I can only read Tom Shippey a little bit at a time because he… his tone is so mansplain-y I have to walk away…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  … and come back. So I don’t think he would say it this way, that what you have going on here is this death spiral of toxic masculinity, but that’s how I would say it.

Anne:  Well, you get to say that. One of the things that’s interesting is that that seems to me to dovetail with what you’re telling me about the game.

Michelle:  Oh yes. Yeah, that could very easily… I mean, I’m not saying I disagree with him, I’m saying that I think that he is making the point more forcefully because he thinks he has to provide a corrective…

Anne:  OK. OK.

Michelle:  … to this more in-vogue popular idea about how they were traders. He wants to say, “Well, you know, yeah, but…”

Anne:  They were death traders.

Michelle:  Yeah. There is this whole piece, and then we have this stuff in the literature about how important it is to them to not show fear. To go to your death laughing.

Anne:  Sure. The thing is, literature is not life, but sometimes we know that there are ways in which the literature takes a kind of idea which is running around the culture and then makes it into this much bigger thing which then can get folded back in, like we talked about that in the Tour de Nesle affair, my theory for instance…

Michelle:  Yes! Yes.

Anne:  … that I think that you were going along with…

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  … that the princesses and the knights were acting out a courtly love scenario that really didn’t fit so well in the actual real court, and got them killed or imprisoned. So I completely understand, you know, if the sagas themselves are written down later, but they come from earlier roots so the stories are known. I can buy it that the sagas themselves kind of feed into the death idea, and you find yourself, you know, living a saga, I can see how that would work.

Michelle:  You know, I think you’re probably right. I mean, I think we see that with The Battle of Maldon, this poem about the raid where they all get killed, but they stay there and they fight and they’re living out the idea, and everybody gets killed.

Anne:  Everybody dies because they could not keep from allowing the Vikings to come over the damn bridge because the Vikings were, like, “Yeah, well if you weren’t so scared you would let us in.” “Ah, we’re not scared, you come over!” And then the Vikings slaughter them. Oh too bad. I like to think about the women back in Maldon going, “Oh for the love of God. What the hell were you thinking?”

Michelle:  I know.

Anne:  “This is just so dumb.” Yeah.

Michelle:  So here’s some other fiction-y kind of things. And this is just a teeny tiny, itty bitty…

Anne:  Tiny bit. Tiny bit. Tiny bit.

Michelle:  … drop, drop, drop because there’s so, so much of this. There’s so, so much but there is a book called Eadfrith, Scribe of Lindisfarne…

Anne:  Ooh!

Michelle:  By Michelle Treeve, which is the pseudonym for a medievalist named Michelle P. Brown who is a specialist in this time period. And so far the amount I’ve read has been quite good.

Anne:  Oh good. Yay. Hurrah.

Michelle:  So that’s worth looking at. In terms of this time period in Ireland, probably the best-known place to go is Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma series, which is a set of… she solves mysteries, right? And that also is a pseudonym for a scholar who is in this time period and didn’t really want…

Anne:  Didn’t want it on the tenure application?

Michelle:  Yeah, not so much. But the series is up to like twenty-seven books now.

Anne:  Oh cool.

Michelle:  It’s not bad. It’s really interesting about early Ireland. Do not have a drinking game with the word “waspish” because you will die of alcohol poisoning. It’s time for his editor to point out to him that is a really noticeable word.

Anne:  “Waspish” is not like saying “and”.

Michelle:  Poor Sister Fidelma is constantly described as “waspish,” to the point where you want to smack somebody on her behalf. But they’re really… they’re actually very good books. I don’t mean to be snippy.

Anne:  Except for the waspish part…

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  OK. Fair enough.

Michelle:  There is a book called Holy Island by L.J. Ross and it is also a mystery that is set on Lindisfarne. The beginning of a series.There is a book… this has nothing to do with anything except I think it’s delightful… there’s a book called The Dig by John Preston that is a historical novel about the dig at Sutton Hoo.

Anne:  Oh really?

Michelle:  So not about the time period…

Anne:  This has nothing to do with anything except this sounds very good. Fair enough.

Michelle:  Except what he’s doing is going back and dramatizing all the tensions involved…

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  … in an archeological dig…

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  … when you have all these egos involved.

Anne:  Fair enough.

Michelle:  Yes. And of course there’s also, on TV, there is a show called The Last Kingdom, which is based on Bernard Cornwell’s series about, obviously, the Viking raids on Anglo-Saxon England. I find this one very testosterone-y as well, so I have to read some and then walk away from it. I haven’t actually seen the show, I’ve read some of the books. I have to…

Anne:  I wasn’t enjoying it myself so I didn’t finish watching.

Michelle:  So I haven’t seen it. For the books themselves I had… they’re very… I guess I should say it nicely and say it’s very male-focused, and I’m not at a point in my life where I want to have all of my entertainment be male-focused so…

Anne:  Well your entire household, besides you, is male-focused, so there’s that.

Michelle:  I know! It’s just me and the cats, so.

And then there is Vikings which…

Anne:  Yeah, I was going to ask. OK.

Michelle:  OK. So. The thing about Vikings.

Anne:  Now we’re now talking about the TV show Vikings.

Michelle: The TV show. The thing about it is there are pieces that are really historically, you know, on, and then there’s pieces where you just have to, like, ignore what’s going on. The pieces that are pretty decent are things like the shifting alliances. You know, at any given moment somebody could be aligning with somebody else. The pieces you have to kind of just sort of take a deep breath and move on is what people are wearing and what they’re living in.

Anne:   Oh god. Oh no. Oh yeah, no.

Michelle:  However, if you are an aficionado of people running about—like, male people—without their shirts on?

Anne:  Uh-huh?

Michelle:  Two thumbs up.

Anne:  OK, so there’s that. OK, fine.

Michelle:  There’s that. Rollo hardly ever has a shirt on, so there’s that.

Anne:  Jesus.

Michelle:  I wouldn’t say it’s, you know, in the same ballpark as Michelle Treeve’s Eadfrith, Scribe of Lindisfarne, in terms of being deeply researched. But it is more… I mean they’re pretty honest about mostly not being that. They’re… I mean the guy who is the central character—Ragnar, Rangar Lothbrok—is semi-mythical, so they’re working from the sagas, so fair play I suppose.

Anne:  Yeah, well. I suppose. Yeah, it’ s like making a show about the Middle Ages basing it on the romances.

Michelle:  Exactly. Yeah, so you know. I didn’t find it unwatchable, I just found it to be something I had to watch with a particular approach.

Anne:  I found it fairly unwatchable but that’s me. On the other hand I was watching The Witcher, so who knows. It had nothing to do with reality of any sort.

Michelle:  OK, so I’m going to confess that I very much… one of the things I really liked about it was when he kidnaps the monk and brings him back and now there’s all this tension between him and the monk because they’re like attracted to each other…

Anne:  Ah!

Michelle:  … but the monk isn’t supposed to be involved in any of that at all…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  … and at one point Ragnar and his wife invite the monk to be involved in a threesome and I wasn’t expecting that, so…

Anne:  OK, well that sounds interesting. I might go watch that now.

Michelle:  So. And the monk is really conflicted. He knows he shouldn’t but he kind of wants to.

Anne:  Yeah, well. Yeah. It’s just like real life. Yeah. Conflict.

Michelle:  There’s this whole plot arc with the monk getting less and less monkish and finally deciding, “I’m so done with this” and becoming a pagan.

Anne:  Well there you go. There you go. Why the Vikings are problematic. They came and they didn’t just steal stuff, they completely changed everybody’s way of life. And the language. The language changed.

Michelle:  We have so many words that come from them, not surprisingly a bunch of words having to do with boats and sailing and stuff.

Anne:  Or place-names, you know. Aldgate. “Gate” being “street”. 

Michelle:  I have a theory that is not at all scholarly it’s just, you know, off in my fiction-writer brain, that the technology in York that was used for the cross, to put the cross down in the wagon, is the technology that was used for the mast in the Viking boats, and it just gets remembered.

Anne:  I… we don’t know but it sounds reasonable. It sounds very, very reasonable. We’re talking about medieval drama here.

Michelle:  You didn’t think you were going to get through without drama.

Anne:  The pageant wagon presentation of the crucifixion of Christ where the cross with Jesus on it is put into the pageant wagon with a jolt. It takes a lot of skill and muscle to do that.

Michelle:  And it has to be put in very fast and it has to be stable. They have to be able to put it in and have it be stable very quickly because it has an actual human on it.

Anne:  Yeah, you can’t be having your cross all of a sudden falling with your actual townsman on it, it won’t be good.

The last time I was seeing the York Crucifixion of Christ it was at Toronto and the pageant wagon was going along toward an arch which was actually not tall enough to let the cross through so the whole audience is, “Ah! Stop! Stop!” You really have to be careful of your cross and your actor/townsperson who is on it. Yeah. They did stop by the way, and no harm was done. They took the cross down and then they took the pageant wagon through the little arch.

Michelle:  In the film Jesus of Montreal, where they’re staging a passion play, one of the major plot points is the cross falling over. Because they don’t have…

Anne:  Oh, god, yeah, they don’t do it right. Yeah, they don’t do it right. Yeah. I’ll take that.

OK, so we did the little Viking… yeah alright.

Michelle: Oh we were everywhere today.

Anne:  We were every… we went everywhere but I believe we did discuss the raid on Lindisfarne so it’s better than… I think we talked about the raid on Lindisfarne more than we talked about the murder of Pedro the Cruel when we were doing that, I mean, which was mostly about everything but that. But I think we did discuss the raid on Lindisfarne.

Michelle:  Well this was an interesting one, right? Because whether it’s a crime depends on who you ask. The people who were raided would definitely say, “Crime.”

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  The people who were doing the raiding were like, “They could have defended themselves.”

Anne:  Right, it would have been a crime if they had shown up in the longboats and stealthily come up and stolen things in the night and then taken them back to the boat. According to their lights, that would have been a crime. But raiding, hello? It was in the daytime and everything. I mean…

Michelle: “ It’s not our fault you were sitting there with all that good stuff and couldn’t defend yourself. You don’t deserve to have it if you can’t…”

Anne:  Yep. So that was our discussion of the raid at Lindisfarne. Ooh! What are we doing next?

Michelle:  The Scots dude. Weren’t we doing the Scots guy? He stabbed him in a church? Robert the Bruce?

Anne:  Murder of John Comyn. OK. So, next time we meet we are going to be discussing the murder of John Comyn by Robert the Bruce. Very naughty, and it was in the church, it was the Greyfriars Church in Dumfries in Scotland, and so moving ahead a few centuries because that’s going to be, what, the early fourteenth century?

Michelle: Yeah, that takes us back to where we just were.

Anne:  In time, but not in space. It takes us back to where we were what?

Michelle:  Yeah, we were in the fourteenth century, but not back with Edward and Isabella and Hugh Despenser.

Anne:  Ah. No. So we go back to the fourteenth century but we’re out of France and England, we go to Scotland. Yay. Yay. 

That’s all for us today. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today but with less technology.

We’re on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher, and any other place that you’re listening to podcasts. Please leave a review. We’d really appreciate that. We’re now showing up if you go to any of these places and you search “medieval,” we show up, but see our goal is to show up if you search “true crime.” We’re not there yet.

You can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com and there you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can reach us all through the webpage, and you can leave comments there. We’d love to hear from you. And if you’ve got medieval crimes that you think we should discuss, please let us know and we’ll take it into consideration.

So, that’s all for us. Goodbye!

Michelle:  Bye!

Philip IV Slaughters the French Knights Templar, Paris, 1310

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  And we are today discussing the Knights Templar and the badnesses which were done to them. So the crime today is not about did the Knights Templar commit crimes. I’m sure they did occasionally. They were human. This is about what got done to them, but we’ll be talking about who they were.

Disclaimer: Here’s our disclaimer, which I often forget to tell you, but I’ll tell you now. Because we are talking about crimes in the Middle Ages, sometimes the details are very distressing, and so if you are thirteen or younger, you should not be listening to this unless your folks already listened to it and said it was OK, and if you are in charge of people who are thirteen or younger, you should listen and find out if it’s OK for them to hear this. That’s our disclaimer.

Michelle:  There’s liable to be some bad language here with this.

Anne:  Oh that’s right, we talk…Michelle and I both occasionally use bad language.

Michelle:  I’ll be super tempted with this one.

Anne:  Yes, because we’re outraged! Outraged, I tell you!

Michelle:  I’m outraged.

Anne:  It’s fairly nice though, we’ve discovered, to get to be outraged about things in the Middle Ages instead of, like, being outraged about what’s going on in our daily lives here in America in 2020. So yeah, we’re going backwards. We’re going to be outraged about things that are long gone. Yes. Although we’re still actually feeling the ramifications of them because, hey, Crusades. That’s where we’re at.

The Knights Templar… this is our common name for the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, that’s who they are… they were founded in 1119 on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At this time, today, there’s eleven gates into it through the walls, at least part of which were built by Herod the Great. Ten gates are reserved for Muslims, one for non-Muslims, and there’s Israeli guards near each gate. In the Jewish tradition and scripture it’s the location of Solomon’s Temple which was the First Temple, and then the Second Temple, which the Romans destroyed, and since the Holy of Holies was there, divinity is still present. So it’s highly sacred.

And for the Muslims, it’s the site of the Noble Sanctuary from which the Prophet ascended to heaven, and also the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, which were built there in the seventh century, and the Dome of the Rock was built where the Holy Temple had been.

OK. After the Crusades, the Muslim community – I’m going forward in time – after the Crusades the Muslim community of Jerusalem managed the site. Since 1967, Israel has controlled the Old City, which is where the site is, and now Jordan is the custodian, with Israeli security. So that alone lets you know how multi-varied and vexed this history is. Like, then and now, it’s an extremely potent site, and important to a great many people.

So the Christians had been worshipping at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – this is early on in Christianity – located where Jesus was crucified and buried, and they’d been doing that since the late fourth century. They were focused on Rome. So the Christians, although they considered this a sacred site, had moved their attention elsewhere. But! There will be Crusades. Crusades are coming soon.

But Jerusalem, which had a high proportion of Christian citizens, was a primary focus for Christian pilgrimage, and Christian pilgrims were common from the fourth century on. In the seventh century, the Holy Land being conquered by the Muslims, pilgrimages became more difficult. Which was one reason that certain sites became more popular, closer sites like Santiago de Compostela, for instance, because, you know, you couldn’t always get to Jerusalem. And this got better and worse, back and forth, back and forth, but by the eleventh century the pilgrimages were being pretty regularly disrupted.

The First Crusade, which was in the eleventh century. We’re now to the eleventh century. In 1095, the Byzantine emperor asked for military help in fighting the Seljuk Turks, and Pope Urban supported him and called for war. Fair enough. The first thing was the People’s Crusade, which was mostly poor people. They set off first. And they got destroyed at the Battle of Civetot, October of 1096. So much for them. Did they get anything done? Not militarily, no.

Although they loom large in historical fiction.

Many collections of soldiers, led by various nobles set off, then, after that. You know, not all together. The First Crusade was, like, a bunch of different groups going off, more or less at the same time. Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, Tancred of Taranto, Godfrey of Bouillon, Baldwin of Boulogne, Robert Curthose, Stephen of Blois… whom we know from having discussed the White Ship Disaster…

Michelle:  I’d forgotten that he was out on this crusade. I had forgotten.

Anne:  Yes, and later he’s going to fight to be King of England. And Robert of Flanders, for they all had different groups. And Baldwin established the first Crusader state at Edessa in 1098. That’s the beginning of the Frankish kingdoms of the Holy Land. And then they took Antioch, that June, and then they took Jerusalem, very badly. They massacred the citizens, they pillaged, they were enormously badly behaved, but then the Crusaders had Jerusalem. OK.

Naturally, then, the number of Christian pilgrimages rose. Wouldn’t they just? Because the Christians had Jerusalem. And Jerusalem itself was pretty safe, on account of the Christians owning it, but the traveling there was not. So people got, like, murdered on their way to the Holy Land. It was really quite… as far as I can tell what was going on is, like, various groups of people were like, “Aha! People coming through here! Let’s just kill them and take all their stuff!” It totally makes sense as the kind of thing you would want to do. You know, they’re brigands. They needed the money.

Michelle:  Yeah, you would. I mean, you think about it from their point of view, yeah. People are showing up and they have stuff. You would take their stuff.

Anne:  You would murder them all.

Michelle:  Mmhmm.

Anne:  Or sell them into slavery. That happened too.

So Hugues de Payens, in 1119 – we’re now back to the Templars – proposed that a monastic order meant to protect the pilgrims be established, and that’s what the Templars were. They were all about protecting the pilgrims to the Holy Land. In the beginning.

Michelle:  And they are kind of a sister-organization to the Hospitallers…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  … whose job it was to provide a place to stay.

Anne:  Yes, hence their name. Now were the Hospitallers… they were providing a place to stay in Jerusalem, right?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  They weren’t providing places to stay along the way.

Michelle:  No.

Anne:  So you had to get from England or France or Germany or wherever they were, you had to get from… you had to get to Jerusalem…

Michelle:  You had to get yourself there. Yeah.

Anne:  It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good. Later on it will be much easier. There’s going to be, like, whole little highways and little places set up and, you know, the Franciscans are going to be giving tours of the sepulchre and all kinds of things like that. But at this point, no. Very dangerous.

OK, so they proposed this monastic order be established, and the Frankish King of Jerusalem at the time, Baldwin II, agreed. Great. The order had headquarters on the Temple Mount in the al-Aqsa Mosque, which the Crusaders called Solomon’s Temple.

I’m having a little moment where I’m annoyed by this.

OK, now I’m back.

Michelle:  OK. We’re done with that.

Anne:  I mean really, the whole… it’s like… all right. Never mind. I’m not a fan of the Crusades, I should probably… Full disclosure: Crusades? I don’t like them. Just saying. Even though it’s because of the Crusades that we now, you know…  because of the Crusades, the Western Europeans going on Crusades, we now have yellow roses. Which we didn’t have before. Did you know that all the yellow roses in Europe, and so hence in America, are descended from yellow roses brought back from Turkey? Did you know that?

Michelle:  I did not know that, and that’s really interesting. I love yellow roses.

Anne:  I do too!

Michelle: Do you remember, in my house in Pittsburgh we had… the one on Glen Lytle, we had a yellow rosebush out front.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  Amazing.

Anne:  I love yellow roses. Yeah, and they’re all… they’re descended from… for all I know they’re descended from, like, one, and they’re all susceptible to a certain disease. Yeah. But the yellow roses, well, of course, and marzipan and, you know, there’s that. And sugar.

Michelle:  Sugar.

Anne:  And mathematics! Also. OK, at any rate… but we move on.

OK. So. The Solomon’s Temple. So they were… and they were a poor order. They were very, very poor when they started, and that explains their emblem. So if you look at their emblem, it looks like it’s, you know, two knights going off to party down. You know, two knights on one horse. The reason it’s two knights on one horse is not that they’re best buddies, but that they have no money and so therefore they only have one horse.

Michelle:  That was news to me, when we… when I was looking.

Anne:  And that remained their emblem. I did know that but, you know…

At any rate, there were about nine of them to begin with, and they didn’t have any money, and it was their job to protect the pilgrims.

Now what happened is that Bernard of Clairvaux, who later would be Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, but only after he was dead… by the way, I have seen his skull.

Michelle:  Really?

Anne:  Yes I have. It’s in a reliquary in this cathedral, what, is in Troyes, and it’s very nice. It’s over by… there’s another reliquary for Saint Malachy, I think, and, yeah. It’s a very nice-looking skull, and it’s nicely polished. I’m just saying.

Oh! Oh! And the reason it survived is that… is it in the revolution? At some point it got spirited off to Switzerland so that it would remain safe because, you know, there’s been various pieces in French history where things got destroyed. And then they brought it back later. Yeah. At any rate. So Bernard of Clairvaux, who was not dead at this time. I mean he’s dead now, that’s why I’ve seen his skull. But he was alive at that point. He was really in favor of them, and he was also big in favor of crusades. In fact he was going to start the Second Crusade, which wasn’t going to go real well. But at any rate, he got them endorsed by the Church and they became a very popular charity. So if you wanted to help the Christian endeavors in the Holy Land, you could give money to the Templars and that was, you know… or your noble sons and your lands and business. You could give them all.

So the Knights themselves had vows of poverty, but the Order could, and did, amass vast amounts of property, lands, money, businesses. And in 1139 Pope Innocent II ruled that they were exempt from local laws, which meant that they answered only to the Pope, they paid no taxes, and they could pass through borders whenever they wanted, and so that made them very powerful.

Michelle:  I think they also were allowed to keep whatever they… so if they were in a battle and there was pillage, they were allowed to keep whatever they pillaged.

Anne:  So not them personally, but they were allowed…

Michelle:  The Order.

Anne:  Yeah they were allowed to give it to the Order.

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  Well that would make sense. Of course! I mean, like, who would be the person… other than the Hospitallers, who would you give it to? Of course. That makes sense.

They also… this is one of the things they did is they established this banking system. I just adore this. So if you were going to go to the Holy Land, you had to have, you know, enough money to, you know… you had to have money didn’t you? But you didn’t want to carry it with you because of the brigands, heretofore mentioned, and what you could do is hand your goods over to the Templars, and they would give you this document which said how much money it was and then, if you arrived in the Holy Land without being dead, you then had this document which you gave to the Templars there, and they took the money out of the treasury and gave it to you. They kept some, you know, because, you know, banker’s fees and whatnot, but that’s traveler’s checks! That’s what that is! I love this! They invented traveler’s checks.

Michelle:  Yeah this… and they ended up being the keepers of the treasury for the French, because they got involved with that when Louis went… because when Louis IX went on Crusade…

Anne:  Is this with Eleanor his then-wife?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Who later was going to be Henry II’s wife?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Yes, because Eleanor went on crusade!

Michelle:  Yes! And they had to… the Templars had to lend them a bunch of money because they didn’t bring enough money to come and do the crusading and go to Egypt and everything. So after that, they ended up being the people in charge of the French treasury. It was kept at the Temple in Paris until not terribly long before Philip decided to…

Anne:  Ah! So that’s how they got involved with the secular money, was that they… of France…

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Was that Louis had borrowed… so they didn’t just issue traveler’s checks, you could also borrow from them?

Michelle:  Yes. Yes they made loans.

Anne:  Well of course! Because they had money. And they would lend it to you because they were kindly. They were kindly, good men… all of them men… they were kindly, good men and they would lend you money for they were your friends. And then you would give them some more money because isn’t that only fair? Oh yeah! The Templars. 

So this was why they were all about money, because they were supposed to be about protecting pilgrims but it just kind of snowballed.

Where was I?

OK. Only about ten percent of the Templars were actually knights, fighting knights – because the rest were the support system – but the knights were renowned. They were extremely skilled, they were fearless, they had these giant warhorses and you’d put them in the front to run people over. In 1177, for instance, at Montgisard, it was because of them that a few thousand crusaders defeated 26,000 of Saladin’s soldiers, because the Templars were there.

Now, Salah ad-Din – whom we call… in the West we call Saladin – Salah ad-Din, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, was renowned in Western Europe as a formidable opponent, and Richard the Lion-Hearted just completely had… he had totally a crush on him, I think, but at any rate, Salah ad-Din took the Templars very, very seriously. Later on, at a later battle, the Battle of Hattin in 1187, he defeated the crusaders, he took Jerusalem, and after the battle he took the Christian nobles prisoners and treated them well, as one would. He sold the commoners into slavery, and he beheaded all of the surviving Templars and Hospitallers. There was about 200 of them, and he did not want to face them in war again. They were not going to get ransomed. He killed them off. It was a military decision and, frankly, it makes a lot of sense because they were quite formidable.

So, at any rate, so over the next couple of centuries the Christians lost more and more land in the Holy Land, after Salah ad-Din took Jerusalem. In 1303 the Templars lost Cyprus and that was the last, that was the end of the crusaders in the Holy Land. So their mandate was over, you know? They couldn’t be patrolling the Holy Land anymore because they weren’t there, but they still existed. They were still powerful in Europe and they wanted to establish their own monastic state which, kind of like, would be scary, and, as Michelle has mentioned, Philip of France owed them an enormous amount of money. And Philip of France didn’t enjoy owing people money, and so he’s the reason that they got suppressed. He got the Pope to… he made the Pope go on with this. They were actually related although I haven’t looked them up on Geni.com to find out exactly how they were related but they were related, Philip and the Pope.

Michelle:  Wait. Hold on. Who? Who was related? The Pope and Philip?

Anne:  Philip and Clement. Mmhmm.

Michelle:  Oh!

Anne:  I read this, but I didn’t bother to go look up how. If I… perhaps I will, in a moment, and find out.

On October 13, 1307, Philip ordered the French Templars arrested, all at once, and they were charged with heresy and they were tortured, so a bunch of them confessed because, duh. That’s what you do when you get tortured. It was like, you must not… “Well if I was being tortured I would certainly not blah, blah, blah.” Yeah. Maybe, maybe not. Probably you would. That’s just how it goes. Because, you know, we’re humans, we’re in bodies. There’s only so much we have control over. Our bodies can only take so much.

In November – so that was October – in November, Pope Clement ordered all the Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest the Templars, which some did and some didn’t, but more on that later. He called for Papal hearings and many of the Templars recanted their confessions, but Philip blocked this. And you know they didn’t personally have money to do a legal fight, but several of them had legal training, they would have been able to act as their own lawyers, but Philip blocked this, and he burned a whole bunch of them at the stake.

Michelle:  Fifty-four.

Anne:  Fifty-four of them?

Michelle:  Fifty-four were burnt at the stake on May 12, 1310.

Anne:  May 12, 1310. In 2001, I think it was, a scholar working at the Vatican found a document which had, kind of like been mis-filed, so we know from this that the Pope had absolved them of heresy in 1308, and this made Philip no never-mind. Philip was very bad.

Michelle:  Yeah, he’s terrible. Oh my god. Most of the people he had arrested were not fighting men.

Anne:  Since 90% of the Templars were not.

Michelle:  These were the support staff. He had the great luck of having the Grand Master, James de Molay, there, because he’d been summoned by Clement to come and have a conversation. You know, “What the hell are we going to do? Because you guys have lost everything. There’s no longer a place in the Holy Land so what are we going to do?”

Anne:  Oh that’s right! He was talking about folding them in to the Hospitallers.

Michelle:  Yes! Yes, yes he had basically told James de Molay, “Send me a paper in which you make an argument for why you don’t think this is such a great idea, because I think it’s sounding good.”

Anne:  You know, it would have been wonderful. I wish they had.

Michelle:  Yeah, he… I mean, James de Molay, you’ve got to feel bad for this guy because he’d been in the Order since 1265.

Anne:  Whoa!

Michelle:  Yeah!

Anne:  So he was not young.

Michelle:  No, he was an experienced fighter but he wasn’t… he just wasn’t a kind of a twisty political thinker, the way that Philip is. He’d become head of the Order after the fall of Acre because the previous head of the Order had died…

Anne:  Yes, he did.

Michelle:  … In the fall of Acre in 1291, so in 1292 de Molay becomes the head of the Order and he is basically spending the next several years crisscrossing Europe trying to drum up support, you know, basically trying to get a new crusade going, and so, you know, the day before the arrest he was at the funeral for one of those ill-fated daughters-in-law…

Anne:  We refer you to the Tour de Nesle Affair podcast, wherein we discuss the daughters-in-law of Philip IV who made some really bad decisions about their sex lives and to whom to give gifts, and so therefore ended up dying early, really, in prison.

Michelle:  James de Molay was a pallbearer the day before, October 12, at one of those daughters-in-laws’ funerals.

Anne:  Wow.

Michelle:  And then, you know, nine a.m. the next day they’re pounding on his door. The people I was reading say that his… the impression of him in the records is that he’s just baffled.

Anne:  Yeah. Like what the hell? Well, I would be! It makes no sense.

Michelle:  Yeah, he can’t pull it together enough even to mount a defense because he just has no clue what’s going on.

Anne:  And what are you defending against? Heresy? I mean, what heresy? You’re the Knights Templar. OK, here… spoiler alert: They weren’t heretics. They didn’t do any of the things they were accused of. There’s the spoiler alert.

I mean, do I approve of them? Not really, because they’re crusaders. But they weren’t heretics. Just saying. Yeah, how would you possibly be prepared for that? You’re part of this beloved order, you’ve been… you know, I mean yeah, you lost Cyprus, whatever, you know, you’re trying to figure out how to re-tool, you know you’ve got to have a mandate.. you’ve got to protect somebody, someplace. “Yeah no, we’re just going to arrest you for heresy and burn you at the stake because hey, we’re Philip IV.”

Michelle:  One of the Templar priests, Peter of Bologna, you know, a couple of years after the arrest he, like, starts trying to mount a defense and pulling it together, and he’s actually pretty successful in front of this Papal inquisition, and what happens is he just flat-out disappears!

Anne:  Oh really? So we don’t even know what happened to him?

Michelle:  Philip disappears him from prison.

Anne:  Wow. Where is he? Is he in the prison at Paris?

Michelle:  Yeah, he’s in Paris, and he just… “Oh, he’s gone. We don’t know what happened. He must have escaped from prison.”

Anne:  Yeah. Yeah, must have done. Yeah, I don’t think he escaped. I think Philip had him murdered, that’s my guess.

Michelle:  I’m thinking that’s what’s likely because…

Anne:  Pretty much this is what the historians agree on, isn’t it? Yep.

Michelle:  Yep, he’s dead. Nobody was buying, even then, the story, “Oh, he escaped.”

Anne:  Yeah, no he didn’t escape. He dressed himself as a washerwoman and went out with a basket of laundry. No, he didn’t do that.

Michelle:  That is not what happened.

Anne:  That was somebody else.

Michelle:  It’s unlikely.

Anne:  So they arrested the French Templars, and Jaques de Molay, the Grand Master, and Geoffrey de Charney, the Preceptor of Normandy, were burned at the stake for heresy, since they had recanted their confessions, and what was that? That was in 1312. So they’re in prison until then.

Michelle:  I think it might be 1314 even.

Anne:  Ah, because in 1312 the Pope dissolved the Order and gave their assets to the Hospitallers, so they didn’t get folded into the Hospitallers but their money and lands did, so there you go. So Hospitallers, whoo-hoo!

Michelle:  Kind of. The Hospitallers spend the next half century trying to get a hold of that stuff.

Anne:  Oh really? They didn’t just get it? Where was it? Was Philip, like, sitting on it or something?

Michelle:  Well, it’s all over Europe. They’re having to fight all over Europe.

Anne:  Oh.

Michelle:  The Spanish kings have already made a play to the Pope like “Things are different here, we have our own problems with fighting Islam here…”

Anne:  That’s right. “We need the money. Yes, we are the new Crusade, fighting the Muslims.”

Michelle:  “You know, and we have our own Order so really we think stuff should go to that…”

Anne:  Yeah, that actually is an argument.

Michelle:  … “And although you told me to arrest the Templars, they didn’t come along quietly, they hauled themselves into their castles and fortified the place and it took me a solid year to arrest them, because I had to besiege their castles, so I’m not on board,” says the Spanish King.

Anne:  “I’m not going to hand their stuff over.”

Michelle:  No, so in the Spanish countries, that didn’t happen at all. In France, the monarchy kept extorting money out of the Hospitallers. They ended up paying them half a million livres to get a hold of the Templar property.

Anne:  And in England, Edward II did not want to mess with this at all, but then he ended up having to agree to arrest the Templars and whatnot, because that was part of the concessions he made in order to get Gaveston back in the country.

Michelle:  This is actually a rare moment of brightness for Edward.

Anne:  I couldn’t believe that I actually was being happy about Edward II.

Michelle:  When Philip wrote to him and said, “There’s this horrible thing!” Edward wrote back and said, “I don’t actually believe that. I think you’re just making a play for their stuff.”

Anne:  Yay, Edward! OK, we’re all going to have a little… we’re like, a moment of actual good leadership on the part of Edward II? Because, like, I kind of enjoy Edward as a human being, but as a leader? Bad, bad, bad. But this little moment? Like, no… and you understand, those of you who are just tuning in, Philip’s his father-in-law, so he’s writing to his father-in-law, the father of Isabella of France, his wife, and saying, “No, no. You totally are making this up.”

Michelle:  He not only writes back to Philip, he writes to the Pope and he writes to the kings in Spain and says, “OK, you’re going to hear this thing, but I’m pretty sure it’s not true.” And then when the Pope orders him to arrest them, he really foot-drags and he does this whole thing where he’s like, “I have to arrest the Templars, I sure hope they don’t flee, or anything, before my men.” It’s totally not at all what Philip did. He gave all of this lead time. And you know what happened when, because they weren’t… they didn’t… he didn’t allow them to be tortured? Guess what? Nobody confessed. Isn’t that weird?

Anne:  Amazingly! Since they… because they hadn’t done any of these things. You know?

Michelle:  There’s a really interesting track between… corollary between the places they were tortured and the places they confessed.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s kind of like one of your exemplar cases for torture. Do you actually get the truth with it? No. You don’t. You get whatever you wanted to hear, which is not necessarily the truth. 

Yeah, torturing people. It’s not a good idea.

All right, so where are we? Oh yeah. Yeah, so the Templars got… they did get arrested around Europe, but nobody… pretty much nobody else got convicted. This is a French thing. 

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  This is all about Philip IV.

Michelle:  And his evil advisor, William of Nogaret. That man is a horrible human being. Goodness gracious. He’s the one who went over to arrest Boniface, he tried to go kidnap the Pope, when they were quarreling with Boniface.

Anne:  That’s right.

Michelle:  He is so… he’s an evil genius.

Anne:  And he’s not a good clergyman, obviously. Kidnapping the Pope is not what you do if you’re a well-behaved clergyman.

Michelle:  He’s so awful. He does this whole thing where it’s all slander and lies. He’s really, really good and of course, you know, they’d done this before. They did this against the Lombards, because Philip owed them a bunch of money too. And then in 1306 they go after the Jews…

Anne:  Yes, because they wanted that money. Yeah. This is what Philip does. He owes money to people and then he kills them. I mean, that’s kind of like essentially it. Don’t you think that history… if you boil it down? If you boil it down, you know, Philip’s reign, that’s more or less it, yeah?

Michelle:  I really love the story of… that is probably not true but I want it to be true… of de Molay going to the stake and yelling out that he was innocent and that he commanded the three people who were most involved in doing this to him, to stand before God with him, within a year, and God would judge between them. And all three of them, in fact, are dead within a year, which is awesome. It’s probably not true but it’s so good. It’s such a great story, I kind of wish it were.

Anne:  I like it too. And I’d like to point out that, if it is true, this is not actually a curse, this is a mandate. Those are different things.

Michelle:  OK, well they’re burnt at the stake in March. Clement dies in April. William of Nogaret dies in October, and Philip dies in November.

Anne:  Yep. Yep, they’re all dead. Along with a bunch of the Templars. But that’s in France. And across Europe, the Templars did not get killed off. They got absorbed into the Hospitallers or they went to private lives. They didn’t get killed off. And in Portugal… there’s a whole different thing going on in Portugal, which I will now explain.

Michelle:  Ooh, I don’t know anything about this.

Anne:  Oh, Hon! In Portugal, the king, Denis I, refused to prosecute… he just simply refused. There wasn’t any of this, “We think that they, you know, la, la, we’re fine.” He’s like, “No. I’m just not going to.” And he created the Order of Christ, which the Portuguese Templars became in 1318, so they’re no longer… now, another spoiler alert: There are… the Knights Templar no longer exists. It was ended. But, the humans in Portugal, who had been Knights Templar, became members of the Order of Christ. They were… they made vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the King, and this Order went through several reforms, over the centuries. It got secularized in 1789, it got abolished in 1910, it was re-established in 1917 as an order of merit, and still exists, but it’s not the Templars. It is the Order of Christ, and it’s not even… it’s not a military monastic order… you know, it’s like, but yeah, Denis I refused. Refused to prosecute and made them into a new Order. Yay. So we like him! I don’t know, we haven’t looked at anything else. For all I know Denis I is just like awful, awful, awful in other ways, but I’m totally down with what he did for the Templars because that makes sense. I mean, it made no… it just… it was wicked to prosecute these people who had not done what they were accused of, and it was totally wicked to burn them at the stake, you now? It was just wicked. And he refused to do it.

Michelle:  By 1300 it’s such a temptation. They just have so much stuff. 

Anne:  They have so much stuff and they no longer have a presence in the Holy Land, so what’s the point?

Michelle:  They own at least 870 properties.

Anne:  Like this is throughout Europe?

Michelle:  Across Europe.

Anne:  Yeah, that isn’t the Holy Land. Because they lost Cyprus, they’re not there.

Michelle:  Right. It’s just too much of a temptation to dangle before Philip IV, who was always looking for somebody who was both rich and vulnerable…

Anne:  Yep. He liked that.

Michelle:  … that he could completely screw over.

Anne:  Mmhmm. And he owed them money, too. So there was that. Because he didn’t have to pay it back, obviously.

Michelle:  Do you know that so-and-so, just the year before, in 1306, he was trapped because there was a little bit, kind of like a peasants’ revolt-lite, happening, and he got caught out of the palace and he had to take refuge in the Templar…

Anne: So they had actually taken… he had taken refuge with them the year before?

Michelle:  Yes. To escape a peasants’ revolt.

Anne:  He is wicked. He is wicked.

Michelle:  They had saved him. I’m so disgusted with him. They had saved him.

Anne:  All this greed. All this greed and all this evil.

Michelle:  It is completely awesome that he gets taken out by his daughters-in-law.

Anne:  Yes, because little recap to this, his daughters-in-law have affairs, he finds out about it, and he has them put in prison, and the knights they were having affairs with tortured and executed. This is all in the Tour de Nesle podcast that we did.

Michelle:  And it’s also completely just that the Capetian line comes to an end with him.

Anne:  Yes, and so he has these four sons, all of whom should have been having lots of children, and because of the Tour de Nesle Affair, the Capetian line dies out with him, and he has a… what’s it, a stroke that he dies from? Pretty soon after this?

Michelle:  I’m seeing different things. 

Anne:  Heart attack? Stroke?

Michelle:  One thing that I saw said that it was stroke, but one said it was a hunting accident. I don’t know.

Anne:  Oh it’s not a hunting…

Michelle:  Maybe he had a stroke while he was hunting? I don’t know.

Anne:  Yeah, whatever.

Michelle:  He did like hunting. He was really passionate about hunting. I don’t know.

Anne:  Yeah, because when we first… another little recap here… when we did the Tour de Nesle Affair, we hadn’t actually done a lot with Philip IV before, and Michelle felt sorry for him because it was so sad that his daughters-in-law had been so badly behaved, and that the Capetian line was ended. And now she doesn’t feel sorry.

Michelle:  Not a bit.

Anne:  And she’s happy. “Ha, ha, ha. You bastard, Philip IV.” Is that a good recap, really, of where you’re at with this?

Michelle:  Yes, really he deserved… the universe was just balancing the scales.

Anne:  Yeah, really so. But I’m sorry about the daughters, and I’m really sorry about those Norman knights who were idiots, but shouldn’t have been tortured so badly and killed.

Michelle:  One of the things I found really interesting about the charges… I read and enjoyed very much a book called The Trial of the Templars by Malcom Barber who is, basically, the world’s expert on the Templars. He has a chapter in that book called “The Charges,” where he basically describes how what got thrown at the Templars is just what was getting thrown… since Roman times, if you had somebody you wanted to slander, this is how you slandered them.

Anne:  Yeah, we see it over and over and over in trials in the Middle Ages. We keep mentioning this. “And then they were accused…” like, you know… “Then they were accused of sodomy and baby-killing and whatnot.” Yes, it’s the usual blah, blah, blah.

Michelle:  Worshipping a great big cat? I… what the hell?

Anne:  That’s kind of new though, really. I mean, I don’t remember worshiping the cat as being part… like, where’d they get that?

Michelle:  He just has example after example, in this chapter, about, you know, “Here’s somebody else they wanted to slander.” Goes back over and over again to sexual immorality, worshipping idols, worshipping the cat… I don’t know about the cat. 

Anne:  The cat. OK, the cat’s an anomaly, but everything else in there is just totally… It’s not even original. Except for the cat.

Michelle:  No, it’s not. What got thrown at them is in no way having anything to do with them, it just has to do with the thing you do when you want to… in fact, this chapter suggests that there’s a chronicler – going back to our other episode about the White Ship – who was convinced that the White Ship had crashed because there was so much sodomy going on.

Anne: Oh, that’s right. I remember this. Yes. It’s like, no, there was an enormous amount of drunkenness, and there could well have been some sodomy – but we don’t know that – but that’s not why it’s crashed. It crashed because it was dark and they were drunk and there was a rock that they didn’t pay attention.

Michelle:  That seems more likely.

Anne:  It’s like why the hurricanes hit New Orleans. It’s not because of the badnesses of New Orleans, which really are not nearly as bad as some people think they are. It’s because it’s on the Gulf of Texas, and there’s global warming and weather. It’s weather.

Michelle:  There’s an amazingly horrible story in this chapter about where the idol came from that they were supposed to be worshipping.

Anne:  Oh really? Tell me. I do not know this bad story. Tell me the bad story.

Michelle:  So the bad story – which is not original and he points out the other places where it shows up – but supposedly where the idol came from that they were worshipping in the temple was that a Templar was in love with a woman, and she wanted nothing to do with him, so after she dies – the night that she’s buried – he goes to her tomb and has sex with her body, and is told by a disembodied voice to return for the child that would come forth.

Anne:  Oh, I think I saw something like this in The Witcher, recently.

Michelle:  There’s all these awful stories about necrophilia…

Anne:  Oh, and babies, like demonic babies given birth by dead people. 

Michelle:  … thrown at the Templars but of course, you know, there’s all these other versions of it that happened beforehand, too.

Anne:  But no! They didn’t! No! No, no. I mean, they were deluded. They shouldn’t have been messing around in the Holy Land at all, as far as I’m concerned, but they were doing the best they could. And, OK, I’m sure that some of them were badly behaved in certain ways, but they were not, as an Order, doing all these god-awful things, and I don’t think anybody tried to make demonic babies with dead ladies. I don’t think they did. I’m just saying. No. No. And also, even if they did, it wasn’t going to work. There’s also that.

Michelle:  Indeed.

Anne:  Let’s just be real about this. Yeah, so the Templars in France were slaughtered. The Templars across Europe, mostly they survived, but the Order was gone. The Order of Christ was created, and so some of them went there, if they happened to live in Portugal. But the rest were no longer Templars, and maybe some of them went into the Hospitallers, and some of them went elsewhere, and some of them just stopped doing whatever.

We need to address some of the myths, because there seems to be a kind of constant… it seems constant now but it actually isn’t.

Michelle:  Yeah. It’s pretty new.

Anne:  Yeah. This idea that the Templars are still with us.

Michelle:  I’m just going to warn you right now, do not go over to Amazon and just type in “Templars,” because what comes up is across-the-board crap.

Anne:  It’s all crap.

Michelle:  I will list some good books to read about them.

Anne:  And I know that you’ve been doing a lot of work on it, but I want to talk about the Freemasons. Because one of the things… I see this so much, this idea that the Freemasons are actually descended from the Knights Templar. They’re not. The Freemasons use emblems and symbols from several military orders, and there’s this story that the Freemasons exist because the Templars in Scotland… the Templars go to Scotland and they helped Robert the Bruce win at Bannockburn in 1314, and then they became the Freemasons. They didn’t. Neither historians nor Masonic authorities believe this. It’s rejected, across the board, by people who are the authorities, because there is no evidence whatsoever. Whatsoever, whatsoever. Were there Templars that lived in Scotland? Yes, there were. Did they become the Freemans? They did not. So. Just stop that. Just stop it.

But yeah, the contemporary nonsenses really started in the eighteenth century and then, in the 1960s, that whole Holy Grail idiocy got started. Although we do have to say that in… that Wolfram von Eschenbach, in Parzival, calls the knights who are guarding the Holy Grail, “templeise,” so he’s using the idea of the temple.

Michelle:  Yeah. Yeah.

Anne:  It’s not… the Knights Templar were not really guarding the Holy Grail. Because, here’s another thing, the Holy Grail absolutely exists as a spiritual entity. As a physical thing, it’s not there! It isn’t there, and it wasn’t ever there, because it was just… no! No, no, no. It just wasn’t there. So. So there was no guarding it, since it didn’t exist. So there you go. 

Michelle, I’m going to hand things more or less over to you now, although I, you know, I have things… will have things to say just as you had things to say in this part. Would you like to talk about the various idiotic theories surrounding the Knights Templar? And it’s just so sad, because it’s like they were really… they were treated badly by Philip IV, and it’s a dishonor to them to continue to tell lies about them. That’s my stance on this.

Michelle:  They have been pulled into so many conspiracy theories. Probably the best thing to read to get a good handle on the conspiracy theories, and how not true they are is a book called The Real History Behind the Templars by Sharan Newman, who is both a medievalist and writer of medieval historical fiction, and is pretty good.

Anne:  But she’s actually a real medievalist?

Michelle:  She’s a real medievalist.

Anne:  Because there are some fake medievalists who write medieval history that don’t do it very well.

Michelle:  So one of the… one of my favorite pieces of the book is that the footnotes are… uh, what’s the word I want to say here… unfiltered. 

Anne:  Cool.

Michelle:  At one point she is referencing a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and the footnote says, “This book needs an entire team of scholars to explain all the mistakes in it. I would be happy to volunteer to be one of them.”

Anne:  I know this book very well, yes. It was a favorite of some of my friends, yes. It’s not a favorite of mine, no.

Michelle:  So, there’s all these conspiracy theories that they went into hiding, that they had a great big treasure, that they somehow got word before – like, why would you stay? If you had gotten word… see, if you had gotten word that the arrest was coming, you would flee, you wouldn’t just hide your treasure.

Anne:  So in these theories, do people believe that fifty-four of them got burned when Philip IV caught them, or do they think that that’s all a pretense?

Michelle:  Yeah, no, they just think…

Anne:  Oh, but there were more of them that got away.

Michelle:  Yeah, there were more of them that got away and took the…

Anne:  Took all their money with them.

Michelle:  … Took their stuff with them.

One of the people guilty for perpetuating misinformation or starting to romanticize the Templars is, of course, Sir Walter Scott, who has a lot to answer for, in terms of…

Anne:  Walter Scott comes up a lot in our podcast, for having made up romantic crap, that then we have to explain no… the bull’s head over at the, you know, the feast… the blood feast at Edinburgh that didn’t happen. That, for instance.

Michelle:  Yeah. It may be worth remembering that, you know, just because somebody’s writing in the nineteenth century, they don’t necessarily, as a novelist, know anything about the Middle Ages.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  It’s entirely possible they know less than we do because the amount of research hasn’t happened yet. So he has two books…

Anne:  And they romanticized the hell out of it because they’ve got agendas.

Michelle:  Yes. So he has Ivanhoe and The Talisman, both of whom have Templars. In Ivanhoe, the bad guy is a Templar and he’s becoming… he becomes kind of for a long time afterwards the model… the exemplar of what a Templar is, right? That he’s proud and greedy, and he wants Rebecca but he won’t marry Rebecca, remember? Because she’s Jewish?

Anne:  Because she’s Jewish. Scott… we need to point out, for people that aren’t familiar with Walter Scott, that one of the reasons that Walter Scott keeps coming up as someone who’s perpetuating these romantic myths is that he was extremely popular. This is popular fiction, and so it goes straight through the public consciousness.

Michelle:  And it continues. I saw an adaptation of Ivanhoe on television in the ‘80s…

Anne:  Oh sure.

Michelle:  … That had been made at that point.

Anne:  I remember that.

Michelle:  Anthony Andrews starred in that. So yeah, he… it’s not like, “Oh the nineteenth century loved Sir Walter Scott and he’s left.”

Anne:  No, he’s… people still love Sir Walter Scott. Walter Scott and Malory.

Michelle:  Malory knew a hell of a lot more than Sir Walter Scott, on account of living at the tail end of it.

Anne:  But he was writing romances and so… 

My favorite story about romances, why they are not history… I was teaching Sir Orfeo and one of my students said, “Is it true that, in the Middle Ages, towns would send insane people out into the woods to wander?” And I said, “Well, I’m sure that some town did that at some point, in the Middle Ages, but I’ve never actually heard of it. Where did you hear this?” And she said, “It’s in a footnote in a scholarly book I read, I’ll see if I can find it.” And she found it. And it was a scholarly book that stated that, in the Middle Ages, towns sent insane people out to the woods, and down at the bottom was the footnote, which gave the source, and the source was a romance.

Michelle:  Oh.

Anne:  Yes, and so this is like telling everybody that in America, at the second half of the twentieth century, there was an enormous problem with amnesia, which you knew because you had seen soap operas.

Michelle:  Quicksand.

Anne:   Mmhmm. Yeah. Fiction is not history. Yeah. At any rate. Walter Scott.

Michelle:  Yeah, so Walter Scott is one of the biggies here. They basically get connected to every single thing you can imagine they would get connected to, right? So there are stories about them supposedly being the guardians of the Shroud of Turin, of the Grail – which essentially just lifts the King Arthur story about Longinus brought the spear and the Grail to England. It just connects the Templars into that existing story. There’s a lot of stories about them supposedly having secret knowledge, or having a secret treasure that is hiding somewhere in the US. I think that’s improbable.

Anne:  No. None of this…

Michelle:   There’s specifically a connection to a church in Scotland called Rosslyn… does that sound right?

Anne:  Rosslyn is a place in Scotland.

Michelle:  Rosslyn Chapel… I think this may actually be in The Da Vinci Code.

Anne:  Don’t get me started on The Da Vinci Code.

Michelle:  But the things that I have read talked about how, you know, one of the ways… one of the reasons that you have all these conspiracy –  yes, it’s Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland – one of the reasons that you have all these conspiracy theories is that when they fell, and the archives were evacuated to Cyprus, and then Cyprus fell, the archives are gone.

Anne:  The archives are gone.

Michelle: The archives are gone.

Anne:  Yeah, so this history is secret because it is lost, not because it was hidden.

Michelle:  There’s a tendency to take a where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire approach, with the arrest. Apparently it’s easier to believe that, “Oh, maybe they were up to something sketchy,” than to believe that Philip IV was such a cold-minded, cynical so-and-so, and that he was just, you know, taking everything he could get a hold of.

This might be the point to mention that one of the things I ran across from him, about him, that is really indicative of his character is that he was wrestling with the Pope, you know, about who got to appoint bishops? And even while he was doing that, there are at least two instances in which, after the bishop dies but before the new one has been appointed, in France, Philip sends loggers into that bishop’s territory and has the forest logged, because nobody can do anything, you know? There’s no authority at that moment, and that sort of… that is deeply cynical. It is absolutely opportunistic, and I think that tells us everything we need to know about his character. He was so constantly short of money that he was not especially troubled by morality.

Anne:  I want to put in here that this business about logging the forest, it isn’t just then that he gets all the trees. It’s that he has destroyed the medieval economy, the ecology economy of the forest, which involves hunting, which involves foraging, which involves this kind of vast network of how it is that one deals with forest, and you do not go log them. You don’t do that. Not until you’re England, later, and you want to build ships.

Michelle:  He did not have any kind of legal standing at that moment to do that, that was just sheer, opportunistic, there’s nobody there to tell him no, and there’s not going to be, so go ahead.

Anne:  So really what we’re faced with, with this whole, “How guilty were the Templars of anything,” is that we have on one side this evidence of decades of Philip IV’s life wherein he takes money from whomever he can get it and, you know, he takes the Lombards down, he takes the Jews down, and then he takes the Templars down. And we have on the other side the Templars, and there’s no evidence of anything against them until all of a sudden Philip arrests all the French Templars and burns a bunch of them at the stake. That’s so… I find it easier to believe that it’s Philip is the problem here, than that the Templars are.

Michelle:  They of course went out of their way – Philip and, you know, his evil Jafar-like henchman William – they went out of their way to scrounge up five or six disgruntled ex-Templars who of course were willing to say anything that they wanted them to say, and did. 

Anne:  Do we know how much money they gave them?

Michelle:  We don’t know what they were paid but of course they came out well in this disaster.

Anne:  So they had witnesses, but the witnesses are not credible.

Michelle:  No. That was how they got the ball rolling in France, was having those guys testify first.

Anne:  Why were they disgruntled? Do you know?

Michelle:  Well there’s one that got kicked out of the Order, and there’s a couple others that left. You know, so, yeah, this is like calling up the guy you fired and asking them to talk about your management. 

Anne:  Or the guy that left because it was really way too difficult. “It’s a hard life!” Yeah, chastity, poverty, obedience, that’s hard stuff. Who wants to do that?

Michelle:  But there’s so, so many conspiracy theories. I just want to emphasize that there is not… it’s really easy when you start seeing all the stuff to think, “Oh man, there must be something here.” But it’s really not. It’s just a magnet because there’s this giant empty space. We don’t have the records. You know the records disappeared on Cyprus after Cyprus fell to the Turks, and then whatever was left, Napoleon, when he conquered the place, took back a bunch of stuff. He took back a bunch of stuff and then the ship that was carrying it back to France sank. So whatever the hell was left went to the bottom of the ocean, in Napoleon’s ship. By the time you get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there’s such… it’s such an empty space that you can write anything onto it.

Anne:  It’s an empty space and it’s a really compelling space because of what the French did to the Templars in France. Yeah, because if it had been this, “We’re going to dissolve the Order and your stuff goes to the Hospitallers and you know you can all go about your stuff,” we would never be hearing any of these things. There would be an Order of Christ in Portugal, and Edward would have let them become Hospitallers, and a couple of them would have opened, I don’t know, pubs and bed and breakfasts and, you know, we just wouldn’t hear about them. There would be no story. The story is because of what Philip did.

Michelle:  Philip was renting out… he had taken charge of their properties in Paris, and he was already renting those properties out and using the proceeds himself before the original set of them were burned at the stake in 1310.

Anne:  I did not know that. That is… that’s appalling. No, this was a set-up.

Michelle:  William of Nogaret, there’s some evidence that he was feeling people out before they ever… very quietly, before they ever moved against them. Like, “Hey, so if this were to come up, like, would you be interested? You know, if this piece of property were to become available, would you be interested? What would you pay to rent that?” And when the Hospitallers got a hold – finally managed to get a hold… because it was still in the 1360s that they were fighting to get a hold of some of this property, a lot of it – when they got a hold of it, it had not been maintained, right? So they got given buildings that nobody had been taking care of for fifty years. Every piece of it’s disgusting.

Anne:  You know, and the thing is, the reasons, it seems to me, that this whole move against the Templars in France is so extravagant, is that they had… they were so powerful, and they had been so beloved, so you really need then, if you’re going to bring them down, to use excessive force and bring them down, and not just bring them down but take all their stuff. You need to use excessive force, and you need to make a case for their evilness, because otherwise there would have been a public outcry.

Michelle:  I’ve read that one of the reasons people are interested in true crime is that it reinforces our understanding that, you know, there’s justice in the world? But this is not one of those moments. This is one of those moments where you get reinforced that you can be entirely right and still get absolutely screwed over.

Anne:  Yes. 

Michelle:  If the wrong person has decided… if you come to the attention of somebody who is absolutely willing to plow you under, you can be plowed under.

Anne:  Yeah. 

Michelle:  Clement knew that all of this was bogus…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  But he himself was more or less being kept hostage in France. He was not being allowed to go back to Rome.

Anne:  I didn’t know that part.

Michelle:  Philip showed up at the… there were a couple different Papal investigations, and he kept showing up at the first one and strongly threatening, basically, you know, “If this doesn’t go the way we want it to go, bad things can happen to you, because my reading is that, you know, Christian kings are allowed to take on sin wherever they find it. And if you’re condoning this and not doing anything about it, then I have to come to the assumption… It’ll make me sad but…”

Anne:  Yeah. There’s… this will not be the only podcast that is about the murder of people by fake judicial means. We also called Joan of Arc’s death a murder, and Marguerite Porete’s death a murder. And this is murder. Philip murdered the Templars in France.

Michelle: This is good context though for Marguerite, because that is going down while all of this is happening.

Anne:  That’s true.

Michelle:  So of course they’re going to show her no mercy. That was 1310.

Anne:  Yeah and in the podcast on Marguerite Porete we mentioned that, that this… in fact that’s one of the reasons that we folded all of this together, because it all seems so seamless. Philip IV and various things going on at the same time in England, and Marguerite Porete. Yeah, Marguerite Porete would not have been burned at the stake if Philip hadn’t been wanting it.

Michelle:  Yeah he… it was happening… because it takes a long time. He has them arrested in 1307, and the Grand Master is not burned at the stake until 1314. It’s taking a long time, and he is kicking hard the whole time. Clement’s strategy is dragging his feet…

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  … And hope a miracle happens, I guess, because he’s not strong enough to take on…

Anne:  If Philip had died before the Templars got burned at the stake, maybe then. But no. No. It does also put the Tour de Nesle Affair in more context, because Philip is not being full of mercy at the moment. Yeah. 

So, our conclusion: The Knights Templar did not do the things they were accused of. Philip of France had them murdered, in France, so that he could get their money. And he caused Clement to dissolve the Order. Other rulers in Europe were not so naughty as Philip, so that’s nice. And Denis of Portugal was especially well behaved. Yay. That’s good. But they hadn’t done those things and also, other things they didn’t do: They didn’t guard the Holy Grail. They didn’t guard the lance and cup that showed up in England, which didn’t show up there and so they weren’t there to guard, and so they didn’t. They didn’t found the Freemasons. They didn’t what else? What else did they not do? What are your other… the theories?

Michelle:  They don’t have a secret code built into the chapel at Rosslyn, Rosslyn Chapel.

Anne:  No secret code that the Templars built into Rosslyn…

Michelle:  They did not go underground and become super-secret knights who pop up in Indiana Jones movies.

Anne: No, they didn’t do that. They didn’t do it.

Michelle:  None of those things happened. Apparently Umberto Eco… I haven’t finished this book yet but apparently Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum is a satire of these kinds of conspiracy theories in which three extremely bored booksellers get together and create a conspiracy theory about the Templars, but then it gets out of hand because somebody finds out about it and thinks it’s real…

Anne:  Of course.

Michelle:  … And starts acting on their… I haven’t made it very far into this…

Anne:  But we recommend it, because any medievalist who’s making satires about Templar conspiracy theories is high up on our list. So we recommend that.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  So also what we need to say is, do not go and just buy books off Amazon unless you…

Michelle:  Good god no!

Anne:  … Are willing to entertain crap. What are the books which we can read without doing dishonor to the Templars?

Michelle:  So a really good introductory book is Sharan Newman’s The Real History Behind the Templars.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  That’s a really good introduction for the non-specialist.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  If you want to go and read the actual scholar who is the big boss about all of this stuff, it’s Malcolm Barber and he has a general history of the Templars called The New Knighthood… and this is Cambridge University Press…

Anne:  Yay.

Michelle:  … 1994, and then the book that I found most useful is his other book called The Trial of the Templars, that focuses specifically on the bad, bad things that happened to them.

Anne:  And the bad, bad things which they did not do, which they were accused of.

Michelle:  Right. This was a book… this was first written in 1978, but he has a second edition from 2006…

Anne:  Oh cool. All right.

Michelle:  … and that’s what I was reading. This is also Cambridge University Press. With those three books you really can’t go wrong. There are many, many others where it’s a really bad idea.

Anne:  Yeah, and the thing is you can go and read them, then, if you are interested in all the nonsenses that are made up about the Templars, but one of the problems is, of course, is that these ideas are very seductive.

Michelle:  Sharan Newman’s book has, at the end, a chapter called “How to Know if You’re Reading Pseudo-History.” 

Anne:  That alone is worth the price. 

Michelle:  Her footnotes. Oh my god! I have never recommended, you know, “Go and read a book for the footnotes.” But her footnotes are hysterical. I already read you the one, about, you know, “I would volunteer to be…”

Anne:  Yes, for Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Lord.

Michelle:  Yeah. “I would volunteer to be one of the fact-checkers for this.” Oh my god. I should have pulled out more of these because they’re hilarious.

Anne:  Yeah, I’m glad to do the Templars, finally, because that’s like… that’s horrible. That was a horrible crime. That was a giant, horrible crime, and there’s something about the extravagance of… you know, it’s not genocide, this thing against the Templars, but it’s using the same techniques of the genocide against the Jews, for instance. I just…

Michelle:  But he does that horrible fifty-four people being burned at the stake in response to them starting to mount a defense. You know, it is absolutely terrorism. He is literally scaring everybody else into shutting up.

Anne:  That’s right, because they had started to recant their confessions and say that they had been given under torture. Well, so much for you.

One of the issues of course with getting heresy confessions under torture, because if you recant once you’re no longer being tortured, you are automatically liable to be burned at the stake because you have gone back to your heresy. Oh god, it’s such a set-up. It’s like the technicality that they got Joan of Arc on. Recanting false confessions. Or, in her case, wearing mens’ clothes again, because they stole all her others.

Michelle:  I mean, one of the things that’s really dreadful – among all the other dreadful things – is that with Joan of Arc, you know, it wasn’t… it was only… her mother was still alive when the next Pope said, “You know, let’s go back and take another look at that.” As far as I know that doesn’t ever happen with the Templars, where the next Pope says, “Let’s come back and take another look at that.” It’s so horrific that they just all sweep it under the rug. They want to pretend like it never happened.

Anne:  The position of the Catholic Church now is that they were innocent. So it does, at some point, but it’s not for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Michelle:  Malcolm Barber has a chapter at the very end of The Trials of the Templars about what historians think about it and he is… it’s a very interesting chapter because he talks about how, when historians first start dealing with this they basically assume that they were probably guilty and it’s only…

Anne:  Like, “when they first” being… what is that then, the eighteenth century?

Michelle:  Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians, more often than not, believe that they probably were guilty of something.

Anne:  How?

Michelle:  And it’s only in the twentieth century… you know, Barber makes a really interesting case for those historians, who are largely male, being deeply uncomfortable talking about the homosexuality, and that their handling of it has as much to do with them needing to re-inscribe their own heterosexuality than about trying to deal with this in any kind of objective way. And it’s a really actually fascinating chapter.

Anne:  That actually makes sense to me. And it’s also… it’s part and parcel of why that particular charge is such a popular one, when dealing with people you’re trying to get rid of. Because it is so damn charged.

Michelle:  Yeah, he says that throughout the nineteenth century you have scholars asserting that of course the Templars were practicing homosexuality, without a scrap of evidence.

Anne:  Like it’s some kind of, like, little ritual? Your little Templar ritual? It’s like… I am sure that some of them were indeed homosexual just as, you know, as many of them were not, and I’m sure that, despite the vows of chastity, some of them were having sex, because humans. But that wasn’t part of being a Templar. It was part of being part of the human race.

Michelle:  He has a really fascinating section also about how the Second World War changed historiography about the Templars because… it’s probably better if I just read this:

“There is no doubt that the twentieth-century experience has deeply shaped our perceptions of the trial of the Templars over the later fifty years.  Awareness of show trials, of pogroms against minorities, of the methods of state propaganda, of mental and physical torture as an instrument of policy, of the internal decay of traditional institutions, of the revolutions in communication and in the sexual attitudes has all helped to determine the way that we have perceived these events.”  

So he makes this really clear, like, because we saw it happen, we believe that it could have happened.

Anne:  It’s because of what went down in World War II.

Michelle:  Yeah. It’s a brilliant insight.

Anne:  Well. Well, well. Would that we… would that we had not ever had that evidence. But it is true, these things happen, and good that we know how it works now. Those of us that are willing to pay attention to history.

Michelle:  I recommend his book really highly. It’s a brilliantly researched and really, really well written book.

Here’s another… as long as we’re doing quotes, here’s a great one:

“Until quite recently most historians (all of them male) found this a difficult subject,” – i.e. the question of homosexuality – “not infrequently sacrificing their own historical objectivity and methodological discipline, in a effort to distance themselves from a matter that not only did they find distasteful but were over anxious to tell the world that they found it so.”

Anne:  Right. Right, right. What we believe, structures what we will agree to know.

Michelle:  Yeah. Yeah, he makes this real strong case that the handling of this history, as we first become professional historians, is deeply influenced by historians’ own discomfort with questions of homosexuality. Which, as you said, underscores why it was such a potent claim.

Anne:  Yeah. That’s why you would do it. That’s why you would throw it around. And of course, if the historians are thinking like this, that’s going to… I mean, because Walter Scott was not an uneducated person. He was quite well educated, but if the historians are believing this, of course that’s going to influence the popular understanding. That doesn’t excuse Dan Brown, but I’ll excuse Walter Scott. But not for long, because Walter Scott goes up my nose, I tell you.

Michelle:  You know, people do studies of medievalism and talk about how, you know, a large chunk of what the Middle Ages does, for all the time periods that followed it, is be this site of “the other,” where they can put things that they don’t want to deal with directly.

Anne:  Yeah, that’s one of the reasons I loved it. I just love it. Because I used to talk to my students about how it is that you will… you know, what it is you will believe about other humans and why, if it’s a culture that you’re not familiar with. Yeah. The Middle Ages. Yeah.

At any rate. Templars! Well-behaved. I’m going to be… yeah, I’ve decided I’m going to be a champion of the Templars. I did not expect that of me but – and it may not last – but that’s where I am at the moment.

Michelle:  Crying out loud, even if – which I’m not conceding – the people out in the Middle East were behaving badly, the people who got arrested and burnt at the stake were the ones who were taking care of their pigs and raising their wheat. They were just support staff.

Anne:  They were just the support staff.

Michelle:  For crying out loud. What an injustice!

Anne:  It was all very bad. It was all very bad. There you were being a, you know, being a Knights Templar by taking care of the farm… getting burned at the stake in France. It’s not alright. Yes, all right, yes. Even given the fact that, really, the Knights Templar should not have been whacking Middle Easterners because it really, really, really… there should not have been a Frankish state in the Middle East to begin with, but there you go.

OK, so do we have more on the Templars?

Michelle:  That’s all I’ve got. This is not the day wherein we remind everybody that sometimes people are good. This is the day where we remind people that sometimes people are awful.

Anne:  Yeah, sometimes people are really, really awful. Yeah. Yeah, but as I say, I do not honor the mandate of the Templars, because I don’t honor the Crusades whatsoever, but I do think that, as an Order, they were involved in trying to do good as they understood it, and I absolutely don’t think they did the things that they were accused of and burned at the stake for. And also, I think Philip IV was a bastard. And so there you go.

So next time, next time, next time we’re going to leave France and England – we’ve been there for awhile – and we’re going to leave the fourteenth century because we’ve been there for a while too, and we’re going to Lindisfarne. To the Viking raid on Lindisfarne.

Michelle:  The Viking raid on Lindisfarne is 795, isn’t it?

Anne:  There you go. There you go. I don’t remember. I do remember it’s earlier, so yay. Yeah, so we’re going to go mess around with the Vikings next time because that’s… I’m kind of tired of the fourteenth century, much as I know about the fourteenth century, I’m kind of tired of it.

Michelle:  793. I just checked. 793. I was close.

Anne:  You were very close. Yeah. So that’s it for our discussion of Templars. Please do not go tell lies about the Templars. It’s just… it’s tacky! So don’t do it.

This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, but with less technology. We’re on Apple podcasts, iHeart podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anyplace you can listen to things. Please leave a review on any of these sites, we’d so appreciate that. We’re trying to build our visibility on these sites because if we get more visibility… eventually we might do, like, Patreon things where we do podcasts that are based on crimes that are outside of our mandate so, you know, after the Middle Ages or not in Western Europe.

At any rate, you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, and the transcripts which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach us all through the webpage for True Crime Medieval, and you can also leave comments, which we would love. We love to hear from you. And also if you have medieval crimes that you think we should discuss, please let us know, we’ll take it into consideration. And we thank you very much. Thanks for listening. 

Goodbye!

Michelle:  Bye!

The Sheer Dreadfulness of Hugh Despenser the Younger, Hereford, England, 1326

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. Today? Really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most Medieval state in America. But in all the good ways. Not the, like, doing horrific executions like what happened to Hugh Despenser.

Anne:  Yeah, no. Good, good Medieval. Like jousting. And having pretty architecture. And a flag. A really, really fancy flag. I believe those are really… yes, that’s what makes you Medieval.

And today we’re talking about the many crimes of Hugh Despenser the Younger, who was just evil. He was evil. And we’ve been wondering, was he a psychopath? You know, was he just a sociopathic narcissist? We don’t know. We don’t know. But he was really bad. And we’re doing this today, instead of anything else we might be doing, because we meant to talk about Hugh Despenser at some point, and the last podcast was all about the murder of Edward II, and Edward II was closely allied to Hugh Despenser, and we said hey, why don’t we just make a little segue and so that’ll make sense. So that’s what we did. Yeah.

Michelle:  This makes sense because when you talk about Edward II, you end up mostly talking about Piers Gaveston, and Hugh Despenser gets talked about as, like, Piers 2.0. But he really is his own person, and really much worse.

Anne:  Yes. No, Gaveston was not actually evil. Gaveston was a little greedy. Hugh Despenser is, like, as greedy as you possibly could get, and also evil. Yeah, no. This is Hugh Despenser the Younger. His father is Hugh Despenser, and Hugh Despenser the Younger is also the first Lord Despenser. He was born in September of 1287, and he died on November 24, 1326. We know exactly when this was. Got a lot of chroniclers that say what it was. We know a whole lot about what happened, although there seems to be some disagreement about details, blah, blah, blah, but believe me it was really, really bad.

Hugh Despenser was Edward II’s chamberlain, and he was also a major Marcher lord. We discussed the Marcher lords in details on our podcast about the Abergavenny Massacre at Christmas, and so you can go and get more details about the Marcher lords there, but in short, the Marcher lords were Anglo-Norman lords who were given castles in Wales. They were given lands in Wales, and they were basically in charge of what was going on there. They didn’t really answer to the King except in cases of treason, so they had a lot of power. Oddly enough, although most of the Marcher lords came from families that… over time, the Anglo-Norman families married into the Welsh nobility… there’s no Welsh in Despenser’s background. I looked this up because I wanted to know, and there isn’t. So his family did not marry into the Welsh. They didn’t. At all. Maybe they do later. I didn’t look that up, but they sure hadn’t by this time.

He was knighted in 1306, at the same time that Edward II was. Piers Gaveston was knighted a few days afterwards.

Michelle:  And Mortimer. Roger Mortimer was knighted at that same time.

Anne:  Yeah, it was all part of the same thing. Yeah, they were all really… I mean, they ended up being horrible enemies, some of them, but they were all connected.

Michelle:  You’ll be shocked to know that they were supposed to spend the night before their knighting quietly praying in the chapel, but instead what happened was a drunken frat party.

Anne:  No! Why?

Michelle:  I know. Amazing.

Anne:  How unlike the humans for that to happen.

Michelle:  It’s completely not what you’d expect sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys to do at all.

Anne:  No! No. But I love it because, you know, if you know the Middle Ages from Victorian pictures and literature, which many people do, you think of all the knights praying all night by their armor in the chapel. I wonder if any actually ever did? Surely somebody did. One or two maybe. I don’t know. But not these guys.

Michelle:  No. Not them.

Anne:  They were partying down.

He married Eleanor de Clare, who was Edward II’s niece, and through her he became one of the richest men in the country. He hadn’t had a lot of money before then — and he did have some debt — and I guess he really liked it. 

And because Eleanor was connected to the court, his connections to the court were stronger.

Gaveston was his brother-in-law, by the way.

Michelle:  I know. Isn’t… they’re all related to each other. Crying out loud.

Anne:  Pretty closely, in a lot of ways.

Michelle:  When I was a little kid, growing up in a teeny, tiny town, in Illinois – my kids’ high school is three and a half times bigger than my hometown, just for context — …

Anne:  Wow. Okay.

Michelle:  … falling in love with the Middle Ages through a copy of Malory, little did I know that the most important piece of preparation for understanding English nobility was going to be all of our inbred relationships in our tiny little town, because it’s exactly the same.

Anne:  Yes. Yes, as I have said, I always tell my students that the entirety of Medieval English history is basically the story of a giant dysfunctional family. That’s what’s going on.

Yeah, you’re related to everybody and you’re annoyed with a bunch of them.

Michelle:  You’re related to everybody. Everybody’s up in everybody else’s business. You’re never alone. If you do something, somebody lets your dad know —  before you’ve ever gotten even home — about it…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  And there’s these things that have been annoying you for a long time, that it’ll just get to the point where some tiny little thing just sets you off because it’s actually not that, it’s the hundred and fifty things before that.

Anne:  Yeah. So, yeah, no, Malory didn’t let you know that, did he?

Michelle:  Who knew?

Anne:  I’m willing to bet that, when Malory got knighted, he did not spend the night before kneeling in the chapel. No, no, I don’t think he did. No.

Michelle:  Because one of the things I didn’t know, until reading this biography of Hugh, was that the Despensers and the Mortimers have a thing going back at least two generations.

Anne:  Mmhmm?

Michelle:  So when Hugh Despenser gets into it, you know, with Roger Mortimer…

Anne:  Oh right, yeah, because supposedly Mortimer’s grandfather killed his grandfather. Right. I remember.

Michelle:  Yes! Yeah, Hugh Despenser the Justiciar sided with the barons against Henry III in 1264 and then, the next year, the grandfather of that guy, Hugh Despenser the Justiciar, was killed when the King’s son and heir, the future Edward I, that scary human…

Anne:  He was very scary.

Michelle:  … led the forces against the barons, and won, and supposedly Roger Mortimer’s grandfather kills him. None of them have any creativity in terms of naming because…

Anne:  No. No. No. No.

Michelle:  … every generation is named the same.

Anne:  No. Let me tell you that if you’re working trying to keep the Medieval tree straight, in some kind of genealogical program online, which somebody we know might be doing, let me tell you that that really messes some people up. Please do not merge all the Mortimers together. They’re different people. Oh yeah. But they’ve got the same name! They’ve got the same name.

I’ll tell you it’s hard in the Welsh tree, it isn’t just that whole bunches of people have the same name, but that families were perfectly willing to name four children Llywelyn who would then, you know… who grew up and it wasn’t like somebody died and they got their name. No, no. You could have four Llywelyns, and why not?

Michelle:  Oh, now that’s interesting. I actually haven’t run into that.

Anne:  Oh yeah the Scots did that too. But they didn’t do it as much as the Welsh. I mean, it’s like, we have to fight for this all the time.

At any rate, Gaveston was his brother-in-law, as we’ve mentioned…

Michelle:  Of course he was.

Anne:  But Despenser would join the barons’ opposition to Gaveston when they tried to get him out of the country.

Michelle:  But you know what’s really interesting about that, is that that family played both sides. Because Hugh the Elder…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  … stayed loyal to Edward II, and then he had his son go side with the barons so that no matter what happened, they were covered.

Anne:  Yes. Yeah. They were really quite canny, in that way. Yeah, I don’t like the Despensers, but they were canny.

And so, at any rate, the rest of the barons didn’t like Hugh Despenser. Why? Because he was totally high-handed, and he was dreadful. He was just dreadful. He insulted people, and so he had a lot of enemies. One of whom, of course, was Roger Mortimer, as we’ve said, who would be Isabel’s… Edward’s wife’s colleague, partner, maybe lover. We talked about this in the last podcast. Unclear as to exactly what the relationship was. And so that was one of his enemies, because Mortimer’s grandfather had killed his grandfather. Really good reason to go get people. Uh-huh, like, for the love of God.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s… for a bunch of Normans, that’s a pretty great Anglo-Saxon blood feud. Good job, guys.

Anne:  It really is. Well, they’d been in England for a while at that point.

Michelle:  They’re picking up the local customs.

Anne:  Not the best of them.

So when the barons rose against Edward, Despenser was forced into exile. So that was in 1321, though he was able to come back the next year and got reinstalled as Chamberlain. And once he got reinstalled, he became worse. So I’m now going to go through some little list of his badnesses, and I’m pretty sure, Michelle, that you have stuff to add. Fair enough?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  OK, so here’s the badness that of course I’m going to spend some time on, because, you know, the Welsh. Llywelyn Bren, who was Llywelyn ap Gruffudd ap Rhys, led a Welsh revolt in 1316 because Payn de Turberville had accused him of sedition for attempting to help his people, because Payn de Turberville, who was one of the Marcher lords, was mistreating them. OK, so Llywelyn Bren leads this revolt. And Edward tells him that if he’s found guilty of sedition by Parliament, he’s going to be hanged, and so he revolts. You know, because why turn yourself in? So in that revolt the Welsh manage to do a lot of damage, but Edward was able to gather a bunch of the Marcher lords — which included Roger Mortimer and Thomas of Lancaster, Humphrey de Bohun — and he brought the revolt down.

Llywelyn surrendered in 1316, in March, and he asked that he be punished but that his followers be spared, which really touched Mortimer. He thought this was very noble, and so he asked Edward to pardon him, and Edward did pardon many of his followers, but he had Llywelyn imprisoned and, alas, he became the prisoner of Hugh Despenser, who had him hung, drawn, and quartered before there was a trial, and then seized all his lands, and imprisoned his wife and as many of his sons as he could actually find.

And so this was entirely, you understand, in order to seize his lands and gain power, because he didn’t even try him. He just… and not only… it isn’t like he went and beheaded him. No. He had him executed for treason before he had been convicted of treason. And this was so dreadful — this is the part that I find interesting — this was so dreadful that it became one of the main complaints of the barons against Despenser, even though it was a Welshman he had murdered. That’s pretty intense.

Michelle:  He seems that his goal was to make himself King of Wales. That’s what it looks like, is that he… the instant he gets a hold of power in 1318, when he becomes Chamberlain, he starts pushing and pushing and pushing, trying to get a hold of all of Wales. Because he had land in Wales, and he looks very much as if the plan was he just wants to directly be King of Wales.

Anne:  The problem with that, of course, is going to be that there’s a lot of Marcher lords, and they do not want to give their land up. So if you’re going to take land, you either have to take on your fellow Anglo-Normans, or you have to steal it from the Welsh, and the Welsh don’t roll over.

Michelle:  He ended up in control of an awful lot of it, for somebody who really has no actual foot on the ground there, in terms of having married in or been born into it or anything. He ends up in control of a lot of Wales. He starts feuding… it’s got to be a descendant of our Abergavenny guy, because it’s a William de Braose…

Anne:  Oh, OK.

Michelle:  He starts feuding with, like, two weeks after he becomes Chamberlain.

Anne:  Oh yeah, you don’t want to feud with a de Braose. No. No.

Michelle:  Trying to get a hold of more of Gower.

Anne:  Yeah, because the de Braose family, they’re not as wicked as the Despensers, but they’re pretty far up there. They’re pretty far up there. Yeah. So, do you think that one of the reasons that the barons were so upset about his taking Llywelyn’s land was that they saw it as a power move against them, because of taking lands in Wales?

Michelle:  Maybe. I mean, they end up flat-out in war with him in 1321, and it’s named after him. The Despenser War. My biographer says he has one of  “the dubious distinction of being one of the very few men of history who has a war named after him.”

Anne:  Goodness.

Well, Despenser was big on stealing lands. He took his wife’s Welsh lands… I mean, that’s, you know, that’s one of the things you were talking about… without actually sharing it with her brothers. He cheated his sister-in-law out of lands. He grabbed Alice de Lacy’s lands while she was unable to defend them because she was, I think, in prison at the moment. He extorted money from anyone he could, and he was a pirate for a while.

Michelle:  Oh my god, that’s my favorite piece of this.

Anne:  I know! I know. He’s our second pirate, that we’ve had to deal with.

Michelle:  Pirating in the English Channel, during 1322 while he’s supposedly exiled. Good night nurse. Can’t you just go somewhere and take a break?

Anne:  No, he can’t. No. There’s something wrong with him. There’s actually something wrong. I mean, he’s greedy, fair enough, but it goes beyond that. There’s something actually broken. He’s unable to see what really the most useful course of action is, even just in terms of getting all this power.

He was also accused of being a sodomite, though that’s a thing, for one thing, that a lot of people got accused of.  All the Templars, for instance. As just a part of making them look really bad. And what’s interesting to me is, like, I’m not seeing any kind of other evidence, just, like, “And, he’s a sodomite!” I mean, with whom? I don’t know. Did you catch any of this? I was unable to see who is he supposed to be being a sodomite with? Because at least with Edward and Piers, we at least know what, you know, Edward… why might we think Edward is a sodomite? Piers Gaveston! OK. But what’s going on with Hugh? What is this? Did you catch this at all, Michelle? I could not find anything.

Michelle:  It was mentioned but there wasn’t evidence. 

Anne:  No. I think there’s no there, there.

Michelle:  There is an interesting… before Edward and… before the execution there’s a chronicler that talks about Hugh and Edward fleeing together and refers to them as “the King and his husband”.

Anne:  So it may… so part of this is that he might have had a relationship with Edward. But that’s one chronicler?

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s just the one. It’s just the one. And of course, Hugh, he has a wife, he has a ton of children, he has an illegitimate child. He’s possibly an all-around horn dog, if that’s what’s going on.

Anne:  Yeah, OK, and he certainly could be having sexual relationships with men too but the thing is, in the Middle Ages this is something you get accused of…

Michelle:  Right.

Anne:  … as a kind of “This is how we know you’re really evil! Yeah! How evil are you? Yeah! Yeah!” That’s what it’s feeling like to me. But I figure we need to say this, because it’s in there.

Michelle:  I never would have thought that last week I was going to be having some warm fuzzy feelings for Piers Gaveston but the thing is…

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  … once you go over to Hugh Despenser… Piers was given things by Edward that he probably shouldn’t have been given, but Hugh didn’t wait to be given anything. He took.

Anne:  Yes he did! He did. I think, if you were sitting at dinner with Hugh Despenser and you turned to talk to the person on the other side, he would steal the meat off your plate. This is what I think of Hugh Despenser. And then he’d lie. “No, not me.”

Michelle:  “Wasn’t me, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Anne:  Then he’d kick you under the table and pretend it was the other person.

Michelle:  Then he would get Edward to say it was all totally legal.

Anne:  And then he’d kill you. No, don’t go to dinner with Hugh Despenser. We’re just saying. Just no. No. No, stay away. Stay away.

When Isabella and Mortimer invaded England, which they would, you know, in order to try and take the country away from Edward II, who wasn’t running it very well, and give it to his son — Isabella’s son — Edward III, so that then they could actually run it… at any rate, they invade. The Despensers fled. Hugh and his father fled with Edward, you know, they went west, toward Wales, and they took with them as much money as they could carry. The reason I laugh at this is that I’m reminded of King John running with all the money that he could carry, and then actually dropping it, unfortunately, into the fens, over where it’s called The Wash, and so people say that King John lost his crown in the wash. Any rate. That was a joke. That had nothing to do with any of this, but was in my head anyway.

Michelle:  They had so much money. Hugh and his father had accumulated so much money that they’d been dead for twelve years before anybody found ten thousand pounds that they had given to this abbot for safekeeping. 

Anne:  So it was kind of like, you know, like those of you that have had hoarder parents might have had the experience of dealing with their houses after they died, and discovering that you couldn’t just throw things away because fifty-dollar bills got hidden like, I don’t know, in the bathroom closet behind the hydrogen peroxide. What it was doing there I don’t know. So it was kind of like that? They’d, like, stashed stuff all over the country?

Michelle:  Yep, he had accounts with Italian bankers. He had stuff where he’d given caches of coins to his… not colleagues, exactly, he doesn’t have colleagues… adherents?

Anne:  Followers?

So he had offshore accounts, besides just hiding stuff over in other people’s mattresses. All right. Fair enough.

So at any rate, so they ran toward Wales. They had all this money.

Michelle:  My God, it’s worth mentioning that he’s only in power for five years.

Anne:  Oh my God, I didn’t realize that. I didn’t do the math.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s not very long. Because he becomes Chamberlain in 1318. It takes him a couple years to get up to speed. Things start falling apart in 1326, so he has five solid years of being in charge, and he manages to extort the country just with ruthless efficiency, I guess you would say.

Anne:  Well. Really bad leaders can do a lot of damage in four or five years, can’t they?

Michelle:  Holy cow. It didn’t take him very long.

Anne:  Yes. 

Michelle:  It didn’t take him very long.

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  And the biographer I’m working with here says that the reason that he’s able to seize control like this, in a way that Piers wasn’t, is that Hugh was actually pretty good at running things.

Anne:  Ah, whereas Edward was incompetent.

Michelle:  Edward… let me go to her actual words here:

“This was Hugh’s way of gaining power; to give answers to petitioners on the king’s behalf…” — because he’s the Chamberlain…

Anne:  Right. He’s got a seal and everything.

Michelle:  He’s controlling access to Edward, he’s reading his letters to him and then answering on his behalf. Let me go back here…

“… and to let Edward see his competence and his willingness to do the hard work. Edward himself, though certainly not unintelligent or lacking ability, was not interested in the daily grind of government and business, and therefore was only too happy to let Hugh take care of it for him.”

Anne:  One of Edward’s main incompetencies was handing stuff over to Despenser. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yeah. “Oh you deal with that for me. It’s so boring.”

Anne:  Yeah, it’s just, you know, perfect storm. So, at any rate, the two Hugh Despensers and Edward and all the money, they go toward Wales. Their followers desert them. I don’t know, why not? They get captured in Wales. Edward was imprisoned, the elder Hugh Despenser was hung, and Hugh the Younger was then set for trial.

Michelle:  Can I ask you about Hugh the Elder?

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  He was executed in Bristol.

Anne:  Uh-huh.

Michelle:  And it says that he was hung in his armor, and then his body was fed to the dogs. OK, I understand the dog part being an insult, but the being hung in his armor part I’m having trouble parsing out. Is that supposed to be an insult? Because he’s a knight? Or is that a mercy because he’ll die faster?

Anne:  Hold on. Let’s actually… that is actually a really good question. Let me… give me a sec. Because you don’t run into this very often.

Michelle:  And I was not able… the biographer… I’m like “Explain that to me!” But she didn’t. Although you know something that’s really interesting about this biography? This is the only book-length biography of Hugh Despenser.

Anne:  I know! I didn’t know there was… I had read that there weren’t any at all. Is this fairly new?

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s 2018.

Anne:  Uh-huh. I’m going to have to get this. Because Despenser is just…

Michelle:  In the 700 years since he did all of this rampaging it’s the only full-length biography.

Anne:  Hmm. No, nobody’s actually saying anything about this that I am finding. 

Michelle:  Yeah, I wondered if you knew whether that was an insult or a mercy.

Anne:  It seems to me that actually it’s both. But I don’t know. That’s a really good question.

Yeah, so I don’t know. It really is a mercy because you would die quickly because there’s more weight on the rope.

Michelle:  Right.

Anne:  But it does seem like it’s also a dis.

Michelle:  It’s an insult because you’re a knight and it’s being shown that you’re a knight.

Anne:  Now, do you know, was his body cut up and distributed or was he just left there? Because if he’s left there, then it’s a gibbet.

Michelle:  His head was placed on a spear and sent to Winchester, to be displayed, and the rest of the body was fed to the dogs.

Anne:  OK. You’d told me that. So it’s not even acting as a gibbet. I wonder if they just didn’t even bother taking his armor off, and they just caught him and they hung him up.

Michelle:  I found that particular detail to be very interesting, that they hung him in his armor.

Anne:  I find that detail interesting too. And we do not know exactly what it means. We have come to a point in our podcast where we do not have the answer. Oh my God.

Hugh Despenser the Younger… so they didn’t even try the elder Despenser, they just hung him. They took Hugh Despenser for trial, so this was a serious show. It was a serious trial but it was also a serious show trial. It was also a spectacle. One of my favorite parts here is that he tried to starve himself to death. That didn’t work. But I’m like, aw, that’s so cute, Mr. Despenser. You know, it takes 60 days to starve yourself to death. I know this from the H-Block Hunger Strike. Bobby Sands was the first to die, it took him 60 days. So Hugh Despenser did not have enough time to do this so….

Michelle:  He kept them from taking him to London. He accomplished the mission of not getting publicly executed in London, in front of everybody and possibly in front of his wife and children, because he forced them to execute him locally, in Hereford.

Anne:  Yeah. In Hereford. So his wife and children were in London?

Michelle:  Yeah, they were imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Anne:  Lucky for them.

At any rate. Well. So, great. He’s in Hereford. He was found guilty of lots of stuff, and I’m now going to give you the list of the charges because this is… because… have you seen this list of charges? Because I love this.

Michelle:  Mmhmm.

Anne:  We’re now going to have the list of charges. His charges:

1. Returning to the realm while still banished. You know, against Parliament’s having said that he could.
2. Piracy.
3. Using royal power for his own gain.
4. Taking up arms against the barons.
5. Colluding with Andrew Harclay who, also a traitor, to murder a bunch of noblemen.
6. Imprisoning the Earl of Lancaster and having him murdered.
7. Executing seventeen barons and knights and stealing their lands.
8. Imprisoning Roger de Mortimer and his uncle.
9. Also imprisoning Lord Berkeley, the father and son, both named Hugh, Audley, and the Earl of Hereford and their kids and all the wives and children.
10.  Imprisoning Lady Baret, breaking her arms and legs and making her insane.
11.  Making Edward go to war with the Scots. Oh naughty, naughty!
12.  Abandoning Queen Isabella when the Scots advanced on them.
13.  Stealing the possessions and robbing the churches of several bishops.
14.  Disinheriting the King by granting earldoms to his father and Andrew   Harclay.
15.  Confiscating lands from the Queen.
16.  Being mean to the Queen and insulting her.
17.   Not allowing Edward to do homage in Gascony, therefore losing it.
18.   Buying assassins in France to murder the Queen and her son.
19.   Causing discord between the King and Queen. I really… I think Edward caused enough himself.
20.   Illegally giving land and various things to his followers.
21.   Illegally imprisoning people for various reasons.
22.   Persuading the King to run away with the treasury against the law.

Twenty-two charges! At any rate, he was found guilty.

Michelle:  He’s not necessarily guilty of all of those, but he’s absolutely guilty of most of them. There isn’t any other evidence for the driving Lady Baret insane through torture.

Anne:  I’m sorry about that because I don’t want Lady Baret to have been driven insane through torture, but I liked it that that was part of the story. Darn. 

Michelle:  That part doesn’t appear to be true.

Anne:  Darn.

Michelle:  But…

Anne:  He would have done, if he had thought of it!

Michelle:  But he did seize her lands. You know, so there’s a piece of it that’s true. He had an absolute program of plopping people in jail until they agreed to sign over manors…

Anne:  Yeah, you can see where this would work.

Michelle:  … and castles to him. Or to sign a document saying that they owed him money. So basically he made people pay their own ransom.

Anne:  He’s horrible! He’s really horrible. OK, so he didn’t do all of the things on the list, but he did do most of them, and he was very bad. Yes. 

So, he was — don’t listen to this part if you can’t stand Medieval torture details — and we have a lot of evidence from the chronicles of what happened to him but there is some disagreement as to some details, but let’s say…

He was dragged naked through the streets by four horses, apparently, so that the crowd could do bad things to him. They wrote Biblical verses on his naked body about the kinds of sins that he had. Greed, for instance. He was then hanged, as a commoner, but they cut him down before he was dead, and then he was tied to a ladder. They sliced off his genitals and burnt them in front of him, and then they pulled his entrails out. That’s the “drawing” part of the hanging, drawing, and quartering. And they cut his heart out and they burned that, and then they cut his head off and they cut him into four pieces.

They mounted his head on the London gates, and they cut his body into four pieces and sent it off. And later – this is a thing that’s going to happen later – about four years later his widow was allowed to gather the remains together and bury them, but at that point all that was delivered to her was the head, a thigh bone and some vertebrae.

Michelle:  Because it was a long time.

Anne:  Yes, it was. Although, you know about the fact that we may have his body?

Michelle: Really?

Anne: Yes.

Michelle:  I know that the effigy that is on where he’s buried is not his.

Anne:  Nah.

Michelle:  That’s somebody else’s.

Anne:  No, they found a skeleton at the former site of Hulton Abbey, which had belonged to his brother-in-law at the time that he was killed. And it is a skeleton that is missing the head, it’s missing a thighbone, it’s missing some vertebrae. And we can tell from the cuts on the bones that it had been cut into four pieces.

Michelle:  I didn’t know that. 

Anne:  Yeah! And they think that this might actually be his body. Which would mean then that what could get salvaged had been salvaged before his wife tried to get the pieces back.

Michelle:  I was trying to track down whether Edmund Spenser was related to him but I didn’t figure that out. You know the poet? Later?

Anne:  Yes, I do. I do.

Michelle:  Yeah. The reason I wondered is that he’s so awful in his approach to Ireland, you know?

Anne:  Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Michelle:  He writes that A View of the Present State of Ireland where he just advocates “Wipe them all out and start over, they’re animals.”

Anne:  Yes, he’s very bad.

Michelle:  So it sort of reminded me, I mean, like… hmmm.

Anne:  Well hold on, because I know how to find this out. So…

Michelle:  If Edmund Spenser is related to these people?

Anne:  Here’s Edmund Spenser. I’m over on Geni.com. Edmund Spenser the poet. And so what we can do is load his relationship path… “View other profiles.” OK, so now I’m going to go to Hugh Despenser.

Michelle:  Of course Lady Diana was also a Spenser.

Anne:  Yep. She was.

OK, Hugh Despenser the Younger. And we’ll see what happens with Geni magic.

Michelle:  Huh. That’s a really cute name. I hadn’t pegged to that piece of it. The geni part that’s magic. I had always been thinking about it from the genealogy… very cute.

Anne:  Magic and genealogy both. OK. Hugh Despenser the Younger is Edmund Spenser’s wife’s husband’s brother’s wife’s seventh-great grandfather. No.

Michelle:  Not really then.

Anne:  Not really no.

Michelle:  They just came up with the whole genocide thing independently.

Anne:  Yes, probably they did. At any rate.

So where was I? Yeah, so it’s possible that the rest of his body was found elsewhere.

Michelle:  That’s just fascinating. 

Anne:  I know!

Michelle:  I had not heard that.

Anne:  Yeah, that is interesting to me. Especially because it means that somebody at some point gathered those four pieces.

Michelle:  Yeah. That’s true. That’s true, that’s what that obviously must mean. And who could possibly, you know… who would have liked him enough to do that, at that point? He did have some sons though, alive.

Isabella is super mad at him, and she is gunning for him big time, when she comes back. The first and only time England has been invaded by its own Queen, just for the trivia night.

Anne:  Because we’re not counting Matilda? Oh no because she wasn’t…

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Yeah, she wasn’t actually Queen at that point, was she?

Michelle:  So Isabella is all over him, you know, and she immediately sends his three daughters… they get sent off to a convent and forced to become nuns even though they’re teeny, tiny children.

Anne:  That’s sort of mean.

Michelle:  Yeah, the youngest one’s three. And his oldest son who, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to know is also named Hugh…

Anne:  No!

Michelle:  … is nicknamed Huchon. He’s pretty close to being an adult at this point and he gets holed up – he’s, you know, sixteen or seventeen – he gets holed up in a castle with apparently the last remaining human being who was loyal to Hugh Despenser, because they hold out in there for months.

Anne:  Where are they? This isn’t London?

Michelle:  No, it’s not London. It is over… they were in Caerphilly in South Wales.

Anne:  Caerphilly. Caerphilly. OK, they’re in South Wales.

Michelle:  Huchon was in there and was besieged from November of 1326 to March of 1327.

Anne:  Wow. Quite a way. And the winter too. Hmm. Those were hard months.

Michelle:  The Despenser adherent Sir John Felton – that is the last person loyal to Hugh Despenser on the face of the earth – had promised Hugh when they left… because Edward… one of the things that doesn’t make any sense about what Edward and… I mean, there’s many things that didn’t make any sense, but they had been at that castle and they could have stayed there. It was equipped for a siege.

Anne:  But they didn’t.

Michelle:  They didn’t. They left and it’s not clear why. Were they trying to catch a boat and escape from Wales? But at any rate they were caught wandering randomly around Wales, whereas Huchon, the younger Hugh, was holed up in that castle with Sir John Felton, who had promised Hugh Despenser that he would not let anything bad happen to Huchon. And they did not surrender that castle until Isabella and Roger agreed to not execute Huchon, because that was their plan. Even though he had nothing to do with anything, I mean, really.

Anne:  Yes, nothing to do with anything except that, yeah, I think you were mentioning the Hatfields and the McCoys to me, when we were talking about all of these blood feuds earlier. Yeah, he had done nothing except he was Hugh Despenser’s son and that in itself is problematic.

Michelle:  He grows up to be a renowned soldier in the 1330s.

Anne:  Really? How nice. And we don’t know of him doing any horrible, bad things?

Michelle:  Nope. He was a famously excellent soldier in the 1330s and 1340s. He gets married, doesn’t have any children, and when he dies his stuff goes to his brother’s kids. I think the brother’s named Edward.

Anne:  Well, yay. Yay. And does he name any of his children Hugh? I’m just wondering.

Michelle:  He doesn’t have any children. Huchon  doesn’t have any.

Anne:  Huchon doesn’t have any children.

Michelle:  Actually those kids turn out reasonably well, just all things considered. I mean, discounting the daughters, who become nuns whether they want to or not. The boys turn out OK. Huchon becomes a soldier and does pretty well. The younger boy… Hugh’s children. There I am. Looking at the part about Hugh’s children. Edward is the second son. He’s young, he’s only eleven when this all goes down, so they don’t murder him. That’s nice. 

Anne:  Yeah, that’s not a given though. I mean.

Michelle:  No, it’s not. 

Anne:  So. Therefore, I’m not buying the “therefore.” It’s like, he’s only a child, AND they don’t murder him.

Michelle:  Isabella, who clearly is out for blood…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Something apparently is different between Huchon, the seventeen… how old is Huchon at this point? He was born in 1309 so he’s… having trouble with the math here. He’s… that would be… seventeen. He’s seventeen.

Anne:  Yeah, she draws a distinction between seventeen and eleven.

Michelle:  Yeah. The littlest one. The third son, Gilbert, is four. Nothing terrible happens to him. And there’s John, who is two, and then there’s a bunch of girls who are… one of them, the oldest, Isabella, was already married by that point so she escaped the nunnery, but the other ones – Joan, Eleanor, and Margaret – get sent off to the nunnery. Elizabeth, the youngest, who was not even one year old yet, also escaped the nunnery.

Anne:  What did they do with her?

Michelle:  She got to stay with her mom.

Anne:  Ahh.

Michelle:  But remember the mom, because of rumors of Edward II being involved with her, even though she was his…

Anne:  Right. His niece.

Michelle:  … niece. She’s imprisoned for more than a year after this whole thing goes down, just making sure…

Anne:  Yeah. Just making sure. But then she doesn’t have any children of Edward II’s. And then she’s released.

Michelle:  Yeah, she gets to just kind of go live her life. Not necessarily spectacularly. Yeah. Isabella’s approach to this is pretty interesting, because she seems like she really just wants to get rid… for a long time really wants to just get rid of Hugh…

Anne:  Uh-huh.

Michelle:  And she’s absolutely furious with him, and is gunning for him entirely, but it’s not necessarily clear that she… you know, the coming and arresting Hugh and the deposition of Edward didn’t necessarily have to happen. There’s a record of after Hugh’s… well, it’s actually not clear whether it’s after Hugh’s death but… Isabella goes to Edward and, you know, falls on her knees in front of him and is trying to reconcile, and he won’t even talk to her.

Anne:  This is after the death of Hugh Despenser?

Michelle:  I’m not sure if it’s after Hugh’s death, but it’s certainly after they’ve all been arrested.

Anne:  So at that point, at that point Edward is imprisoned? Because Edward was imprisoned…

Michelle:  Exactly.

Anne:  OK. So she goes to see him.

Michelle:  She goes to see him and tries to see if there’s any way to reconcile and Edward is having none of it.

Anne:  That is very interesting.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s…. the whole thing is really kind of sad and interesting because Edward and Hugh… you know, Edward never is willing to let him go, to send him away.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Even when it becomes clear that they’re going to lose everything.

Anne:  Well it was like that with Piers too. I mean, when he has that kind of loyalty, for whatever reasons, he just simply doesn’t go back on it. Now he doesn’t have that kind of loyalty toward his wife. Yeah, but one of the things that doing these last couple of podcasts has done is made it clear to me that Isabella is not Isabella the She-Wolf. That moniker is not right.

Michelle:  No, she’s a much more interesting person than that.

Here, I found the specific reference here:

“One chronicle from Flanders which gives a detailed and mostly accurate account of the events of 1326,” – i.e. our biographer thinks we can believe him – “… states that after Edward was captured, Isabella went to his chamber and knelt in front of him, and begged him for God’s sake to ‘cool his anger’ with her. He refused to talk to her or even to look at her.” 

It’s such a sad moment.

Anne:  That is very sad. So we are… this is something that we… this is a chronicle that we can believe. That is very sad indeed. It was a mistake. It was a mistake on his part.

Michelle:  That was his last… that was his last chance. 

Anne:  Mmhmm. Yeah. So this is before he… this is after he’s imprisoned but before he abdicates? Or has he abdicated at this point?

Michelle:  I do not believe he has abdicated at this point because this is 1326…

Anne:  Oh. Yeah.

Michelle:  … and Edward III is crowned in January of 1327, right?

Anne:  Right. Yeah, so he’s still King.

Michelle:  Yeah, our biographer says that this was Isabella “hoping for some kind of reconciliation… She had maintained for a year that her quarrel was with Hugh, not Edward, and she seems to have genuinely meant it. Even at this late stage, Edward’s own downfall and deposition was not inevitable, and perhaps not yet even desired or looked for by the queen and her allies.”

Anne:  That is so interesting. So even the invasion is not against Edward, but against Hugh Despenser. Amazing.

Michelle:  Edward does not have the sense to try to reconcile with Isabella at that point.

Anne:  Yeah, Edward wasn’t actually stupid, but he had… he either isn’t enormously bright or he has some enormous blind spots that he just really can’t see around at all. Those being mostly Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser.

Michelle:  He doesn’t seem to be able to wrap his head around the idea of there being a possibility of him telling somebody to do something and they don’t do it. Which I guess could be a failing if you’ve been raised to be King. I didn’t realize… I learned so many interesting things about Hugh Despenser. I didn’t realize… I guess I should have realized but I hadn’t consciously realized that of course they knew each other their entire lives. This isn’t Piers Gaveston showing up when he’s sixteen.

Anne:  No, they knew each other. He showed up at court when he was sixteen. And as we said last time, Gaveston actually wasn’t a cousin. Gaveston wasn’t related but nevertheless they had all grown up together, yeah.

Michelle:  Yeah, they knew each other. It’s only when he comes to court, he becomes Chamberlain, which, our biographer says, it has to be the case that Hugh the Elder schemed and plotted and planned to make that happen, it wasn’t… there’s no way that Edward II just randomly said to himself, one day, “I think I’ll have Hugh Despenser be my chamberlain.”

Anne:  No, he got channeled into it. That would make sense.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Well what else did you find out about Hugh Despenser?

Michelle:  Oh, gosh. Well, of course he’s dreadful, right? We knew this. Our biographer is, of course, making her best pitch for him. She’s not saying that there’s anything really mostly redeemable about him. She does kind of ask the rhetorical question, “Does he have any redeeming features?”

Anne:  Does he?

Michelle:  What she comes up with is that he could read. Right? We know for sure he could read really well. He could read and write. 

Anne:  That is not a redeeming quality. That is a thing somebody can do. OK, next.

Michelle:  It’s Hugh Despenser. We’re scraping here.

He was smart.

Anne:  OK, also, not a redeeming quality. We’re like, “Did he have any morals?”

Michelle:  He was physically brave.

Anne:  Oh my… OK. All right. OK.

Michelle:  Because he did fight in battles.

Anne:  He did fight in battle. And he did pretty well at the execution up until the very end he… despite the whole trying to starve himself to death, he faced the execution very bravely until… like, he screamed toward the end but hello I don’t… that’s not a lack of bravery, that’s just your body responding.

Michelle:  Yeah, no. The very best thing she can come up with is the damning with faint praise here:  “If he was arrogant, self-important and grasping,…” If? Like, really? 

Anne:  Yeah, “If?” Yeah.

Michelle:  Sorry, that’s my little commentary moment.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Of course he is. “…He was not much different in this respect from most of the medieval English nobility. His successor as over-mighty royal favorite, his greatest enemy Roger Mortimer, behaved in much the same way as Hugh had and was executed for usurping royal power,…”

But then she points out: “…though in modern times Mortimer tends to be viewed and depicted as a considerably more attractive and sympathetic figure.” Whereas Hugh Despenser is, you know, in the top-ten of all-time villains.

Anne:  And they both got executed for treason. But, like, being arrogant and whatnot is not really quite the same thing as imprisoning a whole bunch of people and stealing their lands and also having people murdered. Did Mortimer do that?

Michelle:  Well… not… in some ways. In some ways her argument — that he’s a matter of degree and rather than of content — might be true.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  All of them, all of them that are landlords are trying to maximize their profit.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  They’re trying to steal from one another, they’re trying to use the judicial system…

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  … against one another. One of the very first illegal things that Hugh does is in May of 1315 he seizes Tonbridge Castle because that’s supposed to be part of the inheritance that’s coming to him from his wife, who is one of the de Clares, right? So Gilbert the Earl of Gloucester dies at the Battle of Bannockburn and he doesn’t have any heirs, and so now Hugh’s wife is one of the heiresses that’s supposed to be getting that stuff, and Edward II though, and his lawyer, fart around and don’t allow that to be distributed. Because as long as it’s sort of still in… if it’s still being determined what the legal status is, then Edward gets the revenues from it.

Anne:  Right. Right.

Michelle:  And they’re pretending like they believe Gilbert’s widow Maude that she’s pregnant. They pretend like they believe this for three years.

Anne:  It was a really long and terrible pregnancy. Oh my God.

Michelle:  It’s hilarious. Oh my gosh, Maude is claiming “I’m pregnant, I can feel the boy moving. I don’t know why it’s taking so long!” And they pretend like they believe her.

Anne:  Yeah, because we’re in the Middle Ages and we don’t understand any kind of medicine or anything about our bodies. Yeah. Also I’m going to give birth to twenty-seven rabbits. No. These things aren’t happening. No.

Michelle:  So he goes and seizes this castle but then – this is very funny – one of the people involved in the legal wrangling with that is a man named John Ross, and Hugh encounters him in Lincoln Cathedral on February 22 of 1316 and beats him up. But the part that’s funny about it is that when Hugh was asked about it later it was the “He ran into my knife. He ran into my knife ten times” thing…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Where he claims that John came at him and he just put his hand up to defend himself…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  “I didn’t hit him.” “It wasn’t a beat-down.”

Anne:  Yeah. After that he shot himself in the head and threw himself out the window. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And so, also, didn’t he kind of get in trouble for beating somebody up in the cathedral? Because that’s a no-no.

Michelle:  He was fined, supposedly. On paper. Well no, he was for-real fined but he never paid it. So he was fined ten thousand…

Anne:  Trying to get money out of Hugh Despenser, that doesn’t… Ten thousand pounds?

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  Whoa.

Michelle:  But he never paid. He never paid any of this at all.

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  So he was just, you know, pretending like he was being…

Anne:  That’s a very big amount of money, but if they had charged him ten pounds he wouldn’t have paid that either.

Michelle:  No. No.

Anne:  One of the ways that we’re being asked to maybe think about this is that Despenser is worse only in degree than his cohorts.

Michelle:  Yes. That all of them are landlords. All of them are maximizing their profits. All of them will use whatever legal means are available to gather money and influence and land to themselves.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  I don’t know whether you want to believe that, but she’s making her best case for it.

Anne:  OK, well, I actually believe that all of the medieval landowners except with a few exceptions are getting as much money as they can out of people. I’m fine with believing that. But I’m wondering about this matter of degree, because isn’t it sort of a large degree? I’m thinking… because at some point a large degree becomes actually a different kind of character all together. There’s… if you see what I mean.

Michelle:  Well, I think if you have to learn enough about somebody to be their biographer you, you know, are not going to write a biography… you’re not going to, you know, write a biography and then say “Yeah, actually as it happens he was a total so-and-so who I shouldn’t have spent this much time on.”

Anne:  Well, actually I think you could but, yeah, OK. So you think that basically because she wrote a biography, she spent so much time in Hugh Despenser’s head that she began to see some ways in which he was not just a horrible evil psychopath?

Michelle:  I don’t know that… she’s not making a claim… she’s not excusing any of his crimes…

Anne:  Mmm.

Michelle:  That’s not what’s going on. But she is saying that… here it is:  “Hugh did what most of his peers would have done if they could: as one historian has pointed out, ‘all magnates, to a greater or lesser extent, had the potential to operate grasping, extortionate regimes’ and to manipulate the legal process in their favor. Hugh Despenser the Younger’s sins were writ large; as the king’s favorite, he had a greater stage to play on than his rivals did, and a far greater scope to do whatever he wished without interference. His crimes and misdeeds destroyed a king, his own family, and himself.”

That is the absolute best case she can make for him, and that’s how she ends the book. Like, “Yeah, it’s bigger but, you know, everybody else wanted to do it too.”

Anne:  And so the incredible anger of the other barons against him really has to do with how successful he was, not how evil he was?

Michelle:  I think that that might be true. That it’s not so much that they have moral outrage, it’s that he upsets the balance of power. You know, so much of what goes on with the barons is that they check and balance each other.

Anne:  Right. Until they don’t, and then we have civil war. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  They were outraged. It still interests me, though, that they were outraged at  his murder of the Welshman, but that too can be about the balance of power rather than moral outrage.

Michelle:  Yeah, I think that part of her point is trying to say, you know, the overly-simplistic, “Mortimer was the good guy and Hugh Despenser was the bad guy”?

Anne:  Oh. Right. I don’t think Mortimer was a good guy. I don’t think Mortimer… I think that Mortimer was not quite as evil as Hugh Despenser but I don’t think he was a good guy. I do think better of Isabel than I did before all this, but Mortimer I’m still the same on.

You were saying something about witchcraft and Hugh and Edward? What was this?

Michelle:  Oh my lord. This is one of the weirdest pieces of a weird story. The sorcerer’s name is John of Nottingham. In 1323, November of 1323, twenty-seven merchants and craftsmen in the town of Coventry hire a famous necromancer, who lives in Coventry but is called John of Nottingham…

Anne:  Well, you would do if he wasn’t from Coventry and he was there, that’s how you would know which John he was. OK.

Michelle:  So they hire him to assassinate Edward II, Hugh, Hugh’s father, the prior of Coventry – who apparently has cheesed them off in some way – and two of the prior’s servants who, I would guess, get to carry out the prior’s orders that they don’t care for.

So they’re going to… they want him to kill them with sorcery. And my very favorite piece of this is that they have a trial run first. 

Anne:  Uh-huh.

Michelle:  Uh-huh. So Nottingham and his assistant, Marshall, go to an old house. So now I have a direct quote:  “… half a league from Coventry, having purchased seven pounds of wax and two ells of canvas to form images of the men… For the next six months, they worked their magic there there..” And they have this trial run by making a wax – oh my God it’s so funny – they do a trial run with a wax image of a local resident named Richard Sowe.

Anne:  Because they didn’t like him either?

Michelle:  Apparently not. So, in June of 1324, after six months of preparation, they drive a sharpened feather two inches into the head of Sowe’s image and when they go to his house the next day, he has gone out of his mind and is unable to recognize anybody, and he can only cry out “Harrow!”

Anne:  Yeah. “Harrow!”

Michelle:  “Harrow!”

Anne:  Our favorite line from medieval drama. “Harrow!” Yeah.

Michelle:  So this, they’re thinking, is good progress.

Anne:  Totally working.

Michelle:  A few days later they put the sharpened feather into his image where his heart would be, and he died.

Anne:  Oh my God. OK. So obviously this was totally working.

Michelle:  So now that it’s looking like it’s working, Nottingham’s assistant freaks out and goes to the authorities.

Anne:  Clearly, clearly Nottingham had not made a good choice of apprentice. Because your apprentices are supposed to be doing everything you say and not going to the authorities.

Michelle:  No, not going and ratting you out before you even…

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  … get to try it out.

Anne:  You kill one dude in the town and, you know, Hugh Despenser’s still running around.

Michelle:  I think what’s… I mean, so many pieces of this are fascinating, but the whole “The only way we can get rid of this guy is sorcery,” and it’s just these random people in Coventry. What the hell had Hugh done to Coventry in particular?

Anne:  Well, yeah. Because really, basically, they’re annoyed at the prior, it sounds like. I don’t know. Well, OK, so Edward and Hugh did not die by witchcraft but apparently it’s only because the sorcerer got turned in, because obviously it was going to work, otherwise sharpened feathers in the wax person’s head, you know, and then you’re dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.

Michelle:  So that’s when Edward and Hugh find out about it, when the assistant goes to the authorities…

Anne:  Sure.

Michelle:  … and John of Nottingham dies in prison. Because of this.

Anne:  Do they torture him first, or does he just kind of die?

Michelle:  I have no idea. 

Anne:  Because you could die in prison really easily, they were not good prisons.

Michelle:  The case went to the coroner of Edward’s household on October 31, 1324. That’s hilarious.

Anne:  Oh. Very auspicious. Yes.

Michelle:  Uh-huh. Edward laughed it off. He thought it was ridiculous.

Anne:  I do too.

Michelle:  Hugh took it seriously and wrote to the Pope to complain about being “threatened by magical and secret dealings.” I don’t know why this was the Pope’s fault.

Anne:  This doesn’t make any sense. Did the Pope write back? Because I would just ignore that…

Michelle:  Yes!

Anne:  Oh my God.

Michelle:  The Pope wrote back and said that Hugh should “’turn to God with his whole heart and make a good confession’ and that no other remedy was necessary.”

Anne:  This is actually very good advice and especially if you’re trying to get Hugh to just behave in general, yeah. But really the Pope had… this had nothing do… this had nothing to do with the Pope whatsoever.

Michelle:  It had nothing to do with… and if you’re extorting, among other people, the bishops, because he has been? 

Anne:  Mmhmm. He has.

Michelle:  He’s been extorting, you know, a thousand pounds from the new Bishop of Winchester, who’s also the future Archbishop of Canterbury, so he’s been extorting…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  … from the bishops as well as everybody…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  … so the Pope is not sympathetic to… and what the heck’s he supposed to do about it? Like, it wasn’t the prior of Coventry. He was one of the planned victims. I just love this whole thing though, where the people of… the craftsmen, the merchants and craftsmen of Coventry get together and say, “OK.”

Anne:  “OK, what can we do about this situation?” Yeah.

Well they clearly can’t take up arms, I mean, they don’t have a lot of them because they’re just common people. Really, the only thing they can do.

Michelle:  Our hit list is the king, his lousy, grasping servant, co-king, you know, chancellor. The prior and two of the prior’s servants. So they just run the whole gamut from the king down to the person who we actually interact with who makes us angry. 

Anne:  Do we know anything about what Nottingham had been doing in Coventry? Because, like, one of the things I’m thinking… OK, so here I am, I’m, you know, a craftsman in Coventry, I’m annoyed at someone… I don’t necessarily say to myself “Hey, you know what would work is witchcraft!” I think I might say to myself “Hey, you know what would work is witchcraft,” if there happened to be a known sorcerer running around. Do you know what I mean? It’s like, “Whoa, John of Nottingham! He might be able…” So I think that maybe Nottingham being around would be the impetus for this.

Michelle:  That’s probably a good point, that he clearly has a reputation.

Anne:  It’s not like you say “Hey, we need a sorcerer, where could one be?” “I! I am here, John of Nottingham!”

Michelle:  If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Anne:  Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Michelle:  I’m just saying, if you’ve got a sorcerer…

Anne:  You have a sorcerer, you say whoa, we actually could do something. In fact, here’s how I picture it. A bunch of them are sitting around drinking in the pub one night…

Michelle:  You think that ale might have been involved?

Anne:  I often think that alcohol is involved in many human decisions that are stupid. Yes, so they’re all sitting around and they’re bitching about the prior, they’re bitching about the prior’s servants, they’re also bitching about the king and the chancellor and they say, “Well, you know what? John of Nottingham lives next door to me and he totally was able to get rid of my neighbor’s annoying dog.” And they go whoa, aye, wow! And so they go get John of Nottingham.

Michelle:  And he’s not from here so he must have special powers.

Anne:  Yeah! Nottingham. Woo-ooo.

Michelle:  Those exotic Nottingham powers.

Anne:  Yeah, oooh, we don’t have those in Coventry. Those are like… he’s brought them in from afar. Thank you, I did not know this story, and this is an excellent story. Although I really enjoy the part where the apprentice goes “Whoa! Oh my God!”

Michelle:  “I never expected it to work!”

Anne:  Because the apprentice clearly didn’t think that… he didn’t expect it to work. And it did work, apparently. I like that part. That’s very funny. Although I also kind of wish that really it hadn’t worked, I mean that he hadn’t freaked out so that then we would find out what happened if, actually, John of Nottingham could have made the whole realm be a lot calmer by, you know, killing off Edward and Hugh Despenser and so then we wouldn’t have had to have the invasion, yada, yada. Quiet little thing where Edward III, the child-king, takes over and everything is nice. But no we wouldn’t know about this if it wasn’t for the apprentice so, yay the apprentice.

So they arrested John of Nottingham. Anybody else? Not the apprentice, clearly, because he turned state’s evidence.

Michelle:  Just him.

Anne:  Just him.

Michelle:  He died in prison.

Anne:  When witchcraft goes very, very wrong. I’m impressed though. That’s a lot of wax, actually. 

Michelle:  And six months! I mean, for goodness sakes they prepared that first trial run for six months.

Anne:  Yeah, that’s a long time to be working on a spell. That’s a long time. Oh well. And they did a trial run. See, what would have happened if they hadn’t done a trial run? If they’d just, you know, like, made effigies of Edward and whatnot and stuck little pins in them? You know? Who knows? Who knows?

Michelle:  I know, it’s so scientific. “Let’s do a prototype first.”

Anne:  Yes. Yes it… yeah, it was very scientific. Our little experiment. Do we have to change stuff? You don’t want to waste all that time and then discover that you needed to use a different proportion of wax to linen. You know? You need to know these things.

Michelle:  And then, you know, then they do a little trial run with him too, right? Because they don’t stab him first in the heart. Like, OK, let’s stab him in the head and see what happens.

Anne:  OK, now, the heart. And then death. They could have just broken his legs and arms and made him go insane, apparently, given Lady Baret but no. Thank you for that. That was good.

So what do you make of the execution spectacle? Because they went to great lengths to make that into a… even if they weren’t doing it in London, they went to great lengths to make that a spectacle rather than just… they could just hang, draw, and quarter somebody and not have that be that giant spectacle. They worked on that.

Michelle:  Yeah, they built a fifty-foot platform.

Anne:  That they put the ladder on? So that you could really see it.

Michelle:  Everybody could see what was going on.

Anne:  No matter where you were in the square. Very interesting. They needed it really, really clear that he was dead, and that he was being punished, and that he had been evil. That writing the Bible verses on him? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that.

Michelle:  That was really interesting because I’d never heard that either. I mean it is really interesting, right, that this happens to Hugh Despenser, and it does not happen to Edward II. Edward is deposed but he is not taken out and publicly murdered.

Anne:  No, he’s quietly murdered. If indeed he is, because there’s… maybe he escaped to Italy. Yes. No, they don’t make a spectacle of Edward II, but I don’t think you could, really. You can’t do that…

Michelle:  There is a limit. There’s a line that you cannot cross.

Anne:  That’s an undermining of royal authority, even if you’ve been deposed. That’s highly problematic. Yeah. I mean, later on, later on that’ll change but at this point no. No, but Hugh Despenser’s power and authority have been completely taken away, taken away very fiercely. You know, the cutting off the genitals first, it’s like just…

Michelle:  I’m super astonished at, though, the next generation it kind of all re-sets and his, you know, Huchon is able to basically come back and function in society. He is this villain who has to be taken down, and he has to be taken down in this super public way, but his sons are not pariahs, they don’t have to go out and live in Scotland in a cottage in the Orkneys. They’re able to come back and function in society. I found that fascinating.

Anne:  That is. This is not visited on the generations after him. 

Michelle:  Yeah, Edward III must have made that choice.

Anne:  Oh yeah.

Michelle:  Because that would be on him.

Anne:  Oh yeah.

Michelle:  That he would be the one to decide whether to continue that feud or whether to try to create some peace.

Anne:  Yeah, and it would make sense that he would.

Michelle:  And it’s so interesting, it’s so interesting too that Edward II is this complete reign of turmoil in between two really long reigns. Between Edward I and the grandfather, Henry III, had ruled England for 93 years. And they weren’t peaceful but it was stable.

Anne:  Right. Right.

Michelle:  And then Edward III has this massively long reign. And in between we have this little short and extremely troubled reign of Edward II.

Anne:  Not everybody is good at being king. Not everybody is good at wielding power. I think a lot about the generational trauma. For instance with the Cousins’ War, where you have these decades of families decimating each other. Or the Barons’ Wars where you also have these generations of families decimating each other, and I think about the ways in which that has to, in some way, get passed on through history, you know, that someone whose father has been… someone whose been imprisoned and whose sisters have been put into nunneries and whose father has been publicly executed in this ghastly way, can’t have come through that unscathed and even though we don’t have the kinds of ways… the language that, in the Middle Ages that we talk about it now in terms of trauma and of psychological damage, this has to make an impact on history and how things work out. It’s got to.

Michelle:  Oh we talk about that with Gilles de Rais, you know? The question isn’t why would somebody completely lose their mind? The question is why don’t we see it more often? Because of the level of trauma that is being dealt with, regularly.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s a way of life. And we’ll see it later, I mean, past our mandate, the Tudors… it’s just, I just, oh my God. It’s like, what is it like to be living in the kind of a land where basically you can be arrested and burned at the stake for things you believe. And this goes on back and forth for decades. You know, this has to make a big impact on how it is that the people in general live, and certainly on how their leaders live, and the kinds of decisions they make, and the kinds of relationships they have. I think about this. I think about generational trauma a lot, in history. 

At any rate, so I’m glad that… I’m glad that Hugh Despenser’s children, his sons at least, were able to escape damage.

Michelle:  Yeah and I thought that was really fascinating, that she was utterly insistent that the daughters get sent to the nunneries and the boys are able… and I thought a lot about this and I don’t have a source for this, this is just my intuition, but I think what’s going on there is that if you allow his daughters to grow up and get married, then their husbands can try to weaponize the legal system to try to claim some of the stuff that would have belonged to the Despensers.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  But the boys they can just directly disinherit and put them back to a level that they want them to be at.

Anne:  OK. OK. OK. So that the girls are dangerous in that they might get married and the husbands…

Michelle:  To ambitious husbands.

Anne:  … have a different legal standing than the sons do…

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  … who can be just simply, directly cut off. OK. I’m willing to buy that.

Michelle:  Because otherwise it makes no sense to me.

Anne:  It makes no sense.

Michelle:  All the girls. Off to the nunnery right now.

Anne:  To the nunnery. Why? It makes no sense. It makes no sense.

Michelle:  But leaves the boys, ultimately even Huchon, alive.

Anne:  Because often you see it quite the other way around, that the boys are killed off and the girls are left alone.

Michelle:  Yeah. It was really striking that we see it this way, with his children.

Anne:  Very interesting indeed.

Isabella. Hmm. So she’s so… Isabella has now shown up in three of our podcasts. The Tour de Nesles, the Edward II, and the Hugh Despenser. Isabella’s quite an interesting woman.

Michelle:  She’s very fascinating. Pulls together an invasion.

Anne:  Invades her own country. Yeah, and I like it, she tried to reconcile. But no! Having none of it. Mr. Edward. He’s just… he’s not… he wasn’t a man of great sense.

Do you have more on Hugh Despenser?

Michelle:  I don’t think so. Let me take a quick… Oh, I did… there is this. This is really interesting. 

In March of 1326 Hugh received a letter directly from the Pope urging him, for the love of God, would you please just leave England. And help reconcile Edward II and Isabella. He doesn’t. He doesn’t, but the biographer very drolly says this would have been good advice to heed.

Anne:  Yeah, the Pope got involved. It’s true.

Michelle:  Yeah, he’s trying to… the Pope had been involved, while Isabella was in France, you know, trying to negotiate, and the Pope was trying to mediate between them, and asking Isabella “What’s your problem?” “My problem is Hugh Despenser.” And Edward would say, “I don’t know what her problem is, Hugh’s never said a mean word to her and he would never do anything!”

Finally the Pope just writes to Hugh and says, “It would really be best for everybody concerned if you would leave.”

Anne:  Hugh did not pay attention to the Pope, did he?

Michelle:  No. 

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  This is one of the things that’s really striking about this, is that there are so many places where somebody could have made a good decision…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  … and disaster would have been averted.

Anne:  Yes. Yes. Yes.

Michelle:  They keep choosing…

Anne:  They keep…

Michelle:  … over and over again…

Anne:  … all of them. Yeah. Edward and Piers and Hugh. Yeah. And Isabella and Roger Mortimer, later, I… you know…they… because they come in and they take over the country and they act as unofficial regents for her son. When he grows up he deposes them, and he has Mortimer executed for treason, and that wouldn’t necessarily have happened had they made different choices whilst they were acting as regent, but they were really big once again about the greed. A lot of this comes down to greed.

Michelle:  It’s like something bad is in the water in England for twenty years. That they’re all drinking and it makes them have bad, stupid decisions. Stupid, greedy decisions.

Anne:  Stupid, greedy decisions.

Oh well. So that is our discussion of Hugh Despenser. We knew we were going to want to give him his very own podcast.

Michelle:  The crimes are so thick on the ground, really. He starts small. In 1310 he goes abroad to joust in tournaments even though, in 1309, the King had forbidden his people to go to the continent and joust in the tournaments.

Anne:  Yeah, that’s a small start. That’s a small start. But then he, you know, as he goes he just…

Michelle:  He ramps up quickly.

Anne:  He ramps up. Yeah. He ramps up. Yeah.

So, next podcast we will be leaving the whole issue of how to rule England, and what the hell is France doing, although we’re going to stay in the same realm because we’re going to discuss the Knights Templar, and what happened to the Knights Templar. This is not a crime that the Knights Templar did, this is the crime against the Knights Templar.

Michelle:  Correct. Yes. It was a little confusing with this one, because it wasn’t a crime against Hugh Despenser, it was just that he has so many to his name you have to kind of do ‘em as a lump.

Anne:  Yes, you really do. And indeed, when he gets executed he doesn’t get executed for one of them. He gets executed for 22. 

Yeah, so we’re just going to call this the crimes, the many crimes of Hugh Despenser. That’s what our title will be. Yeah, we’ll do the Knights Templar next time. We’re both looking forward to that because we want to talk about the Templars and we’re tired of Edward II and Despenser and Gaveston and Isabel.

Michelle:  Yeah, after Joan of Arc, the Templars…  if you ask a random person on the street, the Templars – about the Middle Ages, I mean – the Templars would probably be what comes into peoples’ heads. After Joan of Arc.

Anne:  Yes, people know about the Templars and, as usual, what people know, in general, about the Templars, and what actually is true, are probably not the same thing.

Michelle:  I’m reasonably certain that we can say that the Templars do not continue to exist as a protective order for the Holy Grail. I haven’t done my research yet, but I’m willing to go out on a limb about that one.

Anne:  I have. You’re fine on that limb. And so we already know where this is headed. There’s some things that we just will not uphold as, like, myths about the Middle Ages. That’s going to be one of them. Spoiler alert.

Michelle:  That’s one of my research areas for this, is how the heck did the Templars become a locus for conspiracy theories?

Anne:  Why? Why? Why? If you’re going to be able to explain why it is that the Templars get dragged into conspiracy theories I’ll be so happy. It has something to do with the Merovingians, how does that work? What the hell?

Michelle:  Why the Templars and not the Order? Why them? You know, there’s so many other… nobody has conspiracy theories about the Hospitallers… you know there’s all these other knightly orders. Why them in particular?

Anne:  Or the Jolly Friars! There are no conspiracies about the Jolly Friars, and that would be good. They were another, like, military order. And we don’t hear about them.

Michelle:  Why do the Templars get all the conspiracy theories? That’s what we’re going to try to…

Anne:  Why indeed? Well you know… yeah, yeah. Well I think… I actually think we’ll be able to answer that, but we’ll do that then.

So we’ll see ya’ll in two weeks and we’ll talk about the Templars.

So that’s Hugh Despenser. He was very, very bad. He was very bad. And maybe it was just a matter of degree, but it was a pretty big degree.

So this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We’re on Apple Podcast, iHeart Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, any place you can find podcasts. Please leave a review, wherever it is that you’re listening to us. We would so appreciate that, because we need reviews in order to get noticed by, you know, the giant bots.

You can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach us all through the webpage. And you can leave comments there. We’d love to hear from you, and if you have medieval crimes that you think we could well discuss, please let us know. We have a list, but hey, we don’t know everything. Or we haven’t found everything. Or we haven’t gotten to everything. So, let us know.

And so that’s all for us. Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

The Murder of Edward II, Berkeley Castle, England 1327

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host who’s recording in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  And we are both living in relatively peaceful times today. There are federal forces in Albuquerque, we are told, but we haven’t actually seen them yet. Although we might later, because various things might be going on. And Michelle just sort of lives with federal forces because she’s in Maryland.

Michelle:  We are a suburb of DC, so this is just what we do here.

Anne:  Yeah, and so if you go to her house you can get on the bus and then go and see museums, except right now, when you can’t because…

Michelle:  Not so much.

Anne:  No, because everything’s closed. Although I suppose at this point I could actually travel to Maryland, which you couldn’t, like, even… if you come here though, if you fly in you have to be in two weeks of quarantine before we go out to eat, which we can’t do at Monroe’s, because Monroe’s, our favorite family restaurant, since 1963, was one of the restaurants that is suing the governor because they wanted to stay open even though the data shows that really that’s not a good idea. And so, to our sorrow, we have to not eat at Monroe’s anymore, because they’ve been very naughty.

Michelle:  I think it’s going to be a while before I’m willing to get on a plane to go anywhere.

Anne:  I know. Darn it. Cars. You can drive around in cars. Oh well.

Today we’re talking about Edward II, the murder of King Edward II at Berkeley Castle in 1327. 

Edward was the fourth son of Edward I. Two sons had died before he was born, and then his big brother, Alphonso, died in 1284. Not long after Edward was born. Just a few months. And this makes me very, very sad. I don’t know whether he would have been a better king than Edward II was — who wasn’t actually a very good one at all, at all — but it makes me very sad, because I would like for there to have been several kings in England named Alphonso, and there weren’t.

Because, you know, we could have had a lot more, I don’t know, name diversity in England, English kings. But we don’t. Because Alphonso kicked off.

Michelle:  How confusing would that have been for anybody trying to learn a little history but not reading really closely? Have a whole dynasty in England where they’re named Alphonso. 

Anne:  And “Alphonso IX,” you know? It would have been nice.

Michelle:  Guess the country that King Alphonso III goes with!

Anne:  So, no, no, you’re reading it as if everything had stayed the same except there was some king named Alphonso. No, no. If there had been a king named Alphonso, there would be whole lots of people named Alphonso in England. Just as there are many people named Edward.

Michelle:  Well, that’s true.

Anne:  Everybody would know.

Michelle:  That would have been interesting.

Anne:  Mmhm. It’d be “Alfie”. They’d all be called Alfie.

Edward II was 16 when he first went into battle with his father — alongside his father — in Scotland. And he was big, he was muscular, he was a strong man. And this makes no never mind because his father, as Michelle was explaining to me, dragged him around by his hair, not long before his death. And Edward I, his father, was a formidable, formidable… besides being horrible, he was a formidable person. 

He was the Hammer of the Scots, and I like to think of him as the Scourge of the Welsh. He’d spent his reign working at suppressing rebellion and solidifying colonization. He had fought for his own father, Henry III, in the Second Barons’ War. He had gone on the Ninth Crusade. He had conquered Wales fighting against Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and he had created new English towns where the Welsh weren’t allowed to go — weren’t allowed to live — in Wales. 

He built eight castles, across Wales. He invaded Scotland and installed an English government, and later re-invaded and killed William Wallace and sent Robert the Bruce into exile, and imprisoned and executed his family, and exiled the Jews from England. He was just horrible. And he had a horrible temper. You were telling me he dragged Edward around by his hair, not long before he died?

Michelle:  Ten months before he died. Yeah.

Anne:  Why was he dragging him around by his hair? Do you remember? I don’t remember.

Michelle:  It could have been… I don’t remember what exactly Edward did to make his father so angry. Edward, of course… it’s worth mentioning Edward II was the first Prince of Wales, the first non-Welsh Prince of Wales, which is where this title comes from for the English heir.

Anne:  Thank you. Yes. And it’s meant as part of the colonization of Wales. It’s meant to make it clear that Wales is owned, is connected to England.

Michelle:  He believed in manifest destiny.

Anne:  He believed in taking everything he could actually find. Is that the same thing as manifest destiny? I guess it is. Yes it is. “We saw it, and we took it! That was our destiny!”

Michelle:  Well, he is a Norman. I mean, really.

Anne:  Oh yeah, they’re Vikings.

Michelle:  That’s kind of their thing.

Anne:  It is their thing. “We saw it, and we took it. And we colonized.” It isn’t just that Vikings come and take things, they take things and then they stay. They have dinner, they build houses, hand over the language.

Michelle:  Very much of the “I licked it, so it’s mine” school.

Anne:  “And we’re going to live there.” Yeah, Edward I finally died of dysentery, and I’m not sad about this because I just hate him so much. He finally died of dysentery on yet another campaign against the Scots, after Robert the Bruce got back into Scotland, and that was in 1307. Yay.

And you were telling me, when we were messing around with this before, Michelle, you were telling me that “dysentery,” in the medieval chronicles, sometimes does not mean dysentery.

Michelle:  Yeah, sometimes it’s being used as a code for “the lord actually died of some unknown STD but we don’t want to say that.” And we know this because of having done archeology.

Anne:  So we dig up their bones and discover that’s what it was?

Michelle:  Yeah. That it was something else.

Anne:  Uh huh.

Michelle: But, I mean, there were tons of diseases though, that people got on campaign.

Anne:  Oh yeah.

Michelle:  Dysentery is just one of them.

Anne:  Yeah dysentery, yeah. Dysentery is a very common “we went to war and died of this” kind of thing. This would be true on into the Civil War in America. So. Yeah. Yeah, dysentery. You don’t… you do not want to die of… there’s many things you don’t want to die of. Dysentery, I think, is pretty high up there.

Michelle:  Every piece of this research was discovering things you don’t want to die of. So many people get executed in horrible ways during the reign of Edward II.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  Or get murdered, you know, just generally, or get attacked on the road.

Anne:  So dysentery actually seems kind of mild by these standards. At least you get to lie down in your bed.

Michelle:  There is one lord, the Earl of Oxford, has absolutely nothing to do with any of this, and what Warner says about him in the list — the list of people at the beginning where she’s explaining who everybody is — and what she says about this is, “Yeah, this is the Earl of Oxford, but he really plays no role whatsoever. He just stays at his own lands and keeps his head down and has absolutely nothing to do with the reign of Edward II.”

Anne:  That’s amazing, that you could actually  manage that.

Michelle:  Which in retrospect sounds like a great choice.

Anne:  Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You don’t want to be involved in this. Who is Warner?

Michelle:  So, Kathryn Warner, her name is spelled with an “e”, is kind of the acknowledged expert on Edward II. She has four books out. They’re with Amberley Press, which focuses on… they just publish history books. And she’s great. Her books are great. I was delighted to read this book, because she handles the primary sources, and then I don’t have to. She tells me exactly what they say. And she’s done analysis of, “Why does Geoffrey the Baker say all these horrible things about Isabella and all these wonderful things about Edward II?” Well it turns out he was involved in the effort to have Edward II canonized in the 1350s, so his chronicle has this profound bias.

Anne:  Surely, surely trying to have Edward II canonized is a non-starter.

Michelle:  That went nowhere, as it happens.

Anne:  Yeah. Surprising things in history!

Michelle:  I was surprised to discover that there was any effort whatsoever to have him canonized.

Anne:  Any effort whatsoever! What are people thinking?

Michelle:  But, you know, probably… and now that I think about it, it’s probably in response to King Louis. Because, you know, if the French have a former king who’s been canonized, well England’s going to want one too. They’re like two kids with cookies. “Well he got a cookie. Why don’t I get a cookie?”

Anne:  I think they did have some already. They just actually weren’t Normans.

Michelle:  Ooh, that’s a good question. I don’t know when Edward the Confessor was canonized.

Anne:  Yeah, well it would have been before the Normans got there. Oh that’s right, I don’t know when he was made a saint. That’s right.

Michelle:  Yeah. I know that he’s… in real life… let me take a quick peek.

Anne:  Yeah, do. Because people got made into saints fairly quickly back in the early days. And then later it became a much longer process.

Michelle:  He was canonized in 1161. He was canonized by Pope Alexander III, who is not who I was thinking it was. Interesting.

Anne:  So after the Normans get there, and they canonize an Old English king. Hmm.

Michelle:  If I was a Norman king, though, I really wouldn’t… they have an interesting relationship with the Anglo-Saxon past.

Anne:  Yeah.

So, Edward I had a very successful reign by English standards. Not by Scots and Welsh standards, but by English. And Edward II took the throne at 23. The very next year he married Isabella, who was the daughter of Philip IV of France, and she was 12 at the time. She was about 16 when they had their first child, who was Edward III. Who would become Edward III. He was born in 1312. And Isabella, who would later become called the She-Wolf of France, figures in an earlier podcast that we did on the Tour de Nesles affair, because she’s the one that turned in her sisters-in-law, and let her father know that they were having affairs, and this all led to executions and imprisonments and the fall of the Capetian line. So she’d been busy. We were talking about her then. But at this point… at this point that hasn’t happened yet.

But at the time that they were married, Edward II was already fast friends, at the very least, with Piers Gaveston, whom he had met in 1300 when Piers joined the royal household. The King knighted him in 1306 and exiled him in 1307, though just for a short time. And he had a big allowance, and we don’t actually really know what that was about. And we need to say that it’s unclear what exactly their relationship was. It’s very easy for us now to assume that what we’re looking at is a sexual relationship, and maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. I think probably it was, but we don’t really know that. We do know that they were extremely close, and that Edward would be willing to make a lot of concessions in order to take care of Piers and keep him nearby. And so certainly love is involved, and what the nature of it is, is really unclear to us. Michelle and I, we’re both wary of using the kinds of language that we use now, on the past, because the concepts of relationships are so different at this time. But yeah, they were very, very close. Very, very close indeed.

Michelle:  And it’s difficult for us to assess… even when we’re told in the chronicle — in certain kinds of chronicles — that they’re very touchy-feely, we don’t know what that means because contact is cultural, you know? Any American who’s gone to Europe, and now you’re getting kissed on both cheeks, and that’s not what we do, knows that contact is cultural. We have no way of interpreting. When we get told that Edward and Isabella have come back after the wedding, and Edward runs down and grabs Piers and kisses him, we have no idea whether that is a friendship kind of thing — like they do in Europe — or whether that is a sexual… and in some ways I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with a really hard and fast line because, hopefully, most of the time your sexual relationships do involve some friendship. I mean hopefully…

Anne:  Hopefully so. And love.

Michelle:  … there’s some overlap.

Anne:  And love. Yeah.

But we were saying that the historian that you’ve been working with for this particular episode says, and I think this just is so true, that our desire, that any desire we have to nail this down, actually says more about us than them.

Michelle:  I think so. I think she’s right, there. And she says — she talks about this — that we can’t ultimately know. We know that Edward talks about him, in letters, as his adopted brother. Why are we unwilling to accept that? On the other hand, after Piers is killed – sorry, spoiler – after he’s killed, Edward has him embalmed and doesn’t bury him for three years, because he can’t cope. Which my teenager tells me sounds more like lovers than friends.

Anne:  Right. Right. I think your teenager’s on the money. Yeah, they had a very close relationship, and it bothered people, but not necessarily about any kind of sexual ramifications or sexual facets.

Michelle:  It’s the amount of stuff.

Anne:  It’s the stuff and the power. Yeah.

Michelle:  Edward was a great friend but a lousy king.

Anne:   He was very bad at being a king. He was very bad.

And one of the things he did, and we keep mentioning this, that it’s obvious from our understanding of medieval history, it’s obvious that if you’re a king in the Middle Ages what you really, really, really do not want to do is piss off the nobility. Because it just never ends well. It doesn’t end well. Because there’s a lot of them, and there’s not so many of you. You know? Even if you have some power. And the barons did not like Gaveston. He had a great deal of influence over Edward, and they did not like that. And Gaveston liked to spend money. Money gets involved in a lot of this particular story.

Michelle:  Edward makes him Lord of Cornwall. He just vaults him over the top of most of his nobility, and they do not like it one little bit.

Anne:  No, they don’t. And in 1308 — eight years after they’d met each other, one year after the wedding — in 1308 the barons refused to debate any reforms or any issues of money in Parliament until Gaveston was exiled again. And Edward did that — sort of, kind of — by making him Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and sending him to Ireland. Not quite the same thing as exile, but at least getting him out of the country. And for about a year Edward dealt with both the Pope and the barons trying to get Gaveston back, which he was finally allowed to do in 1309, but he had to make a lot of concessions of his powers in order to do that.

But the thing is, things were really bad with Gaveston. And Gaveston didn’t help. He insulted the barons. You know, like, really? No! He insulted them and made them feel bad. And all the while Edward was trying to raise money for the Scottish wars and so the barons did not want to play along, and in 1311 things got very bad and Edward left court and Gaveston went to France. So they’re both out of the seat of power.

Michelle:  Edward has married Gaveston into his family, by this point. 

Anne:  Who did Gaveston marry?

Michelle:  I think Edward’s niece.

Anne:  Hmm. Yeah, so Gaveston’s married into the royal family.

In January 1512, Edward revoked the ordinances that had been his concessions to get Piers back, and he recalled Gaveston. The Archbishop of Canterbury excommunicated Gaveston, and the barons captured him, and the Earl of Warwick executed him after a short trial.

Now we see this a lot: “Short trial.” I think what “short trial” means is “Hey, there you are, you bastard. We have you. Did you do this thing? Yes you did. Whack!” And then your head gets cut off. I’m pretty sure that’s what a short trial is. I don’t think it involves a lot of formality.

Michelle:  “Trial” is really generous, because they basically grabbed him, dragged him out into the street, beheaded him, and then left him where he fell.

Anne:  Yeah, they didn’t like him. They didn’t like him. Edward liked him though.

Michelle:  He gets found, in the street, of course, and they take the body to the castle and the… I think it’s Warwick’s castle… he says, “No, you can’t bring that in here.”

Anne:  No, Warwick wouldn’t have let the body in.

Michelle:  No. So the Dominicans… he ends up in this Dominican friary for quite some time, because Edward has him embalmed, and then doesn’t bury him for three years. And Edward can hold a grudge! He waits for twelve years to get back at some of these people who were involved in this.

Anne:  Yeah, you just don’t want to mess with this whole line, I tell ya. Edward I. Edward II was not as powerful as his father but he did have his little ways.

Edward was very angry about this, obviously. And the barons were actually divided. Not all of them had been in favor of… they’d been in favor of Gaveston not running things, but they had not all of them been in favor of Gaveston getting dead. And in 1314 Robert the Bruce defeated Edward at Bannockburn.

Michelle:  Badly. Super badly.

Anne:  One of the battles that we like, over in the Scots. And then there was a famine and then there was a civil war amongst the barons, who, as I said, were divided, and then there was more war with France, then his relations with Isabelle deteriorated really badly. She disliked the Despensers — Michelle is going to have more about that in a second — with whom Edward had allied, in the Civil War, and she seems to also have been tired of all of the humiliation and nonsense and really, you know? I do think of her as Isabel the She-Wolf but I must say that really? You know, you might well get tired of all the nonsense.

So by 1326 she and Roger Mortimer, who was one of the Marcher Lords who had been imprisoned and escaped from the Tower during the Civil War — so he’s on the other side from the Despensers – between them they planned to unseat Edward and disempower the Despensers, and they had with them the child who would be the future Edward III. He was 13 at that point. And the country backed them in large part because, really, I think the country in general was tired of the humiliation and nonsense, and also they hated the Despensers, and Edward wasn’t really a very good king, and so London went to the side of the invaders. Isabella’s forces followed Edward. He retreated to Wales, and he was finally captured in November of 1326.

Isabella and Mortimer executed the leaders of the opposition. In London the barons and the clergy all agreed that Edward III should be King. Edward II was “convinced” to abdicate, in January of 1327, so at the time that he died, Edward II was not King. Edward III was crowned on the second of February. Edward II was moved to Berkeley Castle in April, to get him out of the way of supporters who might have tried to re-throne him. There’s always some of those running around. And he died – this was reported to Edward III – he died on the twenty-first of September that year.

And what’s going to happen – skipping ahead a bit – what would happen is that Edward III would arrest and execute Mortimer in 1330 for charges of treason — I think about fifteen of them, including murdering his father — but he gave his mother a really nice allowance and spared her. So he put all the blame on Mortimer, not his mom. I think that’s probably not really right, but there you go.

The murder. Okay, the murder. So Edward II died in September, and he might have died of natural causes, and there is some speculation that he actually lived for awhile, wasn’t dead, and Edward III was told he was dead but he wasn’t. But let’s just say he died and that it was murder. It was never officially declared what it was that he had died of. Never. And so there was a lot of speculation, and there kind of still is. And there was a lot of gossip, and there still is that too. And chroniclers… the chronicles posit strangulation or suffocation. That’s what the early stories say, and those seem reasonable. 

Now, we have to make a little statement here. There is the very well known story that he was held down – a table was turned on top of him and he was held down – and he was killed by a red-hot poker being stuck up his bottom, and this is totally… this is total fabrication. It doesn’t appear until later. It’s a great story, isn’t it just! Which is why it got copied, and copied, and copied, and copied, and copied, but it didn’t happen. So stop it. Just stop it. It didn’t happen.

Isabella wasn’t going to die until 1358, in her sixties, and her affair with Mortimer is I think really ironic, given her role in the Tour de Nesles affair, where obviously she brought people down because of their affairs. And they had ruled together for four years as regents as Edward III.

Michelle:  Not very well.

Anne:  Not very well. They misused finances and they made a bunch of political mistakes.

Michelle:  Isabella awarded herself an income from the royal treasury that amounted to one third of royal incomes. It was eleven thousand pounds a year.

Anne:  Really, that’s not right. She liked money. She really liked money.

Michelle:  Earlier on in the reign she has a dedicated tailor to herself and in one year he makes her – it was 1312 – he makes her thirty pairs of hose.

Anne:  Okay, no. You don’t need that many. You just don’t need that many.

Michelle:  I don’t go through thirty pairs of socks in one year.

Anne:  No. No. No. I mean what… no. That’s just wrong. 

And after Mortimer’s death, she continued to spend lots of money. She’d lost her lands, but she had that very generous allowance. She got religion, and she had a very good time, apparently, and when she died, she was buried in her wedding mantle and Edward’s heart, which had been put into a very nice box when he had died about thirty years before, was buried with her. What the hell?

Yeah, so she turned on him but, you know, she had herself buried with his heart. Which, in the same way that embalming somebody and leaving their body around for three years is a clear sign of a very loving relationship, embalming somebody’s heart and having it buried with you is also a sign of a loving relationship.

Michelle:  And being buried in your wedding dress.

Anne:  Well, wedding mantle. I don’t think it was the whole…

Michelle:  The cloak. It was the cloak.

Anne:  It was the cloak. Yeah. Being buried in her wedding cloak. Yeah. I mean, what the hell? It was as if all that treason – I mean, it’s treason to invade the country and depose the King – all that treason, and that relationship with Mortimer, it’s as if that had never happened. It is so weird.

Michelle:  One of the things that’s kind of cool at the end of the biography is Warner thinks  that it’s not insane to look at the evidence that Edward wasn’t necessarily murdered in 1327. She’s not persuaded by it, but she does think that there is evidence that has to be looked at.

Anne:  Well, what happened to him then? I mean, at what point do people think he actually disappears off the planet?

Michelle:  She doesn’t say it’s definitive, but she says there’s evidence — that shouldn’t be just kind of laughed out of court — that he was allowed to escape to Italy, and then was watched there by English spies for the rest of his life. Rather than Isabella agreeing to murder him.

Anne:  Well, that would go along better with, I think, what we’ve learned about Isabel’s character but, so really? He just kind of went to Italy and then never showed up again? And left everybody alone? That seems kind of not…

Michelle:  No, there’s… one of the pieces of evidence that she has is that when Edward III goes to Europe, when he’s in Germany he spends time with a man who calls himself William of Wales and he is reputed to be the King’s father.

Anne:  Yeah, Edward II was Edward Caernarfon.

Michelle:  Yeah. And there’s letters from a guy in Italy to Edward III saying, “Did you know your dad’s here? Did you know your dad is still alive and living here in this monastery? This Dominican monastery here in Italy?”

Anne:  In this case Edward would have agreed not just to abdicate but to stay quiet. They would have had to have been giving him a pretty good allowance.

Michelle:  But that’s not what Warner thinks. She thinks that if this is true, it must have been that he was allowed to escape. That he thinks he has escaped.

Anne:  Uh huh. Well then how is he supporting himself? Because nobody knows that he’s there. I don’t see how that’s working.

Michelle:  I don’t know. She has the evidence, you know. You can look at it. And she’s not persuaded by it, she just wants to say…

Anne:  Yeah, I find problems with it but, yeah, that’s interesting that there’s evidence that seems to show that there was somebody in Italy who was Edward III, but the mechanics of it are escaping me, because you can’t just escape from Berkeley Castle and go to Italy and support yourself if what you are is actually a King.  Well, no, I take this back! He knows how to thatch roofs!

Michelle:  Yeah. And the guy who was living in Italy was living in a monastery, he was…

Anne:  Uh huh, so he might well have been taken in. He might have been taken in someplace. That actually could happen.

Michelle:  So it’s really interesting because she’s not saying she buys it, but she’s saying there’s too much evidence to just categorically deny it…

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  … and say we know for sure it’s not true. And she starts even with things like Edward was embalmed before anybody in his immediate family saw the body, and the embalming involved his whole entire body being covered with waxed linen such that his face was covered too. So nobody… none of his immediate family actually saw that body.

Anne:  So it could have been a different person altogether. 

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Well, what heart is it that Isabella got interred with?

Michelle:  Well, it’s the heart from this body, so…

Anne:  If that’s true, she wouldn’t have known.

Michelle:  Right. They could let us… half of England is descended from Edward III, they could totally genetically test this if they wanted to. But I don’t think the royal family wants to allow a lot of genetic testing, because there’s a real good chance that there are people who were born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Anne:  We had that problem with the bodies that might be those of the princes in the Tower. They’re not jumping to get these things pinned down.

Yeah, but if the heart that’s interred with Isabel is the heart from a body that is not Edward III, then she did not know that he was escaped and not dead.

Michelle:  That’s true, actually. That she would have to… One of the reasons that Warner says we have to look at this is that because this is the first deposition, it wasn’t really clear to anybody, “What the hell do we do with this person?

Anne:  Right. So they maybe didn’t realize that they had to kill him off. I don’t know. I think it’s just common sense. “Look, we have a King here that says he’s not the King but some of the country thinks that he ought to be King, let’s leave him here and he can have dinner in the garden.” I don’t think so. I think it’s pretty clear that you really have to get rid of people. That you can’t just let them sign over things. It’s not a big leap. I think it’s pretty clear.

Michelle:  It is interesting though, once you have this kind of deposition, even if you kill them, this evidence that she finds that might indicate that there was this other person, indicates that even if you kill somebody you can’t really kill them, because you can’t prove a negative. How do you prove that they’re actually gone?

Anne:  No, And the same thing happens with the princes in the Tower, and the same thing’s going to happen with the Romanovs, which is the same deal. You can hand over your power but you’re not necessarily going to survive that.

Michelle:  Edward… in his lifetime there was… somebody showed up at his court claiming to be Edward I’s illegitimate son, and Edward, who was a smarty-pants, greeted him. Let him come in to dinner and said “Hello brother!” But he clearly wasn’t threatened by him. You know.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  You can have these kinds of pretenders all the time, and they show up.

Anne: Yeah, but sometimes you have to… you know, you had to be careful with the pretenders of the princes in the Tower, you have to be careful with Edward II. You’re going to have to be real careful with Charles, but we’ll fix that pretty quickly. Oops.

Michelle:  I will say Warner is much less convinced that Isabella and Mortimer’s relationship was sexual than she is…

Anne:  Oh really?

Michelle:  … about Edward’s. Because…

Anne:  Wait. You tell me “much more”?

Michelle:  No. She thinks it’s…

Anne:  Much less?

Michelle:  … much less likely that Isabella and Roger Mortimer were involved than Edward and Gaveston or Edward and Hugh Despenser.

Anne:  The reason I had to have you repeat this is that that just is stunning information to me. And why is this?

Michelle:  Well, she says that the correspondence between them does not sound particularly personal, and that it seems far more likely to her that they are people who are opportunistic and using one another for what they need done.

Anne:  Which is invading the country and putting Edward III on the throne. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  Wow. Well that would make sense in terms of what we know of her being so appalled that her sisters-in-law were having affairs. Although really, I mean, the humans often break their own morals.

Michelle:  You know, it’s also after that. You know, it’s quite a bit after that. One of the reasons that there’s speculation that he might not have died in 1327 is that in 1330 Edward’s half-brother, Edmund of Woodstock, the first Earl of Kent, was executed by Isabella and Roger Mortimer for a plan to break Edward out of prison, who supposedly had been dead for three years.

Anne:  Huh.

Michelle:  So that’s interesting.

Anne:   That is very interesting.

Michelle:  And I can kind of see the argument on that either way, right? Because rumors are dangerous, so even if Edward is dead by that point, if you have people getting involved in a rebellion, thinking that he might not be dead, that’s dangerous. On the other hand, he’s executed quite nastily.

Anne:  Oh is he? Is this one of those hanged, drawn, and quartered?

Michelle:  Uh huh. This is one of the bad ones.

Anne:  Hmm.

Michelle:  And this is… this might be the place to mention that the family trees are like you gave a particularly hyperactive kitten a ball of badly wrapped yarn. It’s such a mess.

Anne:  They’re all cousins! Everybody’s cousins!

Michelle:  This is Edward’s younger… Edmund, this is Edmund of Woodstock, the one who was executed. Edward has two younger half-brothers that are the sons of Edward I and his second wife, who was Philip IV’s half-sister.

Anne:  So therefore the half-aunt of Isabella.

Michelle:  Yes. Edward’s step-mother was Isabella’s aunt.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  Edward has first cousins, Thomas and Henry of Lancaster, who are Isabella’s uncles. Because Isabella’s mom’s sister, that was her second marriage. I kept reading this in Warner’s biography. Her… “Isabella’s uncle, Thomas of Lancaster”… How the hell can that possibly be? Well, because you have this half… you have this second marriage of Joan – her mother was Joan and it was Joan’s sister’s second marriage. Ay yi yi.

Anne:  I used to often tell my students all of English medieval history is one big long dysfunctional family tale. And I see that I am once again proved right.

Michelle:  Yeah, when this is happening in Kentucky it’s somehow unclassy, right? When it’s the Hatfields and the McCoys we laugh at it, but the royalty are up to the same thing. Fighting amongst cousins. They’re all related to each other. One of the creepier rumors that goes around about Edward: After Isabella has left for France, his niece, Eleanor, they become so tight that there’s rumors that they were having an affair. She’s actually imprisoned for a year after his death to make sure she’s not pregnant.

Anne:  Huh.

Michelle:  Isn’t that wild?

Anne:  That’s awful. And that’s his niece?

Michelle:  His niece Eleanor.

Anne:  Whose daughter is she?

Michelle:  It’s going to be one of his sisters’ daughters, but I don’t remember which one.

Anne:  Yeah, because his brothers were all dead!

Michelle:  Right. But she… I was more… she’s married to one of his, or was married to Hugh Despenser, isn’t it? Isn’t that Hugh Despenser’s…

Anne:  Is that Hugh Despenser’s wife?

Michelle:  … widow?

Anne:  OK. All right. That would make sense. Now Hugh Despenser. We have to talk… we have to have a little segue here. We decided on the fly that we’re going to talk about Hugh Despenser in the next podcast, because he’s really a horrible dreadful person, but we do want to mention him here because he’s the main Despenser in that alliance with Edward that Isabel and Mortimer are fighting against.

Yeah, did we want to talk about… did we want to mention anything else about Hugh Despenser and his dreadfulness? Why was it that Edward had gotten involved with the Despensers in the first place? They’re horrible people.

Michelle:  Oh, they’re terrible. They’re minor and he’s so cutthroat. Hugh Despenser… we will talk about him more next time, because he has so many crimes it’s just best…

Anne:  Yeah. We want to have a whole episode about the badnesses of Hugh Despenser.

Michelle:  Eleanor was the eldest daughter of Edward’s sister Joan of Acre.

Anne:  Ah! OK. 

Michelle:  She was only eight and a half years younger than he was, which means she’s closer in age to him than Isabella was.

Anne:  Uh-huh.

Michelle:  And she was Hugh Despenser’s wife.

Anne:  And by the time he’s supposedly maybe having an affair with her, she’s a widow, because…

Michelle:  Right. He’s spending time with her when Isabella is gone and Hugh is off elsewhere. So Hugh’s not dead yet.

Anne:  Well it would be interesting, really, if Hugh Despenser was going to ally with Edward and stay allied with Edward, and not do any kind of retribution kind of thing about it, if Edward was actually having an affair with his wife.

Michelle:  This leads to modern discussions of wife swapping. Which is really not… I don’t think that that’s a concept that they’re actually working with.

Anne:  Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice had not gotten invented yet, no.

Michelle: No. I will say that one of the things that Edward II does that annoys me the most — this is high on the list of things that he ought not to have done — Andrew Harclay, the first Earl of Carlisle, his lands are up in the borderlands with Scotland and so, as Robert the Bruce is raiding, more and more, because Edward’s doing nothing about it, Andrew Harclay had been absolutely loyal to Edward II. He had fought with him, he had fought for him, he had helped him in the Scottish wars. He had repulsed the siege of Carlisle Castle when it was attacked by Robert the Bruce. He helped defeat… when Thomas of Lancaster finally lost it altogether and rebelled against Edward II, in 1322, Andrew Harclay fought against him and helped defeat him. He finally lost patience with Edward’s unwillingness to do anything, in terms of negotiating with Scotland or actually fighting them, and so he negotiated a peace treaty with Robert the Bruce, and he signed a peace treaty and the King decided that was treason. He had him arrested. He had him hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Anne:  Whoa.

Michelle:  Yeah. This is even worse than what he did to Thomas of Lancaster, because Thomas was kind of up in his face, but Andrew Harclay was loyal. This was bullshit.

Anne:  And getting raided by Robert the Bruce continually

Michelle:  They left pieces of his body hanging around the kingdom for five years. His family was not allowed to bury him for five years.

Anne:  Yeah. So that’s a piece of why it is that Edward was not a popular king in England.

Michelle:  So, you know, I thought it was worth reminding everybody that he got murdered, and we can feel bad for him about that, but it’s not like people took it upon themselves one day to say, “You know, I really hate this guy.” One or two things had happened, before that!

Anne:  A lot of stuff over a long period of time.

Michelle:  But it’s a big deal. Edward’s the first king to be deposed, and once it becomes possible, then you see this whole blup blup blup blup blup series of them.

Anne:  Yeah, there had been kings murdered before. There’s William Rufus, for instance. But the being forced to abdicate, being deposed, that’s really… that’s a very different thing. And you know, actually, the murder makes sense in terms of the power because, as will happen later with deposed kings, it’s really problematic when you depose a king and then you leave them alive, because what that means is that you have a continual focus for opposition forces to rally around.

Michelle:  Yeah. And you can’t have that. You really can’t have… because then you’re just in a constant state of civil war.

Anne:  Mmhmm. As we will see, with the Cousins’ War. In which much the same kind of thing will happen. I do find it interesting though, that when Edward III becomes old enough to depose his mother and Mortimer as regents, he has Mortimer tried for treason, and not his mother.

Michelle:  That’s certainly the easier solution for him. Warner points out that this modern thing that gets thrown around, trying to suggest that Edward II is not the father of Edward III… there’s not a hint of that…

Anne:  No, that doesn’t make any sense.

Michelle:  …in anything in the fourteenth century, and if there had been a reason to doubt his ability to succeed, somebody would have doubted it.

Anne:  Yeah and Isabel was sixteen when that child was born. No.

Michelle:  He’s an interesting guy. We’ll have to figure out a way to talk about Edward III at some point because…

Anne:  There must be some murder around Edward III, but the deal is… what are you thinking of when you talk about how he’s interesting?

Michelle:  Well, you’ve got to be a pretty tough cookie to be not quite eighteen years old and say, “You know what? These people are making a hash of this. I am now in charge. Because this is my job, and you people are doing a terrible job at it. I know I would do better than you people.”

Anne:  Yeah, I do like that part. There’d been a really dreadful king, which was his father, and then there’d been really dreadful regents, which was his mom and her at least friend Mortimer, and he was actually much better at the whole being-a-king bit. He was right.

Michelle:  Yeah, he’s pretty impressive.

So a lot of the reading that I did, of course, was in Kathryn Warner’s books, and she talks a lot about the misinformation about Edward II and Isabella that have come down to us.

Anne:  Oh do tell us about this!

Michelle:  So she spends a lot of time talking about this because you kind of have to get rid of what people think they already know.

Anne:  The table and the hot poker! No!

Michelle:  You’ve got to get rid of what people think they know, before you can actually talk about what really happened. So there’s claims you’ll see repeated a lot that Edward II gave Isabella’s jewelry to Gaveston. And in fact people invent, in novel scenes, where Gaveston is wearing her jewelry, you know, just in front of her. To harass her.

Anne:  So kind of like that thing with the Norman knights wearing the purses that her sisters-in-law had given them.

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  Parading gifts around that have been re-gifted.

Michelle:  So Warner says this is a misreading of the records.

Anne:  Ooh!

Michelle:  Edward II did send… because their wedding presents were given to them in France, so he sent those ahead, to Gaveston, to keep charge of them. To keep them safe until they got back.

Anne:  Ohhh!

Michelle:  And Isabella did have jewelry among that, but he did not in fact take Isabella jewelry and hand it off to his, you know, lover.

Anne:  He sent a bunch of stuff ahead, and Gaveston was the courtier in charge of taking hold of them. Fair enough.

Michelle:  Right. To hold onto it until they got back.

Anne:  OK. I believe that. I’m down with that. What else?

Michelle:  She says that the story is plausible to people because of how rude Edward II was to Isabella at their wedding, and this is true.

Anne:  Really?

Michelle:  Isabella was twelve. 

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  And so everybody commented and noticed… everybody who was present at this wedding noticed that he basically ignored her at their wedding feast and talked to Gaveston the whole time.

Anne:  Uh-huh.

Michelle:  Well, you know, Isabella was twelve, and Edward II had no more tact than a cat, basically.

Anne:  True. True. So he didn’t make a show of making cordial small talk with a pre-teen.

Michelle:  No. He didn’t. He just had not political sense at all. Or couldn’t be bothered.

Anne:  Right. And political sense in the terms, as connected here, political sense in the terms of politics, like how it is that you present yourself and how it is that you conduct yourself with other people. Beyond issues of to whom do you give various bits of the kingdom. Which is clearly politics. It’s also politics as to how you comport yourself at your wedding when you’re married to a twelve-year-old princess so as to make England and France not kill each other for a while.

Michelle:  Edward II is a useful cautionary tale that even at the height of the Middle Ages, when we like to think about kings as having unlimited power, that’s not true. And it was never true.

Anne:  It was never true.

Michelle:  You have to have the consent of the governed, even if “the governed” is your nobles. Because if they’re not on board, they can get rid of you.

Anne:  They really can. And it does sometimes have to go pretty far before they’ll take up arms, because it costs a lot of money and it’s burdensome to have to go to war, but they will do it. And it’s been shown over and over and over. And this is late enough that really? You would want to have more sense. But as we know, just by watching all of human history go by, people often do not learn a damn thing from what’s gone on before.

Michelle:  So another misunderstanding that comes down to us is that Edward II and Isabella’s marriage was unhappy from the start.

Anne:  Oh no.

Michelle:  There’s tons of evidence to suggest that that’s not true.

Anne:  Mmhmm. Yeah.

Michelle:  Everything from their letters to one another, to the fact that if you count backwards, that first kid was conceived during Lent….

Anne:  Whoa! Oh my god!

Michelle:  … when you’re not even supposed to be having sex.

Anne:  I did not know that. That is so wrong. So wrong!

Michelle:  Yeah. Edward III.

Anne:  Edward III was conceived during Lent. Oh my god.

Michelle:  There’s some funny stories from when they visited France, Edward II and Isabella. They had to go to France because he had to do the homage for Gascony.

Anne:  Oh, that’s right. The whole Feast of the Swans thing.

Michelle:  That was part of the treaty. And there’s a couple of funny stories in the chronicles from that time, where their tent catches on fire…

Anne:  This is going to get funny real quick huh?

Michelle: Yes. Yes, here’s the funny part: Their tent catches on fire and Edward has to pick her up and run out of the tent. She’s still… she has burns on her arms, for almost a year they’re being treated. But the funny part is that they’re both butt-naked, when he has to pick her up and run out of the tent.

Anne:  Now people did sleep naked though, didn’t they?

Michelle:  They did, but if you didn’t want to be having sex with your husband you would…

Anne:  You actually… there were chemise things you could wear, yes.

Michelle:  You would figure out something else.

Anne:  Well that is hilarious that they had no clothes on. This is not that funny, Michelle. This is not a funny story.

Michelle:  The chroniclers who tell the story think it’s hysterically funny, that…

Anne:  That I am willing to buy, because I know the medieval chroniclers and I’m willing to think that they thought this was hysterically funny, but no.

Michelle:  They also think it’s hysterically funny that the two of them are apparently up going at it hammer and tongs so late one night that they sleep in the next morning and miss a meeting with her dad.

Anne:  OK, now that actually is funny.

Michelle:  The chronicler has a little commentary here: “And I don’t blame him because she’s gorgeous.”  A little editorial comment about how gorgeous the French princess is.

Anne:  And she was. I mean that was commonly agreed upon. Oh, OK, so they actually had affection for each other, and sensual desire. Yay. Very nice.

Michelle:  So it’s a much more complicated relationship. Warner says: “For most of her marriage to Edward, until his behavior alienated her irrevocably in the 1320s, Isabella was his loyal and supportive companion and ally, and their relationship was far more successful than is commonly supposed. This says a great deal about Isabella’s interpersonal skills, as the fiercely emotional and erratic Edward must have been a difficult man to live with.”

Anne:  Yeah. That is interesting, isn’t it? Of course, she was used to Philip IV…

Michelle:  That’s a good point.

Anne:  … and so there’s that.

Michelle:  For real! Talk about erratic and…

Anne:  She’d been raised to put up with annoying kings. Yeah and that’s actually, to me, so much more interesting than the notion that Edward didn’t like her, and she didn’t like him, and he had some affair with Piers, and she had an affair with Mortimer, and then they killed him. I mean that’s just… that’s kind of boring. 

But the idea that there’s these complicated emotions, that Edward has complicated emotions both for Isabel and for Piers, that Isabel has complicated relations for certainly at least Edward, if not Mortimer. We don’t know about that, apparently. That, to me, is really interesting. Because I think that that invasion of England is really hard to understand. Especially given… I mean, you know, putting Edward III on the throne and Edward II’s been very badly behaved, and the Despensers are highly problematic, fair enough. But it wasn’t like Isabel and Mortimer then went on to be, you know, like, “They were great rulers! Thank god they deposed Edward II!” They weren’t! They were just as bad as he was, except they didn’t have the Despensers.

Michelle:  Warner goes out of her way to talk about how Edward II, allowing both his queen and his heir to get out of his personal control, gets talked about as being really stupid, but she talks about what led up to that decision. By that point Hugh Despenser was so hated that Edward could not possibly leave him alone in England and himself go to France because…

Anne:  Why? What would have happened?

Michelle:  He would have gotten dead, really fast.

Anne:  Edward would have?

Michelle:  No, Hugh. If Edward had gone to France…

Anne:  Oh, I see.

Michelle:  … to negotiate the peace…

Anne:  So he… OK.

Michelle:  … because he was back at war with France, by this point. So if Edward had left and negotiated the peace treaty with France, and done the homage for Gascony, if he had left, Hugh would have gotten killed.

Anne:  Well, that seems like a good thing, actually, but I guess he didn’t want Hugh killed.

Michelle:  Not if you’re Edward. If he had taken Hugh with him, he would have gotten arrested because Philip IV hated him… not Philip, it would have been Isabella’s brother, by that point. But the French all hate him too. And so he would have been arrested by the French authorities. So Edward first sends Isabella to negotiate the peace, and then he makes the later decision to send his son, and it was a bad decision but he didn’t have a better one available to him. Because he had to send his son to do the homage that was required, by the peace treaty.

Anne:  Do you have any idea why it was that Edward was so loyal to Hugh Despenser?

Michelle:  He seems to be the sort of person who latches on to somebody and can’t… he seems to be this… I’m trying to figure out how to say this. He seems to be the sort of person that is so anxious that everybody is against him, that when he gets a hold of somebody who seems like they’re on his side, he can’t let go of that.

Anne:  So in some ways, Hugh is taking up the position that Gaveston had had?

Michelle:  Oh yeah. He… Edward goes through a series of these. There’s Piers and then after Piers’ death there’s a Damory. There’s a couple of other ones. But it’s mostly Piers and then Hugh Despenser, and Despenser is absolutely the worst of the bunch, in terms of being able to manipulate the position to give himself power and wealth. Because Piers is kind of what you would think of as the stereotype of a frat boy, you know? But Hugh Despenser is an ambitious so-and-so, and he knows how to manipulate…

Anne:  Leverage!

Michelle:  Yes! He knows how to… he takes… yeah, that’s exactly what he does. He takes it and he leverages into more. Yeah, he’s a truly, truly horrible human being.

Anne:  We’re looking forward to discussing this. Why is it that Isabella hates him so much? Are you clear on that? I’m not.

Michelle:  No. Warner says that she can tell… I mean, we can tell from the records that Isabel hates him and says she’s afraid of him, but not why.

Anne:  Well, we hate him. And we would be afraid of him if we were there, so I guess we can just accept that as a kind of self-obvious thing.

Michelle:  Warner does talk about how people read into Isabella’s statements. You know, there are people who assert that Hugh Despenser must have raped Isabella, and there’s not any evidence for that at all.

Anne:  There’s no evidence of that at all. Yeah, no. No. And, and! We’re saying that, and we find Hugh Despenser capable of many, many bad things. But no, that doesn’t make any sense. No.

Michelle:  There are assertions that Edward II was effete and girlish. 

Anne:  No. He wasn’t. I mean, he could have been and we would be fine with that, but he wasn’t. 

Michelle:  Warner points out that he was six feet tall, that his hobbies were being outdoors and doing arduous physical exercise. He loved swimming. He loved rowing. He dug ditches for fun and thatched roofs to the point where people were, like, “Why does he do all this stuff that’s for the low-born? What a weird hobby. Who does that?”

Anne:  He liked manual labor. He liked using his muscles. Yeah.

Michelle:  The reason she says this, and here’s a quote: “The ludicrous caricatures made of him in much writing – even, sadly, writing claimed as non-fiction — …”

Anne:  That’s a careful statement by a historian, isn’t it?

Michelle:  “… which say everything about unpleasant and unfortunately still prevalent attitudes towards gay and bisexual men…”

Anne:  Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michelle:  “…and nothing at all about Edward II as he really was.” 

Anne:  Right on.

Michelle:  So she’s pointing this out because, because he gets talked about as being some of the worst stereotypes that we have of gay men.

Anne:  Right. That makes sense.

Michelle:  Used to. I’m going to hold out hope that those are stereotypes that are going away.

Anne:  Oh honey. I just love you so much. You’re just such an optimistic person. Yes, let’s believe that these things are getting better. I think, in general we at least have some more nuanced views of things, in large parts of our society. But not across the board, sugar-girl. Not across the board.

Michelle:  We’ve talked about the “how Edward was killed” myth…

Anne:  Yeah. No table! No hot poker! Stop it, stop it!

Michelle:  Stop it. Stop it.

Anne:  I just had to say that again. I don’t want to hear that anymore.

Michelle:  The source for that is Geoffrey le Baker’s Chronicle, which is the effort to canonize Edward II, so he’s presented as a martyr, so in some weird way he thinks he’s helping Edward?

Anne:  Right. He’s… yeah. Well that’s certainly a martyr sort of death, but the funny thing of course is that that gets connected… it seems to make sense with the idea that he was homosexual and so therefore he was getting killed in this way so as to punish him for his sexuality. And so that wasn’t in Baker’s mind whatsoever, if he was trying to get him canonized. But I swear to god! Unfortunately it sort of dovetailed with a different piece of gossip. I swear to god.

Michelle:  So Warner talks quite a lot about how our ability to understand and see Edward II, and our ability to understand and see Isabella, is really complicated by, on the one hand homophobia, and on the other hand misogyny. 

Anne:  Right on!

Michelle:  It’s very hard to get back to what these people were really like, because both of those things kick in really quickly and she kind of points the finger at Geoffrey le Baker, because he’s a big source for both of those things.

Anne:  Is he the first one to call her the She-Wolf?

Michelle:  He’s not the first one to call her that, but that’s actually in a Thomas Gray poem, because that’s an insult, a slur that was used by Shakespeare at Margaret of France in the Henry VI plays. So it gets picked up. Thomas Gray first calls Isabella that in a poem called The Bard, a Pindaric Ode, from 1757, and it’s an interesting poem because he hates everybody.

Anne:  The whole lot of them! A curse on both your houses, and all the other ones down the road!

Michelle:  The poem has its moments. But mostly… it’s hilarious because you would think, reading that, “Oh he’s the first one to call her the She-Wolf,” that you’re going over to see a poem about how much he hates Isabella. But actually what’s going on is that he’s writing… it says at the beginning, “The following ode is founded on a tradition current in Wales that Edward I, when he completed the conquest of that country, ordered all the bards that fell into his hands to be put to death.” So pretty much what he’s doing is writing a poem from the perspective of Wales, and he hates all of them.

Anne:  OK. I’m down with that. As I’m sure you can imagine.

Michelle:  He hates Edward I.

Anne:  Yeah!

Michelle:  He hates Edward II.

Anne:  Of course.

Michelle:  He hates Isabella.

Anne:  Uh-huh!

Michelle:  He hates Mortimer.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Every single one of them, across the board. He’s throwing them all.

Anne:  Norman bastards!

Michelle:  Pretty much. So although he calls her the She-Wolf, in there, it’s not personal, really.

Anne:  No. She’s just, you know, she’s just part of the whole…

Michelle:  He hates them all.

Anne:  … the whole slew.

Michelle:  When he says:

She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,

That tear’st the bowels of thy mangled mate,

From thee be born, who o’er thy country hangs

The scourge of heaven. What terrors round him wait!

That sounds really bad, but in context he doesn’t hate her any more than any of the rest of them.

Anne:  Oh god.

Michelle:  He hates them all, for what they did to Wales.

Anne:  Yeah, well. It was bad. It was really bad.

Michelle:  So, she does, she talks a lot about the… actually the first chapter of her Isabella book is really… I felt like I should just read you the whole thing but I picked pieces:

“Though she was mostly popular and admired by her contemporaries, her disastrous period of rule from 1327 to 1330 notwithstanding, Isabella’s posthumous reputation reached a nadir centuries after her death when she was condemned as a wicked, unnatural ‘she-wolf’, adulteress and murderess by writers incensed that a woman would rebel against her own spouse and have him killed in dreadful fashion”

Anne:  And so that is way later than her actual existence. That’s not contemporary with her whatsoever. It’s centuries later.

Michelle:  Yeah. It’s mostly nineteenth century. 

Anne:  Oh, of course.

Michelle:  That they really lose their shit over the idea of a woman doing this.

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  Now Christopher Marlowe…

Anne:  Marlowe! We love Marlowe. But still.

Michelle:  Marlowe has a great play, and I was happy to go back to it and look it over, because actually the presentation of them in there — where they’re all just terrible — feels pretty accurate. Nobody’s a good guy. It’s such a cynical play.

Anne:  Right. Yeah.

Michelle:  They’re all awful.

Anne:  Well, Marlowe. Yes.

Michelle:  At one point Despenser is telling somebody else, Baldock, how to behave like a nobleman, and at the very end of his whole listing of things you do in order to behave like a nobleman, he says:

 “You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute

And now and then stab as occasion serves”

 Anne:  Well there you go! And he’s right on the money. Marlowe.

Michelle:  This was great! And of course you know things are about to go to hell with Mortimer when he says: 

“As thou intendest to rise by Mortimer

Who now makes Fortune’s wheel turn as he please”

Anne:  Oh yeah. No. That means things are about to go the other way, because Fortune’s wheel never stops, except like, maybe briefly, like if you’re at the top of a Ferris wheel and you have a little bit of moment while you’re up there, and you get to see all the things. It’s really nice, and then you come on down and you get off.

Michelle:  And if you think you’re in charge of it, you’re about to hit the ground real hard.

Anne:  Very hard. Very hard indeed. Yes.

Michelle:  So that was delightful. I was glad to go back and look at his play. I didn’t go back and re-watch Derek Jarman’s film. Derek Jarman has a 1992 film of Edward II that I saw, when it first came out, and I remember it as being an aggressively offensive film. And I think that it probably — if I were to watch it again — probably is still aggressively offensive, but I think that it would feel differently to me watching it now, because I would contextually understand why he was so angry. You know, a film being made about these two gay men, in 1992, is going to be full of rage.

Anne:  Sure.

Michelle: Because of course we’re coming off the ‘80s. So I think I would be more forgiving of it if I were to see it now, but when I watched it, you know, in my… I was, like, 20 years old and saw this thing, “What on earth is going on?” But there are places that I think are just intentionally really edgy. Like, Isabella bites somebody’s throat out. They have him tied up in a chair and they have her bite his throat ‘til he dies.

Anne:  Yeah, that didn’t actually happen. But we can see it as a kind of symbol, an interpretation of the energies…

Michelle:  And of course, probably the place where people have seen Edward II most is in Braveheart, and so it’s important to mention that the presentation of Edward II in Braveheart has exactly no overlap… if there was a Venn diagram of real history and Edward II in Braveheart, they do not touch.

Anne:  Well, much of Braveheart does not actually intersect with real history. But yeah, for sure, that very, very much. Very, very much indeed not, not, not real. No.

Michelle:  Edward I throws Piers Gaveston out a window. 

Anne:  No. Didn’t happen.

Michelle:  In Braveheart.

Anne:  Didn’t happen.

Michelle:  And Edward II is every single insulting stereotype of a gay man.

Anne:  Also not true. No.

Michelle:  As presented in there. 

Anne:  Stereotype’s wrong and not Edward II.

Michelle:  He’s wearing pink. And blush. It’s really, actually… I know we’re shocked to discover that the noted anti-Semite, Mel Gibson, also has one or two homophobic tendencies.

Anne:  Yeah, you know, the thing is that Braveheart… yeah, no, Braveheart’s a problematic movie in just so many ways, and full of lies. Full of lies, and bad lies.

Michelle:  This is where people get the idea that somebody else was Edward III’s father, because that’s what the film does is William Wallace fathers Edward III. So just don’t, just don’t… listen to the soundtrack. The soundtrack is really pretty. But don’t bother with the film.

Anne:  Yeah, and don’t get me started on the whole “Freedom” thing. No. Just everybody stop. OK. We move on. We move on from Braveheart! Let us celebrate actual Scots people and not made-up people that didn’t exist. There was a William Wallace, that is not who he was.

Michelle:  Yes. And Edward II as told by Christopher Marlowe, that lovely cynic, right? What the editor of this edition says is:

“Edward II is Marlowe’s last look at the self-destructiveness and inevitability of human striving after power and pleasure”

They’re all horrible, in his play. And, actually, having read it now, I think it’s pretty accurate. Having gone back and read some more of the history.

There was all kinds of stuff I didn’t know. This was delightful!

Anne: I’m always… I thought you were going to know this one really, really well. I’m always glad when you get to be delighted by learning things. This is nice. I had fun. I had fun. I always learn something. 

Michelle:  I learned all kinds of stuff. I really did not realize how bad of a ruler Edward II was. It’s not just that he gave too much stuff to his pals, he’s just awful across the board.

Anne:  Mmhmm.

Michelle:  He holds grudges.

Anne:  Mmhmm.

Michelle:  He makes bad choices.

Anne:  Mmhmm.

Michelle:  He annoys people who there’s no reason to annoy.

Anne:  Mmhmm. Yup. He was a very bad ruler, and it was… and Edward III was much better, so it’s great that he came along. There was some bad behavior in there and it is not… we just want to say that although we believe… True Crime Medieval believes that Edward II was not a good king… we do not think it was right to strangle him, or whatever happened in September of that year. That was wrong. Much better to just slaughter him in battle. That would have been a good move, you know. But no. Although, you know, they wanted to be regents. If you had slaughtered Edward II in battle, Edward III would have been Edward III, but you were still going to need regents, and it wouldn’t necessarily be Isabella and Mortimer. No. 

Michelle:  And you know what’s funny about that is that they weren’t actually named to Edward III’s regent council, they just ran the country anyway.

Anne:  Ah. So when he “deposed” them, he didn’t really depose them because they didn’t actually have any role, he just, like, killed Mortimer and made his mother go away.

Michelle:  Yeah, he just seized power because they had taken it from him, and he was now old enough and that was a serious miscalculation on their part, they clearly thought they were going to be able to control him, and they were not.

Anne:  Yeah, that is just so… I mean, had they ever met teenagers? Had they met teenagers?

Michelle:  They assumed, I guess, that he was going to Edward II’s… but of course nobody could control Edward II either.

Anne:  No!

Michelle:  The difference in hard-headedness in Edward I and Edward II is simply how they choose to focus it, not in its existence. He’s as stubborn as his father.

Anne:  Yeah. He’s much more like his father than I think, in general, we give him credit for. No, he’s much like his father. But Edward III I think is a different thing altogether. Although pretty focused.

Michelle:  The Edwards have that kind of bull-headedness in common, but what they do with it is very different.

Anne:  So have we come to the end of things?

Michelle:  He’s such an interesting case of somebody who it probably would have been really interesting to know, but perfectly terrible to have been ruled by. Because I don’t really want to be friends with Philip IV, he can…

Anne:  No! I don’t want to be friends with Philip IV. Absolutely not.

Michelle:  … go whistle. I don’t want to be friends with Edward I.

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  Edward II? Probably an interesting person to know.

Anne:  Yeah, he was complex and interesting.

Michelle:  And he loved plays! I forgot to mention how much he loved plays.

Anne:  Tell me that.

Michelle:  He loved plays. One of the things I adore about Warner’s biography is how many times he cites records of Edward’s entertainment. He loved entertainment. And he paid well.

Anne:  Oh did he? Good.

Michelle:  So we have lots of records of him tipping a pound. A pound!

Anne:  A pound?

Michelle:  For a minstrel, for interludes, for tumblers. Oh my god he loved all kinds of entertainment.

Anne:  We should say as context that at this point a couple of denari, you know, a couple of pence would be a nice tip.

Michelle:  Yeah, he tipped very well. He was very good to his entertainers. In fact, I’m going to… if we don’t mind, I’m going to go pull my notes up here because I have notes from the beginning of the book about a whole list of minstrels that he… and their names are hysterical. Oh my god! This is the best! Here we go. This is 1306, when he was knighted along with Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser and Roger Mortimer.

Anne:  Ah! They were all cousins, and they were friends, and later they were all going to kill each other in dreadful ways. So sad.

Michelle:  Some of the minstrels that were hired for this banquet are (there were 80 of them): Pearl in the Eye, William Without Manners, Reginald the Liar…

Anne:  Reginald what?

Michelle:  Reginald the Liar.

Anne:  Reginald the Liar.

Michelle:  Edward of Caernarfon’s (which is, of course, the future Edward II) trumpeters Januche and Gillot, his crwth —  which is a Welsh stringed instrument — player Nagary, his harper Amekyn…

Anne:  That particular instrument had just been invented.

Michelle:  The famous acrobat Matilda Makejoy, and others called Gaunsaillie, Grendone, Fairfax, Mahu of the North and “the minstrel with the bells.”

Anne:  I want to be the minstrel with thebBells. That sounds to me like a job I could do. I could do that job. Yeah. That’d be me. “Who are you?” “I’m the minstrel with the bells.” “Do you have a name?” “No, I just go around with bells. Got bells.”

Michelle:  He paid so much for entertainment.

Anne:  Well I would have… I would be glad if I could have dinner and hang out with Edward II for an evening, and entertainment, yeah. As opposed to many other rulers.

Michelle:  It would be much better to perform for him than be ruled by him.

Anne:  Absolutely. This sounds right. Although actually de facto you are getting ruled, but you’re not getting ruled in the same ways you would be if you had a manor and he was taking it away and giving it to Gaveston. That would be a different thing altogether. No.

Michelle:  I do so wish he had had somebody write down some of these interludes that he was watching.

Anne:  Didn’t… they didn’t think to. They didn’t think to. Oral society.

Michelle:  1322 he paid two pounds to four clerks for playing interludes before him and Hugh Despenser. That’s a lot of money.

Anne:  That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of money. No, you only had to write a play down if you were trying to preserve it so, later on there’s a bunch of that, or if you were keeping it in the records as, for instance, at York or Chester. But you didn’t generally have to write a play down because people just memorized their lines. They just were… it was… in an oral society you have a very different memory. It’s trained differently than our memories are and so you’re able to do that much more easily.

Michelle:  He also loved fish. Apparently there’s crap-ton of records of him wandering over to the river and buying fresh fish from fishermen.

Anne:  Really? No, he was an interesting, interesting man. He was a horrible king, but he was an interesting man. He really was.

Michelle:  Apparently he loved fresh fish. Which really if you’re going to eat fish it needs to be fresh.

Anne:  Well, no, in the Middle Ages if you’re going to eat fish it’s actually mostly salted. You have to keep it for a while. The salt fish is just the… it’s what shows up in the records.

Michelle:  Well, he liked fresh fish. And he would go chat up the fishermen. This is one of the things that’s hysterical about him, he loved to chat up his subjects. He would just wander into the blacksmith shop and chat up the blacksmith. He’d wander over and chat up the fishermen. And they liked him, of course, because he also tipped well.

Anne:  But they were not the ones who were going to be in charge of deciding who to fight for.

Michelle:  Nope.

Anne:  Well, yes, he’s a very good case in point.

Michelle:  I think I’m at the end of this. And we will come back to Hugh Despenser next time…

Anne:  Yep.

Michelle:  And his tons of badness.

Anne:  Instead of skipping around we’ve been kind of staying in the same time period. We had Marguerite Porete last time, and Philip IV was involved in that. We have Edward II this time, and his wife Isabella was Philip IV’s daughter, and we’re going to talk about Hugh Despenser and his dreadfulness, which I think might be “The Dreadfulness of Hugh Despenser.” I think that might be the title next time. Next week. And then after that we’re going to do the Templars, because they get taken down in this same time period. So. We’ll have a little run here where we’re just, instead of going all around Europe and time, we stay in the same place.

Michelle:  Hugh Despenser is so awful that somebody tries to assassinate him with sorcery.

Anne:  It didn’t work, did it?

Michelle: No.

Anne:  It never really does. Assassinating people with sorcery never actually really works unless you use poison, that’s what I’ve learned from history.

Michelle:  The sorcery of arsenic.

Anne:  Exactly right.

Michelle:  Make sure that you throw a little arsenic in your potion. It’ll be much more effective.

Anne:  You have to feed it to people, you can’t just, like, pour it, you know, on the ground and say stuff.

That’s our discussion of The Murder of Edward II, and all the stuff happening around it, and this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today but with less technology. 

We’re on Apple Podcast, iHeart Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever you can find podcasts. Please leave a review, we would so appreciate that, it would be a method of getting us kind of kicked up into where we get more noticed. 

You can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach us all through the webpage. And you can leave comments there. We would love to have comments. We love to hear from you. And if you have any medieval crimes that you’d like for us to discuss, please let us know. 

And that’s it for us today. Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

The Murder of Marguerite Porete, Paris, France 1310

Anne:  Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host who is in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  Now, we’re going to take a little segue here, because, Michelle, you told me this week that there’s a kerfuffle over in the Maryland legislature concerning your state song.

Michelle:  Can you believe? I mean, I love Maryland, but I’m disappointed in this part, because really we have this amazing flag, this awesome, awesome, gaudy, spectacular, wonderful flag. We have jousting as our state sport. And then, for some reason that I can’t make any sense out of, our state song is a screed demanding and encouraging Maryland to go join Virginia in the Confederacy.

Anne:  Now, my favorite piece about this is that I believe you told me that the state song… that they adopted it in 1939?

Michelle:  1939. Are they late to the party or what?

Anne:  It’s a little late to join the Confederacy. It is, of course, not too late to join revisionist history and all kinds of nonsenses, but the Confederacy itself is really not operative at that point. No. Because there was the Appomattox thing, and the guns being put down, and whatnot. 1939! Maryland! And so I’m just shocked by this, because we’ve been touting Maryland as the most medieval state in America, and that’s really great…

Michelle:  I love it.

Anne:  But now we’re a little annoyed. So there’s actually a fight about this in the legislature? They’re not all going “Oh my god! How did we keep this in? What were we thinking?”

Michelle:  You would think…

Anne:  I would think.

Michelle:  …that that would be the response, but instead we have people going “(grumble, grumble, grumble) keep this!” I can’t imagine.

Anne:  Yeah, because, you know, the whole thing about “We have to keep the Confederate statues because otherwise no one will ever know what the history is, and what the Civil War was.” Which is nonsense. Like, well, “We have to keep the history of the Maryland state song, which makes no sense, and so therefore I don’t even know what the history is.” What’s the history of trying to join the Confederacy in 1939?

Michelle:  I don’t even know why this is a thing.

Anne:  Well, that’s where Michelle is. She’s recording in Maryland, and they have a state song which is…

Michelle:  Which I found out was below the Mason-Dixon line when we were driving down here with the moving truck. Apparently I’d missed it on the first couple times we’d come down here to visit.

Anne:  Yes, it was below the Mason-Dixon line, that’s true, it was. But it wasn’t actually in the Confederacy, so that was the thing.

Michelle:  No, Maryland stayed… this is why the song is so weird! We were never part of the Confederacy. What on earth is anybody thinking? That decision was already made.

Anne:  Yeah. It was over. Yeah, the bus left. But I think you also told me the state song contains the phrase “northern scum.” 

Michelle:  Yeah. It’s not in any way ambiguous. It talks about standing up against the tyrant, i.e. Lincoln. 

Anne:  It’s too late! It’s 1939!

Michelle:  It’s got these lines that sound like Gondor calling for Rohan. “Virginia is calling! We must answer! Go for it Maryland! Stand up against the northern scum!” Oh my god.

Anne:  Okay, well, any rate. 

Well I hope that you do manage to get rid of that state song, and if so then maybe New Mexico can axe theirs. Because ours is not politically insane, in the way that is, but ours was written by the blind daughter of Pat Garrett, the sheriff that shot Billy the Kid, and I think that’s why it’s the state song. Because otherwise there’s nothing really to recommend it. It starts out “Oh! Fair New Mexico, we love, we love you so…” and then it gets worse. So. But that’s just, that’s just artistry, that’s not, you know… It’s artistically lacking really bad, but it isn’t about the politics, or history. Except for the Pat Garrett part, you know. So there you go.

Michelle:  Did you say that you had to sing that as a child?

Anne:  Of course I had to sing that as a child. How the hell else would I know it? “Oh! Fair New Mexico, we love, we love you so!” It’s not even a good tune. I’m just saying.

Michelle:  Oh my. I have never actually heard of anybody having to sing the state song before.

Anne:  Yeah, well that was… so what was that? That would have been, oh, like around 1964 or something. Before that, I was in Texas, where every day we also sang the Texas state song, and pledged allegiance to the flag, and the Texas flag and the United States flag hung at the same level. So it was never really clear to me which we were pledging allegiance to. I think that was actually done on purpose. Yes. Yes. The Texas one starts out “Texas, our Texas! All hail the mighty state!” Which is way better than “We love, we love you so.” I’m saying.

Michelle:  Oh dear. I really have nothing to say about “We love you so.” I’m sure that that was a lovely person, but it sounds like it was written by a fourth grader.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s not good, no. I really do think that this was all about her connection to Pat Garrett. I really do. I really think it was. But, at any rate, that’s our state song. And we’re too busy eating our state cookie, the Biscochito, to worry about our state song. So there you go.

Today… on to business, on to business… today we’re talking about Marguerite Porete, who died on the first of June in 1310. And we’re going to call this “The Murder of Marguerite Porete,” in the same way that we called the death of Joan of Arc “The Murder of Joan of Arc,” because, you know, it’s possible that there are executions that are legal, even if I don’t believe in them – fine, fine, fine – but some are just plain old damn murder, that’s what we’re saying.

And, usually we often say bad words, because we were both apparently raised by wolves, and also our subject matter would sometimes… we’re talking about, you know, bad behavior, so sometimes it’s not good. So if you have children under 13 that you want to share this with, you should listen to it first, just in case we go over the lines.

Yeah.

Everything we know about Marguerite Porete, we know from the book that she wrote, which is called The Mirror of Simple Souls, or from the trial records. The trial for heresy.

So this is what we can figure out. We know that she was well educated, which means that she was probably upper class, and we know that she was one of the beguines. She was attached to the beguine community in Valenciennes. The beguines were a lay order, they were not nuns. They were a lay order, semi-monastic but with no formal vows. You were celibate if you were with the beguines but it wasn’t, as I say, a vow. Which means that you could leave them and get married. They were women that were living on their own and having their own houses, but then putting communities together so that they were connected. It started with women in the Netherlands at the beginning of the twelfth century, living alone, devoting themselves to good works, and eventually buying houses near each other and forming these communities. And they kept their property, that’s another thing that made them different from the nuns. They had no vow of poverty.

At this time, women weren’t allowed to preach, although there were some ways you could get around that. Margery Kempe, for instance — a bit later than this — would… she was often accused of preaching but she wasn’t really preaching. No, no, because the Holy Spirit was speaking through her. Theoretically. I don’t actually myself believe this. Some people do consider her a mystic. I don’t. But any rate, if the Holy Spirit is speaking through you, obviously you’re not really preaching. And you can’t help it, the fact that you’re laying on the floor at the back of the church, screaming and crying and talking about Jesus and interrupting the Mass. You can’t help yourself! So Margery Kempe did that.

So women weren’t allowed to preach, but there were ways to get around that. For instance if you were… you could give advice. So if you were the mystic Julian of Norwich, and you were an anchoress, people could come by and talk to you through the window where you were, and you could give them advice. That was another way.

There was a little line. You weren’t supposed to go over a line, and this was hard on women who actually had things to say about religious life and spiritual life.

So women weren’t allowed to preach, but they could give testimony, and they could urge good behavior, and that’s what the beguines were doing. And they were also, many of them, traveling around. The beguines would decline after 1312, when the Council of Vienne withdrew papal support from the Templars and ordered the beguines disbanded. Michelle, you’re going to talk to us more about that, yeah? After a bit?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  And all the ones that were left were disbanded at the Reformation, so there aren’t any more. But they used to exist.

The preaching issue was a problem, but also that the women were living outside the usual societal structures. This made them quite suspect. They weren’t married. They weren’t nuns. There weren’t men in charge of them. They were on their own. And this was problematic.

So Marguerite was at the beguinage in Valenciennes, and she wrote the first version of The Mirror of Simple Souls at the end of the thirteenth century, but it had been declared heretical by 1306, and at that point it was burned at Valenciennes. At the end of that book she talks about having consulted three theologians, including a very famous one, about the work, and they told her that it was approved.

Here’s what she says about the approval. She starts out:

“I am a creature from the Creator by whose mediation the Creator made this book of himself for those whom I do not know. Nor do I desire to know, because I ought not to desire this.”

In other words, she doesn’t know who is reading this and it’s none of her business. 

“It is sufficient for me, if it is in the secret knowledge of divine wisdom and in hope.”

So, she starts like that. And she takes them to people. 

“The first of these was a Friar Minor, of great fame, life and sanctity who was called Brother John. “ And then there was a Cistercian monk named Dom Franco of the Abbey of Villers, saw it and he also said that it was truthful. And afterwards… this is the famous guy, “A certain master of theology, named Godfrey of Fontaines, read it. He said nothing unfavorable about the book, as little as the others did, but he did indeed counsel that not many should see it because, as he said, they could set aside the life to which they were called in aspiring to the one at which they will never arrive, and so in this they could be deceived because, as he said, the book is made from a spirit so strong and ardent that few or none are found to be like it. Nevertheless, he said, the soul is not able to arrive at divine life or divine practice until it does what’s in this book.”

So she had taken this book that she had written earlier, she’d taken it to three theologians, all of whom said that it was not heretical. This is an important piece.

One of the problems, besides what’s in the book, which I’m going to get to in a bit… one of the problems was that it was written in French rather than in Latin, and you were not allowed to translate the Latin Bible into your own language. And this isn’t the Bible, but she does quote scripture and it’s in French, and so that was a little problem. But the main problem really has to do with the fact that what she’s saying… she says “The mirror of simple souls” this is, so the book itself is a mirror, so you look into it and you see yourself, if you are the simple soul. She also calls the simple soul “the annihilated soul,” and what she’s talking about is this idea that the further you go into union with God, the further away you are from human constructions. 

Saint Teresa talks about this later. She says… I love Saint Teresa talking about it… she says that when you become completely united with God, you no longer desire to die so that you can see him. Because you’re already there, you’re with him, you know? So it’s that kind of idea. That if you go really far into this spiritual life, into this life that’s connected to the deity, you are annihilated in that you are no longer that self. You are the self which is allied to God. Okay. Fair enough.

But one of the problems is kind of like the implications of this. Because one of the implications is that if you’re further and further away from human constructions, you are further and further away from the Church. When she’s talking about no longer needing the Church, and no longer needing the sacraments in the way that regular people would need them… it’s not that you are in sin, it’s that there’s no sin, because there cannot be sin because you are allied with God. And that’s kind of very a lot of what is said to Julian too, now that I come to think of it.

Does that make any sense, Michelle? Am I making sense here?

Michelle:  Yeah. I had thought about Julian quite a lot. I hadn’t heard about Marguerite before but I of course had known Julian, and had thought about, in a different time, would she have been… it didn’t feel that much different.

Anne:  No. It isn’t. And we don’t have to talk about the murder of Julian of Norwich, because she was never even accused of heresy. But this is how Julian does it. Julian is also a mystic, and she sees God directly, and she asks God some questions. Julian is really concerned about sin, and what is sin, and God keeps saying there isn’t any sin, there’s nothing there. There is no sin. And it’s God that finally says to her, “I can make all things well, I shall make all things well, I will make all things well. All manner of things shall be well.” In other words, no one is doomed to Hell for eternity. It’s not happening.

Now, this is a problem because this goes directly against what the Church has taught her, and what Julian says is “I cannot deny what God says to me directly, and I cannot deny what the Church says to me directly, therefore they are both true, and I will know some day how they are reconciled.” When she’s dead, she figures, she will know. But that’s what she does. She says, “The Church is absolutely right. God is absolutely right. I don’t know how these things live together, but they’re both true.”

And she’s never accused of heresy. Marguerite, not so much! Because Marguerite says something very much like this, when she’s talking about the soul which is in perfection, and just the idea that you could bring your soul to that point by being strong and ardent in your faith, and by being really focused on it, that’s amazing. But Teresa of Avila says the same thing. She says that when you get that far, you no longer want to die to see God, because you’re already there.

At any rate, this is one of the things that Marguerite says about the Church. This is a dialogue, and Love is talking:

“Such a soul…” meaning the annihilated soul, “…Such a soul,” says Love, “… is in the greatest perfection of being, and she is closest to the far-nearness when she no longer takes Holy Church as an exemplar in her life.”

Closest to God when you’re no longer taking Holy Church as the exemplar… you can see why people were upset.

Michelle:  Yeah, that’s going to be a problem.

Anne:  Yeah. 

She says, “Holy Church does not know how to understand her. Holy Church singularly praises fear of God, for saintly fear of God is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Still, fear of God would destroy the being of freeness if she could penetrate such being.”

In other words, if you go this far you are no longer afraid of God, and you no longer need these things. And what’s she’s been told by the theologians, essentially, is “You are right, but people need to not be told this, because they’re not going to understand how to deal with it.” Theoretically they’ll all go around being enormously bad because they’ll think they’re all saved and everything, and it doesn’t matter. In other words, “Only somebody like you could actually live this life.”

So. Marguerite wrote this wonderful book.

She was arrested in 1308, along with a beghard – a male beguine – and Michelle is also going to tell us more about that later. They were imprisoned for a year and a half before the trial began and Guiard, the man that she was arrested with, confessed, and was sentenced to imprisonment and I think a year and a half of excommunication. 

Porete refused to speak to the inquisitors, which included William of Paris, the Dominican who was The Inquisitor of France, the High Inquisitor of France. She refused to recant, she refused to withdraw the book, she refused to take the oath that the inquisitors needed for her to take, the oath to tell the truth. In other words, what she was doing was refusing to recognize the authority of the court. Which totally makes sense, since she refused basically to recognize the authority of Holy Church. Because God being bigger than that.

So they did find her guilty of heresy, on fifteen counts, and they burned her at the stake. And the record of the trial includes an addition saying that the crowd wept at her calmness at the end. She comported herself very well.

As to the fate of the book, not all the copies had been burnt. I mean, because, you know, humans. And the book was circulated widely. The original text is no longer extant. There are three texts in French, the earliest of which dates from 1390, and we have four Latin translations, two Italian, three in Middle English. We believe that there may have been as many as thirty-six copies of the Italian translation circulating in the fifteenth century. The earliest copy is in Latin and it’s from 1310.

It was a very popular book. But nobody knew who had written it. It was an anonymous book at that point. Widely circulated. There’s also texts, by the way, in Latin that are arguing against this book, and so it’s not just that it was accepted. There were still problems with it. The Vatican has one of the copies, but scholars aren’t allowed to see it.

Michelle:  The book that I read ends with… this Sean Field’s 2012 book from University of Notre Dame press, The Beguine, the Angel and the Inquisitor, which is a great book.

Anne:  Oh I love that title.

Michelle:  Isn’t it great? 

Anne:  It sounds like a C.S. Lewis title, really.

Michelle:  It’s a really, really good book. It’s really, really well researched but also readable, which is nice. It’s nice to have academic research like that. 

He ends the book with an observation about how widely known her book was:

“Thus The Mirror of Simple Souls enjoyed a wide readership in at least four languages for centuries, with manuscripts…” and this is a quote from someone else… “’bobbing up continually in the seas of late medieval western Europe like unsinkable corks.’”

Anne:  Ooh. I like that.

Michelle:  And the quote continues: “Not only did Marguerite Porete’s book survive William of Paris’s condemnation, but its rediscovery by modern scholarship has made Marguerite a bestselling author (at least by the standards of academic sales.) If William’s demand of 1310–never formally rescinded by the Catholic Church–were somehow to be enforced today, and those possessing copies of the book were compelled to turn them in to the Dominicans of Paris, the stacks of the modern Dominican library there would be buried under tens of thousands of well-thumbed copies of The Mirror of Simple Souls.”

I just love that he ends the book like that. Haha! She won after all, William of Paris!

Anne:  Yeah. Because we can all read it. The copy that I used to use, when I was teaching this, is from the Classics of Western Spirituality, and it’s in English and so you can read it.

So it was widely circulated in the Middle Ages, although they didn’t know who had written it. In fact, we did not know that this was written by Marguerite Porete until 1946, when Romana Guarnieri was able to identify Latin manuscripts of The Mirror as that book, the lost book of Marguerite. And so that’s how long we’ve known that she was the author. The Middle French manuscript was published in 1965. So her popularity has grown very quickly since then.

We knew that there had been a mystic, Marguerite Porete, who had been burned at the stake in 1310. We knew that there was a book, The Mirror of Simple Souls. They weren’t connected until 1946.

Michelle:  Well done scholar, for working that out!

Anne:  Yeah. And there has been some question about is this actually true, but then there’s been other yes, actually really it is. This is hers.

I’m very fascinated by that just simple refusal to even have anything to do with the court. Anything at all. Not the oath, not answering… in fact she refused to come to the court, and they had to go get her and drag her in. She did not recognize the court, and she would not recant. So that’s our girl. Marguerite Porete. Annihilated.

Michelle:  So her fellow… well, it’s not clear that they knew each other… Guiard? He’s arrested at the same time…

Anne:  Oh really?

Michelle:  It’s not clear. At least according to Field. It’s not clear that they knew each other. After she was arrested, he showed up at the gates and said, “I am the Angel of Philadelphia, and I’m here to protect Marguerite.”

Anne:  Well that was a doomed sort of errand!

Michelle:  So it’s entirely possible that… I mean it’s possible they did know each other, but it’s also possible they didn’t, because they weren’t arrested together.

Anne:  Oh, OK.

Michelle:  What we know about him is that he was a minor cleric. He’s literate in Latin. It’s possible that he is also from a minor noble family. A piece that’s really interesting is that he is from Cressonessart. And what’s really fascinating — and Field desperately wants to prove they’re related but can’t ultimately do it — is that Matthew of Cressonessart is a major player in the Templars.

Anne:  Whoa!

Michelle:  Isn’t that fascinating! 

Anne:  OK, and so now you have to explain to everybody why I’m so struck by this issue of the Templars and Marguerite Porete.

Michelle:  What Field says about this is that “Since it is not certain that Guiard also really was a member of this family…,” —  although, sidebar, he really thinks he probably is —  “…the question of whether or how these two men were related must remain open. Nevertheless, it is a striking fact that the very week when Guiard finally confessed, another man from his tiny hamlet was taking the lead in fighting the charges of heresy in the Templar case.”

Field’s book is really interesting because it’s mostly providing political context, so I was ending up over here in the cutthroat land of fourteenth-century politics. Where we can start with Philip IV. The first order of business with Philip IV is that I am officially retracting any shred of sympathy I had for this man after the Tower of Lust situation.

Anne:  We refer you back to our earlier podcast, the Tour de Nesle affair, wherein Philip IV is completely humiliated by his daughters-in-law and the entire Capetian line is stopped.

Michelle:  And is so mad about it, he has a stroke and dies. As far as I’m concerned, that was the universe righting itself.

Anne:  What did Philip do to make you so unhappy, Michelle?

Michelle:  He is a horrible human being. Or, possibly, a straight-up medieval king, and doing what’s necessary to maintain control. Take your pick, they appear to be the same.

So, first order of business with Philip IV at this time: He is cynically using St. Louis to create an overlap between the King and the Church, so that in his reign heresy is the same thing as treason.

Anne:  A double death sentence!

Michelle:  Yes. So here’s what Field has to say about this:

“…the lived sanctity of Louis IX and his sister Isabelle… had helped to foster a public perception of a saintly royal family, which in succeeding decades provided an argument for the sanctity of the whole Capetian line.”

Anne:  Well, no wonder he has a stroke when his daughters-in-law have all those affairs.

Michelle:  Philip IV’s reign… this is back to Field… “Philip IV’s reign witnessed the medieval culmination of this ‘religion of royalty’.”

And he has his people do this in the rhetoric as well. That they take on language used by the popes in the presentation of royal power. Back to Field:

“…explicitly taking formulations used by popes going back to Innocent III to equate heresy with lèse-majesté.” Yes!

So Field’s contention, throughout the entire book, is that the Marguerite and Guiard end up in this situation where they’re kind of getting a double whammy, because heresy is being read also as treason, and they’re ending up being just chewed up by Philip’s political machine.

Bad horribleness by Philip IV, #2: He had quarreled with the Pope, and worked to install people personally loyal to himself in key Church positions.

And this is a move we’ve seen before, right?

Anne:  Yeah, this is normal. This is normal with the medieval kings, yeah.

Michelle:  It’s very standard. I’m not sure that most of the medieval kings try to kidnap the Pope, which is what Philip IV tried.

Anne:  That’s a little over the top, yeah.

Michelle:  In 1308 (I think) one of his right-hand men, William of Nogaret, went off to Italy, because they had gotten word that Boniface was about to excommunicate the king. So, “…on 7 September he and a small, armed group controlled by the Colonna family (mortal enemies of Boniface VIII) broke into the papal palace… and arrested the elderly pope.”

Anne:  Tacky. Just tacky.

Michelle:  Tacky, tacky, tacky.

But the townspeople rallied and forced Nogaret to retreat and let the Pope go.

Anne:  Yay, people of Rome! Yay!

Michelle:  It just gets worse from there, with Philip IV. I profoundly regret having provided even a moment of empathy to this man.

Anne:  I did wonder why you were liking him so much.

Michelle:  Well, but see if you just… this is why it’s so important, you know, why context is always so important, right? If you just look at that one little moment, where he appears to be riding high and the daughters-in-law totally screw him up, then you can have a little sympathy for him. But you have to look at everything that led up to that.

Anne:  Yes. Which we didn’t, in the Tour de Nesle Affair, because we were talking about the Tour de Nesle. Yeah, but here we are. Here we are. Burning Marguerite Porete at the stake.

Michelle:  Yeah, Philip, all by himself, could provide like six months of crimes to look at.

Anne:  Yeah, we haven’t been worrying about running out of material.

Michelle:  No.

He expelled the Jews from France.

Anne:  Yes, he did.

Michelle:  He hounded those who had remained through conversion. He subjected them to inquisition, and actually there was… Guiard confessed and managed to not get dead with Marguerite, but there was someone executed with Marguerite, and he was a man who had been accused of reverting to Judaism.

Anne:  Ah, I didn’t know that. That doesn’t… that should be around. I didn’t know that. Thank you for telling me.

Michelle:  Yeah, we don’t know his name, but the place of execution was chosen because it’s right beside the former Jewish neighborhood.

Anne:  Ah.

Michelle:  Setting an example. He’s really awful.

Anne:  So what was going on with the Templars? Because that’s the other thing he did.

Michelle:  Yep. He did. It was 1306 that they decide to expel the Jews. In the following year, back to Field here, “The following year Philip and his advisors put this experience to use in their infamous attack on the Knights Templar.”

So everything they’d learned via expelling the Jews, they turned against the Templars. What they did, basically, and we can cover this in a different episode because there’s a lot…

Anne:  Yes, we are going to talk about the murder of the Templars, too. Yes.

Michelle:  They accused the entire order of heresy and apostasy which…

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  … Field says is unprecedented.

Anne:  Yeah, and makes no sense.

Michelle:  No. It’s making no sense at all. They’re torturing people to get confessions. The Pope is obviously unhappy about it. And the reason it’s important for Marguerite, according to Field, is that these things are happening at the same time.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  And this is… he says, “It is always dangerous to assume that two events must be related to each other merely by virtue of their simultaneity. Yet in this case the congruent timing in the two Parisian trials is too striking to ignore.”

And, moreover, they have some of the same people involved. Which leads us to William of Paris, my second-least-favorite person in this whole scenario. 

Anne:  Yeah, I don’t like William of Paris either.

Michelle:  So William of Paris was one of these people that Philip had put in place that was loyal to him, and not so much to Rome, or Avignon, wherever the Pope is at this moment. He is a Dominican and those are… if you are an inquisitor you’re basically going to be a Dominican.

Anne:  Yeah, that was the order dealing with that, yeah.

Michelle:  He had worked with Philip over the Templar affair, and really kind of got in trouble with the Pope about it. So he had actually been removed from the case with the Templars, because the Pope wasn’t thrilled with his handling of it. Which meant that he was really interested in handling Marguerite and Guiard’s trials in such a way that he could re-ingratiate himself back with… he needed to both make the King happy and make the Pope happy, and this, according to Field, absolutely affects his handling of their case.

Anne:  Well, that makes sense, and Marguerite and her cohort are expendable.

Michelle:  Yes. 

That’s pretty much what he argues, is that they were William’s ticket back to power and back to respectability.

Anne:  What had the Pope not liked about his handling of the Templars, which also led to people getting burned at the stake. I mean, what was the difference here?

Michelle:  Oh, the Pope didn’t think that any of… he thought that was all bogus, that there was no possible way these people were guilty of everything they were being accused of. And of course, you know, a bunch of them had confessed, under torture in Paris, and then hotfooted to Rome to let the Pope know that they had confessed under torture, and none of it was true.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  And William… we don’t have actual theater, but he staged the executions of Marguerite and the unnamed poor soul with her as theater. I’m actually troubled by how much he appears to have been using what he’s seen in street theater for this. 

We don’t have actual plays for this episode, but we do have theatrically staged executions, which William does specifically so that it’s being used as a public example, essentially, to frighten people. He has an elaborate procession out to the public open space. There’s a raised platform for the important spectators. It’s being done in the street, of course.

Anne:  Are we in Paris?

Michelle:  We are in Paris. It’s a specific neighborhood that they’re at, and it is where the Jewish community used to be.

The Place de Grève. It says… this is Field again… “Before 1306 most Jews in Paris had lived in the neighborhoods immediately north and east of the Place de Grève.” And that is where William of Paris decided to have the relapsed Jew, and Marguerite, executed, in a large spectacle.

He also was very concerned… one of the reasons we have all these documents is that he wanted to dot every i and cross every t. Making sure that there would be absolutely no questions about whether he handled it properly.

Anne:  It must have been pretty upsetting, then, that she wouldn’t take the oath. Because theoretically the trial doesn’t go forward until the accused takes the oath.

Michelle:  Yeah. His handling is very interesting, because he wants to… you know, maybe she understood that that’s what he wanted, because he wanted… you know it’s like getting an A on one test after you’ve gotten a C on the first one? He’s looking to raise his GPA with the Pope, and he needs these guys to be his ticket, which is why Field is arguing that it’s important that the Templar affair is happening at the same time. That ten years earlier, ten years later, it might have had a different outcome.

And he points to other mystics who end up being questioned but don’t end up being executed, as a reason to think that that might be true. He says, “This is the first known instance of an inquisitorial procedure ending with the burning of both a book and the accused author.” And that “Marguerite has been described as ‘the only medieval woman, and possibly the only author of either sex who died solely for a written text’.”

Anne:  Well. Blessings on her. One of the things that’s interesting to me then, hearing about this theatrical presentation of the execution, is that it seems to have gone awry, because if this is supposed to be an excellent example so that the citizens of Paris understand how terrible it is to be heretical, and write books about how much God loves you, then the fact that they’re weeping at her execution would mean to me that they had not really gotten the message. They seem to be upset at her execution, not thinking that it’s a logical and good thing that is happening because of her badness.

Michelle:  Yeah, it may have been a miscalculation. They had known… they didn’t have the Templars executed in public like this. They had had them taken away, elsewhere, to be burnt at the stake, but he decided this was going to be a useful thing to do publicly, and that probably was a miscalculation. But he has all of these documents making sure that all the laws are followed, making sure he has everything in triplicate, making sure it’s notarized, because that’s a thing you have to do. But then, copies of this were in the King’s papers, so it was real clear that William was handling this case both as an inquisitor but also as a loyal subject of Philip IV, who was doing what the King wanted.

Anne:  That’s a really hard line to walk, if you’re dealing with a King who posits himself against the Pope, quite clearly, you know? Trying to please them both is not that easy. Do you know what his relationship with the Pope was later? I don’t?

Michelle:  They’re running through Popes, at this point, because William…

Anne:  So it doesn’t really matter!

Michelle:  William of Paris lives through at least three.

Anne:  Uh-huh. OK.

Michelle:  Because there is Boniface, and then there is somebody else, and then there’s Clement. 

It was a whole slog through the muck this time, they’re just so… they’re both so cynical about doing things for power, to maintain power, and not caring all that much who they roll over. And Guiard, I feel kind of sorry… alright, I did that… I had a problem last time. Maybe something terrible’s going to come out about Guiard, but at the moment I feel kind of sorry for him, because he appears to be not playing with every single dice that might be available.

Anne:  The whole arriving at the gates of Paris and saying “I am the Angel of Philadelphia, come to save Marguerite Porete,” strikes me as not being indicative of having a full deck. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yeah. And they of course questioned him and he eventually… when they started threatening to kill him he eventually kind of cracked and explained what his position was, and it turns out that the “Angel of Philadelphia” is a reference to Revelations. That there are six cities… did you know that? Because I didn’t. I had forgotten… If I had known, I had forgotten.

Anne:  You knew this. I know you knew this. Because you know the Bible back and forth.

Michelle:  At some point I knew, but I’d forgotten. He was asked about this, and he claimed that he was one of these six angels, and he got in trouble because William decided to… instead of interpret this as, “This poor soul is a little crackers,” he decided to interpret what he was saying as, “I have set myself up in opposition to the Pope.” Because Guiard was saying there’s two keys in the kingdom, and Jesus holds one and then there’s this other one and I have that one, and William decided that that meant that he was claiming he was supposed to be Pope. Which isn’t really what he said.

Anne:  Not really, no. Although it does sort of clearly negate the power of the Pope, who is theoretically holding the other key. But I don’t know, if you’re the Angel of Philadelphia, I think that definitely you own all the… you definitely get to hold the key. I would think. If you’re the Angel of Philadelphia. He isn’t the Angel of Philadelphia is he? No. He’s just not.

Michelle:   I mean, obviously not, but they weren’t very nice to him.

Anne:  No, they weren’t very nice at all. I like it that Marguerite Porete is actually known now, although in some ways I don’t know that it would matter to her, in the same way that we say that we’re talking about Julian of Norwich, but that’s not actually her name. We don’t know what her name was. She was at the Church of St. Julian, and so that’s why we call her Julian. In the same way I think that this annihilated soul would not really care if we knew her name. But I do. So I’m glad that we know her name, and I’m glad that we know that this is her book. This is her book, and she and the book were both burned.

I didn’t know that she was the first writer and maybe only writer to be burned simply because of a book.

Michelle:  Field makes a point of how the trial both addresses Marguerite herself and the book separately, and they both get condemned.

Anne:  Oh really?

Michelle:  Isn’t that interesting? That those two things get handled separately, and the book gets condemned independently.

Anne:  But she’s convicted on fifteen counts of heresy. Is refusing to recant the book one of them? It must be.

Michelle:  Because, of course, she’d gotten in trouble with the other bishop, earlier, right? Even though he was gone by then, William could get hold of his records. Yeah, William of Paris is now not my favorite person.

Anne:  No, he’s awful.

What other bishop?

Michelle:  The Bishop of Cambrai.

Anne:  Oh yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Because the book itself got burned. So the book has already been burned once, this is obviously a different copy of the book getting burned when Marguerite is. So the Bishop of Cambrai had called it heretical.

Michelle:  Yeah, she had gotten in trouble with him, and that was when she went and wrote some more stuff to try to explain what he obviously didn’t understand, right? And then went around to those three guys. That’s what’s kind of so raw about this deal is, she checked! She went and asked people!

Anne:  She did. She asked men. She asked religious men, and they said that it was not heretical. But it’s funny because, you know, it was not heretical but it was still dangerous. Because it’s just too difficult for regular people to actually take in. 

We always like to talk about ways in which the thing that we’re… whatever it is we’re dealing with comes on down into modern culture, and mostly, you know almost entirely what comes down with Marguerite is the book itself, which is nice isn’t that? So the book comes down, and so you can find… if you go and look for it you can find so many studies about the book, and meditation guides that use the book. The book itself is very, very lively these days, despite having gotten burnt a few times earlier.

There’s a novel that includes both Christine de Pizan and Marguerite as people that the heroine runs into, and there’s a novel about Marguerite herself. We’ll put links to that in the show notes.

Michelle:  I’m not sure that’s possible, unless that person’s a time traveler.

Anne:  Yeah, it is about time travel.

Michelle:  OK. Then you’d be able to pull it off.

Anne:  Completely. Yes, it’s completely about time traveling. Yes, and so you get to go see people, and so those are just two of the people, those are the medieval women. 

So, more on Marguerite? Do you have anything else?

Michelle:  Not really. William doesn’t call her a beguine in the… he’s so slippery. He doesn’t call her a beguine because he doesn’t want to annoy them, and their supporters.

Anne:  Yeah, because it’s not that they’re enormously powerful, but they’re fairly numerous and they’re admired. They call her something… what is it? Oh, they call her a fake woman.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  A pseudo-mulier. A fake woman.

Michelle:  Yeah, that’s an interesting charge, just in and of itself.

Anne:  Well, I think there’s a couple things going on there. One is of course the writing of the book itself, and the other is that she’s a beguine, and they don’t live in the ways that women are supposed to live at this time.  Yeah, we like the beguines. We’re into the beguines. 

That’s our discussion of Marguerite de Porete, who we consider to be murdered, and as an endnote, this is from The Mirror of Simple Souls, the book she wrote:

“I am God, says Love, for Love is God, and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is God by righteousness of Love. Thus this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says Love, takes my nourishment.”

Michelle:  Thank you for doing that.

Anne:  Yeah. I do love Marguerite Porete. She’s worth reading. It’s worth going and finding that book.

Michelle:  I am glad you did because I had not. Probably should have tried to do the primary source but I got far into Sean Field’s book. I was really enjoying it.

Anne:  You’ll like The Mirror of Simple Souls, though, so you might, you know, get that for some bedtime reading.

And next time, next time I tell you what, why don’t we stay in the same general time period? We’ve been talking about Philip and Tour de Nesle, why don’t we talk about the murder of Edward II?

Michelle:  Oh, yeah. Let’s do that.

Anne:  And you do know about that.

Michelle:  That one I’m familiar with. If for no other reason than I’d read Christopher Marlowe.

Anne:  Christopher Marlowe definitely… Christopher Marlowe would be one of the ways in which Edward II comes down to us, yes. Marlowe.

Yeah so that’s our discussion of Marguerite Porete, and we are True Crime Medieval, signing off. True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, but with less technology.

We’re on Apple podcast, iHeart podcast, Spotify and Stitcher. Please leave a review on any of these sites, we really appreciate that. For one thing, if anyone is looking for “true crime” in the podcast, we wouldn’t come up as an offering unless we had, you know, kind of solid reviews. But we’ve been around awhile. We’ve got twenty… this is our twenty-first podcast. 

You can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also reach us all through the webpage. And you can leave comments there, which we’d also love. We’d love to hear from you, and if you have medieval crimes that you think that we should discuss, please let us know! Because we will take that into consideration.

And so that’s all for us. Bye!

Michelle: Bye!

The Massacre at Abergavenny, Wales, Christmas 1175

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen, your host who is recording in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  They have jousting.

Michelle:  We do have jousting, but it’s… I looked this up.

Anne:  Oh yeah, did you? Because we were wanting this. What did you find out?

Michelle:  It turns out that there has been ring jousting… so when we’re talking about jousting being the state sport, it’s not the “tilting in the list” kind…

Anne:  Oh, okay.

Michelle:  … that we mostly think about. Going against each other? But it’s the “being on your horse and going and trying to collect rings on your lance”…

Anne:  Okay. Alright.

Michelle:  Those kinds of tournaments have been happening in Maryland since Colonial times.

Anne:  Really?

Michelle:  Isn’t that interesting?

Anne:  Oh really. Because you had said that you thought maybe it was, like, 1960s, but no.

Michelle:  It was made the official sport in the 1960s, but it’s because those tournaments were happening in Colonial Maryland.

Anne:  Wow.

Michelle:  I love Maryland. Geez Louise. We have houses on the Eastern shore that are the best surviving examples of certain kinds of medieval building techniques, because the people who came here knew old-fashioned techniques.

Anne:  Oh right. And jousting, clearly!

Michelle:  Apparently. The houses survived here and not in England.

Anne:  Wow.

Michelle:  Yeah, Lord Baltimore was, like, the first cosplayer, I think. Medieval cosplayer, because that flag is all about a show, a big deal.

Anne:  When you’re kind of not medieval, really, at all.

Michelle:  Oh no, not really, no.

Anne:  No, not really, no. It’s been awhile since Medieval.

Thank you. I love to hear about Maryland.

We have a very old history too, but it isn’t English Medieval. It’s… we have the oldest inhabited cities in North America in the form of Taos Pueblo and Acoma Pueblo.

Michelle:  In a different part of my life, I would be digging trying to find out whether they brought any drama with them, but I haven’t successfully found… the closest I’ve found is a reference to pasteboard characters, tableaux?

Anne:  Uh-huh.

Michelle:  That’s the closest I’ve found.

Anne:  But they brought jousting, and architecture.

Michelle:  Apparently.

Anne:  Well, today we’re discussing the Christmas Massacre at Abergavenny, Wales, in 1175, and we’d like to give you our disclaimer, which is that we often do not use good words when we are speaking, and also our subject matter is necessarily bad because we’re talking about bad behavior in the Middle Ages, and we’re not actually… we don’t have any gory details in this one, but we do have some fairly sad stuff. So, please, if you have children under thirteen, please, you listen to it first to see if it’s okay.

We are focusing on William De Braose, the 4th Lord of Bramber, who was a Marcher Lord. Now, the Marcher Lords — or, in Welsh, it’s Barwn y Mers, the Barons of the March — the Marcher Lords were Anglo-Norman Barons who lived in castles on the Welsh-English borders — which were the Marches — and they were meant to help subjugate the Welsh, which the Anglo-Normans had been having trouble doing since they got there, in 1066. They’d been having trouble with subjugating the Welsh, who were not easily subjugated, as it turns out.

And the Marches, by the way… Michelle, do you know where the word comes from?

Michelle:  I should, but I don’t. At least not right this instant.

Anne:  Not right off the top of your head?

Michelle:  Maybe I used to know and I’ve forgotten.

Anne:  It comes from the root that means “mark” or “border” and in Old English, for instance, the word “mearcstapa,” “border-walker,” is the word for outlaw.

Michelle:  Wow.

Anne:  So this is the Mark. We’re in the Marches, we’re in the Mark, we’re in the borders.

Michelle:  Okay, I knew it was ringing bells for me. This is why the Rohan, in Lord of the Rings, is the Mark.

Anne:  Ah yes. That would be it. Yes. And there’s more Norman castles in Wales than in any other part of Britain. They were working so hard at trying to get the Welsh to behave and they just sort of wouldn’t. Wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t.

Now the Marcher Lords had a special kind of position. They were semi-autonomous, except for treason. Except for the crime of treason, the Barons were in charge of the laws, period. And they got to make their own. And they were not accountable to the King. They could build castles. They had their own courts. They got to keep all the money. And the law was very often a mix of Welsh and English law. So they had an enormous amount of power, although they also had to do a lot of fighting, and things were not easy. 

It was a cushy life in some ways, but not in others. And what would happen, eventually, is that by the 1500s they had all been pretty much taken over by the crown, and the very end was the Acts of Union, or the Laws in Wales Acts (1535-1542), which made the Marches into English counties, and they made English law the law throughout Wales, and they made English the official…

Popper:  Hi! I have things to say!

Oh Popper, here we go. Popper, here we go! The reason my parrot is talking is that Laura is home for lunch and he’s really excited.

The Laws in Wales Acts of 1535-1542, which made the Marches into English counties. They made English law the law throughout Wales. They made English the official language. This is the point at which the Welsh had to take surnames, which they had not had before. They had used a patronymic system, so that your name might be, for instance, Seisyll ap Dyfnwal, who we’ll be talking about, and that means that this is Seisyll who is the son of Dyfnwal. 

But they had to give that up, and that’s why Wales has fewer surnames — percentage of surnames — than other parts of Europe. Wales has fewer surnames because they got invented so late. But if you know people whose last name is Bowen, for instance, that’s from ap Bowen, or Prichard is from ap Richard. Lloyd is from llwyd, which means grey, it was a nickname. That kind of thing. So they invented surnames and we still see them around. 

They had to make them out of place-names, or consolidating the patronymics, or sometimes they just simply used their father’s or grandfather’s name, like Rhys, for instance, is often a surname, and that’s just a name. At any rate. Sideline. Sideline. Sorry. But you know I care about these things.

Michelle:  I think that that same thing was going on in Ireland in the sixteenth century. That must be an English policy at this point, right? To try to stamp out native law in the places they’re trying to colonize.

Anne: The Irish and the Scots had used a patronymic system too, although it starts disappearing earlier.

Michelle:  Oh, so, sorry, not the name thing. The law thing. The attempts to…

Anne:  Oh, the law thing.

Michelle:  … put English law in place rather than the native laws that were there.

Anne:  Yeah, so that it all becomes part of the same kingdom, even though there’s this boundary, in between Wales and England, it’s still… the Welsh have to obey English law. 

They didn’t actually all take surnames, by the way. Some had taken surnames earlier, especially the families that had married into the Marcher Lords, and some took surnames then, but in the rural areas, for instance, a lot of families just continued to keep patronymics as long as they possibly could, so you see them showing up for another couple hundred years.

At any rate, at the time that we’re talking about, the time that William de Braose was operating, the Marcher Lords were going quite strong.

So here’s the background to the massacre.

In 1162, Henry Fitzmiles, who was the son of Miles de Gloucester, because the Normans also had a kind of patronymic system, was killed and his lordship and his estates, and the castle of Abergavenny, went to William de Braose, the 3^rdLord of Bramber, who’s the father of the guy we’re going to be talking about. And it went to William de Braose because his daughter, Bertha, was married to him. And Bertha’s brothers had all died without children, so she inherited, and it went to William de Braose. 

By 1166 the 3^rd Lord of Bramber held Brecon, Abergavenny, swathes of land in Sussex and Devon. He was extremely powerful, and he was a close companion of Henry II.

William IV had taken up control of Abergavenny while his father was still alive, which I think is what leads to a lot of confusion because if you go to look this up you’ll see some places that say that Henry Fitzmiles was our William’s father-in-law and some that say it’s his uncle, and I think that’s where the confusion comes from.

William IV was married to Maude de St. Valery, and she had no Welsh antecedents at all. She was totally Norman, which is so weird in the Marches. But his mother was Bertha, who was the daughter of Sibyl de Neufmarche, who was the daughter of Nest verch Osbern, who was the daughter of Nest verch Gruffydd whose father was Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, the King of Wales. And so William de Braose himself, through his mother, was descended from Welsh kings. 

This made him no never-mind; I’m just saying that that is ironic.

The Anglo-Norman Marcher Lords were often marrying into the Welsh nobility and so you see, if you’re working with the genealogy, Norman names show up in the Welsh lines, Welsh names show up in the Norman lines. It’s all back and forth.

Back in 1162, Henry Fitzmiles, William IV’s uncle, had been murdered. And Michelle, you were saying that this looks like it was, like, in battle?

Michelle:  That’s what some of the sources I was finding were saying. That it wasn’t that Seisyll had Henry Fitzmiles assassinated, it was that they’re just squabbling and Henry Fitzmiles ends up dead.

Anne:  Okay.

Michelle:  I think that’s important because it’s one thing for there to be an ongoing feud, right? Where they’re taking turns assassinating each other. But to take revenge for something that happened in battle is a bit hard to justify.

Anne:  Yeah, especially if you’re taking revenge in 1175 and the battle was in 1162. I mean, give me a break. Yeah, but supposedly… this whole massacre is going to take place in 1175 and supposedly it’s going to be in retribution?

Popper:  Hi! I have more things to say!

Michelle:  That’s hilarious that we’re hearing from him today, because we have hardly heard anything from him until now, and we’re on, like, Episode 20.

Anne:  This is Episode 20, and the parrot is now talking.

But the thing is, he’s gotten healthier and healthier and healthier. Back-story is the parrot is a rescue parrot, an elderly rescue parrot, and we have nursed him through his liver disease and he’s got little seizures and he’s been on medication and he’s gained weight and he’s very, very happy, and so we hear from him a lot now. So, I’m Anne Brannen. I’m in New Mexico. Michelle is in Maryland. And Popper the Parrot is in New Mexico too, and I think he’s just going to be part of things. I’m not going to be able to edit all of this out.

Michelle:  He’s the representative for birds.

Anne:  Yes, he’s the bird representative. And I record in the studio and he lives in the studio and so that is really it.

At any rate, supposedly, Seisyll ap Dyfnwal was responsible for Henry Fitzmiles’ death, and this may or may not be true.

So at Christmas, 1175, William invited Seisyll, and a couple of other Welsh nobles from the area, one being Ieuan ap Rhirid, who now falls out of the story. I mean, I found his name but I couldn’t find the other prince’s name, but there they are. And he invited them and they’re meant to come with their men to a Christmas feast, supposedly either to hear a royal proclamation about carrying arms – I’ve seen that in some places – or to celebrate a peace between the Welsh and English, you know, because everything’s forgiven and it’s okay that Henry is dead. And that actually would make an enormous amount of sense, because it was the custom, in Wales, that at that time of the year, Christmas or New Years, yada yada, that was the time to reconcile and to settle differences. So it would make enormous sense…

Popper:  Hi! I am still here, and feeling gregarious!

… it would make enormous sense to the Welsh that of course, of course the Anglo-Norman lord was inviting them to make everything okay. Of course. Obviously. Which is especially mean. We’re having another blood feast which, you know, Michelle and I are very fond of, and so we’re having a blood feast because he invited them to the feast! And there they were, at the feast. They left their arms at the door because, duh, that’s what you do. And William had them slaughtered.

Now we don’t actually know exactly how this worked out. Did they sit down at the feast? And were they feasting and then he slaughtered them, or did they come into the hall and they closed the door and then he slaughtered them? We don’t actually know. You’ll find people saying all kinds of stuff, but we’re just kind of inventing it. We don’t know. But, at any rate, they were all dead. Every single one of them. He slaughtered everybody in the hall. And then, William de Braose was not done! He went over to Seisyll’s castle where he captured Seisyll’s current wife, I think she was his third wife, Gwladus verch Gruffydd. They captured her and murdered her 7-year-old son Cadwaladr. So, there you go.

Seven years old! So that also, was very bad.

It wasn’t a case of because he killed Seisyll and the 7-year-old son he therefore killed all of Seisyll’s heirs. He hadn’t. There were some grown brothers hanging around who later would try to take Abergavenny and would actually fail at that point. But no, it was a seven-year-old kid and he just killed him, because he was there. 

So, the Welsh never forgot this — since it was very, very evil indeed — and in 1182 Hywel ap Iorwerth took the castle and burned it down, although William wasn’t there. 

Continuing to what happens, William went on to be a favorite of King John, for a while at least, and in 1203 William captured Prince Arthur, who was, at that point, the main rival claimant to the throne of England, because he was the son and heir of Geoffrey, John’s brother, and he was the heir who was designated by John’s brother King Richard I.

Popper: I have thoughts on this! Hi!

William de Braose captured him and then Arthur disappeared. We have no idea what happened to him. Although, pretty much everybody on the planet who knows anything about it, either then or now, thinks that John had him killed. It’s not even a question. It’s like “What happened to the princes in the Tower?” We don’t know. “What happened to Arthur?” John had him killed. We’re clear on this.

So John favored William, he gave him lots of stuff, until about 1207 when he turned on him for reasons that are actually unclear. William at that point joined forces with Llywelyn Fawr – Llywelen the Great – but in 1210 he fled to France, at which point John captured his wife and son and they died in prison soon after, but we’re saving that for a later episode where we get to talk about King John killing Maud de Braose.

Sidenote! John would marry his daughter Joan to Llywelen Fawr in 1230, and William de Braose – another William de Braose, an entirely different one, this is the nephew of the one who perpetrated the massacre – had an affair with Joan while he was being held for ransom at the castle, and so Llywelen hanged him.

Michelle:  No!

Anne:  Yes! And then he put Joan in house arrest for 12 months, but then he forgave her. The relationship between Joan and Llywelen is really interesting, because she was clearly one of his counselors. And he forgives her for this, you know. Although, to be quite fair, the medieval Welsh stance on illegitimacy, adultery, people basically having affairs and whatnot, was so much, so much looser than that of the Anglo-Normans. If you were illegitimate, in Wales, you could inherit as long as your dad said yeah, this is my son (or my daughter). It’s like… it just did not carry the stigma. At any rate. She was in prison for a while, but then she was alright.

So later, in 1403, Abergavenny would be attacked again, and the town burned, because Owain Glyndwr would march through the valley on the last of the national uprisings. 

So. Abergavenny.

Michelle:  It was burnt that time, in 1233, by William Marshal’s son. So William Marshal, showing back up.

Anne: Billy Marshal. So it got burnt down again. Abergavenny. So it gets burnt a lot. Oh well.

Michelle:  Yeah. I’m going to talk about the castle later, but the spoiler on this is that not a stick survives from the time period we’re talking about.

Anne:  No. I think there’s some curtain walls, yeah? I mean, there’s some fairly impressive tall ruins, but they’re not from this time. 

Michelle:  Yeah, they’re not from now.

Anne:  But you can go see them. And they’ve very impressive because, as with all ruined castles and abbeys, you can sit and have your lunch and get all melancholy and perhaps write excellent romantic poems or bad romantic poems, depending on how you feel about it. So. The massacre. That’s my story. It was very bad. Michelle, it was bad. There’s just nothing good about this. It’s like, there’s not even a clear reason for it. I don’t buy for a minute that, like, we’re avenging Miles who died just in a general skirmish as far as I can tell. When everybody was having skirmishes all  the time, and plus it was quite some time ago. Was it to consolidate power? Was it just to get rid of a bunch of the Welsh nobles? I don’t know. But it was not well done. It really, it screwed up Welsh and English relations for a while, although they’re not ever, in this time period, really great, but, you know, screwed ‘em up.

Michelle:  Not only that, it’s derivative. It’s only been five years since Becket was killed over Christmas, at the cathedral. I mean, come on.

Anne:  So you’re… what you don’t like here…

Michelle:  I’m objecting on grounds of creativity.

Anne:  … Okay, so, but the creativity that you’re… the lack of creativity that you’re upset about is not necessarily having the blood feast itself, which is also fairly derivative and quite common, as we have pointed out, but the fact that it’s at Christmas?

Michelle:  Yes. Because it’s only been five years since Becket’s murder. Which we haven’t dealt with yet, but we will, because it’s a big juicy one.

Anne:  In fact I haven’t actually decided what we’re doing next time. You want to do Becket next time?

Michelle:  I thought we were going to do Becket over Christmas, as opposed to last time when we were trying to do Gilles de Rais and we were cursed and things kept crashing and disappearing.

Anne:  Oh that’s right. Yeah. Yeah, we can do Becket over Christmas. I’m cutting this part out, but I’ll figure out what we’re doing before we get to the end of this.

Yeah, so that’s the massacre at Abergavenny. It was really very bad. And that detail, about them going and capturing Seisyll’s wife and slaughtering the seven-year-old, that’s really awful. And by the way, we do not know what happened to Gwladus. She was captured, we know she was captured, but we do not know what happened to her. We never hear about her again. And she was high nobility in Wales and so this really annoyed some important people on the Welsh side.

I think that Abergavenny was not only evil but fairly stupid.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s one of those time period things. Because if he had tried this three or four hundred years later, it would not have been… it’s barely tolerated in the time he’s actually working in, and the Normans have a pretty strong stomach for violence. They’re a violent group, and even they are outraged.

Anne:  Yeah, it was not received well by the Normans. It was really not received well by the Welsh. After that they called this William the “Ogre of Abergavenny.” The monster.

Michelle:  So one of the ways we know about this is the Welsh Annals. It’s talked about directly in the Welsh Annals. But it’s also talked about by a contemporary historian, or chatty priest, depending on how you want to look at him.

Anne:  You can be both.

Michelle:  Gerald of Wales, who is so fascinating, all by himself. I spent most of my research time, I’m just going to be honest, dealing with Gerald of Wales, because he is a hoot. He has both Norman and Welsh ancestry. He’s got a Welsh princess for a grandmother, so he ends up being, ancestry-wise, seventy-five percent Norman and twenty-five percent Welsh, but I think possibly in response — if we’re allowed to psychoanalyze Gerald of Wales – to the brothers… his brothers become very strong Norman knights, and he identifies really strongly with the Welsh side.

Anne:  Huh. That is interesting.

Michelle:  Isn’t it? Isn’t it just?

Anne:  That really is.

Michelle:  He wanted to be a priest from a really early age. In one of his works… because he wrote seventeen books, by the way.

Anne:  I did not know that.

Michelle:  Amazingly productive. And we’ve lost a few of them.

Anne:  I’m looking him up. Yeah, his mother is Angharad FitzGerald, but his grandmother is Nest verch Rhys, you are so right. Yeah. This is an important damn family.

Michelle:  Yes, he is from a very important family. It’s interesting because he’s so well born, he has amazing ambitions, but he’s too well born to be allowed to reach those ambitions. 

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  Henry, the King, sees him as a threat…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  … and so is constantly in the way of allowing him to get promoted.

Anne:  Mmhm.

Michelle:  So he wants to be a priest from a really early age. He tells a story in one of his chatty books about when his brothers made sand castles on the beach, he made sand churches.

Anne:  That is so sweet!

Michelle:  Which, even if it’s not true, it’s so cute. And that’s how he views himself.

Anne:  Little Norman church castles. Oh. I don’t know. With sand, is it easier to make the round arches, or the pointed ones? I don’t know. But at any rate. Oh, that’s just so cute. That sounds cute.

Michelle:  So he wants desperately to become the Bishop of St. David’s. Because what he wants is to help the Welsh Church become independent, re-independent of Canterbury. The English Church is trying, just like the Normans are trying, to consolidate control over Wales. The English Church is trying to consolidate control over the Welsh Church. And he wants to help the Welsh Church become answerable only to Rome, again.

Obviously, the King doesn’t want this. We will have seen, will see this with Henry. This is why he’s fighting with Becket, five years earlier. So the Bishop of St. David’s dies, in 1175, and the canons, who generally would kind of pick three candidates and then send that on for the Pope to pick which of them he wanted, so they pick a slate and then the Pope picks? Gerald makes a strong play. He really tries hard. He’s in his thirties; he’s at the height of his power and his charm. He makes a real strong play, and the electors are pressured by Henry II to reverse course and back his candidate instead, whose name is Peter de Leia. And of course, you know, Henry doesn’t… it’s not like Gerald gets over it, right? He has a real tense relationship with the guy who got the job instead, as you would. But Gerald doesn’t give up those ambitions, and in fact he keeps… Henry II keeps trying to throw him a bone, right? “Well how about Bishop of this other place?” “No.” It was St. David’s or nothing.

Anne:  Yeah. It’s the Welsh equivalent of Canterbury.

Michelle:  Yeah. It was, he wanted that or he didn’t want anything. And he certainly didn’t want to be fobbed off on some other. So, you know, things are tense between him and the King, for a while, but Gerald is too well connected to just kind of ignore. So Henry, six years later, so in 1181, Henry summons Gerald with one of those offers you can’t refuse. He needs somebody to essentially negotiate between him and the Welsh, and Gerald is really well connected to do this. 

Anne:  Yeah. He comes from a family that really gives him the authority to speak. He’s closely descended from Rhys ap Tudur. Yeah. 

Michelle:  So he wants him to become one of his counselors and help keep the peace in Wales, and also to be tutor to the young princes Richard and John, which is really interesting, because John, just like he does everybody else, screws him over. Just like John does to everybody.

Anne:  To everybody. Absolutely everybody. Yeah.

Michelle:  John is one of these people who agrees with whoever talked to him last.

Anne:  Yes. Yes. Yeah he’s… 

“King John was not a good man –

He had his little ways.

And sometimes no one spoke to him

For days and days and days.” 

A.A. Milne.

Michelle:  So in 1198, under the new King John, because, you know, Richard’s come and gone by this point, the Bishopric of St. David’s… Peter de Leia dies and so now, now it’s open again. Sigh. Poor Gerald. He goes to John and he says “Okay, will you support me with this?” and John says “Yeah, that sounds good.” And so Gerald, you know, hauls ass to Rome to try to get the Pope to confirm him before John changes his mind, as Gerald knew very well he would do. And he gets there, with copies of his own books to give to the Pope, to sweeten the deal, and he says to him “Other people would show up with bribes, I’m showing up with books.”

Anne: Did that go over well?

Michelle:  Well… I mean, the problem was that John got talked to by somebody else…

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  … and changed his mind and then those people show up in Rome and, anyway, one thing and another, Gerald spends the next five years trying to battle through this and get to the bishopric, to the point where the people of St. David’s are just like “Please, we just need a bishop.”

Anne:  “We don’t care! We don’t care.”

Michelle:  “Goodness sakes, this has to be over!” So Gerald finally is forced to… I feel bad for the dude. He had this one ambition, that he kept not being able to… because he was just too well connected to be allowed to have that position.

Anne:  Yeah. Yeah.

Michelle:  If your aim was to keep control.

Anne:  Yes. What happens to his brothers?

Michelle:  I don’t have the first…

Anne:  He’s a de Barri…

Michelle:  So the reason I bring up Gerald of Wales, is that he writes a book that makes mention of this massacre. Other than, as we know, you know I have a thing about digging into primary sources because it’s a lot of fun.

Anne:  And we do have primary sources, ergo…

Michelle:  Ergo. So here we are. He writes a lot of books. But in 1188 he gets hauled in with Baldwin, who I think is the Archbishop of Canterbury… yes, this is who this is. Baldwin is the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he is going around drumming up support for the Third Crusade.

Anne:  As you do.

Michelle:  Uh-huh. So he’s going around strong-arming nobles into taking the Cross, to go on the Third Crusade, and so Gerald gets called in to come with him because if you have a local person to come with you, you bring your local person with you. And of course, like any other even halfway educated person – and Gerald was well educated –

Anne:  True. Paris, he was educated in.

Michelle:  Yeah, he went to the University of Paris and he spoke at least four languages.

Anne:  Oh really? I didn’t know that part. So Welsh and Latin and what?

Michelle:  Welsh, Latin, the Anglo- Norman…

Anne:  English and French?

Michelle:  Whatever the Normans are speaking, so maybe not English. Anglo-Norman.

Anne:  No, they’re speaking Anglo-Norman still at this point. Yeah.

Michelle:  So he gets taken off on this adventure, with Baldwin, to drum up support for the Third Crusade, and he keeps notes, as they go along, and it becomes this book, A Journey Through Wales.

Anne:  Oh! Delicious!

Michelle:  Which is a delightful book. It is chatty and it tells all kinds of stories but it doesn’t tell them in chronological order. He literally just sort of tells them as he goes along. “Here’s where we are! Here’s where we are, I know a story about this place!”

Anne:  So they have a linear order, as to the journey, but not a chronological order. This is an early travel journal.

Michelle:  Yes! That’s exactly what it is! And he had done the same thing… This is like a sequel, because he had done the same thing with Ireland. He had been sent over to do work in Ireland and so he writes a travelogue about Ireland and so now he’s doing the same thing in Wales. And it’s detailed enough that we can pretty well track where he was, and where they went. So, as they are going into, in Chapter Four, Abergavenny, he first tells the story that I was telling you earlier about Richard de Clare getting ambushed because he foolishly goes ahead of his army and thinks he’s going to be fine.

Anne:  Hint: that he’s not.

Michelle:  He is not.

Anne:  It’s not fine.

Michelle:  He’s not fine.

Anne:  What was in his head? Was he thinking, “The Welsh love me even though I’m an Anglo-Norman!” or was he thinking “No one will notice me because I’m wearing very few bits of jewelry,” or what was he thinking? What was it? We don’t know.

Michelle:  Gerald’s tone is just so disapproving about this. 

“When they reached the entrance to the wood, Richard de Clare sent back Brian…”

This is Brian de Wallingford who is acting as his guide…

“… and his men, and rode unarmed into the forest, although this was much against Brian’s wishes and, indeed against his express advice. Richard was foolish enough to imagine that the trackway was safe. Ahead of him went a singer to announce his coming and a fiddler who accompanied the singer on his instrument. From then onwards things happened very quickly. The Welsh had prepared an ambush for Richard.”

Yeah, Richard ends up dead. And then, then he kind of (fast forward noise) The lesson from this is “We learn to be careful about the future and to exercise caution even when all seems to be going well.”

So, chatty, chatty, chatty and then he goes on to not wanting to talk about the massacre, which is really interesting because this is the third version of the travelogue. He’s been working on this thing. Gerald lives to a ripe old age, and so he wrote the first version of it right after he got home, hot off the presses, in 1190, but the people he wrote about, in large measure were still alive, and kind of powerful and so he kind of thinks better of it, and I have bad things to say about the editor of the edition that I’m working with, which is a Penguin Classics edition, because we get told that in the first version, the 1190 version, which still survives – there are three manuscripts of it – but what we get told is “The passages concerning William de Braose in Itin., I.2, are far more trenchantly worded than they were to be later.” 

But, does he tell me what it is? No. He doesn’t. All I know is that he was apparently a lot more loose-tongued in the first version than he’d been in either the second or the third, where what he says is “I leave it to others to tell the story of the bloodthirsty outrages which have been committed one after another in these parts in our own lifetime,…”

And, he decides to blame, for reasons, Henry II as the real instigator.

Anne:  How does that even work? How does that work? I don’t understand that.

Michelle:  He does not make an argument for that, he just says “It’s hardly William’s fault at all, he got put into the… you know, you things just happened, and he got locked up in his own dungeon and it didn’t…” So he writes this revision, you know, where now William’s, I guess, back on the upswing, and he’s looking to do a little CYA and is claiming that William had absolutely nothing to do with his massacre, and that it’s all Henry’s fault, who of course is safely dead by the time he’s writing the third version.

It’s always best to blame the dead people.

Anne:  Dead people are really useful for that, but how does Gerald spin the slaughter of the seven-year-old boy, and the kidnapping of the wife? Because Henry wasn’t actually there, so William escapes and in a little fit of rage goes and attacks Seisyll’s castle?

Michelle:  He just doesn’t talk about that.

Anne:  We move on. 

Michelle:  He talks about “I have thought it better not to relate them in detail,…”

Anne:  Yeah, well.

Michelle:  “… lest they serve to encourage other equally infamous men.” “I’m not going to tell you what happened, because everybody already knows,” but then he does go on to spend quite a lot of time talking about what happens when “the sons and grandsons of those who had been murdered grew to man’s estate and from being boys became fully-grown adults. Burning with revenge, they concealed themselves with a strong force of soldiery…” 

And this is that part you were talking about, with it then getting attacked again? We know tons more about that second attack, in Gerald’s third version of things, than we do about the first. The first is just hop, skip and a jump.

Anne:  Bunch of dead people in the hall.

Michelle:  It just happened!

Anne:  It was dinner and then things fell apart. Yeah. But! Later there was an attack!

Michelle:  Yes. We know tons more about that attack from… I am so irritated that I cannot find the first version of this to find out what the “trenchantly-worded passages” were.

Anne:  The first version doesn’t exist in digital-land, does it?

Michelle:  It doesn’t appear to exist in any land, that I can get hold of. There are three manuscripts of it. And Gerald’s works, you know, a lot of them survive and they survive in multiple copies, which tells us a lot about him.

Anne:  Yeah. They’re well known. And I’m wondering, also, if he’s bringing stuff to the Vatican, surely that stuff is all there. I mean, the Vatican library hasn’t been sacked. Nobody’s gone over the Vatican library and taken all the paper out and burned it in the courtyard like they did at, like, Peterborough, for instance.

Michelle:  The first versions, there’s one in the British Library, one the Bodleian, and one at Cambridge. 

Anne:  So those are all still in England. Okay.

Michelle:  Those are in England. Let me scroll forward here. The second version exists only in the British Library, and the third version:  British Library, British Library… I don’t know where the Phillips is.

Anne:  Essex.

Michelle:  Ah!

Anne:  It’s the Peabody Essex.

Michelle:  These have all managed to stay in England.

Anne:  They’re all in England. That is interesting. Nobody’s gone and gotten them and taken them to California.

Michelle:  So Gerald of Wales was fun to read about. He’s a really interesting counterpoint to who we were talking about last time, Gregory.

Anne:  Gregory of Tours.

Michelle:  Yes. He’s a really interesting counterpoint to Gregory because Gregory is writing very serious history and pretending like he has no bias, but Gerald is just like “Let me dish for you, girl!” He’s hysterical. I love him.

Anne:  He’s having fun.

Michelle:  He’s having such a good time.

Anne:  Well, so that’s Gerald. Yay. Thank you Gerald.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  So our contemporary sources are Gerald, kind of wandering around telling the story, and the Chronicles as well. Because of course it would show up in the Welsh Chronicles. “Bad things that were done to us by the annoying Normans!”

Michelle:  So the castle is interesting, but of course none of it that was there is there. And partially because the castle was originally a motte-and-bailey, so it’s wooden. It was built by the Norman lord Hamelin de Balun in 1087 and it was wooden. 

Of course they’re rebuilding in stone as quickly as possible, but they’re not getting there fast enough, because it’s pretty well leveled by Richard Marshal in 1233, in addition to that earlier attack we were talking about where the Welsh came to get their own back.

So everything that was there now… things were rebuilt, the castle was rebuilt between 1233 and 1295, and then added onto in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the curtain wall and the gatehouse, and it was used until the English Civil War.

Anne:  Really?

Michelle:  The English Civil War was a bad time for castles.

Anne:  Yes, actually it was a very bad time for castles. Very bad indeed. Yes.

Michelle:  Forces on both sides were actually using them, and then by this point you have really effective cannons so… I saw a castle in Ireland once that had been used in the English Civil War and there were pieces of walls that had just been blown twenty feet away from where it had been, because of having been hit by cannon fire.

Anne:  Those were strong structures, but they were not made to resist cannonballs. No.

Michelle:  This castle was not actually damaged in the English Civil War, instead what happened is that, as the Royalists lost ground, Charles I ordered it to be slighted. 

Anne:  Really?

Michelle:  So the walls were taken down on purpose. The walls were lowered to the point where it was not considered to be good enough for defense. Yes! He did it on purpose! The ones that weren’t blown up got slighted, on purpose. It was a bad time for castles and now I have somebody else to be mad at. I was already pretty mad at Henry VIII, all of the medieval manuscripts he destroyed.

Anne:  Yeah, those of us who love architecture and manuscripts, we have a lot to be annoyed with.

Michelle:  I kind of knew this already, that the Civil War was a really bad time for castles. I guess I hadn’t thought so much about the ones that were destroyed on purpose to keep them from being useful to the other side, rather than the ones that were blown to smithereens by the cannons. That’s Fort Pitt… you remember when we lived in Pittsburgh…

Anne:  Yes. We used to live in Pittsburgh.

Michelle:  Fort Pitt is that different design, with the points?

Anne:  Mmhm.

Michelle:  The five-point? Which is what castles become, once we move into the age of cannons, because then the cannon balls kind of slide along and don’t hit it as much.

Anne:  Well, the other thing that the Civil War was hard on, the English Civil War was hard on, were the cathedrals. I used to do my work in Cambridge and Ely, the cathedral at Ely, all of the statuary, everything you possibly could reach, the faces have been smashed off, because Cromwell…

Michelle:  Oh that’s right! That bastard!

Anne:  … was from Huntingdon, which is nearby, and he stationed his men there. So I was used to that. I was so shocked when I went to York and the statues, the faces on the walls are actually where you could put your hand up and reach them and they haven’t been touched. But the places that the Puritans were holding, the cathedrals are devastated.

Michelle:  That I did know. I did know that there is one church in England that survived with all of its medieval stained glass, because they were so busy throwing rocks through everything.

Anne:  Yeah. They had to smash everything.

Michelle:  Medievalists are pretty salty about the Puritans. With good cause.

Anne:  Yeah. Because there’s a whole lot of stuff that existed up until then that then got smashed, because it was iconic. It was all icons. All the Mary statues.

Michelle:  So in 1818…

Anne:  Oh yes. We move on.

Michelle:  Yeah, there was a hunting lodge built on the site for the Marquess of Abergavenny, and that building is now the museum and gift shop on the site.

Anne:  Oh good, a gift shop. Yay. And a tea shop, I’m hoping, because every place you go there’s a tea shop, and a gift shop. But you have to have tea. Tea is important.

Michelle:  I’m in favor of that.

Anne:  Oh yeah. Oh yeah, totally. You know what, the tea shop at the British Library is really great. I love that tea shop. At any rate. But, that’s a digression entirely. I don’t know… oh yeah, the manuscripts. That’s why that was in my head. Tea. Manuscripts.

Michelle:  This was my week to hunt for things and not find them. As we know. I was so excited when you had told me about that play, from 1897, about the massacre of Abergavenny, but I can tell that it exists. If things weren’t shut down I could have requested it over Interlibrary Loan. Because there are paper copies of it, but it has not been digitized, so who knows what that play is about.

Anne:  I’m assuming it’s godawful, but it might be amusingly godawful. I’m not thinking it’s brilliant but, you know, because mostly not. But still. Yeah. I’d like to know.

Michelle:  I would have liked to have seen it, than not seen it. I prefer to see the plays and assess on my own whether they’re godawful.

Anne:  You don’t want to just take my word for it. It’s awful! Michelle! Terrible! No.

Michelle:  I don’t know. That one that we talked about last time, from 1593, about the… no, not last time. Must have been the time before. About the Peasants’ Revolt, was actually pretty decent. I would have done it.

Anne:  Yeah, we want to do that one. We want to do that. That sounds good. But mostly not.

Michelle:  This one’s probably terrible. I mean, it probably is. But I would have liked to have seen it instead.

There is, however, if you have more time than me, because I was busy looking for primary sources, there is on Kindle Unlimited a novella called Massacre at Abergavenny Castle by Will Roberts, and there is a novel called Lady of Hay, which has to do with the city and not the cow-fodder, by Barbara Erskine, and the massacre does come up in there. But I’m just going to own up that I didn’t look at either one of those because I was busy making friends of Gerald of Wales.

Anne:  Yeah, it was all Gerald of Wales, all the time. And I really can’t blame you, actually. Can’t blame you. I actually am surprised though that it doesn’t come down to us more, you know, in the same way that we were talking about the… oh, what is that one, the Scots one, that didn’t… what was it? The Edinburgh…

Michelle:  Oh! The fake one! The fake one?

Anne:  Yeah. The one that we don’t believe actually ever happened, even though there’s all kinds of histories that it did, in Scotland. You know, that one? I mean, that  one shows up all the time, but this one really is… there’s a website I have found where they’re talking about it and relating it to the Red Wedding of Game of Thrones, yada yada. But I don’t know. It really is much more locally known than the one with King James and the Douglases and the bull’s head that wasn’t there.

Michelle:  Oh the bull’s head one! Yeah.

Anne:  Mmhmm.

Michelle:  One is forced to conclude two things, about these kind of things, I think. Number one is that those hospitality rules existed for a reason, because people were all the time breaking them, about how you’re actually supposed to treat your guests and, you know, feed them and don’t kill them?

Anne:  Yeah, you have them take their arms off and then you pretend you’re going to show them a nice time and you slaughter them? It’s just… it’s tacky. It’s so tacky.

Michelle:  Attacking at Christmas, also, clearly is a thing that strategically people keep coming back to. We see this. The Vikings do this. They attack… I think it’s Waterford they attack on Christmas Day. Even George Washington uses it.

Anne:  True. True. It’s a very good device, because people tend to be thinking about other things, like, you know, partying, or eating stuff, or having little presents or whatever. And especially with this case, where it’s not only the Christmas festivities, whatever they may be, but the Welsh custom of forgiveness and reconciliation, and preying on that is just so mean. So vicious. 

Yeah, but of course, of course it’s a really great time. If you need to get some slaughtering done, you might as well do it as Christmas. People are much less… and at a feast, because people then aren’t, like, paying attention. They’re, like, all happy and eating stuff, and then you do things to them and they’re dead.

Michelle:  It worked.

Anne:  What is that, though, it was called The Christmas Massacre, wasn’t it? I want to mention that before we go.

Michelle:  Oh, oh the blog post. Yes, this is another work of fiction. I forgot about that. It’s a blog post called Brecon Beacons, which sounds like it’s an official Welsh… yeah this is a Welsh national park thing. So that makes this even funnier, that they have written a satirical blog post from the point of view of William, and it’s all about it’s really unfair that people are calling him the “Ogre of Abergavenny,” because every single thing he did was justified.

Anne:  It is. It’s fairly hilarious:

“We welcomed them all to the castle. We stacked all their weapons and their armor in the guard room and locked it. We made sure their servants and their horses had all the food they needed, and then we started the feast. It was a great feast, a truly great feast. They ate goose, venison, pigeons, all kinds of fowls. If I had been sitting in the castle of the man I killed I would not have been so arrogant as to eat so much food I could barely stand, and drink all the mead and beer Murderer Seisyll and his terrorists drank, even it was Christmas. Lousy leadership.”

Michelle:  This is hilarious.

Anne:  It is. It sounds… the tone of it sounds very much like a certain leader of America at the moment. “Bad mistake,” he says.

Michelle:  I love this so much that it is on this, you know, official Welsh national parks website.

Anne:  It’s on the Brecon Beacon National Park site, and it ends: 

“I am William de Braose, and I approved the Christmas Victory 1175, at Abergavenny Castle.”

We’ll put that link in the show notes.

That was our foray into Wales. That’s the first time we’ve gone there. You got anything else, Michelle?

Michelle:  No. I don’t. I enjoyed this.

Anne:  Yeah. You always do. You always do. You like learning stuff, so it always works really well.

Michelle:  Yeah, I didn’t know anything, although my eyes were crossing trying to make the family trees make sense.

Anne:  Oh, the family trees… the family trees c’est moi. Yeah, I enjoyed this too, because I was very glad to be able to talk about Wales, finally.

Next time, we’re going to talk about Marguerite Porete.

Michelle:  Oh!

Anne:  Yeah! Let’s go to France.

Michelle:  I don’t know anything about that. So…

Anne:  Yep.

Michelle:  I do actually know… we keep coming up against things that I don’t know anything about, but I do know things about the Middle Ages, just not these specific things, until we research them.

Anne:  And actually she often knows things about the specific stuff, it’s just that she hadn’t realized that’s what it was about.

Michelle:  I forgot.

Anne:  Yeah, well, Marguerite Porete. We’re going to count her, like we count Joan of Arc, as murdered, how about that? Just because you’re legally killed doesn’t mean it wasn’t murder. Sometimes it’s not murder, but sometimes it is. So yeah, we’ll do Marguerite Porete. Burned for heresy.

Michelle:  Okay!

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Okay.

Anne:  Yeah. So that’s our discussion of the Massacre at Abergavenny, the Christmas Day massacre perpetrated by William de Braose on Seisyll ap Dyfnwal and several other people.

This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology.

We’re on Apple Podcast, iHeart Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher. Please leave a review, we’d really appreciate that. And you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, and you can find there, also, the show notes, written by Michelle, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich. And you can reach any of us through that page.

And you can leave comments there too! We’d love to hear from you, and if you have medieval crimes that you think we should discuss, please let us know! And that’s us for now. Goodbye!

Michelle:  Bye!

The Murder of Sigebert, Vitry-en-Artois 575

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host who is recording in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America. Just check out our flag. I’m just saying.

Anne:  Also, jousting is actually the state sport, isn’t this true?

Michelle:  It is!

Anne: Ya’ll are hilarious.

Michelle:  How did that even happen? I have no idea. Jousting!

Anne:  Yeah, the flag we understand, but the jousting? Where is that from? You have to look that up, so you can tell us next time.

Michelle:  I mean, I know it happened in the sixties. But I don’t know why.

Anne:  I so want to know. So you have to find this out.

Michelle:  Oh, I’m going to have to look it up. Because, what was in somebody’s head, that they said to themselves “Let’s pick a state sport! I know! Jousting!” Other people have things like badminton.

Anne:  The great state of Maryland. I’m in the great state of New Mexico. Michelle’s in the great state of Maryland, and we’re talking about bad medieval behavior.

We promised – and so now we’re doing it – to go backward. Because we keep saying “One thousand years of people behaving badly,” and we stuck it on our business cards, and that’s our little logo. That’s not a logo. What is that? A saying? It’s our saying? It’s our maxim?

Michelle:  It’s our tagline.

Anne:  It’s our tagline! One thousand years of people behaving badly. Our tagline.

But we really have been focusing on the late Middle Ages, maybe going back to the middle Middle Ages, and we have not done the early Middle Ages, and so that’s what we’re doing today. We’re going to talk about Sigebert, the murder of Sigebert. And it’s not really enough to just talk about the murder of Sigebert, because it’s hooked in to the execution of Brunhilda and so we’re just sticking the whole thing together.

So we get to talk about the Merovingians. Yay! We’re at the very early pieces of the Middle Ages. This is so exciting. 

And we want to tell you – here’s our disclaimer – that we often use bad words, and also terrible things happen to people in our podcast because it’s the Middle Ages, and they’re behaving badly, and so you should use discretion if you are a child, or if you are sharing this with children, you should listen to it first. So, there you go.

So, yeah. So, Sigebert. Sigebert was one of the Merovingians, and the Merovingians were named for Merovech, who had fought with the Romans against the Huns. What happened is that Rome was really big. Rome got really, really big. You knew this Michelle, right? About Rome getting big?

Michelle:  Mmhm.

Anne:  Yeah. We knew this. And, where Rome went, Rome had soldiers and Rome did things like they built aqueducts and roads and bathhouses and they were just… they came with enormous technological superiority, and so they handed that on over and they had soldiers, and they would win, they would conquer, the people who were living in these places where they went, and then those people would often become pieces of the Roman army. They would become Roman soldiers. And so that’s why Merovech was fighting with the Romans against the Huns. And so these were… I don’t know, are they still barbarians if they’re using Roman weaponry? I don’t know. At any rate, so, though later on they would turn against Rome – it was sort of sad, that piece of things – but there they were. They had been trained by Rome. So they were the Gallo-Roman forces.

The Germanic tribes participated in the Roman military, and then later they would defeat the Romans in Northern Gaul, and the Frankish kings in the north and east. The Merovingians were part of the Germanic forces.

And they were in Francia. This is the kingdom of the Franks, which is now France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany. And after the Romans left… because you remember the Romans, they kind of like fell apart and then they left  everywhere and, you know, so King Arthur was washed up on the shore? It was really sad. It was the largest of the barbarian kingdoms in Western Europe, until the Treaty of Verdun, which was in 843, which divided it into the West and the East, and the West is what would become France and the East is what would become Germany. So the Merovingians were descended from Merovech.

Now I have to add something in here which really, probably only interests me, but I’m going to tell you anyway, which is that, fascinatingly, to me, the Merovingians are the only people I’ve run across in Europe who were not descended from the gods.

Michelle:  really?

Anne:  Oh yeah! All the other genealogies, people are descended from Odin, and people are descended from Beli Mawr the Sun God, you know, which I used to be, on Geni, until we cut all the mythological figures off, and now I’m not, at least in Geni reality, because in my reality I’m still descended from Beli Mawr the Sun God, but that’s neither here nor there.

No! The Merovingians were descended from Merovech, and he was a guy. I find this hilarious.

Michelle:  That’s really unusual!

Anne:  I know! Yeah, because what was going on, with these genealogies, is that if you were rulers of some kind of place in the Middle Ages, obviously your line of ancestors was very important, and obviously you came from some kinds of gods. I mean the Romans did this… the Romans actually were gods, and so there was that. But yeah, I mean, this is normal. No, the Merovingians are descended from Merovech, and Merovech was just a guy, and he is not descended from the gods. I’m just telling you. I love this.

Michelle:  But he must have been a pretty amazing guy, if they’re, like, “We don’t need to be descended from a god, because check out our dude. Who needs Odin?”

Anne:  Yeah. “We don’t need this! We don’t need Odin. We don’t need Beli Mawr the Sun God.” Yeah.

So, the Frankish Kingdom. From around 450 to 751 the Kings of France were the Merovingians, and by the middle of the sixth century they had united the Franks, they had conquered the Gauls and the Alemanni, and the Bavarii, and the Saxons, and they were just humongous. 

In fact, I might put this up as one of our visuals. I might put it in the show notes. You look at the map of the Frankish Kingdom, it’s really big! It’s all of Europe, basically.

Michelle:  And this is at a time when things were done by personal loyalty. You took your oath directly to your king. That’s an amazing accomplishment.

Anne:  Yes, they had a hereditary line. Clovis was ruling from 481 to 511, he’s really the person who brings this all together, and he conquered the Romans and Frankish tribes, it was just… forget the Romans. Oh, by the way, the beginning of the Middle Ages is 410, when a different barbarian group, which I’ll get to later… because that’s when, basically, the barbarians take over Rome. So that’s the beginning of the Middle Ages. So we’re right after that.

Michelle:  Click.

Anne:  Sigebert.. this is Sigebert I, and his dates are about 535 to 575, let’s say, and he was king of Austrasia from 561 to 575.

Michelle:  I had to look at that three times to make sure it wasn’t Australia. I knew it wasn’t, obviously. I obviously knew it wasn’t Australia, but I wondered if maybe Australia was named after a different place. But if it is, it’s not named after this place.

Anne:  No, it has to do with “east.” “Aust.” “Aust-rasia.” This is the eastern part. 

So his father died, in 561. His father was Clotaire, and the background of this is Clotaire had murdered the sons of his brother, Chlodomer, so as to take his territory because… here’s the deal… The Merovingians had laws, they were big on laws. In fact they were so big on laws that the Salic Laws are descended from one of the branches and they would influence and be part of French law, like, on into… I mean up until the revolution, I think. So they had laws. And they also had customs. And the way that it worked when you were a king of… and you were, like, controlling a whole bunch of territory, and you were a Merovingian, when you died the kingdom did not go to, like, your oldest son, or somebody that you had named as a successor. No, no. It got divided up. Just as if you were, like, you know, when our parents die, everything gets divided up. Just like you were some kind of, like, normal sort of person. And not descended from the gods at all, I might mention.

But the problem with this is that, although it’s nicely sort of fair, in terms of all the sons are treated equally – forget the daughters, they’re not counting, but medieval-land and so let’s just take that for given – it all gets divided up, over and over and over. It’s good in theory, but over and over and over what happens is that the sons fight amongst themselves in order to reunite the kingdom, and somebody to take power. It just happens over and over and over. And now we’re at a piece of it.

So Sigebert. Sigebert’s father had died, in 561. The kingdom got divided. Sigebert had Austrasia, and the capital was at Rheims. Charibert got Paris and it’s environs, which Sigebert then got when Charibert died in 567. Guntram got Burgundy, its capital was at what’s now Orléans. And Chilperic got Soissons. 

OK. Great. So it’s all divided up. And Sigebert got married to Brunhilda, who was a Visigoth. It’s the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410. So Brunhilda, who had been an Arian Christian, when she was raised in what’s now Toledo, became a Catholic when she married Sigebert.

Chilperic, then, Sigebert’s brother, married Brunhilda’s sister, Galswintha. OK. Fair enough. However, alas, he got tired of her, and he had her murdered, and then he married his mistress, Fredegund. OK. So, Brunhilda was very upset by this. Our sources are clear that, when Sigebert went to war with Chilperic, he did it because Brunhilda was pushing for the war. Now, quite frankly, since the entire thing is set up so that really you have to fight each other for your territory, I’m not actually buying it completely, that the reason that Sigebert went to war with his brother is totally because his wife was so annoyed. You know? I’m like, I’m sure his wife was annoyed. Very annoyed. And indeed the feud was going to go on until everybody was dead. But, I think that probably fighting your brother so that you could have Soissons is just not an unusual sort of thing.

Michelle:  Yeah, I don’t think it was a hard sell.

Anne:  No. So, he went to war with Chilperic, and this was a long, long war, which got continued by their descendants. Sigebert conquered Poitiers and Touraine, but he was murdered after these places declared him king. And he was murdered by assassins who had been sent by Fredegund. They were using poisoned knives, and they stabbed him. So, that’s the death of Sigebert. The murder of Sigebert. He got murdered. That was really sad huh? Are you sad, Michelle?

Michelle:  Seems like there’s quite a lot of violence going on. The potential for episodes here is thick on the ground, really. 

Anne:  You could turn the Merovingians into one of those drama soap operas that goes on and on and on and on and on. It’s really the same plot over and over and over and over. And you just kind of like move along a little bit in time. Until eventually… I’ll tell you what happens to the Merovingians is that eventually they just kind of like peter on out, and the kings don’t have a lot of power, and the mayor of the palace, who’s really, in Merovingian terms, the second in command, the second most powerful? The mayor of the palace, at some point, when it’s Charles Martel – Charles the Hammer – will basically rule as king, and then his son Pepin will take over, and Pepin will give birth to Charlemagne, and then we’ll have the Carolingians.

There’s a little piece in there where the Merovingians are kind of like…. And then the Carolingians! Ta-dah! The Carolingians arise. But, at any rate, that hasn’t happened yet.

OK, so Sigebert’s dead. Chilperic, I guess, gets all these places. Now at this point, what we’re going to do is discuss Brunhilda, because Brunhilda had been instrumental, at least, in causing this war to go on. Although, as we pointed out, it would have gone on anyway, probably. But Brunhilda is really something else. So, as I promised you earlier, Michelle, when we were talking, I’m now going to give you the précis of Brunhilda: Her History.

Michelle:  OK.

Anne:  Yeah. Here we go.

So, she married Sigebert in 567. And his brother, Chilperic, who was from Neustria, the eastern part of the land, married her sister, murdered her, married his mistress. OK. Chilperic invaded Sigebert’s land and was defeated, and Sigebert was declared king, and Fredegund had him killed, and also at that point, Fredegund had Brunhilda imprisoned, at Rouen. Chilperic’s son, Merovech (not our original Merovech, he’s named after his ancestor) went to see her, and married her. OK, so she got married to her nephew by marriage, which actually this was against canon law, but she did it anyway.

And then Chilperic sent him to a monastery. He escaped, and he tried to take Tours, but he failed, and he committed suicide by having himself killed by a servant. OK, so now she’s been a widow twice. I hope you’re following this.

Brunhilda became regent for her son, Childebert II, and she actually – this is kind of actually sort of heartbreaking – she did a lot of good administrative things for the country. A lot along the lines that the Romans had brought in, things like fixing the aqueducts and the roads and whatnot. She also established monasteries and everything but, unfortunately, she was kind of high-handed, and she annoyed the nobility, always a bad move. Always a bad move. And do royal rulers do this over and over and over, throughout history? Yes, they do.

At any rate, Childebert continued the war – her son – fighting Clotaire II. So the descendants are still fighting, and Childebert died in 596. He was only 26 years old. She then acted as regent for her grandson, Theudebert, but he exiled her in 599 when, I guess, he got old enough, and I think she was annoying. I think she was sort of annoying, Michelle. Because people keep trying to kill her, and they exile her, and they don’t want to be friends with her, and it’s just sad, really. 

Michelle:  She seems to be surviving it, though, so, she must have…

Anne:  Well, yes. For quite a while. Although she’s dead now. She’s dead. OK. And she went to his brother Theuderic and incited war. So here is another war amongst the brothers that Brunhilda has incited.

She had the mayor of the palace killed, in 604, so that her lover at that time could take power. He was murdered by his own warriors, and Brunhilda had their leader tortured and executed, and then she had assassins murder Desiderius, who was a priest, when he preached against her, and he accused her of very bad things, like incest and murder, which actually are technically true. And so she had him murdered, and now that’s who Saint Didier is. So, he’s a saint because of Brunhilda.

Sigebert II, who was a child at that time, succeeded Theuderic. OK, fair enough. And the nobles declared him king, to keep him away from Brunhilda. They didn’t want her to be regent. But she did become regent, and she was in her 70s by this point. I don’t know if you’re doing the math, but she’s in her 70s.

Much of the nobility joined up with Clotaire II and they killed the young king, and then Clotaire accused Brunhilda of murdering ten kings, which actually I think is a little much.

Michelle:  Close.

Anne:  Yeah, she had killed a bunch. And Austrasia and Neustria were joined together, at that point, because they had, in Brunhilda, a common enemy. So she was executed. Did you come across this? Do you know how she was executed?

Michelle:  You know, I stopped after Sigebert’s death.

Anne:  Oh, and you missed all of Brunhilda. Yes. Brunhilda was executed… you understand, she’s like in her 70s at this point. She was executed, we are told, by being tied by her hair and one arm and one leg to a young colt, and they made the colt to run and his hooves tore her apart. One of the things I read said that actually one of his hooves kind of like immediately knocked her head off, which I hope is true. I really hope is true. That’s what they did! That’s what they did. They executed her in a very dramatic fashion. And that is our Brunhilda.

So that’s our murder. We had a murder, which was a murder of a king, which was in the middle of an enormous bunch of other murders of kings, and people who were associated with kings, and mayors of the palace, and people who were lovers of the kings and just like Sigebert. Sigebert got murdered. Brunhilda, on the other hand, had quite a long little story of messing around with powerful people and being powerful herself until, eventually, it was over. The end.

Michelle:  She lasted a long time, though.

Anne:  She did, didn’t she? It’s really amazing. It’s just amazing because other people are just dying right and left around her and she just… she kept going for quite some time.

I don’t know why somebody didn’t either assassinate her or publicly execute her earlier, but that public execution and the accusation about killing off ten kings seems to me to be a kind of thing that’s being used to really show that this particular piece of power is over.

Michelle:  But if somebody has not written a book about her called Murderess of Ten Kings, they’re missing an opportunity.

Anne:  You can do it!

Michelle:  To have that accusation thrown at you? That’s kind of impressive. 

Anne:  Yeah, most people who murder kings manage about one, before various forces come down on them. Ten? Really? Ten?

Michelle:  That would imply some talent and success, that I think maybe they weren’t going for when they made that accusation.

Anne:  I don’t know. I think she was a very scary figure.

Michelle:  My sewing machine’s named Brunhilda.

Anne:  Oh really? By you or by the company?

Michelle:  By me.

Anne:  How did that come to be?

Michelle:  It’s just really tough and can sew anything, so it seemed…

Anne:  Because you didn’t know her story at this time, or at least this piece of it.

Michelle:  I didn’t, but it’s pretty simple. It’s straightforward, but it’s very successful. So now I’m feeling really good about the choice. 

Anne:  Yeah. I bet it could sew through ten layers of denim. You should try this, you know, and let us know.

Michelle:  One of the public services we’re providing, I hope, is knocking people out of the idea that being royalty in the Middle Ages was really great. The likelihood that somebody was going to kill you was really high.

Anne:  Yeah, and it’s not always nice. I mean, I like the poisoned knives killing Sigebert, because that’s really… like even if you don’t manage to stab him through the heart, or an artery, he’s going to go, one way or another. It’s very smart. A very smart method. The tying you to the tail of a horse, that’s just…

Michelle:  That’s bad. That was a little excessive.

Anne:  Yes. I had seen earlier that she had been executed by being torn apart by horses. Then I found the detail and it’s not actually horses, it’s just one. There’s an efficiency to it, really.

Michelle:  So I was supposed to look up adaptations, which I kind of did, but we also know that if there’s a primary source to be had, I generally end up in it. So, you want to hear what Gregory of Tours has to say about Sigebert’s death?

Anne:  I do!

Michelle:  I was delighted to discover that there was a contemporary historian, because we don’t have a lot… for this time period, in England, we don’t really have sources like this. Very, very few contemporary sources.

Anne:  Yeah. There’re the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.

Michelle:  Yeah, they’re later. For the sixth century, things are thin on the ground in England. Partially because you have the Anglo-Saxons invading, and they’re not literate yet, and they’re burning things down, and the Celts are too busy trying to not get killed to be writing stuff down.

We have a couple things, but not a lot. Anyhow, so I was delighted to find Gregory of Tours, which is a name I had heard, of course, as a historian, but not really done too much with.

Anne:  No, because he writes about stuff that wasn’t…

Michelle:  Wasn’t something I’d had an opportunity to come up against yet. So here’s what he has to say about Sigebert getting dead. 

“Now Sigibert took the cities this side of Paris and marched as far as Rouen, wishing to destroy these same cities with his army. But he was prevented from doing so by his own people. He returned thence and entered Paris. And there Brunhilda came to him with her children. Then the Franks who had once looked to the older Childebert, sent an embassy to Sigibert that if he would come to them they would abandon Chilperic and make him king over them. On hearing this he sent men to besiege his brother in the city mentioned above, and he himself purposed to hasten thither. ”

Here’s the important bit:

“And, the holy bishop Germanus said to him, “If you go and do not purpose to kill your brother you shall return alive and victorious; but if you have another purpose in mind you shall die. For thus said the Lord through Solomon: ‘You who prepare a pit for your brother shall fall into it.’ But because of his wickedness he failed to pay heed. And when he came to the village named Vitry, all the army was gathered about him, and they placed him on a shield and made him king over them. Then two slaves who had been placed under a charm by Queen Fredegunda, carrying strong knives with poisoned blades – of the sort commonly called scramasaxi – approached him on some pretext and stabbed him one on each side. He cried aloud and fell and died in a short time.”

Anne:  So sorcery is involved. Interesting.

Michelle:  Gregory of Tours is real interesting, because I had sort of assumed that he was writing all this… it was delightful to find that he was contemporary, but I didn’t really assume that he was involved. So it turns out that he knew all of these people! He was from a Gallo-Roman family that was well to do. He had relatives that held the Bishoprics of Tours, Lyons, and Langres. He was connected to thirteen of the eighteen bishops of Tours who preceded him, so he was in this well-connected family, and he knew these people. It’s hard to tell in the particular passage I just read, but generally speaking he’s pro-Sigebert and anti-Chilperic, because Chilperic had him arrested and tried for treason.

Anne:  What had this treason consisted of?

Michelle:  Chilperic had heard a rumor that Gregory had said not especially polite things about Fredegund.

Anne:  And was writing them down. Worse. Yeah. But he calls… he says “Sigebert, through his wickedness,” so he doesn’t put him up as some kind of, like, icon of good behavior.

Michelle:  No, it’s… oh, the whole thing is full of him saying “And here’s a sign that things were not in your favor,” so he sees a lot of things as being kind of holy signs. I just found this completely fascinating, because I’m sort of more used to our chroniclers over here by a monastery, by ourselves, hearing what’s going out in the world, but not really being… oh no. He was at everybody’s court. He was in all of this.

So he’s contemporary, but it would be hard to say that his is… you know, we’re trading off his closeness for objectivity, because he’s an eyewitness, but he definitely has feelings about how things are going down.

Anne:  Yeah, and that’s one of the things that we know when we’re reading Gregory of Tours.

Michelle:  I was really fascinated, too, by how Roman he is. Because, again, remembering from England, once the Roman legions pulled out and the Anglo-Saxons start invading, they lose Roman things pretty quickly. Whereas France, you have this kind of co-existence of the Roman families and this new leadership, in a way that we don’t really see in England. So I found that really fascinating. He’s really well educated.

Anne:  Well, you know, one of the things going on is that we are much closer to Rome. England’s really… England’s out on the edges, so it’s let go of early.

What does Gregory of Tours say about Brunhilda?

Michelle:  You want to know what he says about her when they first get married?

Anne:  I want to know what he says about her at all.

Michelle:  In Book IV, Chapter 27, we get told:

“Now when king Sigibert saw that his brothers were taking wives unworthy of them, and to their disgrace were actually marrying slave women, he sent an embassy into Spain and with many gifts asked for Brunhilda, daughter of king Athanagild. She was a maiden beautiful in her person, lovely to look at, virtuous and well­ behaved, with good sense and a pleasant address. ”

And probably still alive when he’s writing this. And powerful!

“Her father did not refuse, but sent her to the king I have named with great treasures. And the king collected his chief men, made ready a feast, and took her as his wife amid great joy and mirth.”

Right there he has positive things to say about her. She converted, she became Catholic, she remains Catholic. But it is, you know, useful to remember she’s still alive at this point, when he’s writing, and has not yet fallen out of favor.

Anne:  Is any of this writing after she’s gone? His later writing?

Michelle:  When did she die? Because he dies in 594.

Anne:  She doesn’t die until after 604, certainly. Yeah, so she’s never dead during his lifetime. So naturally he’s careful about what he says. But yeah, she comes across in Gregory as being quite lovely.

One of the things, also, that I hadn’t actually really mentioned, because I felt like Fredegund I didn’t even talk about, but she’s got a history of her own. It isn’t just that she has Sigebert murdered and she has Brunhilda put in jail, put in prison for a while. She also tried to kill her daughter by pushing the lid of a trunk, a storage chest, down on top of her.

Michelle:  Oh my god!

Anne:  A servant intervened and so her daughter didn’t actually… she was really quite awful, and one of the things I read said that she comes down to us as Cinderella’s stepmother, at any rate. Yeah, so that’s Fredegund.

Yeah, so Gregory says very nice things about Brunhilda. Thank you. But she’s alive.

I would not say bad things about Brunhilda if she knew me and she was alive. I might say bad things about her if she was alive and I was in London. London might be safe. But I would not say bad things about… or Fredegund! I wouldn’t say bad things about her either. I tell you, the Merovingian women! They’re just… well, Brunhilda’s a Visigoth. The barbarian women…

Michelle:  So that’s actually kind of interesting because I also, as you know, read the Nibelungenlied, which is tangentially connected, kind of, to this history. It feels to me like this history gets kind of folded into a larger body of mythology, because in the Nibelungenlied, you have characters that are somewhat analogous to our main characters here. We’ve got… his name is Siegfried. So we have Kriemhild as an analog for Fredegund. Siegfried is the analog for Sigebert. Gunther… Gunther is actually, this is a slight variation, Gunther is Kriemhild’s brother, but we still have Brünhild. Her name is the one that stays closest and this… I understand now why she has such a presence and gets remembered. And it’s really interesting because, in the poem, she becomes magical. As if there’s no way to explain the kind of power she wielded without her being magical. She is… in the poem, Brünhild is really, really close to being like Grendel’s mom.

Anne:  Oh, wait! Brünhild being Grendel’s mom. I just… that’s so excellent. And, if you have her look like Angelina Jolie, I mean, then you just, you’ve got the whole thing. 

Michelle: Yeah, oh it’s… what is wrong with Hollywood that they can’t make – just, sidebar – what is wrong with them that they can’t make a good Beowulf movie? They’re both atrocious. There’s an animated version and there’s two live-action versions and they are uniformly atrocious.

Anyhow, the poem is really weird and really interesting. About 1200, it definitely has one foot in the older tradition, the Beowulf kind of tradition, and one foot in the newer. Because we’re roughly contemporary with Chrétien de Troyes, in 1200. The French poet who is writing Lancelot. Who based… probably is the creator of Lancelot, you know the guy who thought him up, because he’s the first reference we have to Lancelot.

Anne:  Yeah, we think of Lancelot as being an integral part of the King Arthur story but he’s such a latecomer.

Michelle:  I love the fact that Chrétien gets a hold of the King Arthur legend and he says “No, no, no! You thought this was a story about an English king. No, no! The actual hero of this whole thing is a French knight, of course!”

Anne:  He’s French! Lancelot du Lac.

Michelle:  How could it be otherwise?

Anne:  And the English at that point were like “Okay, we buy that. Here’s Malory. We’re just going to fold it all together. Everything! It’s all the same.”

Michelle:  So in this poem, Siegfried wants to marry Kriemhild, but her brother says “No, you can’t, unless you go help me woo Brünhild, who was the Queen of Iceland, and who has an Atalanta-type thing going on where she won’t marry somebody unless they can defeat her in trials of strength. And they cheat! The moral of the poem is “Don’t lie to your wives!”

Anne:  Especially if they’re later versions of Brunhilda and Fredegund. Yeah.

Michelle:  So they cheat. OK, first of all they lie, when they get there, and they tell Brünhild that Siegfried is Gunther’s vassal, instead of them being kind of fellow kings of two different countries, for reasons that are never clearly explained. But they lie, so this causes all kinds of problems later when they’re married, the two couples are married and Brünhild is getting up in Kriemhild’s grill about “Why is it that you guys think that you’re just as good as us? Because hello! You guys are vassals!”

So they cheat. Siegfried has, he literally has an invisibility cloak. A Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak, and he helps Gunther against Brünhild. And of course Brünhild can’t see him, so she thinks that Gunther is doing this by himself, and Siegfried is Beowulf-type strong. Also he fought a dragon and killed him and got all drenched in the dragon’s blood, except for this one spot on his back, which is this Achilles kind of thing. So this person also kind of knows… once could be a coincidence but twice suggests that this person knows… some version of Greek mythology has come down to him, because we have these echoes of it.

Anne:  I like the idea of the Achilles back.

Michelle:  So later on, when Brünhild has gotten very angry, because they also trick her on her wedding night. The two couples get married and Gunther shows up, you know, and Brünhild says “You know what, I’m just not feeling it,” and so she ties him… she ties him up in her girdle and hangs him from a hook. And she finally lets him down in the morning, but she won’t sleep with him. So he goes to Siegfried and asks for help. Help! And Siegfried says “OK, we’re going to do the invisibility cloak thing again.” So he sneaks in and… this editor thinks that in earlier versions of the poem Siegfried actually rapes her, basically, which, because of the patriarchy, takes away her magic power and now she’s no stronger than anybody.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  But in this version he wrestles her until she’s tired, and then Gunther can sleep with her. But then, for reasons that are never explained but are basically a metaphor for that earlier version, he takes a ring of hers and her girdle, Siegfried does. So there’s all this lying to the women, who then get really mad. Not surprisingly.

But it’s a really interesting poem. It just doesn’t have as much to do with what we were reading today as what I thought it might and so I read 400 pages only to get to this, alright. On page 371…

Anne:  So this is a direct quote?

Michelle:  Yes. I’m pulling it out to read this. On page 371 the editor says:

“The names Siegfried and Brünhild are known from Merovingian sources, but apart from the general background of treachery and murder, no convincing parallels can be educed.”

Anne:  OK, well, the treachery and murder I think is pretty telling. So what comes down, then, is this idea that Brunhilda is very, very powerful. And that everybody’s very bad to each other, and kills each other all the time. And I think that these things make sense.

Michelle:  It’s a weird poem to read though, because you will be in the land of romance at one moment and then, whup, you’re back over into the land of early medieval epic in the next… literally the next paragraph. 

So, in Chapter 7, when they first come to Iceland to woo Brünhild, we get all this description of what they’re wearing, that there’s bells, that the castle is made of grass-green marble, and all the of the jewels and there’s brocades from Arabia and there’s jewels from India. And then in the next paragraph… so here we are, firmly in the twelfth century, land of romance… in the very next paragraph, whup! Literary whiplash! Because the fortress opens, the Chamberlain comes out. “You must give us your swords and bright corselets.” And they say no. Right? Because nobody in the land of romance ever says “Hold up. Hand over the weapons before you go inside.”

Anne:  No. 

Michelle:  They ride horses into King Arthur’s hall and challenge them. It’s in the earlier ones where you had that kind of more realistic understanding of not bringing weapons into the palace.

Anne:  Yeah. I like this idea. Being like a bridge.

Michelle:  Well, and now I’ve read the Nibelungenlied, which I hadn’t, so. I have learned a few things.

Anne:  Yes, and I believe you were explaining to me earlier that this version of the Nibelungenlied has been on your shelf since when?

Michelle:  1992. I bought it because I was going to write… I have a thing about over-planning projects. 

Anne:  I know!

Michelle:  You probably… yeah, you do! Those two hundred plays I read. Have we explained yet that Anne was my dissertation director, and so…

Anne:  We actually haven’t mentioned that at all. But yes. It’s true, when she was writing her dissertation she was going to read every single play that was written in a particular time period.

Michelle:  I did in fact read every play that was written between 1400 and 1585, and it was well over 200. Even counting the cycles not as individual plays. As one. It would have been a hell of a lot more if we had counted the cycle plays as individuals.

So that wasn’t a new personality characteristic. And, as an undergraduate, I had this Arthurian class, and I was going to read so much stuff, for the paper. And the Nibelungenliedwas one of the things I was supposed to be reading, which I’m glad I didn’t get to because it has nothing whatsoever to do with King Arthur legend.

Anne:  No, it actually doesn’t have anything to do. No, it doesn’t. Tristan and Isolde, sure. That gets dragged in later. But no, the Nibelungenlied, no.

Michelle:  Not a single thing, so I don’t know what I would have written about. But it turns out that I was fifteen pages into the twenty-page paper and the Nibelungenlied hadn’t shown up yet… which is good because I hadn’t read it yet… so I excised about 80% of what I’d planned to do and then hurried over and turned it in.

Anne:  Well I’m glad that we have fulfilled our purpose. Our purpose here is to enjoy ourselves, and continue to be medievalists, and to learn things if we possibly can, and I’m glad that we have continued this, and you got to read the Nibelungenlied, even though we were talking about the Merovingians.

Michelle:  After all these years. I will probably die with many unread books on my shelf, but the Nibelungenlied will not be one of them.

Anne:  There you go! And you’ll be able to say “You know, it really doesn’t have much at all to do with Sigebert and Brunhilda.” It’s really quite often that the adaptations that we talk about aren’t actually really that connected, as for instance, Bram’s Stoker’s Dracula comes to my mind when we were talking about Vlad  Țepeș. But sometimes they do. The Joan of Arc stuff.

Michelle:  Oh! Yeah, the Joan of Arc… I totally missed a big one! I completely missed the Stradivarius violin that is named for her.

Anne:  I had never heard of a Stradivarius violin that was named for Joan of Arc. Why is it named for Joan of Arc?

Michelle:  Because the guy who got hold of it, in the nineteenth century, looked at it and said “This is in mint condition, it’s never been played, it’s like a virgin.” And so he named it….

Anne:  La Pucelle!

Michelle:  Yes!

Anne:  It got named for her virginity!

Michelle:  Then he made a frontispiece to put on the case.

Anne:  I like it that, you know, if you wonder, like, “What’s an example of a virgin,” the first thing that comes to your mind is Joan of Arc.

Michelle:  Joan of Arc! “Let’s name the violin for Joan of Arc!”

Anne:  Well, have we successfully had our little foray back into early medieval bad behavior?

Michelle:  We had so many bonus murders today. We were doing the one… you know, come for the one, get six for free!

Anne:  Yeah. This often happens, actually, when we’re talking about royal murders. The same thing happened with Pedro the Cruel.

Michelle:  I’m feeling a lot happier about my Irish peasant ancestors, let me tell you. Because at least they probably weren’t getting involved in so many murders.

Anne:  A lot of the times, in this podcast, we’re actually talking about my ancestors, which is pretty sad.

Next time we meet, do you want to do another bloodfeast?

Michelle:  Ooh! Who are we up for?

Anne:  We’re going to do the Abergavenny Massacre!

Michelle:  I know nothing whatsoever about this. Awesome!

Anne:  You are going to be very happy about this, because you do know the time period. Yeah, although Wales you’re not quite so familiar with.

Michelle:  No, what I know about Wales is that there are more castles per square mile, in Wales, than anywhere else on earth. Which tells us a lot about how hard it was to conquer Wales. 

Anne:  Yes, because the Welsh didn’t really build them. These are Edward, mostly.

Michelle:  Yep. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Wales, actually.

Anne:  It’s lovely.

Michelle:  So this will be fun. I will learn things.

Anne:  My family always thought “Brannen” was Irish, because, I don’t know, because I think they think it meant “Brennan,” or something. But it isn’t. It’s Welsh. Yeah, so we’ll talk about the Abergavenny Massacre. I’m pretty happy with all that.

So that’s our discussion of the Merovingian murders. A bunch of them taking place. And this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, but with less technology.

We’re on Apple Podcast, iHeart Podcast, Spotify and Stitcher. Please leave a review. We’d really appreciate that. And you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich. And you can also reach us all through the webpage.

And you can leave comments there. We would love to have comments. We’d love to hear from you. And if you have medieval crimes you think that we should discuss, please let us know.

So, next time. Bloodfeast in Wales! The de Braoses! Misbehaving. As usual!

Michelle:  I don’t think we’ve been in Wales yet, so this is good.

Anne:  No, we haven’t been in Wales. And it’s 1175, so we’re usually a little later than that. So that’s it for us. Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

The Peasants’ Revolt, England 1381

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m the host recording in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  And we said, in our last podcast, that we were going to be talking about the murder of Sigebert, but we decided not. Because some stuff happened… by the time you hear this, you know, other things will have happened altogether… but some stuff happened and cities across America have been pretty busy, and so we decided to do the Peasants’ Revolt instead. So, we switched topics.

Michelle:  It was a pivot.

Anne:  We pivoted.

Michelle:  We pivoted.

Anne:  We like to have a disclaimer or, at least, I like to put in a disclaimer. Michelle thinks that anybody who’s underage shouldn’t be listening to true crime podcasts anyway. But we like to say that this podcast will contain adult language, probably, and certainly adult themes, and so if you are under thirteen you should probably not be listening to it. And if you are in charge of people under thirteen, you should listen to it first and make sure it’s OK. So, that’s our disclaimer.

We’re talking about the Peasants’ Revolt, in England. It was May-November of 1381, and it’s of high interest. In England it shows up in literature, and it gets talked about, and it gets remembered. It was a very substantial peasants’ revolt, and had some impact on the country. Certainly on how people were thinking about things. And it caused a lot of problems for Chaucer’s brother-in-law, who is often referred to as John of Gaunt. But I like to think of him as Chaucer’s brother-in-law.

The context is that this is not the only peasants’ revolt in history. No, no! There’s thousands of years of peasants’ revolts. Earliest, I think, we’ve got record is in China from around 209 BCE. And Egypt, about 205 BCE, and the Byzantine Empire, 928 CE. But even focusing on Latin Europe, there are peasants’ revolts before the Black Death in Normandy, in Flanders and Denmark, but after the Black Death there’s about 150 years of a lot of turmoil. 1358 there was the Jaquerie rising in France. 1381 is the Peasants’ Revolt in England, which we’re on. 1382, in France. 1437, Transylvania. 1450, the Jack Cade Rebellion in England. 1450-51 Merfold’s Uprising, again in England. 1453-1454 the Albanians and Greeks in Morea of the Ottoman Empire. 1462-1472, again 1485-1486 Catalan (peasants, War of the Remences*). 1467-1469 Galicia, a piece of Castile. 1478 Carinthian (Peasant Revolt*), in the Holy Roman Empire. 1498, Poland, the Ukrainian peasants (Opryshky movement*). 1514 Württemberg (Poor Conrad Revolt*). 1514  Hungary (György Dózsa Rebellion*). 1515 Slovene (Peasant Revolt*). 1515-1523 the Frisians of the Netherlands. 1524-1525 the German Peasants’ War. 1524-1533 the Dalecarlian Rebellions in Sweden. 1534 Denmark (Skipper Clement’s Rebellion*). 1540 Norwegians (Peasants’ Rebellion in Telemark*). 1542-1543 Sweden (Dacke War*). Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But we’re focusing on this one because it’s so well known, in English literature and history, and because it gets invoked, later, by the Socialists, and so we’re focusing on this one.

Which I believe you’ll be talking about, Michelle? When we get to your piece of things?

Michelle:  Yeah. I have so many places that it shows up in literature afterwards. It’s really cool. I really enjoyed this research.

Anne:  So the Black Death. We are back talking about the Black Death. Brief overview: Over from 1348-1351, one half to one third of the population of Europe just died. They just died. In different amounts. Some places were not hit very badly at all. Some other places were devastated. Scandinavia was badly hit, for instance. The massive death was across lines. Really, the Black Death did not care whether you were a noble or peasant, it just kind of got you.

So this led to increased social mobility. Serfdom had been on the way out, but it was really broken by the Black Death. And later, the population rose again, there were food shortages, but wages rose for urban workers and rural workers both. But because of inflation, your increased money didn’t buy as much as it had before, so that was awful. And there was a shortage of agricultural workers. And there were abandoned villages. They still occasionally find them. You can see them if you have, like… if you go up above, like in helicopters and stuff, you can see the outlines of abandoned villages across Europe.

Michelle:  An archeologist once told me that there’s nothing as permanent as a hole in the ground.

Anne:  Well, that would make sense.

Michelle:  So if a hole has been dug to put in a post for a house, even after the house is gone the hole will still be there. And you’ll be able to detect it.

Anne:  In general, after the Black Death, land was plentiful. Laborers were scarce. Wages were high. Mobility was higher. And social structures, as they had been, disintegrated.

Michelle:  And of course the manor-owners are cheesed about this, because it’s not like they’re taking these changes… they’re continually saying “No, we want it to go back! We want it to go back! Back to the way it was!” You know, “Now that the pestilence is gone, let’s just all go back to the way it was,” and they’re in a crunch. You know, they’re not taking in as much money, but they’re paying out more.

Anne:  Yes. And oddly enough, the peasants, who had found a kind of liberation – you know, higher wages and more mobility – did not actually want to go back.

Michelle:  It’s weird, huh?

Anne:  Not so weird.

In England, Parliament passed laws trying to fix wages at the previous level, and require peasants and laborers to work where they were told to, and transgressions could, theoretically bring around branding or imprisonment, but it was impossible. You just can’t legislate this stuff, and you can’t make time go back.

Near London, laborers were able to move upward socially, and actually change employers and become servants, and so there was some real shift, in some families, as to where it is they were on the social scale.

Michelle:  Well, every manor-owner has an economic incentive to both demand that the rules are followed, and break them at the same time. Because they need laborers to come and take care of their crops, and they don’t want to pay them more but they still need somebody to do this. So yeah, they can’t band together because every time they pretend like they’re going to, it’s then in everybody’s incentive to not follow the rules.

Anne:  So, more background:  The Hundred Years’ War had started in 1337. True Crime Medieval, Things that Happen During the One Hundred Years’ War. We seem to keep going back there.

Michelle:  Yeah, well, to be fair, a lot of stuff was going on.

Anne:  A lot of stuff. And it did last a hundred years. Money was bleeding out of the country and going to France, because England had been fighting this war in stages for quite some time.

Richard II became king in 1377. He was ten years old. He inherited the throne from his grandfather because his father, Edward the Black Prince, had died before his father died. So King Edward died, Richard II became king. His uncle, John of Gaunt, — or as I’ve explained, Chaucer’s brother-in-law – his uncle, John of Gaunt, was one of the powers there. He was an extremely powerful man in England, and he wasn’t one of the regents but he still had a great deal of power over various committees.

Michelle:  You know I knew he was rich, but until I was doing the reading for this, I didn’t realize how rich.

Anne:  He was the richest man in England.

Michelle:  His income was twice as high as the second-most-wealthy man in England. He is making ten thousand pounds a year, which if we all remember our Pride and Prejudice, was still considered to be a crap-ton of money in 1814, when that book was published. So he’s spectacularly wealthy. I mean, really unimaginably wealthy, in the fourteenth century.

Anne:  And he was in charge of… he was the power behind a whole lot of the tax laws that I’m going to be talking about.

So a real focus for resentment, because he had a lot of money, and he was trying to get money out of you, and so, you know…

So, to finance the war, the country needed money. Well, the people who were fighting the war needed money. The peasants weren’t interested in this. And so that meant taxes. The statistics that they used for the taxes were the ones that had been taken before the Black Death, and so they were trying to get the same kind of percentage of money out of any different locality, as would have been available before so many people died off. So that was one problem. And before Edward died, Parliament had introduced a poll tax.

So “poll” means “head.” It means “head” and, essentially in a poll tax, what you were doing is charging taxes according to how many people. Everybody counts as one head, because that’s what you’ve got. And this can be very, very problematic. So at that particular poll tax, every person over fourteen owed four pence, and there was a deduction for married couples. And that was unpopular but it did raise a bunch of money.

In 1379 there was a new poll tax, this time with a sliding scale, which is at least more fair, because of course, you know, as ought to be immediately obvious, if you’re a peasant, four pence means a very different thing than it would if you were John of Gaunt. So OK, so we institute a sliding scale, yay. And that was fairer, but there was so much evasion that it raised less money. And in 1380, the money situation was really dire, and they needed an enormous amount of money, and so the next poll tax which they put in, and which will be the spark to a rebellion, required twelve pence from each person over fifteen, no deduction for married persons. You had something you wanted to say about the poll tax?

Michelle:  Oh, I didn’t know as much about this as what I learned about in the detail of this, and the last one is so onerous. I didn’t realize, before I was doing the reading for this, that there had been so many in such a short period of time, and that the last one was particularly just asking way too much. And one of the other things I found in my reading is that you were allowed to exempt children, but the people coming around to check – because on the first go, it was so onerous that people were just lying about how many grown-ups there were…

Anne:  “One. There’s one… shut up, Grandpa!”

Michelle:  Yeah, the tax collectors got wise to this because they compared it to the earlier ones, and were like “Where the heck has forty-three percent of the population gone?” So they came back to do a door-to-door census, and people would tell them “This child isn’t of age yet, so I don’t have to pay tax on them,” and there were stories of tax collectors lifting the skirts of girls to see if they had pubic hair, to know whether to count them as adults. And it doesn’t actually matter whether that’s a true story or not. It’s a story that was being told, and it’s an outrage, of course it’s an outrage, and it’s one of the ways that people got whipped into this… because it’s not just, at that point, about the money. The money was terrible, but it’s also “They’re harassing and abusing our children!”

And I mention it because that one shows up in the literature more than once, later on.

Anne:  As especially egregious. Yeah.

Michelle:  As “What we did was totally justified.”

Anne:  “When we burned down Chaucer’s brother-in-law’s palace.”

There’s another piece of this, too. Twelve pence is in money. You had to cough it up in money. And it’s true that wages had risen, but this is in a background of essentially a barter society. I mean, people pay their tithes to the Church in barley, and malt, certainly on into the sixteenth century. Because much of what you had was not money, it was goods. The stuff… in an agricultural society, the stuff you were growing, the stuff you were raising, or beer, if you were making ale. And so that twelve pence is a lot of money, even if wages have been raised, it’s a lot of money, in the rural areas, to someone who doesn’t actually have as much cash as they have other things. Which also get taken away by various entities.

Michelle:  I believe I read that they’re trying to collect this tax in April, which is a spectacular problem because…

Anne:  Oh no!

Michelle:  … people get paid in the previous fall.

Anne:  Yeah, at Michaelmas.

Michelle:  When they’re bringing in the harvest.

Anne:  Yeah, and things don’t really start getting better until… Lent actually makes a lot of sense because you’re eating less during that time that, really, basically, there’s not as much food as there was. Things don’t start getting better for a few months.

Is there a second payment? There’s Michaelmas and then… do they also get paid six months later, or in the spring?

Michelle:  I believe that what Barker said about this is that if you’re specifically doing extra work with the harvest, you get paid then. So that getting pulled in… be the extra hands for the harvest… because you have to do that in a really short amount of time and you can’t have things get wet.

Anne: Right. That is hard work, fast.

So, London was in difficulties at that time because various authorities were feuding with each other, and also the Flemish weavers were a focus of resentment. England got a lot of its money from the wool trade. From exporting wool. And indeed, Chaucer – whom I have mentioned earlier – had, as one of his civil servant jobs, he worked in the Customs as Comptroller of the wool trade. But that was wool going out to be woven. The weaving in England was not a big industry, and the Flemish were the best weavers in Europe, that was the story. And they were being persecuted and needed someplace to go, and so Edward had made a good deal with the Flemish weavers to come in and create this product that, then, England could sell. But this… many Londoners resented the immigrants, and hated them, and so there was a problem there. They were a focus of resentment and violence and bad behavior, such as humans throughout time apparently exhibit to each other.

The rural communities were, in general, resentful of the local courts because they were run by the landowners and, if you had a grievance with the landowner and the landowner was running the court, that really just didn’t take you very far.

So, the revolt. After that third egregious poll tax got put in, John Brampton, who was the Archdeacon of Lewes, went to Essex to collect the poll taxes that hadn’t been paid. The poll taxes were required, and then not everybody coughed them up. As has been mentioned. So he summoned villages to appear and hand over the money, and the representatives arrived armed.

Thomas Baker, the representative of the town of Fobbing, said that the town had already paid the tax, they were not going to pay anymore, and when Brampton tried to arrest him, a riot broke out. Brampton escaped, but three of his clerks and some of the people… the local people who were there to be jurors for the court, were killed. So there was actual blood loss in that riot. And from there the revolt spread rapidly.

So, the poll tax was egregious, and it was the spark that set this off, but the riots were not just about the poll tax. They came out of decades of hard feelings and resentment and difficulties and feuds. And so, there was a background to the riots before the poll tax.

So there were a few thousand Essex rebels, organized and started marching toward London. Some of the Essex rebels went out to Suffolk to raise a revolt. And in Kent, locals stormed the jail to free Robert Belling, who had been accused of being an escaped serf. And so they freed him. During the whole Peasants’ Revolt there was an enormous amount of storming the jails and freeing prisoners, which reminds us of the Bastille, later. Much later. But, you know, much the same kind of thing.

So Wat Tyler – Wat is W-A-T – Wat Tyler became their leader, and they marched toward Canterbury and executed a bunch of people that they suspected of being members of the local council, whether or not they were I’m unclear. And then they started toward London. Coordinating with rebels from Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk.

So, basically, we’re in southeast England and East Anglia. This is not across England completely that… Cheshire is not marching. But it’ll go up as far north as York.

Michelle:  The population density is higher in East Anglia, so the economic impact of these poll taxes is higher.

Anne:  Yeah, in East Anglia and in the southeastern counties. York and Lancaster basically are always in rebellion. But they aren’t actually marching on London.

Michelle:  They burned some records too, because the records are part of the grievance because there’s all these “You haven’t paid this, you haven’t paid that.” “Well, now prove it.”

Anne:  Yeah. And the Peasants’ Revolt was not actually made up entirely of agricultural peasants. It included a very high percentage of laborers, workmen, people who were not working agriculturally but worked as skilled laborers. But it was highly illiterate. Very high percentage of illiteracy, and it would make sense to me if a group of people with grievances against entities that wrote everything down, and then produced paper to prove that you needed to give them more money, it would make sense to me if they went for the records. Doesn’t that just make sense? And archives! And books, when they get to libraries. But, we’ll get into that later.

The king was about fourteen at this time, and he took a boat down the Thames so as to get past the rebels, and he went to the Tower of London, and so he was in this particular fortress – it’s really built so solidly! William the Conqueror built that fortress, didn’t he? Am I remembering that right?

Michelle:  Sorry, are we talking about the Tower of London?

Anne:  We are!

Michelle:  Yes. That’s a Norman… oh yeah, the walls are like twenty feet thick.

Anne:  They’re humongous. They’re just really humongous.

So, at any rate, the king, King Richard and his mother Joan – who in her youth had been “the Fair Maid of Kent,”  — she was never called that in, you know, contemporaries did not call her “the fair maid of Kent,” but later Romantic-type historians started calling her that. “The Fair Maid of Kent.” So, at any rate, that had been his mother.

Sir Robert Hales, who was the treasurer, the Earls of Arundel, Salisbury, Warwick, were there. And the Bishop of Rochester. Thomas Brinton was sent on out to negotiate. Meanwhile, in the town of Blackheath, which was a few miles away, I think to the southeast of London, the Kent rebels were gathered, and the priest John Ball was there. Now, he had been getting in trouble for at least a decade before this. He was a very well known radical priest and preacher. He had been released from jail by the rebels, which is how he was with them, but he was imprisoned over and over. He had some connection with Wycliffe. But he preached a lot of things that he was not supposed to be saying, such as that the Bible should be in English, and tithes should not be paid, and that the feudal system should be dismantled, and he thought that all property should be held in common. So, he kept getting put in jail. And he delivered a famous sermon. It included the line “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” We’re told. We don’t have his writings, but the Chronicles give us this information, and this is what, Jean Froissart Chronicles? This is Brereton’s translation. This is his quotation of John Ball’s sermon at Kent.

“Good people, things cannot go right in England and never will, until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same. In what way are those whom we call lords greater masters than ourselves? How have they deserved it? Why do they hold us in bondage? If we all spring from a single father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they claim or prove that they are lords more than us, except by making us produce and grow wealth which they spend.”

And this is really the beginning of this kind of thinking. It’s really the Black Death which allows this kind of thinking. Like, wait a minute. Wait a minute! These social distinctions upon which societies have been founded, and which we have known all our lives, where do they come from? And what are they doing? And why should we go along with them? And it’s that instability in social structures, and the change in how it is that things are being produced and how important humans are in what they do, that brings this on. Because that’s not just “The poll tax is bad and we shouldn’t pay it!” That is “We are equal. We are fundamentally equal with the nobility,” and that is a very big thing to say.

Michelle:  I didn’t know until doing the research that John of Gaunt had sort of, probably might would be too much to say “sponsored” Wycliffe, but he found some of the things John Wycliffe was saying to be politically useful, so he paid… he didn’t believe it, right? John of Gaunt is the utter pragmatist, and pretty much just focused on what he can get for himself… but he brings Wycliffe to London and sponsors his preaching there, because Wycliffe is saying “We should take property away from the Church. The Church is too wealthy.”

Anne:  Not paying tithe to the Church, and taking things away from the Church, fine, fine, fine. John of Gaunt would not have gone along with “We are equal with the nobles, even if we are tilling the fields.” No.

Yeah, see, you open the door and all these ideas come in.

Michelle:  Yeah. I mean the Black Death reveals who’s an essential worker, because they’re starving without people out in the field to plow, and to take care of the animals.

Anne:  Yes. John Ball’s probably also the one who created the rebels’ slogan, which is “With King Richard and the Commons of England.” And so the king, they do see as, at least nominally above… although, as we’ll see in the negotiations, some of that breaks down.

So, those negotiations failed. Because the king had come down to the negotiations in a boat. He was on the Thames. And he wouldn’t get out of the boat and come onto land and talk with the rebels, and they insisted that he did, and so that all failed and so the king went back. And at that point, his military commanders were pretty much out of the country. He had soldiers with him. He had a bodyguard. But most of the forces were not in the London. They were off at some other various skirmishes that were going on. Including John of Gaunt, who was up in Scotland.

On the thirteenth of June, right after those failed negotiations, the City of London took down the defenses on London Bridge. It’s unclear to us now exactly what the reasoning was behind that. Were they doing it because they were afraid of the rebels, or were they doing it because they were in league with the rebels? But they took defenses down, and the rebels came across London Bridge and entered the city through Aldgate, and Chaucer lived up above Aldgate so… and we don’t know if he was in town at the time.

Oh, “Aldgate,” by the way, does not mean “old” gate, which is what it sounds… the “gate” actually is “gat,” which means “road”. It’s from the Vikings. And “ald” originally was “aest,” so it was the East Gate, is what it was. It’s the east road.

At any rate, so, the rebels were joined by Londoners, and they destroyed Clerkenwell Priory. They went over to the temple and attacked the legal buildings, and they burnt the books and the papers, and they destroyed the buildings. And they went down Fleet Street, down to the Savoy Palace, which is a house that John of Gaunt owned. It was one of John of Gaunt’s houses. He had a bunch. And they destroyed and burnt and threw things into the Thames. They didn’t actually apparently steal anything, but they destroyed everything they could find. And they set the building on fire.

Michelle:  John of Gaunt’s father had renovated the Savoy when he got hold of it. He spent thirty-five thousand pounds renovating that house. Sorry! I’ve got the wrong guy. It’s a Henry. It must be his son. Serious amounts of money was spent renovating that building, is what we know.

Anne:  Serious amounts of money. Yeah. The Savoy Palace was really a showcase. Until the Peasants’ Revolt. After which point it wasn’t.

The next day they burnt houses in Westminster. They killed anybody that they thought was Flemish. If you had an accent, they killed you. It was at least seventy-five people that they killed on account of either being Flemish or being thought to be Flemish. And the king left the Tower again… this fourteen-year-old boy. I mean, later he turns out to be just not very good. But, there are some things which I really… I admire the courage of this fourteen-year-old boy. After that, he’s not so admirable. This leaves a big impression on him, and he becomes an autocrat.

He left the Tower again, to negotiate, leaving his advisors behind, and he only had a small bodyguard force.

The rebels’ demands included giving up the officials – they had an execution list of all the officials they were pissed off at, including John of Gaunt – they wanted them all executed. They wanted serfdom abolished. They wanted to make the law of Winchester the law across the realm, and we’re not clear on exactly what this means but, okay. And they wanted amnesty for all the rebels. And Richard agreed to abolish serfdom, and he issued charters. And he promised to deal with the egregious officials by, you know, bringing them to justice. And so he signed all that stuff, but while he was out, another piece of the rebel force took the Tower. The gates were open. Because the gates were open, because they had to leave them open, because Richard was going to come back, you know? So they left the gates open, and the rebels went in. And they captured a bunch of people who were on the list. Archbishop Sudbury, who was the Chancellor, one of the people in charge of the poll tax. Robert Hales, who was the Treasurer, and had been one of the people in charge of getting the poll tax. John of Gaunt’s doctor, William Appleton, who, I think, was just hanging around. And one of the royal sergeants. And they took them to the Tower Hill where Johanna Ferrour, one of the leaders, had their heads cut off.

Did you know this? This I hadn’t known. There was a bunch of women who were part of the rebel forces itself. Women were included in this. And there were a few women leaders of the rebel forces. I had not known this. Had you known this?

Michelle:  I didn’t know that either. It came up, while I was researching, but I didn’t know it.

Anne:  So we both learned it this week. Yay! I had heard all those mens’ names. I had heard none of the women. And I’m a medievalist! What the hell?

At any rate, she had them beheaded, and their heads were stuck on pikes and paraded around the city, and then stuck on London Bridge. Which I find really, really interesting, because that’s a thing that the government does when they are dealing with traitors, and the commons then did this, the rebels did this, as if they were traitors.

Archbishop Sudbury’s head, by the way, is still at a church in Sudbury so, I don’t know if it’s on display, but it’s still there.

There were other people there. Joan, the fair maid of Kent, was there. And Joan Holland, her daughter, who was, of course, Richard’s sister. And they apparently taunted them and were mean, but they let them go and didn’t kill them, so that’s nice.

After the negotiations where this, you know, the Essex rebels started leaving, but Wat Tyler and the rebels from Kent remained, and they spent the night killing lawyers, and Flemish people, and anybody that they thought was associated with John of Gaunt. And then the king met with the rebels the next day. And this time he brought a large force, and Wat Tyler spoke to the king, using very familiar language, he did not talk to the king the way you’re supposed to talk to the king. And he demanded a new charter, and then he got into an argument with the king’s servants, and when he made a move toward the king, the Mayor of London ordered him arrested, and Tyler attacked him, and the Mayor and one of the squires stabbed him to death. Pulled him off his horse and stabbed him to death.

The mayor was William Walworth. This is the second time he was mayor and, by the way, he used to work for Chaucer, in Customs. Just saying.

The rebels nocked arrows, which is a danger signal for sure, and Richard went to them and said “I am your captain. Follow me.” And led them away. The Mayor marshaled forces, he cut Tyler’s head off and put it on a pike. Then the rebels in London collapsed.

Meanwhile, led by John Wrawe, the rebels advanced into Suffolk. They took the abbey at Bury St. Edmunds, and they beheaded the prior. They went to Lakenheath and they killed Sir John Cavendish, and they took Ipswich. And townspeople from St. Albans, which had been in a long feud with the abbey there, went to London and complained, and Wat Tyler gave them permission to storm the abbey so they did that, and they destroyed abbey property throughout Hertfordshire.

In Cambridgeshire, the local people, led by the Mayor of Cambridge, attacked Corpus Christi College, which was associated with John of Gaunt, and again there’s a long-standing feud… this is not just hatred of John of Gaunt, there’s a long, long standing feud and bloodshed between the townspeople and the university people. It’s the town/gown conflict, which we will be addressing, actually, at some point.

Michelle:  Oh yeah! I bet there’s some awesome town/gown conflicts we could do.

Anne:  Oh yes there are. In Oxford and Cambridge both, I can’t speak for the Continent, but I’m sure we will find lovely ones.

They attacked Corpus Christi College, and they burned all of the library and archive papers they could find. In this case, they were led by Margery Starre, another woman. And the revolt spread to Ely, where they stormed the jail and they killed the Justice of the Peace. And in Norfolk, Sir Roger Bacon was one of the leaders in Norfolk. Some of the nobility was in on this, although not very many really. The rebels killed Sir Robert Salle, who was trying to negotiate it, and they looted Norwich, and they made various noble people act as servants to the weaver, who was another leader. This was Geoffrey Litster. And they killed more Flemish immigrants.

This whole making noble people be servants to the weaver is very interesting to me. So they humiliated some people.

When the news of the rebellion got north, to York and Lancaster — which were long sites of dissent, this actually would continue through the Tudors at least – there were various uprisings in York and Lancaster to attempt to take towns and property, and a few people were executed. Not officials, actually, but unpopular locals. So that’s what was going on up that far north.

So, how did it get stopped? In East Anglia, the Bishop of Norwich gathered forces and took Peterborough back, and executed all the rebels he could find. He took Cambridge, Huntingdon, Ely, Norwich, and then he found Geoffrey Litster after the Battle of North Walsham. The Battle of North Walsham – we don’t actually have any contemporary accounts of, and we don’t really know how much fighting there actually was – it was big in the local minds. The Battle of Walsham. And they cut Geoffrey Litster into four parts and sent them all around the county, so as to show that really you should not be a rebel.

The Earl of Suffolk returned to Suffolk, and held courts, and found lots of people guilty, and executed them.

Thomas of Woodstock held courts in Essex. Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, held courts in Yorkshire. The king went to Essex and told the rebels that they were still rustics, and things are now going to be worse. Jack Straw was executed in London, that’s probably a pseudonym; we don’t actually know what his name was. John Ball, the radical priest, was executed. John Wrawe was hung, drawn and quartered, and Sir Roger Bacon was put in prison, but then he got pardoned.

On the thirtieth of June, all of the charters that Richard had signed were revoked, and the king pardoned almost everybody, actually, including the rebels, but some were not pardoned. The people who had stormed Bury St. Edmund’s were not, and also anybody who had killed any of his advisors, were not.

There really was actually very little punishment of the rebels, given how much stuff had gone on. And there was no more poll tax! There was no more poll tax. Not until the seventeenth century, and then again under Margaret Thatcher in the twentieth, and there would be some riots then too. But that’s how they stopped it. They marshaled forces, and things had begun to break up, and so they were able to deal with individual forces, and they executed the leaders, but they didn’t do vast executions, so that’s nice, I suppose.

Yeah, so that’s what happened in the Peasants’ Revolt, in England, in 1381. People got pushed to the limit, and then they behaved badly, and then, you know, the nobles, they all behaved badly too. There was a bunch of bad behavior in 1381 in English as well, I’m saying.

Michelle:  I think that, if you lived through the trauma of the Black Death, or been born right after it, bad things are going to happen. Because it’s so much upheaval.

Anne:  You know what? There’s not just so much social upheaval, there’s also a kind of shared civic trauma. You see it in the literature, of course, and in the paintings, you know? Death coming and getting everybody and dancing all around. That was highly traumatic, and so it had a big impact on people emotionally.

There’s a story I tell, which is that I was visiting cousins in Norway, and my grandfather’s people are from Mandal, and I was thinking, I was like “Mandal,” doesn’t that mean “man-valley,” what the hell does that… and so I asked my cousins, “Why is this called Mandal?” And they said “Oh, well in the Black Death there was only one man alive in the vale.” And so, Mandal. And I think that’s probably apocryphal. I think there was probably more than one man alive in that valley, but it says to me how deep that trauma went. Centuries later, people are still explaining “Oh, you know, the Black Death!” Whereas a lot of people do not know where the names of the places they live come from, I’m always appalled by this. But in Mandal they knew immediately. “Black Death, duh!”

Michelle:  You know, I found out, during the research for this one, why John of Gaunt was out expeditioning in Spain. Remember when we did Pedro the Cruel? I was shocked to find out that he was kind of randomly going through Spain? But it turns out that what was going on was fighting the Hundred Years’ War by other means.

England and France were having a proxy war through Spain, and after he married Pedro’s daughter, he had ambitions to make himself king of that area. He actually had himself painted in the arms of Castile.

Anne:  He never did become King of Castile, he’s just John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s brother-in-law.

Michelle:  No, but it makes me sort of think that maybe it wasn’t all the way Henry Bolingbroke’s idea to depose Richard.

Anne:  Yes. Richard’s going to end up being imprisoned by Henry Bolingbroke, who will say that he’s king, and he’s going to be imprisoned, he’s going to die in prison, and we think probably of starvation, because there was no trauma on the body. And we don’t know that he actually was starved by his jailers. There’s a strong feeling that he actually starved himself. Historians have said that it would not be out of character for him.

But he acquitted himself bravely with the Peasants’ Revolt, although then he was mean and a liar. Although on the other hand he had signed that stuff under coercion. That’s only fair to point out.

Michelle: And he has to go back and answer to his advisors. He’s still not necessarily being able to take independent action.

Anne:  No, he’s only fourteen. Well, it was a hard position for a king to be put in. There you are, with your mama, you’re fourteen, and you’re with your mama in the Tower and you’re trying to go talk to the rebels, and they’re cutting people up and sticking heads on pikes. No wonder he goes out with his army the next time. Like, two hundred people! “Let’s take those!” 

So, that’s the Peasants’ Revolt. And so you’re going to tell us… you’re in charge of talking about how it comes down to us, rather than what happened.

Michelle:  Yeah. The fourteenth century is a spectacular time of literature in England. Because you’ve got Chaucer, you’ve got Langland, you’ve got Gower, and you’ve got the anonymous poet who writes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl. So, it’s very interesting, the resounding silence, really, among them. Which is a helpful reminder that, if you’re a writer at this time, you make your living by finding a noble person who wants to pay your bills. So you’re not really going to expect writers of this time stepping up, saying “I think they had a point!” because, of course, number one, they ultimately lost, it would probably be different if the revolt had had a different outcome, but when you’re being sponsored, you have a certain obligation, right? They’re not going to keep paying your bills if you insult them.

So, it’s interesting. Chaucer’s only real mention of the revolt is in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which is a satire. This is the animal fable, with Chanticleer.

Certes, he jakke straw and his meynee      

Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille      

Whan that they wolden any flemyng kille,

So, he’s probably, here, making fun of Gower, who calls the rebels “animals.” Gower is actually the only really contemporary poet who has anything lengthy to say about it, and it’s mostly to throw vitriol. I will have to say that I am having to take peoples’ word for that, because the work that he writes about this in, is in Vox Clamantis, which is written in Latin, and there is not, in fact, an English translation of it on the web. You would think, when you go over to a site called Gower Translations, that it would be there, but it’s actually later parts of the work. It’s a crowd-sourced thing, and the first part of the work has not yet been translated. The piece of it that used to be online from the Norton Anthology isn’t there anymore, which is the one that all the sites link to. It was a bit of a disappointment.

Anne:  Yeah, neither one of us had it on our shelves.

Michelle:  Yeah, it was very frustrating. But feel free! You can find it in Latin on the web. Knock yourself out.

But what the people who are Gower scholars say, is that he’d already had Vox Clamantis done, before the Peasants’ Revolt broke out, and then he went back. He’s so upset about it, he goes back and adds, right at the beginning, two thousand lines of why this was the work of the antichrist.

Anne:  Two thousand lines? That’s really quite a lot.

Michelle:  That’s a lot of vitriol to be spilling all over the place.

Similarly, William Langland had… Piers Plowman was already done, and was circulating, and it gets cited by the rebels. They make reference to the poem, so he goes back and revises his poem to kind of downplay… “That’s not really what I mean, guys,” you know.

Anne:  Langland wants people to behave better within their structure. He does not want to take the structure down. Those are very different things.

Michelle:  He has that famous part of the poem where he has the metaphor of the cats and mice…

Anne:  Belling the cat.

Michelle:  Yeah. So this is the one where he has the metaphor of all the mice are very unhappy that there’s a cat, and they want to put a bell on the cat so that they’ll know when the cat is coming, and this is a really great idea until they look at one another and figure out who’s going to do it? Who’s actually going to go take on the cat and put a bell around it? And, I mean, Langland’s poem was pretty… at least in the revised part… is pretty explicit that “It’s just ridiculous to think that people could rule themselves! Of course you have to have somebody in charge!”

The other contemporary, or near-contemporary piece of literature that really ties in with this – and I think I probably knew it and I had kind of forgotten it – is the Robin Hood stories. The Robin Hood stories really take off during the fourteenth century, and the people who are the bad guys in the Robin Hood stories are the same bad guys that are the bad guys in the Peasants’ Revolt. The sheriffs, the tax collectors, the wealthy churchmen.

Anne:  That’s true.

Michelle:  We don’t have them, of course. We don’t have fourteenth-century… we know that they exist, because they’re mentioned in Piers Plowman, and we have other mentions, but the Robin Hood stories we don’t actually have extant copies of, for another hundred years. But they’re in circulation now. We know they’re in circulation, and the pieces, even a hundred years later, that are surviving, still have all of these kind of sympathies with the grievances of the Peasants’… I thought this was utterly… because I know Robin Hood pretty well.  I used to teach a whole class about the Robin Hood legend, and I kind of hadn’t… or maybe I’ve just forgotten it. Bits of my brain are falling out, as I get older.

So maybe I knew it and I forgot it.

Anne:  It gets worse. I’m just saying.

Michelle:  Oh no!

Anne:  Sorry.

Michelle:  So you will be thrilled to know that I also have at least one play for you.

Anne:  Oh! What is the play? Yay! We do love to have us a play. What is it?

Michelle:  Oh, I would produce this play. I’m so excited about this play. It is a play called The Life and Death of Jack Straw, and it is from 1593.

Anne:  Really?

Michelle:  Isn’t that interesting?

Anne:  Yeah. Now, okay, 1593.. yeah.

Michelle:  And, we have the play. We have no indication that it was actually performed.

Anne:  So it didn’t belong to a troupe?

Michelle:  It’s possible it was so sympathetic that somebody decided, “We really can’t do this.”

Anne:  So this is sympathetic to Jack Straw?

Michelle:  Yeah. It runs about an hour and ten minutes, and it is a really great play in that it ends in all the places it’s supposed to end in, in terms of the rebels have been overcome, thus always to those who challenge authority, but rhetorically that’s not where the sympathy of the play is. The play begins with Jack Straw, he’s with his family, and the tax collector comes in and is getting very handsy with the daughter, to see if she’s old enough for them to have to pay the tax.

Anne:  The story that you were telling me before.

Michelle:  Yeah. That’s why I mentioned it. Because it becomes a real touchstone in the later literature.

Anne:  Everybody believes it. That’s how bad it was.

Michelle:  That’s how bad it was. And the other thing that I think is really interesting about this, is that there are several lines in it that I think of as being Shakespeare-derived, that are actually in this play earlier than what they show up in Shakespeare. So I think they must be proverbs, that have largely dropped out and now Shakespeare’s getting credit for them.

So, for example, we get told, “We owe God a death, and we can but die.” When I went to Google that one, it’s in Shakespeare, but it’s in a later play. And John Ball is in this, and he gets a bunch of great speeches.

Anne:  Oh does he then?

Michelle:  Yes! And here’s part of one:

Neighbours, neighbours! the weakest now-a-days goes to the wall;

But mark my words, and follow the counsel of John Ball.

England is grown to such a pass of late,

That rich men triumph to see the poor beg at their gate.

But I am able, by good Scripture, before you to prove

That God doth not this dealing allow nor love.

But when Adam delved, and Eve span,

Who was then a gentleman?

Isn’t that great? And it goes on. It actually is not a bad play. I would do this play.

Anne:  Interesting. And maybe Laurie would do it with you. Laurie! We want you to do this play with Michelle.

Michelle:  I would do this play, and I enjoyed reading this play because the direct address in it… first of all, it always makes my heart happy to find direct address. But the direct address in the play tells me where the sympathy is, because it’s not Richard and his nobles who address the audience.

Anne:  It’s the rebels.

Michelle:  It’s the rebels. Right? So the second scene ends with Nobbs standing alone, who’s kind of one of the younger rebels, and he says:

Here’s even work towards for the hangman: did you ever see such a crew.

After so bad a beginning, what’s like to ensue?

Faith, even the common reward for rebels, Swingledom.

Swangledom, you know as well as I.

But what care they? ye hear them say they owe God a death, and they can but die.

‘Tis dishonour for such as they to die in their bed,

And credit to caper under the gallows, all save the head;

And yet, by my fay, the beginning of this riot

May chance cost many a man’s life, before all be at quiet:

And i’ faith I’ll be amongst them, as forward as the best,

And if ought fall out but well, I shall shift amongst the rest,

So he says, you know, “We’re going to lose, but I’m in anyway.”

Anne:  Yeah, “We’re going to lose, and die. We are going to lose and die, and I am going in.”

Michelle:  “And I’m going in anyway.”

Anne:  Who wrote this?

Michelle:  We don’t know! We have no idea whose play this is!

Anne:  We’ve got it in print? It’s not manuscript?

Michelle:  Yep. It was published in an antiquarian volume in 1773, which is why we have it.

Anne:  So who knows what it was in when they found it.

Michelle:  Who knows? It has largely been unproduced, but I’m delighted to tell you that a version of it was done in 2016, by a lovely production company called Bad Quarto Productions.

Anne:  Good name! Good name!

Michelle:  And they have scenes from it, or at least from their rehearsal, on YouTube.

Anne:  Oh yay!

Michelle:  There is another greatly-named company called Beyond Shakespeare, did an audio production of it just last year, and they were planning on doing a staged version of it in October of this year, so I will be delighted to find out whether this continues.

Anne:  What it is that they do. Well it’s really interesting timing, isn’t it? Isn’t it just.

Michelle:  Isn’t it just?

So I was very happy to find this play.

Anne:  I am delighted to hear about it. I really am. 1593. That is very interesting.

Michelle:  1593, but apparently not actually done. We may just have to remind everybody that, in order to do plays, in the 1590s, you have to get it through the Master of the Revels. You have to take your manuscript in, and he has to sign off, and if he doesn’t sign off, you can’t do it. Well, you can, but you’re going to be in trouble.

Anne:  Yeah, the Master of the Revels is probably not signing off on this.

It’s interesting to know that there’s such sympathy, at the end of the sixteenth century, for this fourteenth-century rebellion.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s been two hundred years, and the memory is pretty clear, in here. They’ve got the pieces right, and the sympathy is with the rebellion, despite doing the thing where it’s pretending like it needs to, you know, at the end…

Anne:  It reminds me of the moral at the end of the Brome version of Isaac (Abraham and Isaac*), where you’re given this moral that completely negates everything you’ve been made to feel. “Don’t be upset if your children die.” It’s like, really, wait a minute! This entire thing was about being upset when your children die, don’t be silly.

Michelle:  Well, one of the ways I know that the sympathies of the play are with the rebels, and not actually with authority re-establishing itself is that, at the end, we see John Ball and Wat Tyler on their way out to be executed, and they get to say “I don’t regret a word of it.” You know, John Ball says 

“And what I said in time

Of our business, I repent not;

And if it were to speak again,

Every word should be a whole sermon,

So much I repent me!”

And we see them… remember how, when we talked about Joan of Arc, and we talked about Henry VI – the Henry VI play she shows up in – how he doesn’t show the burning at the stake, because how do you do that without creating sympathy for her? And he absolutely does not want there to be sympathy for her? This play shows them, on their way to be executed, sticking to their principles.

Anne:  Lovely. OK.

Michelle:  And then it ends with the king saying “Well, I’m back in charge now, and everything’s fine.”

Anne:  Everything’s fine. “You’re still rustics.” Yep.

Michelle:  So that’s probably my favorite, favorite adaptation I found.

Anne:  Me too. I’m totally in favor of it. I’m going to be loyal to it, no matter what else you bring.

Michelle:  Oh, I’ve got a good one though! I’ve got a good one, from 1903.

Anne:  1903?

Michelle:  Yes! So, I found that this is referenced during the English Civil War, during the Jacobean Uprisings, and during the American Revolution, as an inspiration.

Okay, isn’t that spectacular? That…

Anne:  That’s very spec… that’s a really good kind of legacy. Do you know what I mean? Like, if you’re going to have a legacy from a rebellion, that doesn’t actually get much done, that’s a good legacy. It continues to be a focus for energy and for ideology.

Michelle:  I’m completely amazed about, you know, not the English Civil War. Fine, fine. They’re going to remember it. The Jacobean Uprisings, they’re going to be looking for any excuse. For it to be hauled out during the American Revolution is pretty amazing.

Anne:  If they had tea in 1341, they would have thrown it in the damn harbor! We’re just saying.

Michelle:  There’s a nineteenth-century chapbook, that was published in Scotland, called The History of Wat Tyler and Jack Strawe, that gets passed around, and it’s really fascinating that it does, because the chapbook is absolutely not in favor of the rebellion. It says things like “With such like seditious and traitorous persuasions, this tardy priest did prepare the vulgar, who are always ready to entertain the least proffers of rebellion, and fit them for insurrection upon the slightest occasion.”

Anne:  Wow. So it’s not just, like, they were very bad people to riot, it’s because they’re lower class, they’re likely to believe idiocies and crap. My goodness, that’s mean.

Michelle:  Yeah, and just looking for any excuse.

Anne:  Anything! Any excuse to do bad stuff to righteous nobles.

Michelle:  Clearly just the concept of being able to be in rebellion was enough, because this chapbook still gets passed around. It’s in Scotland that this particular one is being published. So passing this chapbook around, and using it for inspiration, is really interesting, because it, itself, is absolutely antithetical. This particular one is after the Civil War, the Jacobean Uprisings and the American Revolution. So it’s got to be an earlier version of it.

Anne:  But our version, that we’ve got, is from 1803. Alright.

Michelle:  But it’s interesting.

Anne:  Because it’s being used against not only what it explicitly says, but it’s actual meaning. Which is different. The play explicitly says a thing it does not mean.

Michelle:  Exactly. Yes. No, this seems pretty clearly to be saying that the rebellion was a bad idea because, you know, those peasants just take any excuse to rise up.

Anne:  Yeah. Who do they think they are? Well, I know who they think they are. When Adam delved and Eve span, who was the gentleman? There weren’t any. We’re just saying.

Michelle:  So I’m back to Southey.

Anne:  Are we back to Southey? I had no idea, when we started this podcast, that Southey was going to end up being some kind of thread running through.

Michelle:  So, Southey has a… it’s not really a play, exactly. He’s calling it a dramatic poem, but it’s divided up into acts. So I guess, if the spirit moved you, you could perform it. But I wouldn’t recommend it.

Anne:  Or maybe read it aloud?

Michelle:  But it does have one really good part. The conversation between Tyler and King Richard is really interesting. Because it just reminds me… Richard says to him “Why did you do this? Why did you kill my officer? Why did you raise people up?” And Tyler says “Well, because they were oppressed.” And King Richard says:

“Was this the way
To remedy the ill?— you should have tried
By milder means—petition’d at the throne—
The throne will always listen to petitions.

Anne:  Oh god!

Michelle:  “… The throne will always listen to petitions.”

Anne:  Oh my god.

Michelle:  Doesn’t that ring a bell or two?

Anne:  Oh my god.

Michelle:  And then Tyler says to him: 

“ King of England,
Petitioning for pity is most weak,
The sovereign people ought to demand justice”

I’m going to forgive Southey the rest of this crappy poem, for these lines.

Anne:  Bob Southey, you’re a poet! Poet Laureate.

Michelle:  The earlier crap that I had to slog through to get to this, where it’s all, you know, Morris dancing, and there’s all this fake Middle English, and the word “’tis” shows up enough, ‘till you want to fall over. And then we get to this, which is actually where he wanted to get to in the first place, I think. Because it’s where the poetry’s actually good. And the King of England says “Yeah, but did it have to be violent? Couldn’t you have just protested nicely?” Aw geez. Where have we heard that before? I scared the cats off the table when I found that, going “What!” Can you believe that?

I have three more literature things that are pretty cool.

One is William Morris’ A Dream of John Ball, from 1888. That is weird. A kind of fun, short novel. But it’s a dream-vision. It’s really interesting because it’s a dream-vision that is also time-travel. So, our narrator falls asleep, and he ends up back in the fourteenth century when he wakes up, only maybe not. Maybe it’s just a dream? It’s got that plot device thing going on.

Anne:  Morris knew his medieval literature.

Michelle:  So, narrator spends some time in the fourteenth century, following John Ball around and listening to him preach.

Anne:  Yeah, and this is explicitly socialist, right?

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  Yes, Morris is using it. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  When Adam delved and Eve span…

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  Property in common.

Michelle:  So the narrative voice gets back into his own time period, before bad stuff starts to happen to John Ball. But he’s there to hear what he has to say, basically. Not to witness the bad stuff happening to him. But it was kind of sweet.

There is a book called The March on London, in 1898, that is very interesting. The author’s name is G.A. Henty, and he wrote, I kid you not, 122 books that are mostly…. This is that boys’ book thing going on in the nineteenth century.

Anne:  Mark Twain made a lot of fun of that.

Michelle:  What’s really, really fascinating about this book is that it, too, is sympathetic to the rebels, but Henty is controversial during his own time period, because he is so racist and so pro-colonialism. And even he manages to write a book…

Anne:  So even at that time, it’s too much. Because really that’s a big time for colonialism and racism, and so you’d have to go pretty far to be somebody who was noticeable.

Michelle:  Yeah. I thought it was pretty fascinating that, even this guy, who is the apologist for “No really, we should just invade everywhere, because we’re just that much better,” he has… one of his books is sympathetic to the Confederacy, basically. It’s the “Noble South” fighting against these interloping northerners. Even he manages to write a book that is sympathetic to the Peasants’ Revolt.

And the last one I have for you is delightful. It’s a book called Long Will. It’s written in 1903, by a woman named…

Anne:  Langland!

Michelle:  It is a book about William Langland. And it’s by an author I really need to know more about. Her name is Florence Converse.

Anne:  I know this name.

Michelle:  I wondered if maybe you would. She was a writer who wrote a number of books. She appears to know medieval stuff up, down, and sideways. And she lived with her partner, Vida Dutton Scudder. So they were early lesbians, I guess. Or out?

Anne:  Yes, this is why I know her.

Michelle:  I thought maybe you might have heard of her. The book… I’ve got to read you the first line of the book here, in a minute, because it’s stunningly beautiful. And she’s fascinating. Vida Dutton Scudder is fascinating. I have a review of her book, that was written contemporaneously to when it was published, that is pretty fascinating.

Anne:  She was from New Orleans and died in Pittsburgh. I thought I’d just tell you that.

Michelle:  I didn’t know that.

Anne:  Went to Wellesley.

Michelle:  Yeah, I knew she went to Wellesley, and she’s buried in New England, in Massachusetts, with…

Anne:  Yeah, with Vida.

So, about Langland?

Michelle:  About Langland.

So here’s the review, that was published in The Commons, in 1903, when the book came out. Maybe 1904. But it’s contemporary:

In “Long Will” she has perhaps even more successfully (it was comparing it to an earlier book of hers that doesn’t really matter for our current purposes) the tragedy of the English peasants’ revolt, in 1381, that first great strike, which initiated the labor movement in England. (So they’re also connecting it.)

Her hero is Will Langland, whose vision of Piers Plowman she treats not as literature merely, but as what it is, the first great labor poem in English history.

Anne:  OK. I’m passing on this.

Michelle:  “Many cantos of the Vision are wrought into the story most effectively. The diction and style are exquisitely quaint, in old English colloquial…

Anne: Oh god, no.

Michelle:  … without being difficult to read. (Yeah). 

The characters of Langland and his daughter, Calote — the English type of Joan d’Arc — (See, isn’t that fascinating? It connects back to our previous one?)

Anne:  Oh my god. Oh my god. I’m totally going to have to read this.

Michelle: … are powerfully drawn, as are the robust forms of John Ball, Jack Straw, and Wat Tyler, and the half spoiled, but winsome spirit, of the boy-king Richard.

Anne:  For the love of god.

Michelle:  “Through the whole story runs that spirit in which Greene, the historian, says, ‘Langland stands alone in his fairness, in his shrewd political common sense on the eve of a great struggle between wealth and labor.’ Besides giving us a great story, delightfully told, Miss Converse has added a book that deserves to be used, not only as a collateral reference for the enjoyment of that early English poem, but as a strong side light upon the historical and economic study of that distant struggle, which has not yet ceased to have its bearings upon our present-day issues.”

That’s 1904.

Anne:  Yeah. The Peasants’ Revolt. It reverberates through history, and it gets called on as an icon for the Socialist movement, for Labor movement.

Michelle:  And I’m going to read you the first line of the book, because it’s beautiful:

“THERE were a many singers on the hill-top. They twittered in the gorse; they whistled from the old hawthorn tree, amid the white may; they sprang to heaven, shaking off melody in their flight; and one, russet-clad, lay at his length against the green slope, murmuring English in his throat.”

Anne:  Whoa.

Michelle:  Isn’t that gorgeous?

Anne:  OK. Alright. OK. Alright. Yeah, sounds like it’s worth reading.

Michelle:  I literally stopped researching for the day when I read that line. What an amazing first line of a book.

Anne:  Yeah. Boy. It goes in so many directions. You follow it through and it keeps going elsewhere and then coming back. Yeah, that’s a good line. That’s a very good line.

Michelle:  I’m not convinced that the attempts at faux Middle English actually help the book, but there’s some amazing writing going on in here.

Anne:  The attempts at faux Middle English I do not anticipate to be a thing that I like in the book. I anticipate it to make me annoyed. Kind of like that time that we went to the Renaissance Faire, and the minute I walked in, ya’ll had to start kind of like trying to, I don’t know, stifle me, because people kept coming up to me and talking to me in fake language and I hated that. Kind of like then. Kind of like then. When we went to the Renaissance Faire.

Michelle:  There is a quote at the beginning that I can’t track down where it’s from. So if you get a hold of it, let me know where it’s from.

Anne:  What is it?

Michelle:  It’s:

Lo, here is felawschipe:

One fayth to holde,

One truth to speake,

One wrong to wreke,

One loving-cuppe to syppe,

And to dippe

In one disshe faithfullich,

As lamkins of one folde.

Either for other to suffre alle thing.

One songe to sing

In swete accord and maken melodye.

Right-so thou and I good-fellowes be:

Now God us thee!

Anne:  I like that.

Michelle:  It’s maybe fifteenth century…

Anne:  Nope. I got it. I got it.

Michelle:  Did you find it?

Anne:  Oh yeah.

Michelle:  What is it?

Anne:  Just a sec, let me bring this on up. I’m on Google.

Michelle:  I was all over Google. The only thing I could find it in was a book that it can’t possibly be where they originated from. It’s a contemporary book.

Anne:  I’m finding a lot of quotations of it.

Michelle:  But the book that I found that it was in, is another nineteenth-century book and it can’t be where it’s from. It’s got to be another place that’s quoting it. Anyway. I spent some time trying to track it down.

Anne:  I’m in E.P. Thompson and English Radicalism. “At Batley in 1953… collector of old songs… and in his report Thompson quoted in full an example taken down ‘fifteen to twenty years ago’ from ‘a blind workhorse inmate (who thought the song ‘Chartist’)’, but which he himself judged plausibly as ‘an early (eighteenth century?) song — possibly sung at primitive trade-union ceremonies:” And then exactly the thing you just quoted.

Michelle:  Huh. I did not find that. Good job.

Anne:  I’m the internet queen. Just saying.

Michelle:  Oh, and there’s a reference to Pearl at the end of this book.

Anne:  Really?

Michelle:  Mmhmm. But I could not find the quotation. So I’m glad to know that you did.

Anne:  E.P. Thompson and English Radicalism. It’s on Google Books, so it’s online. It’s a history book from 2015, and it gives the whole thing that you just read.

Michelle:  Now, see that’s really interesting. If it’s a poem that she’s citing that is a radical workers’ poem, that makes the connection that the review is making clearer.

I think that it’s very interesting that, you know, we have this one event that then just stays around forever, as it becomes a way to talk about other things.

Anne:  And it’s not really about what happened. We know Wat Tyler, and we know John Ball, and we know the burning of the Savoy Palace, and the behavior of the young king, and people getting executed. But what exactly this is about, and how it is that the poll tax is being used, but it’s in this much larger of a kind of thinking about class, as not what is has been. It had always been this inherited structure that didn’t change, and it becomes a thing which can change, and that opens the door. That opens the door to so much. It leads to a kind of thinking that is fairly radical.

Michelle:  Some of the things that we see reminds me about what happens with Joan, in terms of getting picked up later and being used as a way to talk about other things. But with Joan, the use is very widespread. Whereas with this, it hardly ever gets picked up and used as a way to re-inscribe authority. It’s being consistently used as a way to challenge authority, which is a much more focused message than what happened with Joan, who becomes everybody’s poster child, if they need…

Anne:  It failed, in that it got dispersed, and the things that the members of the revolt wanted did not come to pass. But, it made some changes in terms of how people were thinking. You know, the landowners were quite wary of riots for awhile. There had been riots before, but this was the first big one, after the Black Death, and it is now a kind of thing that can happen. Under grievance, in England, I mean. Because of course it had been going on, really, in the world for thousands of years at that point.

Yeah, you push people very far, you often push them too far.

Michelle:  And once it’s a thing that has happened, people don’t forget it’s a thing that can happen. Hence it keeps showing up in the literature, over and over again.

Anne:  Yeah, and the demands of the rioters were not really how this all comes down. What they demanded, they didn’t get. What comes down is John Ball. The sharing of wealth. Things belonging to the commons. The abolition of classes. That’s what comes down. Even though, really, to the rioters, that really kind of wasn’t the point. That’s not what they asked, that’s what John Ball talked about. And that’s what we hear. That’s what we still hear. When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? And the answer is “nobody.” We invented that system. God didn’t hand it to us. That’s the answer.

Is that it, then, my dear, for the Peasants’ Revolt?

Michelle:  I think so. I learned a lot of things, so I’m happy.

Anne:  Yeah, me too. And we pivoted because we felt it was timely. The protests have been going on for almost a week now, and by the time you hear this, those of you who are listening to podcasts, it will be past that. It will be another couple of weeks. But we thought it was timely. It was timely for us.

So that’s our discussion of the Peasants’ Revolt in England. 1381. And this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, but with less technology.

Next podcast we’ll go back to Sigebert, since we promised we would do him, and then we didn’t.

We’re on Apple Podcast, iHeart Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher. Please leave a review. We’d really appreciate that. Ooh, and there was another review on Apple. Somebody who’d been sent our way and thought we were accessible. That we talked about things that made them understandable. Yay! Which was nice.

You can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, all one word, where you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can reach all of us through the webpage. And you can leave comments! We’d love to hear from you. And if you have medieval crimes that you think we should discuss, please let us know.

And so, we’re out of here now. Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

*additions to the transcript

The Murder of Joan of Arc, Rouen 1431

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host who’s recording in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  First of all, we’d like to say that all our podcasts contain material which is not suitable for children. Because we tend to have potty mouths. Sometimes really ghastly things happen to people, and so there’s that also. So if you are sharing this with people under thirteen, probably you ought not. Or at least you should be very careful and listen to it first, to make sure it’s okay. So that’s our disclaimer.

Today we’re talking about Jeanne d’Arc — Joan of Arc, Jeanne La Pucelle — and we’ve been very excited about this, because it’s quite a story.

Yeah, so we’re doing Joan of Arc. The Murder of Joan of Arc is what we’re titling this.

Michelle:  Yeah, I think if there’s any figure from the Middle Ages that you can bet that somebody’s exactly… yeah.

Anne:  Somebody’s exactly what? I got lost there. 

Michelle:  No, I was just saying that if there’s a single person that you can bet that people have heard of now, you know? A figure from the Middle Ages? It’s going to be Joan of Arc. And you can tell because she shows up in Bill and Ted’s Great Adventure. Excellent adventure. And I call myself an ‘80’s kid. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Anne:  Well, yeah. Anybody who shows up in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is, yeah, well known.

Yeah, she’s very well known in the popular imagination. We’re going to talk about that somewhat. She’s known. So. Joan of Arc.

She was born sometime around 1412. We don’t know exactly, but that’s what we’re guessing from… she didn’t… she wasn’t able to say exactly how old she was, but we’re piecing that together from various contextual bits of history. And she died on May 30, 1431.

She was born in Domrémy, which is now Domrémy-la-Pucelle, been named after her. And she died in Rouen, which at that time belonged to the English, which is why she was dying there. More on that later.

The background includes two wars. One is the Hundred Years’ War, and one is a civil war in France between Burgundy and the French king.

The Hundred Years’ War had been going on in stages since 1337. At the time that Joan was born, there was a peace, for a while. The English were busy dealing with Owain Glyndwr over in Wales, who had an alliance with the French, and Archibald Douglas, who had laid waste to Northumberland, so they had some wars that they were in the middle of.

But the Hundred Years’ War would begin, again, in 1415, not long after she was born.

Michelle:  Which of course takes us back to Isabella the She-Wolf, because it’s her marriage to Edward II that sets up the claim that the English kings are pursuing then, in the Hundred Years’ War. The claim to the throne of France.

Anne:  Yes, that’s why the English are fighting France. And you can hear more about the build-up to the Hundred Years’ War if you listen to our podcast on the Tour de Nesle Affair, which was why there were no male heirs to France, on account of the French princesses behaving very badly. Yeah. We did that in the past somewhere.

I’m believing that my dog is going to be showing up. I’m hearing him. Because everybody’s at home — because we’re still recording during plague time, so everybody’s home — so that means the dog and the parrot are more exercised than usual, so you might be hearing them in the background. And because of the way this is all set up, I won’t be able to do anything about that. Do you have cats over where you are, Michelle?

Michelle:  I have a door closed so hopefully neither cats nor children are going to show up, but, you know, it’s anybody’s guess.

Anne:  Yeah, I don’t… I have a screen door because all my work is done in the room where the parrot lives, and so I have a screen door, basically, on the porch.

The French were having a civil war. Charles VI had gone mad, and the power grabs then began between his uncle, Philip, the Duke of Burgundy, and his brother, Louis of Valois, who was the Duke of Orléans.

Philip died, and his son John had Louis assassinated, and both sides tried to ally with the English. In 1418 the Burgundians took Paris, and the Count of Armagnac – this is the French forces: Burgundy, it’s part of France, but it’s in civil war with France at the moment, so I’m going to call it Burgundy and the French forces, it’s just easier – the Count of Armagnac and a couple thousand of his followers were assassinated, in Paris, when the Burgundians took over.  There was a lot of bad blood going on, and a lot of war.

In 1415, Henry V of England had invaded France again, starting off the last period of the Hundred Years’ War. He won at Harfleur and Agincourt. He took most of Normandy, including Caen and Rouen, and he made an alliance with Burgundy. So the English entered Paris in 1421, which I hadn’t really understood. Did you know that the English were hanging out in Paris in 1421? Somehow or other I had missed this.

Michelle:  I didn’t know that. I do know now, though, why Charles d’Orléans, who was taken captive at Agincourt, why he was never ransomed. Because Henry V specifically said he could not be. He was specifically excluded. And then when Henry died suddenly, his brother John of Bedford decided to honor that and Charles was never ransomed. He stayed for the rest of his life in English…

Anne:  Okay. And that was because he was from the Armagnac forces. Okay. Alright. And the English had allied with Burgundy. Thank you!

Michelle:  Yeah, the last time we talked about this I didn’t know that, but I looked it up.

Anne:  In 1428, the English laid siege to Orléans, and at that point Jeanne will enter the picture. Domrémy was, at Jeanne’s birth, in French territory, but it was surrounded by Burgundian forces and places. Forces that raided the area and burned her village, in her youth.

The house she was born and lived in is still there, and is now a museum. I have been there. You can go in and you can see where Joan… it’s actually, it’s a pretty substantial little house. It’s not big, but it’s well-built. Obviously. Or it wouldn’t still be here. And there was a tree nearby. They tried to make much of this at the trial. There was a tree nearby which the locals called the Fairy Tree, l’Arbre des Dames. It was a beech tree and the children used to dance around it, and sing, and make wreaths for our lady, which is what Joan admitted to.

She never saw fairies there, she said. She did hear voices there, sometimes, but she was not in league with the fairies, as far as she knew. So, that’s what she said. And that tree is gone. I mean, that tree’s long gone, although its children are still there because, as trees do, it reproduced itself. There was a little spring there, also, which is also still there. When I saw it, it was full of trash. Because humans. So there you go.

Maybe the trash is gone today. I can’t say.

So that’s one of the places she used to hang out. And the church… you can also see the church where she attended Mass, but it’s kind of like overshadowed by this art deco giant church thing — that was built after she was canonized in 1920 — which has lots of paintings of Joan of Arc but isn’t, you know… I like the rest of it better. The stuff where she really was.

She was about 13, in 1425, when her visions began. Or rather the voices that she heard, which were accompanied by a blaze of light and which appeared to her. It took her a while to figure out who they were, but she figured out, according to her they were St. Margaret, St. Catherine, and the Archangel St. Michael, who showed up with a bunch of angels with him. By May of 1428, the voices told her to go help the King, and when Orléans was besieged, she was told to go there. She was told to go to the King, and then to go to Orléans, and she said to the voices “I am a poor girl, I do not know how to ride or fight.” But the voices said “It is God who commands it.”

She managed to get to Charles VII — this is the King of France — at Chinon, in March of 1429. They sent her to be examined by bishops and doctors (which would mean academics), at Poitiers, and they declared that she was not a heretic, and she could be trusted. Unfortunately those documents – we have an enormous amount of documents relating to Joan of Arc that are contemporary documents – we don’t have those. Which is really a shame. It would be nice to see them.

During her trial, at Rouen, she referred to them continually. Because she had been examined by the doctors and bishops in Poitiers, and they had said she was not a heretic, and they had said that there was nothing wrong with her wearing men’s clothes, a point that’s going to come up later. But those are gone.

She entered Orléans, getting by the English – Orléans was besieged by the English and they had forts all around. They had built forts all around it, and she slipped through and she got to Orléans on April 30, 1429, and by May 8 she had inspired the French to attack. Which they hadn’t been. They’d been defending, they hadn’t been attacking. But they attacked the English. They captured all the English forces, and so that’s the Deliverance of Orléans, which they are not going to forget. Another thing which we will be mentioning later.

Michelle:  Can I just add that one of the really shocking pieces, that I didn’t know before I started reading for this episode, is the number of times she had to submit to a gynecological exam to allow them to ascertain her virginity.

Anne:  I did not know that either.

Michelle:  I should not be astonished by this but I kinda was. They have her… she has to submit to gynecological exams, repeatedly, to ascertain her virginity. When she first goes to try to see the Dauphin, one of the first things they do is he has her — thank God he doesn’t decide to have some man do this — but he just kind of gets a hold of a couple of random noblewomen, and they go check her out. And then again, later on, they do this again. And then, when she gets captured by the English, they do it too. The emphasis on her body is really, really interesting.

Anne:  Mmhmm. La Pucelle. Yeah.

So, she liberated Orléans from the English siege. The English had not gotten into it, but they had been besieging it for quite some time. And at that point, her voices told her that she was only going to last another year. Did you know that?

Michelle:  I didn’t know that.

Anne:  Yeah, I mean she isn’t actually… it’s going to be another two years before she dies, but yeah. She’s taken out of action in another year.

The French King and his advisors moved slowly. Because Jeanne wanted to liberate France from the English. I mean, hello! There’s a goal! And she managed to take back the Loire, and she captured Troyes, and then Reims, where the King was crowned. And she remained with the army, though the King and his advisors were not helping the cause. They wanted to make peace with Burgundy, rather than fight. They kept trying to get some truce.

Michelle:  You know, I didn’t know, until I was reading for this, that Reims was really important to get the Dauphin… to have him crowned there, because there’s a holy ampoule of oil that the French kings are required to be anointed with…

Anne:  And it’s in Reims…

Michelle:  … that is supposed to go back all the way to Clovis, and it’s kept there.

Anne:  I knew he had to be in Reims to be crowned, but I didn’t realize it was the oil inherited from the… what is that? Is that the Merovingians or the Carolingians? I don’t know. It’s way back there. We’ll be knowing more about this later, because we’re doing Merovingians next.

In August of 1429, she was wounded trying to retake Paris. France, at that point, then signed a truce with Burgundy. Which is what Charles had been really wanting to do all along. She laid her arms down on the altar of St. Denis, and then the King ennobled her, and her family. So they were all lords and ladies, although I don’t think it really changed their living situation much. As is often true, with being lords and ladies.

In April of 1430, the truce was over. What she’s doing in between then – you know, I actually don’t know what she did from August of 1429 to April of 1430. It’s like the lost months of Joan of Arc. She wasn’t fighting. Did she go back home? Was she sewing and spinning again? Because she said, at the trial, that she was really good at that. So she could have been doing those things.

Michelle:  I don’t think so. I don’t think she went home. I think she’s… the biography that I read talks a little bit about this. That she’s not really sure what she’s supposed to be doing, because she’s there to help with the battle. And she’s irritated that they’re all just kind of sitting around, and not going back out after the English. She’s answering letters, apparently, during this time. Which of course she’d have to be dictating.

Anne:  Yeah, she couldn’t read or write. You can tell it from her signing her name. That it’s the letters of… the writing of someone who does not actually do that. Yeah.

Michelle:  Because apparently we have one letter written to her, during this time, where she’s being asked by a French nobleman, “Hey, who do you think the real Pope is?” Because, you know, it’d been settled by that point. The split. But he apparently was still holding out for the last Pope in Avignon who, at this point, had retired to a monastery. So this French nobleman’s wanting to recruit her to go on record saying that the retired Pope, who was no longer in Avignon, is actually the real Pope. And what she says to him, in her response, is very diplomatic. She says, “I’m not really thinking about that right now. What I’m concerned about is getting the English out. But once that’s done we can circle back.” 

Anne:  “Later on, we’ll discuss this.” That is very diplomatic.

In April of 1430, the truce was over and she took up arms again. The voices told her that she would be taken prisoner by midsummer, and she was captured by the Burgundians on May 24, 1430.

John of Luxembourg claimed her as a prisoner, but he sold her to the English. Now, we’ll reiterate what we said about medieval war: People who are not nobles or not worth anything are… you don’t, like, take them prisoner. You just kill them or, if you’re nice you let them run away, or whatever. You take prisoners because you then get their ransom. You get the money for it. And so, at that point — because I’m going to say more about this — at that point Joan is legitimately a prisoner of war. And so John of Luxembourg can claim the ransom. He sells her to the English, and so the English can claim the ransom. But she should have been treated as a prisoner of war. I just want to make sure that everybody knows I think this.

The French could have exchanged her, later. They had prisoners, such as the Earl of Suffolk. So a fair exchange, in terms of economics, could have been made. They didn’t even have to cough up the money. But the English were not actually holding her for ransom. They wanted her dead. And they wanted her dead… they needed her not just dead, but discredited. They needed her dead, because she was dangerous to them because she was so inspirational. And they needed her discredited because she was — by her own word and by the belief of the people around her — she was being led by God. Through the voices of angels and saints. And if that was true, that meant that the English cause was not good. So she had to be shown to be in league with the Devil, from the English point of view. That was what they needed.

Michelle:  Sorry, I think it’s worth pointing out that, even on the French side, who you would think would be inclined to believe her, they don’t just credulously accept anybody who shows up and says “We’re on a mission from God!”

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  There are set principles for discerning the spirits. Because they accept the possibility that she could be seeing things, and so not be lying, but be misled, or be ill, or be being tempted by demons. So they accept the possibility that all of these supernatural things exist, and can be interacting with the world. But they don’t just credulously say, “Hey, awesome! You say you’ve had visions! Let me take you to the Dauphin, and he will be excited to see you.”

Anne:  Yeah, I think that’s important to make clear.

Michelle:  I’m, of course, always feeling like I need to point out that medieval people were not stupid.

Anne:  I believe that that’s what your husband says, that all medieval papers are saying. That all medieval professors are saying, essentially, is that “No, they weren’t that dumb!”

Michelle:  Yeah, remember that? He went to that very first medieval conference I went to, in 1992, and came back home from it and said, “You know, right, that every single paper, the conclusion is ‘And yet once again I prove that medieval people weren’t stupid?’” 

Anne:  At any rate, no more stupid than we are. And no more badly behaved, either. We all still like to point out.

Michelle:  Fair.

Anne:  So where was I? Okay. Yeah, so the English wanted her discredited, and so what they did was they handed her over to the Church arm. Because the secular law can’t discredit her as being a heretic and lying about hearing… and being in league with the Devil. That has to be the Church. So they got the Bishop of Beauvais — who was loyal to the Burgundians, and did not actually have, by ecclesiastical law, jurisdiction over this trial — they got him to be the head of the trial. She’d been captured in Burgundy, so the English wanted him to be the authority at the trial, even though it took place in English-held Rouen, where the seat was vacant. And so they didn’t actually have to fight with some kind of bishop, some actual real bishop of the place.

So she appeared at the court on February 21, 1431. They had been, like, having an investigation for awhile without her, but that’s when she shows up in the documents. Legally the entire trial was crap. She should have been a prisoner of war, and trying her for heresy was meant to destroy her reputation. The court structure was loaded by putting the Bishop of Beauvais in, as head. She was not allowed to have an advocate. She was being held at the castle of Rouen, and being guarded by English shoulders. She should have been held, for ecclesiastical trial, in the Church prison. If there was going to be an ecclesiastical trial.

After she tried to escape, by jumping out of a window – she landed on soft stuff and so she actually wasn’t killed by it – she was kept in an iron cage and chained by the neck, hands and feet. She was not allowed Mass or other spiritual privileges, because of the heresy charge. I’m going to mention this again later. And she was also charged with wearing clothes that were wrong. “Deformatate Habitus,” “monstrous wear.” She was charged with wearing men’s clothes. More on that later.

At the trial, her answers were clear, they were pious, they were sensible, and so the trial got moved! Because it started out they had a large assembly with, you know, lots of people there. You know, people who weren’t actually part of the trial, but observers. And so they moved it to a small, tiny court with just the judges in the prison, so that there weren’t any witnesses, because she just looked too good. She was too believable, so that didn’t work. So they took her to the little thing. And she was asked to submit to the Church Militant.

Now, we’re going to get into some technicalities here. This Church Militant — in this case, in the ecclesiastical courts — is a specific legal phrase which she probably… she didn’t understand. We know she didn’t understand from her answers. She was completely confused by them. And it’s right to be confused, because it’s sort of confusing, and plus they were attempting to get her on a technicality. Which indeed they would.

The Church Militant is made up of the humans on earth who fight for the Church. Who work for the good of the Church. Which is different from the Church Triumphant, which is the souls in heaven. That is, the saints. Joan herself did not see a distinction in between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. It’s a kind of a subtle one, but if you are agreeing to submit to the Church Militant, if you are someone who is spoken to directly by the Church Triumphant — which is what was talking to her, as far as she could tell — then there’s a problem. Wouldn’t you… if you were this person, wouldn’t it make sense to you that you were to obey the Church Triumphant rather than the Church Militant? But it’s the Church Militant that’s going to have the secular arm burn you at the stake. This is, I tell ya… the legal technicalities, the hoops they had to jump through in order to burn this woman at the stake, were amazing. They had to work hard at it. Because she just was not a heretic. And she wasn’t a witch either. No, that wasn’t true.

So, on March 17, they finished the examinations and the judges declared that her voices were false and diabolical, and that she should be handed over to the secular authorities, which would mean being burned at the stake. But she refused to submit, and they threatened torture. No go. So, on May 22, they erected a stake and dragged her there, and she was asked again to submit, before a large crowd. And she agreed to sign a retraction, but it’s not clear what she thought she was signing, because we have — amongst these reams of documents we’ve got — we have the retraction she signed. And it is really, really, really, really long. But the official who read it to her, we know from the later trial, said that it was just a few lines. So what was read to her was not what she signed. But she signed, and she said that she retracted insofar as it was God’s will, and she was taken back to prison. So she didn’t die at that point.

This did not please the English and the Burgundians. Because that was really not what they wanted. So they had to figure this out. One of the points that she was condemned on was the “monstrous attire,” and she put men’s clothes on again, and there’s speculation as to why she did this. We don’t know for sure, but one of the witnesses at the later trial said that her women’s clothes had been taken away, and men’s clothes left for her, so I’m willing to believe that.

So, she was wearing men’s clothes again and so, therefore, because it was in the thing that she had signed — that she would not wear men’s clothes — she had gone back to her heresy, technically, and so that’s what they got her on.

On May 29 she was declared, by thirty-seven judges, to be a relapsed heretic. And that’s the point at which they can burn you at the stake because, you know, you have to relapse first. And so she was taken to the stake on May 30, and she was allowed to confess and receive communion. Which I don’t really understand, because if she was indeed a heretic, and a relapsed heretic, and being killed as a heretic, then I don’t understand why she was being allowed to confess and receive communion, when she hadn’t been allowed to receive it and to confess in prison because she was a heretic. There’s some really circular logic going on here.

The clerk who had been the recorder at the trial said that she never recanted the voices. She never said that they did not come from God. And so that is how Joan of Arc was murdered. Anything you want to add before I do the second trial?

Michelle:  You might be getting to this, with the second trial, but apparently at least one of the Englishmen gives evidence that he was pretty convinced that she was a virgin, because every time he stuck his hand up her shirt she slapped him. She was being held by these men and was in constant danger of being assaulted, and apparently some of them did attempt to assault her.

Anne:  And a very strong reason for wearing men’s clothes was that everything could be fastened together. The hose to the boots, and to the doublet, and so it gave you more protection than women’s skirts. Which give you no protection at all.

Michelle:  And they don’t send her to a convent. They don’t do any of the things that they would do if they were attempting to behave like human beings. They’re intentionally intimidating her, by having her be held by these men.

Anne:  Yes, and they’re intentionally trying to get her to wear men’s clothes, because they can get her for recanting, for going back to heresy.

No, she shouldn’t have been in this prison in the first place. She should have been in the Church prison. She should never have been being held by the English. Yeah, no. The legality of all this is just not there.

So, twenty-four years later… there was a rehabilitation trial about twenty-four years later. The first trial – the one that we just went through – had been conducted without the approval of the Pope, even though Joan had filed an appeal to him. So that’s another ecclesiastical legality that went by the way.

Paris had been captured by the French in April of 1436 so, at that point, the University of Paris no longer had the authority over Joan that it had had during the trial. Many of the people who were serving at that trial were theologians from the University of Paris, and who were allied with Burgundy at that point.

So, they no longer had that authority, and Rouen had been taken back in November of 1449, so the documents which had been held by the English were now held by the French. So, those two things had changed radically. So, pretty quickly after 1449 — after Rouen was taken back — in February of 1450, Charles ordered one of the theologians at the University of Paris to conduct a preliminary investigation into Joan’s trial. But there were powerful people who had been part of the trial who were not happy about this because, you know what it was going to show, Michelle? It was going to show that they had been part of a scam, fake trial of badness. And so they weren’t happy about this. So they… everybody dug their heels in, and the investigation got shut down in March. Not long after it got started.

Michelle:  And Charles, by the way, did not a thing to try to get her out of the English… I’m not willing to let the Dauphin go past, here, without acknowledging that he did absolutely nothing to try to get her out of English control.

Anne:  No. His forces did try a few times to attack Rouen, but there’s nothing specific – and that didn’t work – but there’s nothing specific in there about trying to get Joan back. He did not try to get Joan back.

Michelle: No, he just decided that whatever she could do for him was fine but, really, it wasn’t that important, and he was not required to show her any loyalty, I guess.

Anne:  No. He was a dreadful person.

In February of 1452, Cardinal d’Estouteville, the Papal Legate in France, managed to get Charles to meet with him, and he got an inquisition started. With the Pope’s authority, they handed it over to the Inquisitor of France, who was Jean Bréhal, and the inquiry limped along for a few years, during which time some of the opponents died. That, I think, was very useful. And then there was a new pope, Callixtus III, and the Inquisitor went to Rome to meet with him in 1454, to ask that Joan’s trial be investigated.

The Pope formed a committee of three major clergymen of France — an archbishop and two bishops — and the re-trial opened on November 7, 1455, at Notre Dame.

Joan’s family was there. Her mother gave a speech about Joan’s piety and condemned her trial as being unfair and godawful. I don’t think she used the word “godawful,” but I believe it’s a correct use of the term. And that trial was very carefully conducted, unlike the first one. They had 115 witnesses, which included her family and villagers who had known her as a child, soldiers who had fought with her, people from Orléans who were really grateful about her work there.

And a bunch of her early investigators also were called as witnesses, but you know what? They couldn’t remember anything, Michelle. Unlike everybody else, who could remember a lot. I believe I see this a lot on Court TV and, you know, in my little true crime podcast. A lot of people can’t remember a thing about what happened on that day that the big thing happened. Just forgot all about it. “I don’t know!”

At any rate, the Appellate Court annulled her sentence on July 7, 1456, and declared that she had been tried under false accusations. Yay!

Joan’s mother wanted the surviving tribunal authorities to be punished, but that didn’t happen. But, any rate, Joan! Yay! She was not a heretic! And the men’s clothes, it was just alright.

It’s in the rehabilitation trial that we get some of the details about the cross-dressing charge. Heresy wasn’t a capital offense until it got repeated. She was required to wear women’s clothing as part of her subjection to the Church Militant, so it was as explained — and as we’ve mentioned — she wanted to keep men’s clothes as a protection. And because – and I think this is actually really important, although I think kind of falls away – because she had been told by the voices. You know, so she was kind of waiting for the voices to say, “Okay, now it’s okay to wear dresses,” and she did wear dresses at times. It wasn’t like she’d refuse to wear dresses entirely, but men’s clothing was important to her for spiritual reasons, not just practical. And the whole issue of cross-dressing was vexed. It wasn’t okay as a general practice, although it wasn’t supposed to be something you got burned at the stake for, but as you know, the part of a heresy charge that got made up. Alright. It wasn’t okay as a general practice, but it was supported by doctrine when it was necessitated, such as, if you were a woman going through enemy territory or, like if you need to wear armor, or if you wanted to deter rape for awhile. It was absolutely okay to wear men’s clothes. Absolutely. There was nothing against the Church Militant except as what they said, at Rouen, when they condemned her.

So the insistence on her cross-dressing was a set-up, that’s all it was. It was a way to have some semblance of some kind of reason for murdering her, and so, there’s that.

Her story wasn’t forgotten. The Catholic League in France kept her significance alive, and she was a folk saint in France. She was beatified in 1909, after about 50 years of effort that was led by the Bishop of Orléans, and in 1920 she was canonized by Pope Benedict XV. And Orléans had been commemorating her death every year since 1432, though the French Revolution banned it, so they didn’t have it for a little while, but then Napoleon re-allowed it so, you know, there was that. Yeah. Joan.

Michelle:  We were talking earlier about that one of the things that’s really interesting about France at this point, that I didn’t know, is that Joan is not unusual in claiming to have visions, claiming to have direct revelation from God. And I think that that’s a really interesting context that I personally was not aware of. But in the biography I read they talked about a couple of people before her, a couple of people after her. Joan was actually called in to assess one of the women making a claim about having visions that there was a woman in white who comes to visit her in the middle of the night, and so Joan stayed with her all night and, like, “Hey, when is she showing up?” “Oh, she’ll be here,” but, never showed. So Joan advised Charles “Send her home. Send her home to her husband and kids. There’s nothing really going on here.”

And so I find that really interesting, that you have this context of people having revelations, which kind of helps with understanding why you have to have a structure for assessing. You can’t just take everybody at their word. But also with that, there’s a fair amount of gender non-conformity going on with these people and I find that really interesting.

Anne:  It’s not all women?

Michelle:  It’s not all women! William, who is showing up after Joan, rides side saddle. Which of course is a fairly new development. The side saddle is a development of the fourteenth century. It comes to England with Richard II’s wife, whose name I think was Anne, and she introduces that into England, so it comes from France. So, it’s basically… it’s kind of a new thing at this point. 

So for him to ride side saddle is a really striking statement.

Anne:  Is William English?

Michelle:  Nope, William’s French.

Anne:  Ah, Guillaume, okay.

Michelle:  These are all French mystics. But we kind of have this going on in England too, right? We have Margery, Margery Kempe. There’s something going on in the fifteenth century that is feeding this development of mystics, and so you have to be able to assess whether you’re dealing with somebody who might really be having a mystical experience, or might be just kind of wanting to have a mystical experience. Or maybe they’re being misled.

So Joan, in terms of literature and art in representations; this is really interesting, because no time at all passes before she is being memorialized.

Anne:  She’s not even dead, at the point at which stuff starts.

Michelle:  Yeah, Christine de Pizan has a poem — written in 1429, right after the Siege of Orléans — that praises Joan. So we might remind everybody that Christine de Pizan is a major, major figure. She’s the first woman we know of in Europe who makes her living as a writer. She had been married, her husband dies but, like, young, because she’s left with three kids to raise, but…

Anne:  And she’s taking care of her mother. It’s three kids and her mother that she’s supporting.

Michelle:  Yeah, she’s a busy lady, and all these creditors start coming out of the woodwork, so Christine has to figure out how to support herself and these kids. So that’s what she does, she’s a writer. And of course her big work is The City of Ladies, which is great.

Anne:  Christine herself refers to it as “becoming a man.” She had to make herself into a man. It’s so unusual, and so unheard of, that you would be making your living by writing. And she does it by being attached to the French court. You have to have patrons, if you’re going to make your living writing.

Michelle:  Because she doesn’t have a lot of family. Her dad… they’re “de Pizan” because they’ve come from Pisa. The father had brought the family – her father, Christine’s father – had brought the family. They’d been recruited to come to France and work for the French king, so they don’t have deep, deep ties in France. So Christine is on her own when she’s widowed. So she’s living in France when the English take it, she has to flee. She ends up living in a convent, where it’s possible her daughter was a sister. Her son has died by now. Her son dies in 1425. He was actually – this is so cool — he worked for the Dauphin. He was the Dauphin’s clerk.

Anne:  Oh, I didn’t know that!

Michelle:  Isn’t that cool?

Anne:  Good, so she had him situated. That’s good.

Michelle:  So her son, Christine’s son, was the Dauphin’s clerk, and I looked and looked and I could not find out what he died of, in 1425, but we know that she outlives at least her son.

So by 1429, when Joan raises the siege at Orléans, Christine was ready for some good news, and this poem compares Joan to a whole bunch of classical and biblical heroes, starting with Moses.

Anne:  Are there any women in this list of the classical and biblical heroes?

Michelle:  Yeah. Yeah, it starts with Moses. It’s Joshua, Gideon, and then Esther, Judith and Deborah.

Anne:  Oh, okay, Esther I get. Yeah. Of course.

Michelle:  Christine mentions the prophecies that foretold Joan’s coming.

“Therefore, above all the brave men of the past, she must wear the crown, for her deeds show clearly that God has given her more courage than all those men one talks about. And she is not finished yet.”

Anne:  Oh, that’s beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, the English had to kill her.

Michelle:  It’s a great poem. I really like the fact that Christine, this major, major figure, in her own right, writes about Joan, this other major figure.

Christine probably dies before Joan.

Anne:  That’s the way I had remembered it. And I remember being very glad about that. That she didn’t know what happened to her. Christine had already been through… she’d been at the French court when the news came back from Agincourt, and so she’d written about that. And the men of the French court had been decimated at Agincourt. It was horrendous. So that was very bad. So to be able to write about this wonderful victory that this woman had inspired and led was good. I’m glad that Christine died not knowing what happened to Jeanne.

Michelle:  That is probably true. I’m working from the Norton edition at this point, so that’s what they think. You know, she was a generation or two older than Joan, because Christine also of course lives through Agincourt and writes about that.

Anne:  Yeah, in 1415. Earlier. Much earlier.

Yeah, and she was an adult at that point. Yes. So yes, she would have been pretty aged at this point, yeah. Because she was already supporting her kids and her mother by the time she wrote about Agincourt.

Michelle:  I think she’s probably in her sixties when she writes the poem about Joan.

 So of course we already know about the 1435 play, we’ve talked about this in detail.

Anne:  Yes, so those of you who want to hear about the play written by Gilles de Rais — of the Siege of Orléans, which he wrote before he became a mass murderer, or serial killer I guess is better terminology – you can go to our previous podcast concerning Gilles de Rais. Whatever number that is. I think we should probably keep track of the numbers but I don’t, and I probably never will.

There’s an earlier one. Gilles de Rais. He was one of her compatriots, one of her colleagues at the battle of Orléans.

Michelle:  There’s a really helpful Wikipedia page that is the cultural depictions of Joan of Arc, but it’s handling in the list of the play is really interesting, because it’s mislabeled, right? It’s called The History of the Siege of Orléans and it’s not that, it’s the “mystery,” and it’s deliberately that, making a link between Joan and the religious plays of the time period.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s a saint’s play.

Michelle:  And absolutely there is no mention of Gilles de Rais, which I think… he is completely scrubbed.

Anne:  Well he was… he really was a very bad person at the end. But he was good. He was good and then he was bad. He’s, like, one of those people who falls from a great height into, like, the depths of human depravity. Oh well.

Michelle:  So we don’t have to talk about Gilles de Rais’ play, although it’s pretty awesome. Twenty thousand lines of verse, a hundred and forty speaking parts, plus another five hundred extras. He literally nearly bankrupted himself putting on this play about the Siege of Orléans. So.

Anne:  He did produce it. It did actually exist.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Only once.

Michelle:  Single-handedly he put that play on.

Anne:  Orléans continued to do a play in her honor every year, but it can’t have been that one, because there were no cities in Europe which could have afforded to put that on more than about once. Or perhaps it’s a cut-down version. I don’t know. I do not know.

Michelle:  Somebody must have been messing with it because the version that survives, survives from around 1450, and it’s not clear whether that has been tinkered with. 

Anyhow, here is possibly my favorite Joan adaptation. In the winter of 1434 to ’35, there was unusual snowfall in the city of Arras. On September 21 there was a meeting there to at last settle the dispute between Charles and his cousin Philip, which is stemming, I’m pretty sure, from Charles having had a hand in the murder of Philip’s father.

Anne:  Oh okay. Why not? 

Michelle:  So the city of Arras, in order to commemorate the thing that’s happening, with the kind of civic theatricals that you would do… instead of building them out of wood and paint and such, they made snowmen with all of this awesome, unseasonable snow.

Anne:  Whoa!

Michelle:  Isn’t that amazing! I’m so excited about this! 

Anne:  These snowmen, they’re not going to be those round balls with coal for eyes?

Michelle:  No, they went out and made, more properly, snow sculptures. And they made the Nine Worthies, okay?

Anne:  Okay.

Michelle:  I’ve got a source about this.

Anne:  We’ll link to it in the show notes.

Michelle:  The source is called Princes and Princely Culture. He’s got a great, actual paragraph about this that I’m attempting to pull back up.

“A special memoir written on the express instruction of the local authorities gives a census of plusieurs choses de neges, snow-men, sculpted for the streets and squares of Arras. Among these are the figures of the Emperor, the King, Death, the Seven Sleepers, some local noblemen and high officials, Reynard the Fox and le Grand Pucelle.

Anne:  Why is Reynard in there? But okay, whatever.

Michelle:  Yeah. Interesting. Oh, it just gets better. 

“Interesting because her nemesis was Philip the Good, by whom she was delivered into the hands of the English.”

So here we are in 1434, not very long after her death, with the passive-aggressive getting in Philip’s face. The guy who was there, who had her turned over to the English. He’s there for a council of peace with his cousin to try to settle the fact that Charles was involved in, probably, the murder of Philip’s father, and the city of Arras passive-aggressively build a snowman to remind them of Joan. Because both of them are at fault. Charles and Philip are both at fault. I cannot believe the guts that is involved with this.

Anne:  Yeah, and so very early on. This is an artistic depiction of her, which is why we’ve got it in here, but every early on. It’s not just that she’s a folk saint, it’s that there is outrage on her part. People know. They all know that it was wrong.

Michelle:  Yeah. I didn’t actually do as much as I might have with later depictions because I found these early ones to be so interesting, the ones that are happening just before her death or right afterwards. And I think that the amount of records we have, both from the original trial and the re-trial, show how much awareness there was of eyes being on them. That the English have to make a plausible excuse for doing what they want to do, but then the French realize they’ve got to go back and correct this because people are not forgetting. And they’re not forgiving.

Anne:  No, she doesn’t fall into obscurity. She never does. Yeah, I mean she might have done, if it hadn’t… Orléans! I mean, Orléans didn’t damn forget.

Michelle:  No. They actually, after her mother… after Joan’s mother was widowed, Orléans provides her a pension and a house.

Anne:  Good going, Orléans! Good going. Yeah, I like them.

Michelle:  So I’ve got a couple of other little mentions…

Anne:  What you got?

Michelle:  Joan shows up in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part I. It’s an early play. It’s 1590. I quite like his presentation of Joan, but his original audience would probably have been shocked by her. His Joan shows up and gets in the Dauphin’s face. She shows up and they have the legend of her, or at least the urban legend, about the Dauphin trying to fool her, and having other people go out and greet her as if they’re him, and her knowing that it’s not. But then, the Dauphin also just basically says “Oh really, you’re here to lead me in battle? Come on, show me what you got,” and she takes him down. It’s awesome. 

He says: “Then come, o’God’s name; I fear no woman.” And she says, “And while I live, I’ll ne’er fly from a man.” And, “They fight and Joan la Pucelle overcomes.” That’s in the stage directions.

Anne:  You know, okay. Things that didn’t happen.

Michelle:  Things that didn’t happen. But Shakespeare puts it in here, and you know that for his audience this is supposed to be shocking and horrible, and I’m like “You go!”

The same thing happens later where Joan fights Talbot, hand-to-hand, which of course is something we’re told never happens, that Joan deliberately does not fight, she only ever carries a banner into battle. She’s there to inspire, she’s not there to kill anybody.

Anne:  Right. She wears armor because she’s not an idiot. And she gets wounded, a couple of times, but no. She’s not a fighter herself.

Michelle:  Shakespeare’s Joan is out there, kicking ass and taking names, and being aggressive and unfeminine, and I really like her. But I know the original audience is not supposed to. And then of course she’s revealed, in Shakespeare’s play, to be an outright sorcerer, right? Calling on demons?

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  This is all not something Shakespeare’s making up. It’s from Holinshed. So by the time we’re getting history written in England, they’re positing Joan as a witch who calls on demons, who is unnatural and unfeminine, and also probably a slut.

Anne:  Yeah, but that was what the English had been saying from the very beginning. So it goes down into their written history, but that was the whole point. Of course she had to be all those things, in order to make it okay to kill her. And she had to be all those things in order to make her cause not the one that God wanted. Obviously.

Michelle:  Shakespeare’s innovation, that isn’t in Holinshed, is that he has Joan captured by the Duke of York. 

Anne:  I’d forgotten that. Yeah, that’s true. No, that didn’t happen either.

Michelle:  It totally did not happen, and it’s not even in Holinshed, but he uses it to have Joan say to him “I curse you,” and… hold on, let me see if I can find the specific line that she says to him where she curses… there it is:

“Then lead me hence;

with whom I leave my curse:

May never glorious sun reflex his beams

Upon the country where you make abode;

But darkness and the gloomy shade of death

Environ you, till mischief and despair

Drive you to break your necks or hang yourselves!”

So Shakespeare blames the Wars of the Roses on Joan, is what this means.

Anne:  It’s all Joan’s fault, really.

Michelle:  It’s all her fault.

Anne:  She cursed the Duke of York.

Michelle:  Shakespeare ends up creating a link between Joan and Margaret of Anjou, that basically all of the nasty sorcery, unnatural female things that Joan is doing, just gets passed on to Margaret of Anjou.

Anne:  Oh, okay. But not Elizabeth Woodville. 

Michelle:  No, not her.

Anne:  She got hers from someplace else. Oh, okay. Just checking.

Michelle:  So it’s pretty astonishing that, by 1796, Robert Southey, who we’ve encountered before… He’s, as I have learned, the poet laureate of England at this point, and he writes an epic poem about Joan that is positive, and I’m quite shocked by this. It starts with:

“War’s varied horrors, and the train of ills,

That follow on Ambition’s blood-stain’d path

And fill the earth with woe; of France preserv’d

By maiden hand, what time her chiefs subdued,

Or slept in death, or lingered life in chains,

I sing: nor wilt thou FREEDOM scorn the song.”

So this is a way far way from Joan claiming, in Henry IV Part I, “You can’t kill me, I’m pregnant.” “Oh, who knocked you up?” “Oh this guy.” “Well it can’t have been this guy.” “Oh well, I meant that one.” She goes through about three different lovers. And it ends with:

 “Thus the Maid

Redeemed her country. Ever may the All-just

Give to the arms of freedom such success.”

Which is really fascinating that, by 1796, Southey is comfortable bringing her back into the literary fold and writing about her in this way.

Anne:  1796… hold on. When is the French Revolution?

Michelle:  1797. Is that right? Maybe I’m wrong. Hold on, let me check…

Anne:  Because this is important.

Michelle:  Oh, I bet you’re right. I bet it’s earlier. The French Revolution is 1789. So it’s before this. Oh I was totally wrong. It’s 1789 and so, of course… and it’s ongoing. 1789 – 1799. So yeah, they’re having fellow-feeling with France at this point, because the aristocrats are all worried.

Anne:  It goes even beyond that. The French Revolution condemned Joan of Arc. 

Michelle:  That’s really interesting.

Anne:  For that short piece of time, she’s condemned by the government. That’s the background to this.

Michelle:  Yeah, that’s a really good point. I find English literature from that time period, the 1790’s, to be really interesting because, when you look at their literature, the American Revolution doesn’t really… it’s not even a blip, right? They’re not concerned. “Nah, we don’t care.”

Anne:  They’re sending people off to die, but they don’t mention it much.

Michelle:  It’s not creating the crisis of faith…

Anne:  Yes!

Michelle:  … the way that the French Revolution happens and all of a sudden people are freaking out. “The world is falling apart! It’s ending! We have no idea what’s happening!”

Anne:  Right. No. Because they’re very different things. The French Revolution overthrows a king. The American Revolution is a bunch of colonials way far away, behaving badly. But the French Revolution is right next door, and it does strike close to home as to things that had been possible, of course, because England has also had, before this, a war that deposes a king.

Michelle:  Yeah I’ve… you know, as an American I find it really interesting, because our history… English… that’s such a loaded phrase but… the English-speaking way of thinking about ourselves as the United States because we successfully killed so many of the inhabitants who were already here that we can pretend like they were never here…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  … in large portions of our history, basically begins with the American Revolution, so we think it’s a big deal. So, it was kind of an interesting shock to go start reading English and French literature from this time and find out that they’re just not too fussed about it.

Anne:  No, no they fight us or they send us money, but it’s really… yeah, we’re not that important.

Michelle:  Not to them, at that particular moment.

So my last adaptation that I have for you is George Méliès’ film from 1900. This is amazing. 

Anne:  Did you get to see it?

Michelle:  Yes! It’s on YouTube! It’s eleven minutes long. It is his second… not really full-length film, exactly. It was the first of his films to surpass two hundred meters in length. And it’s really one of the first narrative films ever created. It is kind of in color because it was painstakingly, frame-by-frame, colored. It is amazing. And it was lost until 1982.

Anne:  How did it get lost? What had happened?

Michelle:  I have no idea how it got lost. But it was released in 1900, and then he had a very, very famous film, in 1902, A Trip to the Moon, which you’ve probably seen. That’s the one with the picture of the moon with the spaceship splatting into its face. It must have gotten lost pretty early, because what we’re told is that it was believed to be entirely gone, until a print was found in 1982.

Anne:  Oh lovely.

Michelle:  And the first scene is actually missing.

Anne:  I will go watch that.

Michelle:  It’s delightful. The medieval costumes are not bad. It’s very theatrical, so it has sets. Clearly as if they were theatrical sets. George Mélièsis the original actor-director. He’s basically in every single scene, he plays seven roles…

Anne:  “My direction is that I am in the film all the time! That is my direction by me!”

Michelle:  “No, no, you cannot do it properly. Let me do that role!” It’s great.

Anne:  He doesn’t play Joan though, does he? He does get somebody else to play Joan?

Michelle:  No, he doesn’t play Joan.

Anne:  Just asking.

Michelle:  But he plays Joan’s father, Joan’s uncle, a soldier, one of Joan’s jailors, the wood-carrier at the execution, like, he is all over the place. It’s great. And I was impressed with it. Not just because it’s from 1900, but their medieval costumes are actually pretty nice. As long as you ignore their shoes.

Anne:  Okay. The shoes! The shoes are always an issue in medieval reconstructions. The worst is when you’re watching a medieval reconstruction and people are wearing their Reeboks. Like, stop it! No. Just stop it.

Yeah, okay. So, the shoes. We can give him a pass on the shoes.

Michelle:  They’re wearing theatrical shoes. So the men have on ballet flats, and the women have on little short heels. But the piece that made me so happy was, at the Siege of Orléans, the defenders throw sand over the walls. There’s no boiling oil. There’s sand. Heated sand. Isn’t that cool?

Anne:  Very good.

Michelle:  I have seen so many, much bigger budget and higher technical ability things, that get siege warfare wrong and have people throwing boiling oil out. 

When I told my kid about this, he just kind of sniffed, right? Because he’s lived with a medievalist his whole life. He was like “Of course they wouldn’t throw oil, that’s expensive.”

Anne:  I have been told, in France, when I was in the Dordogne, where there had been a bunch of stuff, and the English, ya da ya da… I have been told, in France, by the tour guide, pointing up at the wall of the castle, “That is where they poured the boiling oil on the English.” Have been told that. In France. Just saying.

Michelle: Well, what I had read was that sand was a really great choice. Heated sand…

Anne:  Oh, heated sand would be horrible, yeah.

Michelle:  Heated sand is a great choice to be throwing over at the knights, because it goes in through all the little cracks in the armor and is distinctly unpleasant.

Anne:  Very bad. Yeah. That would be my choice. But no, I would not be pouring boiling oil over… I mean, you have to use it later to kill people with if you’re, like, the Tudors, but no, I would not be pouring it over the wall of my besieged castle.

Michelle:  The only other thing I would point out about Joan in her literary and artistic afterlife is that her story appears to be very attractive to people who want to tell a story visually. Theatre has been a humongous part of it.

Anne:  The paintings and the engravings. I mean, I have an entire collection that’s actually on my wall as we speak.

Michelle:  Yeah, there is not a decade, I don’t think, since 1900 — with that first George Méliès film — until now, that doesn’t have a Joan of Arc film. Her story gets into film at the very beginning and stays there.

Anne:  One of the things that’s interesting to me about the paintings and the engravings is that, because they are focusing on one moment, they have to pick what they’re doing. And so they divide, very easily, into depictions of Joan hearing voices, and depictions of Joan in battle, and depictions of Joan in prison or being burned at the stake. So it’s always of interest to me what moment it is that people chose to memorialize. Because that’s a very varied life, and it divides nicely into what it is that you might be using Joan for in your personal life. You know, for spiritual meditations, or for courage. She divides up in different ways.

Michelle:  One of the books I was reading was talking about how, over the last 500 years, Joan has been picked up by so many different facets of society to be their spokesperson. And, distressingly — this is Marina Warner’s book that I’m talking about here — she’s been picked up recently by the far right. And I found that to be a little hard to wrap my head around.

Anne:  Not really that recently, because, in France, there’s been a long history of associating her with retro causes and the like. But recently, then, there’s been a surge, yeah.

Michelle:  And I find that to be really interesting. And it may be connected to, once you remove somebody from being a person and make them into an icon, it’s not so difficult to take them and hang them on various things, and try to have their stamp be pulled over there. 

Certainly Warner’s book is really interesting about the range of topics that Joan’s been pulled into, which may or may not have had anything… and, of course, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure! Get pulled into there. There’s an Epic Rap Battle of History that features Joan, but it’s not as awesome as the one with Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, because they randomly match her up with Miley Cyrus. Which makes no logical sense at all.

Anne:  No! No.

Michelle:  I don’t recommend that one. Go watch the George Méliès film. That’s much better.

Anne:  There’s been some recent ones that are very good. Some not. But, one of the nice things you get to do, this whole battle stuff, and of course the burning at the stake. Very dramatic. Very visual.

Michelle:  You know, I am deeply troubled by the reading that I had done that… and maybe you saw this in the trial documents too… that the English made her executioner stop the fire in between when Joan was dead and having the flames consume her utterly, so that there wouldn’t be anything left for there to be relics. They made him put the flames out so that the crowd could see her body. I’m so troubled by this need to expose her, even in death.

Anne:  Yeah. Very bad behavior. Very… we have been covering a thousand years of people behaving badly. The English were really badly behaved in this. And the Burgundians also. So. And also the French King. Not doing anything that was great. So. There you go.

Michelle:  Well he got some karmic justice, because as soon as his own son was old enough to give him grief, his kid was giving him grief. His seventeen-year-old son got involved with an attempt to overthrow him.

Anne:  I can understand why. I mean, he’s so ineffectual. What is this, making deals with the English? And the Burgundians? When Joan could have actually taken those towns back so much easier. They could have done so much more than they did. Very ineffectual leader.

Michelle:  I’m telling you, who I feel sorry for in this whole thing, other than Joan, of course.

Anne:  Other than Joan, yeah, of course.

Michelle:  Other than Joan, because that’s a given. But John of Bedford. It sucks to be John of Bedford. His older brother, Henry, kicks the bucket young, gets to become the well-beloved warrior king who never ages, and John of Bedford is left holding the bag. But yeah. This was a hard one. I’ll be honest. Reading about some of the stuff they did to Joan was rough.

Anne:  It is very hard. It is really, really very hard. There needed to be no way in which it could be said and rumored that she had been spirited away and saved. There needed to be no doubt. The English wanted her dead, and they wanted her discredited, and one of the things also was that her angels had not saved her. And, you know, to the credit of the French people, they just didn’t buy it. They knew the English had killed her, but they didn’t believe that she had been a heretic, and they didn’t believe she was a witch, and they didn’t believe the English were in the damn right. You know? So there you go.

Yeah. Yeah. I love her very much. I love her. I recommend going to Domrémy and seeing where she was born. It’s really worth it.

Michelle:  I didn’t realize her house was still there, but that’s really awesome, that they recognized that and saved it.

Anne:  I tell you what, I’ll use that as our picture, because there’s an almost infinite number of Joan images that can be used. I’ll use her house. How about that? It’s the same reason that I used the Old Synagogue for our Crimes Against the Jews in the Black Death episode. Are there pictures of the Jews being burned and whatnot? Yes there are. And I didn’t want to use them. Same thing with Joan. She gets used a lot. But there’s actually a house where she was born, so I’ll use that one. How about that?

Michelle:  Yeah, that would be good. I would like that. 

Yeah, Shakespeare wisely side-steps showing the burning at the stake, because how do you do that without garnering sympathy? So he just doesn’t do it.

Anne:  Holinshed was a liar. But the English had been lying about Joan of Arc for quite some time at that point. I kind of like can’t think highly of Southey, because Byron hated him, and thought he was a crappy poet so, you know. And Byron knew his stuff. But I am glad that he wrote that excellent poem about Joan of Arc and her wonderfulness, and so the English kind of redeem themselves at that moment. It’s weird that it’s Southey that does it. Okay, so that’s just weird.

Michelle:  The poem feels very self-important, so I could kind of see why Byron might just kind of eye-roll…

Anne:  Byron hated him.

Michelle:  … “Really, get over yourself.”

Anne:  Yeah. There’s no irony in Southey, and there’s so much in Byron. I like his Don Juan. Where they have to eat the spaniel. Because, you know, well they’ve been shipwrecked.

Oh but before we go, so do you know Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc?

Michelle:  Oh! No, I don’t.

Anne:Yeah, Mark Twain was not big on visions and religions and whatnot, but he did his research on Joan of Arc and he came to adore her. He adored her. And in fact his biography of Joan of Arc is… he considered his best work. And nobody knows it, because we all know Huckleberry Finn and, you know, his funny stuff from California. He thought highly of his biography of Joan of Arc. I made my students read it once, in one of my classes, and they’re like “This is not Mark Twain!” But it has its funny stuff in it. He can’t help it. There’s some funniness. But it’s not Joan. Joan herself is not hilarious. Some of the soldiers around her? Very, very funny. Because it is, after all, Mark Twain.

Michelle:  I see that there is a 1910 book by a French author and it gets translated into English, as The Mystery of Joan of Arc,by Arthur Conan Doyle. So I may have to look that up.

Anne:  This I don’t know. Yeah, so I’m going to have to look that up too. 

Michelle:  As you know, my brain blew a fuse when I first started doing the research for this, trying to figure out how I was going to deal with the extreme number of adaptations.

Anne:  Yes. And podcast listeners, we were discussing putting this into two episodes: One, the History; Two, the Adaptations. But Michelle said that was not going to work, so, hence we’re going over a little bit. We’re a little bit longer than usual.

Michelle:  There is a play that I could not find in English, and I really would have liked to have looked at it, that is an expressionist drama about Joan and Gilles de Rais. But it’s in German, and I could not find an English translation of it. So if somebody else happens to know an English translation, send me a link.

Anne:  If it was French I could tackle it, but German I’m going to have to stay out of. No. Too hard.

Michelle:  But the number of things that are plays or films are just amazing. Something about her story appeals to visual storytelling and I… I love the Pre-Raphaelites, so I really love their versions of Joan.

Anne:  Yes, I’ve got some very good examples of Joan hearing things, and… my favorite, though, is unlike anything else I’ve seen. Henrietta Ward’s painting from the end of the nineteenth century, and it shows Joan… it has nothing to do with Joan’s reality, but it shows Joan as a young woman in some tent. There’s obviously a battlefield, and she’s in some tent, and there’s a very, very tired soldier in his armor there, and she’s there leaning over a water jug, and she’s got a dress on, she’s got a rosary. Clearly it’s Joan as a young woman, you know, tending to somebody in battle. It’s like, this never happened, but I like it anyway. It’s just so different from everything else. Because so much of her life has been lied about, but this is a nice lie. And so much of her life has been canonized and made iconic. The visions. The battle. The incarceration. The death. But this is “young woman, hanging out with soldier.” I like it a lot.

Michelle:  That’s really interesting, because Southey does the same thing in his poem. He has her be a healer. Here I am, back to Southey:

“Meantime

From many a potent herb the juice she press’d

Medicinal, and touch’d with lenient hand

Each gaping wound, where life, as loath to fly

Sat trembling.”

He has her going around and healing people after the battle with medicine, which… She didn’t do that.

Anne:  No, but I think it’s part of the story.

Michelle:  It’s really interesting because it pulls on that whole legend about that one of the ways you know the medieval king is… and they’re the right king… is that they can heal. So it’s very interesting.

Anne:  Yeah, so Joan by her very touch…

Michelle:  Mmhmm.

Anne:  Yeah. Alright. So, more on Joan? Anything else we need?

Michelle:  I enjoyed the legend.. or, not legend but presumed miracle that she gives the Dauphin when he asks for a sign and she says “Go to this church over there, and there’ll be a sword under the altar.” That was great. I thought that was great.

Anne:  Yeah. It also makes good visuals.

Michelle:  But it’s kind of Sword in the Stone-y, right? It’s kind of King Arthur-y.

Anne:  It’s just such a short period of time, with so much in it.

Michelle:  But I think that one of the reasons that her story takes off so much, I mean, in addition to the horrific things that are done to her which creates empathy, the story has all of these components of a hero’s legend, right? So it’s a very short jump to go over into legend when you’re kind of already 95% of the way there.

Anne:  Yes. And we were talking about.. there’s some revisionist theories, and one of them is that Joan didn’t really exist and she’s just a myth. And the thing is she feels like a myth. 

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  She feels like a legend. And she has mythic and legendary qualities. But she was actually a real person, as we know from reams of documentation. Just so much documentation surviving from the time. We have two full court documents that let us know that was a real person. Her mother thought she was real. The villagers thought she was real. The English thought she was real. The Burgundians thought she was real. The Dauphin thought she was real. Everybody thought she was real. At the time. And so we do too, because there’s evidence that she was. Revisionist theory, that’s just silly. That is just dumb. So no. 

Michelle:  I would think that we have more documentation of Joan than we do of practically anybody else who lived, including a few kings from the Middle Ages.

Anne:  So that is our discussion of Joan of Arc. The Murder of Joan of Arc, because that wasn’t a trial. That’s not even a judicial murder. That was a murder. Absolute pretend trial, and bad things done to a person who needed to be treated much better than she was.

Next time we get together we will be… because we keep saying this is a thousand years of people behaving badly, so we’re going to go back to the beginning and so, in amongst the Merovingians, and talk about the murder of Sigebert, and so… which is like from the sixth century.

Michelle:  About which I know nothing, so this will be cool. I will learn things.

Anne:  You are totally going to have to learn about the Merovingians, and they’re not… they’re complex, but that’s okay. And, you will get to discuss adaptations and things going into history because there’s this thing called the Nibelungenlied, so there you go.

Michelle:  Excellent.

Anne:  Yeah, there you go. I’ll leave that to you.

That’s all for True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, with less technology.

We’re on Apple Podcast, iHeart Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher and other… I think we’re at a whole bunch of places these days. If you can find a podcast then I think we’re on there, but you have to look for us because we’re not coming on up into… like if you go and search “true crime” on Stitcher or Spotify or Apple, we don’t come up. You have to say “true crime medieval.”

Now, if you leave us reviews, we will start going on up into true crime, and so then many people can see us. We’d love it if you left a review. We’d really appreciate that.

You can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, and there you can find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can reach us all through that webpage.

And you can leave comments. We’d love for you to leave comments. We’d love to hear from you. And if you have medieval crimes that you think we should discuss, please let us know. And there you go. That’s us! So we’re saying goodbye!

Michelle:  Bye!

Vlad Țepeș Slaughters the Transylvanian Saxons, Wallachia, 1460

Anne:  Welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host who’s recording in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  Which we explain in some other podcast, earlier. It’s the jousting and the flag, just briefly. That’s what it is.

We’re still recording in Plague Time, in stay-at-home orders in both our states. This actually really doesn’t make much of an impact on the podcast because we were always recording in different states, and so we were never sitting in the same room when we talked about this. But it does affect our moods, actually. Sort of. You know, a little bit at least.

Michelle:  I’m getting to use my office to record for the first time since the lockdown started.

Anne:  Your office at your house?

Michelle:  Mmhmm.

Anne:  Was your house not part of the lockdown?

Michelle:  Well, no, it’s just that people have been using this space.

Anne:  Oh. And you managed to get them out of your office?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Uh-huh. Do I want to know how you did this?

Michelle:  It’s just that Brian didn’t have many meetings this afternoon, so he decamped down to a different room. Usually he has a full day of meetings, so… The first week, under lockdown, I was in the basement, and that was when Samhain was recording with me.

Anne:  We had the cats! I remember we had the cats.

Michelle:  Yep. And then the last two times I’ve used my bedroom. But Brian only had two more meetings, so I booted him down there today.

Anne:  See, this is what happens when you have an entire family who’s home and working from home. Because my wife is working from home, but she’s over in her office, and I’m in my studio with the parrot, and it’s the same thing as it’s always been.

Michelle:  I have told all three children that I’m recording, which does not in any way guarantee that they won’t come knock on the door.

Anne:  Oh absolutely not. And so, they’re totally going in the outtakes, if they do. I’m just telling you. I’ll take their little names out, and everything, but other than that I’m keeping ‘em. I’m keeping ‘em in.

Today we’re talking about Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Țepeș or Vlad Dracul, as he’s also called. And so we’re in Wallachia, which is part of Romania. It’s one of the pieces of Romania. Wallachia, about the middle of the fifteenth century. Part of Romania, and Romania is at the crossroads of Eastern and Western Europe.

The number of cultures that have been through Romania and left their mark; the Greeks, the Romans, the Goths, the Huns, the Bulgars, the Magyars (another name for the Hungarians), the Mongols… The background is Vlad…  is that there’s been a lot of movement back and forth, and wars in his territory, and Wallachia didn’t become independent from Hungary until 1330. Vlad is born in 1428. He dies sometime around December 1476 or January 1477.

So Wallachia, at this point, is still kind of back and forth with… it’s messing with Hungary and the Ottomans. It’s not a calm sort of time. It’s not a calm time for Wallachia.

Vlad Dracul, who would become Vlad Țepeș after he impaled everybody, because that’s what that means, was born in 1428. He was the second son of his father, who was the ruler of Wallachia. His father had become the ruler of Wallachia in 1436, and in 1442 Vlad and his younger brother were held hostage by the Ottoman Empire. Recently they discovered the archeological remains of the dungeon, the castle where they were held.

Michelle:  Ooh, that’s cool!

Anne:  I know! They were held by the Ottoman Empire…

Michelle:  At least you know which ones are fictional. Which countries are fictional, and which ones are real. Because my understanding of this is so screwed up by Shakespeare and all of his fake Eastern European countries that he likes to randomly set things in.

Anne:  Wallachia existed. The Ottoman Empire existed. Hungary existed. That’s pretty much what we’re dealing with. Although the Transylvanian Saxons are going to come in there too.

Hungary invaded Wallachia in 1447, so this is the same people from whom they had gotten independence a little more than a hundred years before then. And at that point Vlad’s father and his older brother were murdered, and Vlad is still, at that point, held in the Ottoman Empire. And at that point then, Vlad’s second cousin, Vladislav II, was installed as the ruler of Wallachia.

In the fall of 1448, Hungary attacked the Ottoman Empire, and Vladislav went with them, at which point Vlad took over Wallachia briefly, until Vladislav came back, and he had to leave.

Things fell apart though between Hungary and Wallachia and, in 1456, Hungary supported Vlad when he invaded Wallachia. Are you being able to keep track of all this, so far?

Michelle:  I think so. I’m following.

Anne:  Because, yeah, Vlad’s cousin is on the throne after Hungary invades Wallachia…

Michelle:  Right.

Anne:  OK, but then things fall apart and — because Vladislav goes with Hungary — but things fall apart and at that point Hungary then backs Vlad. OK. Whatever. I don’t think Hungary is entirely interested in Wallachia being a calm sort of political entity at this time. That’s what I’m getting here.

OK, so Hungary supported Vlad when he invaded Wallachia in 1456. Vladislav was killed in battle, and Vlad then purged the Wallachian boyars, the nobility. “Purging” means he killed them off. I don’t know whether you knew what that word meant, but that’s what that meant. Because he wanted to make sure that everybody who was left with any kind of power in the country was in favor of him. Fair enough.

The Transylvanian Saxons had opposed him because they were allied to Vladislav’s brothers, and Vlad’s half-brother, and so he plundered their villages. He took everybody captive, he took them back to Wallachia and he impaled them. That’s the point at which he becomes Vlad Țepeș. That’s it.

When the Ottoman sultan sent envoys demanding homage, Vlad impaled them too.

He attacked the Ottomans in 1462 and he massacred the Turks and Bulgarians. The Ottomans put forth Vlad’s younger brother. They backed him as a replacement for Vlad. Vlad went to Hungary to ask for assistance but they imprisoned him, in Visegrád, from 1463-1475. 

So at this point, if you look him up on Wikipedia, you discover that he was the ruler of Wallachia three times. Once, when he invaded while Vladislav was out of the country, and then he had to leave. The second, when he impaled everybody and then he got imprisoned in Hungary. He’s going to come back again. During that time the stories about his cruelty spread. He was released in 1475. He fought with Hungary against the Bosnian Ottomans, and he was killed in battle. So he was released in 1475, he was the ruler of Wallachia again, but he was killed that year. In late 1476 or… but he was dead at least by January 10, 1477.

So, that’s the précis timeline: Vlad the Impaler.

The “Dracul” part of his name is real, and it was inherited from his father, who had joined the Order of the Dragon originally, which was originally one of the military crusader orders founded by the King of Hungary in 1408, and dedicated to holding back the Ottoman Empire. So he’d inherited that name from his father.

I want to explain the Ottoman Empire because I was thinking, it’s like, we say this all the time, what exactly are we talking about? The Ottoman Empire had been founded at the end of the thirteenth century in Anatolia. After 1354 it controlled the Balkans. At its height, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, under Suleiman the Magnificent, it controlled Southeast Europe, the Caucasus, North Africa, the Horn of Africa. Constantinople was the capital. What’s going to happen to it, way after our time period, is that it’s going to ally with Germany in World War I, and get partitioned after that war. Which is why it’s no longer with us.

The Dracul family line continued after Vlad’s death, from his third son, but they were no longer rulers of Wallachia.

OK. So. The stories about his cruelty started in his lifetime. This is not one of those things where people said bad things about him after he died. No, no! They said these things while he was alive. And they became highly popular, especially in Germany, and they were helped both by Vlad’s slaughter of the Transylvanian Saxons, which made a big impression on Germans, and the rise of the printing press.

The timing of this is really bad, for Vlad, in terms of reputation. I’m going to get to that. But the stories that were being put forth were, in essence, true, though the extent of the cruelty really does get exaggerated. Which is hard when actually he really did impale all those Transylvanian Saxons. I mean, to actually exaggerate that kind of cruelty, wow. Takes some creativity.

By the time of his death, even during his imprisonment in Hungary — it was said to have been due to his cruelty — the printed books also had horrific woodcuts – I might put one on our page – for instance showing Vlad eating dinner surrounded by impaled people. Which if that actually had happened would be one of our blood feasts, but it didn’t, so whatever.

So that’s from the 1499 and 1500 editions of the German text. Yeah, Germany had the printing press, and so they were able to print a lot of things. Lots of copies of the stories of Vlad the Impaler.

The Russian manuscripts – clearly the story was popular because there’s more than twenty still extant – they’re copies of a South Slavic text from about 1485, in which Vlad is horribly cruel, but it’s necessary to strengthen the government. The Romanian histories record the impalements, and some legends that show up in the Slavic and German versions – this is where I was talking about the exaggeration, where he would just burn lazy and poor and lame people, or he executed some woman who sewed a shirt that was too short for her husband, you know, whatever. So they include that but they make it very, very clear that his cruelty was necessary in order to rule and control Wallachia.

Michelle:  That’s the same justification we got with Pedro the Cruel.

Anne:  Absolutely. Who really was very badly behaved. So was Vlad.

From the mid nineteenth century on, Romanian historians have in general treated him as a great ruler, and a fighter for independence, who used terror because it was necessary. There’s an exception. Ioan Bogdan, the historian, said that Romanians should be ashamed of him, but he seems to be a kind of lone voice.

I want to just say this about Stoker, because Michelle is going to be talking about the vampires and I just want to say, to make it really clear, that Stoker used Vlad because Vlad the Impaler was well known. He’s a very well known piece of Romanian history, and his name was familiar, and Stoker wanted some local color for the vampire novel so he used Vlad because it was an authentic name. That’s it! Having to do with Vlad the Impaler, that’s what has to do with vampires. It’s the Irishman, Bram Stoker, connecting Vlad because he liked the name. That’s it.

But I want to talk about medieval war crimes. You interested in this, Michelle?

Michelle:  Yeah. Yep. And I definitely wanted to talk to you about him compared to Pedro the Cruel, because his name is generally known because of that connection that Bram Stoker created, but on the scale of, say, Henry VI, who never did anything bad on purpose but was incompetent, all the way up to Pedro the Cruel, where does Vlad fall? The real warlord?

Anne:  On the scale of one to ten, if ten is Pedro the Cruel, I would say that Vlad the Impaler is fifteen.

Michelle:  So, worse? Worse than Pedro? Yeah.

Anne:  Absolutely. Yeah. Isn’t that… that’s right off the top of my head, and so why am I thinking that? I think Vlad was much more efficient, and Pedro the Cruel would absolutely kill you if you were in opposition to him. Vlad would kill you if you were living near someplace where somebody was in opposition to him. And he would kill you and all your neighbors, women and children. I don’t know, did he leave the dogs and cows alone? I have no idea. But the article in Wikipedia says if he was operating now, he would be convicted of genocide and war crimes, that’s the deal. It wasn’t just war crimes. What we would consider war crimes. It was genocide.

Michelle:  So I’m curious though as to… that’s using our standards. So by medieval standards is he considered, or is it just the people who would have opposed him anyway who consider him to be a criminal?

Anne:  The surviving Wallachians, I gather, think OK of him. But I’m not entirely sure about that. But that’s what I want to talk about. What are the medieval standards? Are there any medieval standards for what a war crime is, and how are they applied? So, yes. Because I was curious about that. So I went to look this up. And I do love my military history.

So the first actual trial for medieval war crimes, for war crimes in the Middle Ages, was in 1474 when Peter von Hagenbach was executed for the murders and rapes committed by his soldiers during the occupation of Breisach. So that’s 1474. Vlad the Impaler is actually alive at this time, fair enough?

Michelle:  Mmhmm.

Anne:  OK. And our international laws didn’t start until the late seventeenth century. In the Middle Ages, warfare was understood to include pillaging, arson, murder and rape. It’s as you go on into the late Middle Ages that things start to actually change, although I want to talk about some laws before then. And Vlad the Impaler is in the late Middle Ages, and so there’s two things I think that contribute to his contemporary understanding as someone who was unnecessarily cruel, and our understanding of it. One is the printing press, because his story got sent around so widely. The other is that the notion of war crimes has become stronger right at this time.

Isn’t that nice? Vlad the Impaler. That’s why we know about him.

Michelle:  Interesting. That corresponds with this emerging idea that there is a principal of governance other than ‘whatever the King says, goes’.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  That’s also something that’s emerging in the fifteenth century. 

Anne:  Yes. He’s at the crossroads of a lot of things, and that’s one of them.

The Church, rather than secular authority, had overall jurisdiction. See, that’s one of the things about, well, when you talk about what are medieval war crimes, you’re talking about a vast… a continent and some islands stuck onto it… a continent of lots of different countries. It’s the Church, in Christian Europe it’s the Church that has a kind of constant presence, and the Pax Dei of 989, which is very early, proclaimed excommunication as a penalty for some war crimes, and here are the war crimes:  Despoiling ecclesiastical property, robbing the poor, or attacking women, children and unarmed clergy. So by 989 that was an idea of war crimes.

Michelle:  OK. Noncombatants.

Anne:  Yes. Noncombatants. And, you know, you’re not supposed to steal stuff from poor people. You can go and raid John of Gaunt’s house, but you can’t steal from people that are poor. But that’s not secular law. That’s the Church law.

The eleventh-century Truce of God, this is also the Church, is the point at which combat was banned from noon on Saturday to Monday morning, and later that will become all high holy days, and about a century later there were only 80 days a year that were actually OK for fighting. Now, was this obeyed? No it was not. But it was a thing. It was a kind of overarching idea, if that makes sense.

By the late Middle Ages, military courts were convened in France and England in an attempt to enforce acceptable soldierly behavior, but the standards were really very, very low, so don’t get excited. And in 1385, under Richard II, the Ordinance of Durham not only specified the rules — Don’t desert in order to pillage, for instance — but specified that the rights of citizens should not be violated. That is a big deal. And that’s 1385, it’s before Vlad. So there are places in Europe where this is being paid attention to. Wallachia? Not so much.

I got that, by the way, from John A. Haymond, a military historian. Really liked his work.

Michelle:  I think we should point out that it’s not that some of these things weren’t considered to be wrong, before that, it’s just that, you know, ruler by ruler… If the particularly Viking lord that you’re raiding with isn’t OK with you doing whatever you want, he can decide what to enforce, but in terms of this emerging idea of there being codes that have a wider buy-in to, that’s what’s different.

Anne:  We’ve talked about this before. We were talking about this with Pedro the Cruel, for instance. It is true that there were very clear notions of how to treat prisoners, but they had to do with economics. Prisoners who couldn’t afford ransom… I mean, there were no prisoners who couldn’t afford ransom, you just killed people. But you might take a prisoner who was noble and hold them for ransom, because you have to feed them, and everything, you’re not just going to do this for free, you have to be getting money back. But what that means is that if I should take a prisoner and hold him for ransom, that money, any money is mine. And so therefore you should not kill him because that’s a wrong done to me, not the prisoner. Does that make sense?

Michelle:  Mmhmm. And of course it’s not considered theft when you’ve captured a prisoner of war, and if they had something good, you know…

Anne:  Oh no. No.

Michelle:  The armor, the horse, all of that stuff is…

Anne:  That’s yours!

Michelle:  … absolutely forfeit. The idea that you’ve stolen that from this person is not anywhere in anybody’s consciousness.

Anne:  Oh no. No, no, no. And if your leaders give you permission to go pillage, that’s just fine. The dictum against pillaging when you haven’t been allowed is that you are essentially deserting. You should be doing something else and instead you’re robbing people. And there is a notion that it’s very bad behavior to kill civilians and rape women, but it isn’t something that’s illegal. Certainly not at an international level, but not even at national levels.

I went looking for something because you and I had talked about this because we know Shakespeare. We were interested in the part at the Battle of Agincourt when Fluellen is upset. He says “To kill the boys, to kill the boys that’s against the”… well, he says “the rule of law”. But it’s not, actually.

In 1419, Henry V had made ordinances of war that forbad rape of women, desecration of churches, and the taking of children under fourteen as prisoners. But killing off the baggage boys is not actually contained in that. I thought I’d tell you. Shakespeare’s just, you know, being Shakespeare.

Michelle:  That’s interesting. He’s definitely going out of his way in there to try to make sure that Henry V looks even better than what he can argue that he was, right? Even if you want to take a really golden view of him. Because elsewhere in the play he has… he gives orders that you’re not going to take anything without paying for it, so you’re not going to have the army go and, like they typically would do, support themselves by stealing from the countryside. He tells them no. If you’re going to re-provision from the French citizens, you’re going to pay for it.

Anne:  That’s actually in his ordinance, yeah. It’s actually there. If I remember this correctly, there’s stuff about pillaging, when you’re allowed to and when you’re not. 

But no, yeah. He does order the prisoners killed, but his reason is not that the French have killed the baggage boys, it has to do with another French attack. But it’s a big deal, because you’re losing money.

Michelle:  So we have this concept, in the Middle Ages, of war crimes, but it doesn’t necessarily line up with what we would consider to be war crimes, so we always have to be careful with terminology.

Anne:Absolutely. But it is very clear from the speed at which Vlad’s reputation for cruelty went across Europe that it was over the top. It was over the top for late medieval Europe.

Michelle:  That’s an interesting point. I wonder how the reaction would have been three hundred years earlier, or five hundred years earlier.

Anne:  I don’t think much reaction. It would be like, you know, the usual history. No, he’s late, that’s the deal.

Michelle:  It’s the time period. 

Anne:  Yes. Things are changing in Europe and he’s not going along with, you know, some new ways of thinking.

Yeah, the slaughter of entire populaces has certainly been done before. People know about that as a method for dealing with insurrection or captured enemies. That’s been done.

Now the whole impaling thing. That’s just, I mean… the cruelty of it. It isn’t like he just went and slaughtered them and just, you know, cut all their throats or something. No, no, no. The impaling is really bad. But that has to do, of course… definitely what impaling an entire population does is it creates a visual spectacle that is extremely powerful.

Michelle:  Which of course is something that the Romans were good at. He’s not inventing this. Yeah, he’s not inventing this concept. This has been around for a long time, but the Romans, it was different. It was a different time. They could get away with that.

Anne:  They lined the Appian Way with the crucified Spartacus rebels, didn’t they?

Michelle:  Mmhmm.

Anne:  Wasn’t that the Appian Way?

Yeah, it’s much easier to impale people than to crucify them. I’ll just point that out. In terms of, you know, what you can manage in a day. You have to have a… but the Romans were very efficient. They were very efficient. So they could crucify six hundred people.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  So yes, if it had been earlier, we would have the story, but it wouldn’t be as powerful as it was. It got spread all over. It was taken note of because things were changing and it got spread all over because of the printing press. Ta-da. My assessment.

Michelle:  Yeah, I think you’re right. I hadn’t really thought about the role of the printing press in cementing his reputation but, you know, you and I talked about with Pedro the Cruel that he had one reputation in Spain, but over in England they’re talking about him entirely differently. Once you have printing, and you can move things around a lot faster…

Anne:  Mmhmm

Michelle:  …and in larger volumes, it’s much harder to have that kind of humongously disparate reputation in two different places.

Anne:  His reputation in Romania is different, but that’s it. Yeah, that’s it.

Oh yeah, and you should see the woodcuts. I’ll put one on the page. It’s like… (gagging noise). It’s just not good.

Michelle:  But it’s early true crime literature.

Anne:  It is actually related to crime literature, isn’t it? Yeah. “Here’s the terrible bad things done to our people by Vlad the Impaler. Here he is eating his dinner with our people stuck around the table”. That’s nice. Yeah, you’ve got books, you can send them around.

Michelle:  So I think the impaling thing is, you know, one of the reasons it’s been so easy to attach the vampire legend to him.

Anne:  I think so too. Because the blood.

Michelle:  Yeah, the whole stake thing, you know, has a certain amount of overlap.

Anne:  Yeah, yeah.

Michelle:  As if it somehow just kind of makes psychological sense, right, that somebody who likes to impale other people would himself have to be dispatched with a stake? But, you know, as you said, there’s not any evidence at all that anybody in his time period attached this folklore to him. I didn’t know much of anything about this, so I learned lots of things. Which makes me happy.

So, one of the things I found out, that I didn’t know, is that the same party weekend of 1816 that resulted in Frankenstein, resulted in a story called The Vampyre that was started off by Byron. He didn’t finish it, his buddy Polidori asked “Hey, can I finish that up?” and he finishes the story, and it’s published in 1817 and kicks off…

Anne:  So that’s the first. OK.

Michelle:  Yeah, it kicks off nineteenth-century interest in vampire stories. So that’s a really important weekend for literature.

Anne:  Yeah, it was.

Did Stoker know that story?

Michelle:  I don’t know if he knew that one in particular. He knows the ones that draw from it. There’s a nice book called A Dracula Handbook that is by Elizabeth Miller who is a professor emerita at the University of Toronto, and is kind of a Dracula bigwig. So I have a nice quote from her about this:

“Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) was to become the prototype for most subsequent fictional vampires throughout the nineteenth century. The villain, Lord Ruthven, is not at all like the vampires of folklore. Rather, he is a handsome, jaded and charismatic nobleman who bears an intentional resemblance to Lord Byron himself.”

Anne:  Well Byron started it, didn’t he, just?

Michelle:  Yeah. That’s awesome.

So it kicks off this wave of nineteenth-century vampire literature, including one by our old pal Dumas, The Pale Lady, 1848. Is there a pond he wasn’t dipping into?

Anne:  No. He was so prolific. And very varied. He was busy, busy person. 

You know Carmilla, right?

Michelle:  That was the next one I was gonna… I haven’t actually read Carmilla but now I want to, having read about it. It sounds amazing.

Anne:  When I would teach the horror lit class I had to include Dracula because, duh, although it really annoys me. But Carmilla! Oh, I love Carmilla. Yeah. Go read Carmilla.

Michelle:  That’s the one Stoker probably knew.

Anne:  Yeah, Stoker did know Carmilla. That’s why I was using it. Besides the fact that I like it. I don’t really like much vampire literature. There’s certain tropes in horror lit that bore me to hell. One would be zombies. Bore, bore, bore, bore. Another is vampires. The other is, like, aliens. I’m, like, totally bored by all these things. And I don’t know why. I like bad house tropes. I like horror stories that are about bad houses. I do like those. But yeah, Carmilla? Very good. Very, very good indeed.

Michelle:  And that one is by an Anglo-Irish author, like Stoker, so somebody he… I mean… is probably, like, one generation earlier, because Carmilla is published in 1872 and Dracula is published in 1897. So one generation before him.

Stoker’s innovation is bringing the horrors of the gothic into the contemporary, modern world.

Anne:  Yep. Because even Carmilla is kind of past and romantic stuff. Whereas Dracula is all about “We went onto the main thoroughfare and had an adventure.” It’s, like, very, very modern London.

Michelle:  And I think that’s really interesting. Because the gothic was not a new… by the 1890s the gothic as a genre’s been around for over a hundred years. Probably longer. I’m learning more about the nineteenth century but it’s not my, you know, area of expertise.

Anne:  My horror lit class always started off with The Monk, which is just so scary, really, and full of dreadful things.

Michelle:  So he hauls this all over into the contemporary, modern world. And there are science fiction elements to it. One of the things that struck me, reading Dracula, is the importance of the typewriter, and how much is being done in the book with the importance of being able to gather information, collate information and then send it back out to people. And of course it’s Mina who has to do all the typing because, you know, some things never change.

I will tell you that Dracula has kind of a soft spot in my heart because I had a really interesting experience reading it for the first time. I was listening to it as an audio book and we had gotten delayed by snow, and so we’re driving out to my parents’ house – this was years ago at this point – and it is absolute dark because we are in the middle of freaking nowhere of Illinois, and it’s two o’clock in the morning, and everybody else in the car is asleep, and I am petrified, holding onto the steering wheel, listening to them tracking Dracula down to kill him at the end of the book. I was not sleepy.

Anne:  In the dark, and in the snow. Yeah. That is a good scene. I will admit that.

Michelle:  Oh my god, it was so scary. I might have felt differently about it, reading it under different circumstances but, holy cow, under those conditions it was really scary!

Anne:  There are pieces of Dracula which are just totally brilliant, and which are wonderful. I think my big beef with it is that I really want some more editing. I don’t think that it needs to be… I don’t think it needs all the stuff that’s in there. So. Yeah. But the core of it is just really lovely. Very well done.

Michelle:  So one thing I’ve found out that’s interesting about it is that he mostly just lifts the name. He finds it in a book of history, Wilkinson’s history about Transylvania and the other place that is a real place that sounds fake that he was actually king of, I don’t remember…

Anne:  Wallachia?

Michelle:  Yeah, that one.

Anne:  Yeah, Wallachia. It does sound fake but it’s not fake. It’s real. It’s a real place. It’s not there anymore, because it’s a political entity which is gone. It’s just part of Romania now.

Michelle:  So a more substantive source for him is Emily Gerard’s article “Transylvanian Superstitions”.

Anne:  Ah! That’s where the folklore came in.

Michelle:  Yeah. Her essay is the source of the word “nosferatu”.

Anne:  Really?

Michelle:  It’s not a real word. It’s not a word in Romanian or Hungarian. The author I was reading thinks that it might be a mishearing of a Greek word? For – hold on, let me scroll down – it might be a mishearing of a Greek word “nosophoros”.

Anne:  And what does that word mean? In Greek?

Michelle:  “Plague carrier”.

Anne:  Well. We’ve got a bunch of those around right now, don’t we? We’ve got an entire globe full of nosferati. “Plague carrier”.

Michelle:  I had forgotten that the idea that sunlight destroys vampires isn’t in Stoker’s book. I had forgotten it, but I was reminded, with doing the research on this. It appears for the first time in the 1922 film, that German film Nosferatu? And apparently it’s put in because it makes an awesome special effect.

Anne:  I love that. That’s very nice.

Michelle:  Isn’t that great?

Anne:  Yes. It does make an awesome special effect. Yeah. OK.

Michelle:  Stoker was dead by the time the film was made, but his widow fought a long legal battle with the filmmakers, because it was clearly based on Dracula but they hadn’t bothered to get permission, or pay any rights or anything. She eventually won the lawsuit, but it didn’t matter. They were ordered to destroy all copies of the film, but it didn’t happen.

There’s an interesting suggestion that one of the reasons he sort of unconsciously picked the name “Dracula” is that it sounds similar to a Gaelic phrase that is pronounced “dra-cola” and means “bad blood”. I am in no position to evaluate whether that is – I mean, it’s interesting.

Anne:  Yeah, and it’s possible, but Stoker, he was Anglo-Irish and living in London, yeah?

Michelle:  The likelihood that he knew any Gaelic seems…

Anne:  Very small.

Michelle:  By his lifetime, the English had worked very had to stamp out anybody who was speaking Gaelic, so the likelihood that Stoker was running into anybody speaking Gaelic…

Anne:  What year is Dracula? Remind me again?

Michelle:  Dracula is published in 1897.

Anne:  That’s after the famine, and it’s the famine that finally breaks the back of Irish, for a while. I mean, it comes back and you can find it, and it’s around, and it’s the famine… they lost a third of the population, much of it Irish-speaking. 

My ancestors, for one. Some of my ancestors were there and they were speaking Irish and they died.

Michelle:  Ours came too. The Markey strain showed up in New Jersey at that time. That they left to avoid starving.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s really… I think it’s really unlikely that he… he wouldn’t have known Irish, and that’s not a word that he would have run into. So I kind of doubt that.

Michelle:  It’s one of those “Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so” sort of…

Anne:  Exactly.

Michelle:  … suggestions.

Anne:  Did he even know that “dracul” meant “dragon”?

Michelle:  I doubt it. It literally sort of looks like he opens up a book, grabs a name and closes the book.

Anne:  It really does feel like that. Yeah. Stoker. Whatever.

Michelle:Because he doesn’t ever use the name “Vlad” even.

One writer – I’m back to Elizabeth Miller again, because this I thought was fascinating, and here’s a quote:

“One writer ( in a work that was familiar to Stoker) comes up with this diatribe: ‘There are other and darker shades in the Wallach character, and in these, alas! he much resembles his Hibernian prototype. He is much given to treacherous revenge, and is capable of the most awful atrocities when aroused.”

I thought that was fascinating because it makes this implicit comparison between the Transylvanians and the Irish, that they’re both just awful.

Anne:  And I’m trying to really recall — I would not be averse to knowing it, were it true — but I’m trying to recall the Irish, any of the Irish, impaling entire populations on stakes outside their palaces. And that is not coming to my mind. What the hell is he talking about? What the hell is he talking about? There’s no “there” there.

Michelle:  Of course that’s not a modern scholar. That’s you know, a nineteenth-century scholar who is seeing…

Anne:  Oh, I totally get this.

Michelle:  Anybody who’s not English is basically uncivilized and backward.

Anne:  Yes. I mean, they thought the Irish had tails. I mean, for the love of god. I mean, if you’re going to talk about horrendous things, I’d go for Cromwell and, you know, the massacre at Drogheda, myself, Personally. But that’s me. OK, so I’m annoyed now.

Michelle:  Yeah, I thought you might like that, so I definitely wanted to share that with you.

Anne:  I totally got annoyed at that. I am so annoyed at that. 

Michelle:  I have, in all caps, in my notes: “He just compared them to the Irish!”

Anne:  Oh my god. Yeah, no. And it’s not like the Irish… I would not argue that the Irish are well-behaved. As you know, I believe that humans have behaved badly all through history. But there’s behaving badly, and there’s impaling entire populations on stakes outside your palace, and those are two different things. Scale! Fifteen on the scale, Michelle. Fifteen on the scale. Irish, basically don’t get up above eight really.

Michelle:  The ironic piece, of course, of Stoker connecting Dracula to Vlad the Impaler, is that there’s no particular reason to have made that connection, but without the connection there wouldn’t particularly be widespread interest in Vlad the Impaler.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  It’s such an interesting moment about the power of story. 

One of the very last classes I taught before I retired was called “Based on a True Story,” where we looked at real historical events, and then how they got fictionalized. We didn’t do Dracula but we maybe could have because this is why we’re still… you know, this is why everybody has heard of Vlad the Impaler and nobody had heard of Pedro the Cruel.

Anne:  Right. Or Beatrice Cenci. Or, you know, the Tour de Nesle affair. Yeah, everybody’s heard of Vlad, but they don’t really know Vlad. 

Yeah, so there’s these two things that contribute to Vlad being popularly known in American culture, at least, these days. And one is that the printing press spread the story around, and the other is Bram Stoker.

Michelle:  And I’m not even going to talk about all the other… it can be an exercise, it’s way far out of our bailiwick to think about all the other vampire adaptations. There’s tons of them. Absolutely tons of them. Musicals, ballets, films, postage stamps, you can go to Whitby and do the Dracula walking tour. Fan clubs. It’s wild.

Anne:The only vampire I’m willing to spend any time with at all is Carmilla. That’s it. Other than that, no, I’m not… Oh, well, I do make another exception and that is Anne Rice’s vampire, because what she did that was different for the vampire trope was she made the vampire accessible and sympathetic by taking the vampire and really exploring the philosophical and religious issues in being a vampire. What does it mean to be… how do I feel about being a vampire? I mean, that’s the entire Interview with a Vampire, is like how he feels about being a vampire. What kind of decisions you have to make, and what it means to be a vampire and that is… no, that’s Anne Rice.

And so now we’re used to it. We take it for granted, but we take for granted the exploding in the sun, too, and that’s stuff… stuff gets invented and then it just seems like it’s always been there.

Michelle:  I did find one… maybe there are others but they are hard to find, I didn’t find them… I found one historical novel that is just about Vlad, not any vampires.

Anne:  Usually, in this portion of the podcast, we are discussing adaptations, current adaptations and later adaptations of our historical figure, and of course the vampires haven’t got anything to do with him, but oh my god, there’s actually a novel about Vlad?

Michelle:  Yes! It’s by C.C. Humphreys and it’s a pretty new novel, actually. And it’s called Vlad: The Last Confession. And it’s on Kindle Unlimited. I did not read the whole thing, but what I looked at, looked like I would read it.

Anne:  But he’s not confessing to being a vampire, is he? Because if he’s confessing to being a vampire then he’s right out. No.

Michelle:  No, it actually – again, looked at it very quick, but looked at some reviews of it – What the novel is doing is looking at how he goes from being a basically decent human being, to being a horrible human being.

Anne:  That sounds like so much fun. And so he explains about why he impaled all the Transylvanian Saxons outside his palace yeah? That’d be good.

Michelle:  So I gather.

Anne:  I want to know what somebody thinks is a good explanation for that.

Michelle:  That one’s about the real human, and essentially appears to be his Macbeth version, right? Where you start out with good intentions, and then you start killing people, and now you don’t know how to stop.

Anne:  And you know, you have the stakes left over. I mean, you know, you gotta use them somehow. Plus you know how to… everybody’s used to how to do that. The technology of staking has become really easy, you know. Everybody knows how to do it.

Michelle:  You have to make things work out even. You can’t have an extra victim, or an extra stake.

I’m also reading an incredibly long book called The Historian,that is twenty-six hours of audio book, so I’m not done with it yet. It’s a much more kind of standard vampire-plus-history story. It’s an inter-generational story. This is also a newish book. It came out in 2005. There’s the dad… I’m enjoying it because a lot of it is academic research.

Anne:  Yes! And that’s always fun.

Michelle:  It reminds me of Josephine Tey’s book about Richard II, where they’re doing a lot of research and trying to figure out what the real story is. But there are most definitely vampires in it. And then of course the other fun adaptation that crossed my path was an episode of Epic Rap Battles of History, featuring… Do you know Epic Rap Battles of History?

Anne:  No, I do not.

Michelle:  This is a YouTube series in which they pit two historical or sometimes fictional characters against one another, and they go back and forth arguing why they’re better than the other one. 

Anne:  I believe the humans behave badly most of the time, but I do enjoy their creativity.

Michelle:  One of my kids loves Epic Rap Battles of History. He will play them for me. He’ll summarize them for me. And there is one pitting Dracula against Vlad the Impaler.

Anne:  OK. Alright. There you go. So that’s a… that’s a good little summation of this particular thing.

Michelle:  Yeah, the internet is great about spreading misinformation, but it can also clear up misinformation.

Anne:  Yeah, it can.

Yeah, because it’s all there. So it really depends on where you focus, and what you’re likely to run across because of your focus. And how it is you interpret things. Yep. It’s all there. And it came so quickly too. The innovation of the internet! Like, it started out and you could occasionally find some things and then, after a while, you could find all things. All things were there.

Michelle:  And some things that are not true. There’s a number of writings that are not true.

Anne:  Yeah. Is it half and half? I don’t know. It might be.

Michelle:  So that was fun. I learned some things.

Anne:  Yeah, I was… I wanted to do Vlad, and I knew that most of the adaptations if not all of the adaptations were not going to have anything to do with him whatsoever, as turned out to be true. But I was interested in the issue of war crimes. What exactly… was he in the wrong? And the answer is yes he was. Because of his time period. It was wrong to impale all the Transylvanian Saxons on stakes. It was just wrong. That’s my dictum on this.

Michelle:  It is interesting because it’s so… that epic mystery of his time period. We see this as the Medieval is transitioning into the Early Modern. Charles I utterly misreads the time period he’s living in, and he thinks he can rule as if he’s in the ninth century. And England says no.

Anne:  Yeah. Kind of decidedly. Oops. Yeah. Things shifted. Things really shifted.

So that’s our podcast studying Vlad the Impaler and Dracula, who he wasn’t. So I will say what we’re doing next: Joan of Arc.

Michelle:  Are we really? Oh boy!

Anne:  We’re going to do Joan of Arc. And you are aware of the crime that she died for, right?

Michelle:  I think we’ve talked about this, right? That it’s heresy? Not witchcraft?

Anne:  It’s not witchcraft. It’s only technically heresy.

Michelle:  Is this the dressing in boys’ clothes thing?

Anne: Yes, she died for cross-dressing. That was what they got her on. It was a technicality. She died for cross-dressing.

Michelle:Oh god.

Anne:  Yeah. Oh god indeed.

Michelle:  I love my time period, but holy crap sometimes it’s hard.

Anne:  Yep.

This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, but with less technology. And we’re on Apple podcasts, iHeartRadio podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, other places. Please leave a review. We’d appreciate that. And you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com where you can also find the show notes, which are written by Michelle, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich. And you can reach all three of us through the webpage. And you can leave comments, we’d love to hear from you. If you have medieval crimes you think we should investigate, please let us know.

I forgot to tell you, at the beginning of the podcast, that the podcast is not child-friendly, so I’m telling you now. I hope you figured that out.

Bye!

Michelle:  OK, bye!

Crimes Against the Jews, Latin Europe, 1348-1349

Anne:  Welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. In some cases really, really, really badly. Such as today. This is Anne Brannen. I’m your host who’s in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  And today, Michelle and I have been talking about how we’re reminded — during the corona virus plague and the anti-Asian sentiment we’re seeing, and various bad behaviors on the part of people — we’re reminded of the Black Death. Because we often get reminded of the Black Death, that’s kind of how we are. And so we want to do something a little different today. 

Usually we focus on one particular crime, and then we’re able to look at large aspects of life in the Middle Ages beyond that. Today we actually want to look at, in general, the persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages during the Black Death. We’ll focus on a couple of instances, but we wanted to give a larger picture. We will, at some point, be focusing at least one podcast on one of the massacres of the Jews. I’m especially interested, myself, in the Massacre in York. Have you got any candidates, Michelle?

Michelle:  I was seeing some interesting stuff out of Spain, and particularly since that’s one of the earlier… and since I found that one book that is entirely about Spain. But I enjoy learning lots of new things, so whatever we want to do, I’m fine. I did sort of write a cool intro for this though.

Anne:Oh did you then? Would you… oh, oh, and by the way I’m supposed to say this podcast contains adult themes, and we almost always have adult language because we have potty mouths, both of us, and so please use discretion listening to it. We don’t recommend it for people under thirteen, certainly, and you may have to be lots older.

You have an introduction you want to do?

Michelle:  I do. And I’m having difficulty imagining a true crime podcast that is child-friendly.

Anne:  No. They are all… No.

Michelle:  What does “True Crime for the Preschool Set” really mean?

Anne:  Winnie the Pooh stole a jar of honey. Piglet broke Eeyore’s balloon.

Michelle:  It’s just difficult. My kids did have a child version of Clue, but nearly always the answer was the dog had hidden the ball. So there wasn’t really a crime.

Anne:  Well some dogs are very badly behaved. Gryffyn, for instance. She had her badness in her youth.

Michelle:  It’s been months since she ate a bird. It’s been months!

Anne:  Well it’s actually been years since she ate a bird. It’s been months since she bit anybody, so you know, there you… Or tried to bite. Please. Tried to bite. She doesn’t actually get her teeth on anybody anymore. Okay. Well not much. I mean, it’s just little nips. Okay. We’re moving on. Moving on from my corgi. Moving on from the corgi. Not child-friendly. Michelle, what was your introduction?

Michelle:  Unfathomable disasters often lead to scapegoating. So it is, unfortunately, no surprise that the first victims of the Black Death were barely cold in their graves when persecutions began. Largely, these attacks were directed against the Jewish population. Indeed, in the first wave of the plague, 1347-1350, there were so many acts of slaughter, theft, and destruction targeting Jews, their belongings, and their property that if we devoted an episode per event, we would need a year to cover them all.

I found that one source that just listed all of them.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Which I know was from 1906, but lots of later sources were still citing it as the definitive list. So I felt okay citing that, and that was a really sobering sort of number to see.

Anne:  Yeah, it goes on and on and on. On and on. On and on. 

The persecutions of the Jews during the Black Death were very bad, and there’s a great deal written on them. And, if you look up histories of the Black Death, you can find mention of this at least, but they’re actually part of a much larger history which we wanted to explain somewhat. Because I think that that’s not always in our heads. We think “Aha”. We hear “The persecution of the Jews in Europe during the Black Death”, and so that’s very bad and very awful. But, we maybe don’t have a clear idea about how this fits into the history of the Jews in Europe.

We’ve got diverse records, various historians. Jewish historians, Roman historians, Greeks. We have records of Judaism in Greece from before 250 BCE. In Alexandria, by about 50 CE. By 27 BCE — Caesar Augustus’s time — there were over 7,000 Jews in Rome. They were in Croatia by the second century, in Southern Gaul by the fifth century, in France and Germany by the sixth century. So there’s an early Diaspora into Europe. And the persecution of the Jews persisted throughout the Diaspora, and throughout time.

In Latin Medieval Europe, which is where we’re focusing – so we’re going to be not talking about what was going on in the Middle East, we’re focusing on Latin Europe – there were waves of massacres, starting with the first crusade in 1096. As with the Black Death, that was when the first real wave of massacres started, but there had been exiles from Latin European cities and provinces since at least 1012, and sporadic strictures.

In 1141, the Jews of Oxford were forced to pay ransom to both Matilda and Stephen. This was the war that followed there not being an heir because of… you can go to our earlier podcast… the wreck of the White Ship. There was no heir. And so Matilda the Empress and Stephen of Blois were fighting for England, and the Jews of Oxford were forced to pay ransom to both of them, or their houses got burned.

In 1144, Jews were accused of murdering the child, William of Norwich, and in 1168 they were accused of murdering Harold of Gloucester. These both went into English literature, and were well known amongst the English. They were, of course, lies.

In 1179, thirteen Jews were murdered after a girl was found drowned in Boppard in the Rhineland.

In 1180, Philip of France imprisoned all of the Jews in his lands, and demanded ransom for release. And, in 1181, he took all of their property and exiled them from Paris.

By the way, I’m just giving some pieces. I’m not saying everything. This is just bits. I wanted the list anyway.

In 1182, the Jews were expelled from Orléans.

In 1189, in London, a crowd attacked a Jewish deputation which was attending the coronation of Richard the Lionheart. And, they attacked the Jewish population in London, and this spread around England. Was there a reason for this attack? No, there wasn’t.

In 1190, the Jews of Norwich were slaughtered, and the Jews of St. Edmunds were murdered on Palm Sunday.

The Jews of York were massacred by departing crusaders, that same year.

In 1210, King John imprisoned many of the Jews in England, and demanded ransom.

In 1210, there’s a mass murder in Toledo.

In 1221, there were riots in Erfurt.

In 1235, Emperor Frederick II held a special conference to rule that the Jews did not require Christian children for blood rituals, and the Pope also ruled on this, but this made no never-mind, because that was one of the stories being told; that the Jews were killing Christian children so that they could use their blood in their rituals. Which they weren’t. At all.

In 1240, the Jews were expelled from Brittany.

In 1243, it was the first accusation of “Host desecration”. The idea here is that Jews are stealing consecrated Hosts — which are, according to the doctrine of transubstantiation, the actual body of God — and that they are doing bad things to the Host, and using it in their rituals. So that’s the first (1243) accusation of Host desecration, and the Jewish population of Beelitz was burned at the stake at that time.

In 1254, the Jews were expelled from France. They keep being allowed back in, but every time you expel the Jews from one place or another, what you would be doing was taking all their stuff, and then allowing them back in later, and then expelling them, and then taking all their stuff. This happened over and over.

1264: Simon de Montfort inspired a massacre of the Jews in London.

In 1275, Edward I of England made usury illegal, and ordered the Jews to wear yellow badges. This is in England. In 1290, he expelled them from England.

And so essentially what’s going on, from the twelfth through the thirteenth century, there’s not a year that goes by without massacres, pogroms, looting, burning of the Talmud, exiles going on across Europe. That’s the background to the arrival of the Black Death in 1348. So the wave of massacres against the Jews didn’t come out of nothing. It came out of a background, a foundation of bloody and vicious persecution of the Jews that had been going on since they’d gotten there. But especially after the Crusades, things had gotten very much worse after the Crusades.

So, the Black Death persecutions. Theoretically, at that point, the Jews of Europe were protected by the Church but, again, this made no never-mind. They were believed to be spared from the plague. This was not true, but many Christians believed that the Jews were not getting the plague. They were also believed to be poisoning the wells. That that’s how the plague was being spread. There’s many places where the Jews were not using the wells that the Christians were using, and so that actually added to this idea.

And they confessed. Many Jews confessed to having poisoned the wells. Under torture.  

But those were just excuses. The foundation was anti-Semitism, and centuries of persecution of the Jews. And, the fact that you got their stuff if you did bad things to them and got rid of them.

The first Black Death massacre was in Toulon, Provence, in April of 1348, where forty Jews were murdered, and the Jewish section of the town was sacked and looted.

The next was in Barcelona, the next year. And the massacres spread across Europe. There were, like, 510 Jewish communities destroyed. Is that pretty much the number that you came up with, Michelle?

Michelle:  Yeah. Yeah, so actually, it would take a lot more than a year to do those at one episode… lots more.

Anne:  And much of Northern Europe’s Jewish population, the survivors, moved to Poland and Lithuania, which at that point were safe places to go. King Casimir of Poland had said that the Jews were safe. This is, of course, highly ironic, given later developments in European history. But that’s what was going on in 1350.

The wave was over by 1351, but then the previous level of persecution remained.

In 1352, the Jews were expelled from Bulgaria, for being heretics.

In 1354, massacres in Span.

In 1359, Charles V of France allowed the Jews back in, so that they could pay the ransom for his father, John II, who was, at that point, imprisoned in England.

In 1360, they were expelled from Breslau.

In 1365, they were expelled from Lorraine, because they had apparently made lightning destroy 22 homes.

In 1370, the entire Jewish population of Brussels was massacred for desecrating the Host, and that was the end of the Jewish community there.

In 1376, they were expelled from Hungary.

So, this continues. Massacres, expulsions, forcible conversions, burning of manuscripts… And it continued also in the New World.

When the Europeans got to the New World. In Peru, for instance. In Lima, Peru, this was going on. But I want to point out, also, that it actually doesn’t stop. After the massacres of the Second World War, there were fewer massacres, though the persecutions continued in Russia and the USSR, and things continued in different forms. Synagogue bombings in America, France, Holland, Vienna, Rome, Copenhagen, Canada. Holocaust deniers galore. And, in the twenty-first century, a rise in bombings, murders, vandalisms… in Europe, but especially in America.

Michelle:  I think it’s important to include that context because, if you just look at the massacres that happened during the Black Death, it’s too easy to say “Well, everybody was under pressure, there was this thing that was happening”, you know? It’s too easy to try to make excuses. And what you have is, with the Black Death massacres, a heightening and a continuation of what already existed.

Anne:  Yes. Yes. That is exactly it. It was already there, and it continued. And it continued until World War II, when it was another wave, extremely bad, as we know, and then after that there was a little kind of… the massacres stopped but the synagogue bombings, the murders, they keep going. And that they are, especially, going on in America. This has been going on in America in the twenty-first century. Very important to know.

Michelle:  One of the sources that I was looking at says that perhaps only… this is a quote now:  “Perhaps only ranking behind the annihilations by the Nazis, the ravaging of the Jewish communities at the time of the Plague was the most extensive oppression the Jews every faced in the history of Germany.”

The level of violence is almost inconceivable, but it is not unprecedented. You know? We’re dealing with scope and scale, rather than content.

Anne:  Yeah. And the same thing with the massacres of the Jews in World War II. It did not come out of… it was not invented out of whole cloth. There was a foundation for it.

Michelle:  Yeah. All of the sources I looked at pointed to “This is what’s happening in 1348, but in 1320… forty years earlier, in 1300,” you know, pointing to there had been these earlier ones. The same source talks about two major persecutions that had happened in Germany in the half century before the Black Death.

Anne:  And a hundred years before. And two hundred years before. And three hundred years before. Yeah. Yes.

We were reminded of this, of course, because, at the moment, there are waves of violence and just sheer bad behavior toward Asian-Americans, and so we were reminded of this, but anti-Semitism is also on the rise. Yes, so a time of stress, and things get worse, but the background of it doesn’t go away.

Michelle:  Yeah. They get worse, but they don’t get different.

Anne:  Yes. We cannot give space and honor to all of the dead of all of the massacres, but we wanted to look at a couple of them. I’m going to talk about the Erfurt massacre of March 21, in 1349. We’re in the Rhineland. It still has a well-preserved medieval town center. It’s in Thuringia. And it was on the Roman Via Regia, a trade and pilgrimage road so, though I had never heard of this town, it was important in the Middle Ages. Right on the trade route. And it was a member of the Hanseatic League, the confederation of towns and merchants’ guilds. And so it was a place that had money and power. And there’s an old synagogue — the Old Synagogue — which was there at the time — still exists. It has parts of it which date to the late eleventh century, although most of it’s from, like, the thirteenth through fourteenth century. It is the oldest intact synagogue in Europe, and it’s now a museum of local Jewish history.

It was damaged in the massacre of 1349, and the city then took possession of it and used it as a storehouse. It’s on a little back road, and other stuff got built around it, and it was being used as a storehouse, so it wasn’t noticeable during World War II, which is why it survived the Nazis. Because the Nazis — on the ninth and tenth of  November, 1938, Kristallnacht — they were busy destroying the synagogue that was actually in use, which is now called the New Synagogue. There’s a new New Synagogue, because it got rebuilt, but that’s what the Nazis destroyed. They had no idea that the old synagogue was there and, in fact, I don’t know that most people knew what it was at all.

But they started conservation efforts in 1998, and it now holds the Erfurt Treasure, which was found nearby. When the Jews who had survived the massacre were forced to leave, or perhaps it was during the massacre itself… this is a wealthy merchant’s treasure. It was hidden. It was buried, and we think it was Kalman of Weihe, although I don’t know that we’re absolutely sure. So it has the treasure, that includes a lot of silver coins and jewelry. And it also has facsimiles of what’s called The Erfurt Hebrew Manuscripts which are, at the moment – the city possessed them, after the massacres, and then they ended up in the Berlin State Library, which still has the originals. But there’s facsimiles at the Old Synagogue, which is the museum, and there’s a facsimile of a Tosefta, which is the oldest of only three known manuscripts – t he original is — which provides interpretation of some aspects of the Mishnah, the primary book of legal theory. So it’s part of that.

The Jewish community of Erfurt was one of the most influential in Germany, and in 1349, during the Black Death, they were rounded up. More than 100 of them were killed — including, we believe, Alexander Suslin, who was an important Talmudist — and the rest were expelled from the city. Their goods were confiscated, except for that treasure, which was hidden. And they moved back in, in a few years, but the community was disbanded by the city in 1458.

You know about why the name Alexander is important, historically, to the Jews, Michelle?

Michelle:  I don’t, actually.

Anne:  I get to tell you! Alexander the Great, when he annexed Israel to all his stuff, did it without bloodshed, and allowed the Jews to continue practicing their religion. Alexander comes directly from Alexander the Great.

Michelle:  That was probably a pleasant surprise.

Anne:  I know! I know. It’s like, there’s ways in which I’m fond of Alexander, anyway, but I would not want to put him forth as any kind of icon of good behavior. No, no. But, this was good. And so his name reverberates through that community, historically. So that’s kind of nice. Things that Alexander did that were not godawful.  Yay.

Much of his godawfulness had to do with getting drunk. That’s too bad.

Michelle:  So I looked up Strasbourg, about which I knew nothing. So that was cool. Now I know some things. 

Anne:  I had never heard of Erfurt.

Michelle:  Okay, so, one thing I don’t know for sure is whether it was in Germany or France, in the fourteenth century, because I’m finding sources that say both. And of course the reason it’s complicated is that it’s on the border.

Anne:  Yes. Which goes back and forth. And if you’re in France, you drive through France, you get to around about Strasbourg — they’ve got a great cathedral there — you go to Strasbourg and you go to eat things. It seems like decidedly German food. Even though you’re in France. It’s the weirdest thing.

Michelle:  I think that cathedral is the fourth largest cathedral in Europe.

Anne:  I don’t know, but it’s pretty big. And it’s really… it’s so busy. It’s really busy. It’s like, if you want to get a busy Gothic cathedral, that would be right up there.

Michelle:  Well I was intrigued by the geography, right? Medieval Strasbourg is on an island. There’s the river on one side, and then a branch of the river on the other side, that has been made wider. So when you look at it on a map, it looks oddly straight, in parts, because it’s been made into a canal, and it’s been widened.

So it wasn’t real huge. It was only three quarters of a mile by half a mile at its widest point. So it’s not real, real huge.

Anne:  So it’s like a tiny Manhattan.

Michelle:  Yeah. So what is really interesting about Strasbourg is that, even when authorities try, the mob mentality had grown so strong, looking for a scapegoat and, of course, going to their favorite one… Even when the authorities are attempting to provide protection, they’re not able to do so. 

The town council of Strasbourg had been being paid protection money by its Jewish citizenry. You know, requiring them to pay money to protect them. And the leader of the town council was Peter Swarber, and he tried. Representatives of the guilds would come to him and say “Hey, we got this idea, we’re pretty sure that we can keep the Plague from showing up” – because this is this other point, is that it hadn’t even gotten there yet, this was just proactive persecution – because everybody knew. They’d heard rumors that there was this illness going around, and it was likely to show up to them.

Anne:  Oh right. Yeah. Because this is… is this 1349?

Michelle:  Yup.

Anne:  Yeah, so it’s a year after it hits Italy. Yeah.

Michelle:  So the town council had rejected those calls and were deposed, on February 9, 1349. The guild leaders came to them and essentially told them to either step down or we’re going to kill you.

Anne:  Good lord.

Michelle:  Some of them survive. Peter Swarber, essentially, disappears. He dies quite soon after this so it’s possible something happened to him.

So this is interesting because sometimes we look back at the past and these things that are happening and we’re wondering “Where are the people in charge? They’re abdicating their duties, they should be protecting their citizenry!” And, in many cases, they’re not even making an effort. But here we have, in Strasbourg, where they’re trying to do so, and they just cannot do it.

There’s other complexity going on with this. The coup happens also, in part, because for the last decade there had been jockeying for position as to who was going to be on the town council. It had been largely patrician. There had been a couple of families who had been ousted from the town council in 1332. They — the noble families Zorn and Müllenheim — cooperated with the guilds in this coup of 1349, because that allowed them to get back on the council.

Strasbourg was also under papal interdict from 1324 to 1346, because they had supported Ludwig, King of Bavaria, who had been excommunicated, and so they were also in trouble. But, what this meant is that when Clement, Pope Clement, issued two papal bulls — that did not mince words! I was pleasantly surprised to discover Pope Clement making a solid effort here to protect Jewish citizens of Europe from the Christians…

Anne:  Yeah, he tried.

Michelle:  He tried. He issued two papal bulls denouncing anyone who suspected Jews of causing the plague, and condemning violence against them, saying that such people had been misled by the Devil. So he did not mince words. But in most places, and in Strasbourg in particular, this did not have any impact. Because Strasbourg had been ignoring the Pope for twenty years solidly by this point, anyway.

Anne:  Of course.

Michelle:  Because they’d been under interdict.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  And of course, you know, the papacy is complicated at this point anyway, because he’s not in Rome, he’s in Avignon.

Anne:  He’s in Avignon. 

Michelle:  Which is not helping.

One of the sources I relied on pretty strongly here is Winkler’s article called “The Medieval Holocaust”. There’s also a great chapter in Norman Cantor’s book about the Black Death, and that’s mostly what I’m relying on, here.

Cantor has some interesting numbers: “In the fourteenth century, there were only 2.5 million Jews in all of Europe, but a third of these lived in Spain and on the other side of the Pyrenees in Southern France.” And some of these communities went back to Roman times.

I’m finding different numbers about how big the Jewish population was in Strasbourg. Winkler thinks it’s probably smaller. By the way, I cannot recommend Winkler’s article highly enough. He gets detailed. He goes, he finds… you know, he names all the sources. He’s evaluating whether he thinks they’re reliable. He thinks that the Jewish community in Strasbourg was smaller than Cantor does. He thinks it was probably 200-300, but it’s possible that people had fled there from other areas, so it was higher than that at the time of the massacre. But that’s who he thinks probably was the size of the permanent community. But what we’re told is that, on February 14, 1349, 900 members of the Jewish community in Strasbourg were taken to the Jewish cemetery, forced into a rough wooden house that had been built there for this purpose, and killed by setting the house alight. People were grabbing at their clothing as they went past, being shepherded there, you know, trying to…  thinking maybe they had valuables. So, it’s really horrific to just imagine this happening.

Anne:  It’s horrific and it also… the horrific details usually have to do with people being in their homes already, or in the synagogue or, in York, in supposedly the tower of protection.

Michelle:  No, this is stone-cold planned.

Anne:  God almighty.

Michelle:  Yeah, this is not a crowd that has gotten together and somebody loses their head and throws a torch into a house. This is a plan that apparently they’d been working on for five days, since the coup…

Anne:  God almighty damn.

Michelle:  … five days earlier.

Anne:  I did not know about this. I knew that it had happened before the plague actually hit Strasbourg. It was obviously having really nothing to do with well poisoning. But no, this is just… so it’s about getting the money, isn’t it? It’s about the goods and the money.

Michelle:  It’s the financial. They loot the synagogue. They divvy up belongings. They eliminate the debts. And you and I should probably talk about the ways in which the Jewish population in Europe wasn’t moneylenders by choice. They had been told that they weren’t allowed to do these other things. The number of things that Jews in Europe were allowed to do, as a trade, had been narrowed and narrowed. You know, they weren’t allowed to own land. They weren’t allowed to be farmers. To the point where they’re forced to largely make their living… many people, you know, because medicine is still open.

Anne:  Medicine and administration were two of the areas where the Christian Europeans were finding them useful.

Michelle:  Yeah. But when you have people making their living as moneylenders, you set them up to be hated, and you set them up to be killed. Because it’s very easy to get rid of debts by killing people.

Anne:  And we remind our listeners, because surely they already know, but the Christians weren’t allowed to lend money. It was called usury. You could lend money and then get it back, but not with interest. So you couldn’t make money on money.

Michelle:So the interpretation of the Bible, at that point, was that Christians weren’t allowed to do that, but go ahead, the Jews can do it. And because it’s a necessary part of a functioning society, somebody has to do it. And so, yay them.

So there’s this huge financial benefit. I think it’s Winkler who cites one of the bishops kind of proactively – not in Strasbourg but in a different city – kind of proactively saying ‘Hey the next time there’s an attack on the Jews, oh I’m going to allocate this stuff to so-and-so.’ So clearly this is a huge, huge part of the motivation. The Archbishop Berthold of Strasbourg was entirely on board with this attack. There were other bishops trying to protect Jews in their dioceses, but this particular archbishop was “Go team”.

Anne:  So his relationship with the papacy can’t have been very good.

Michelle:  Wouldn’t think.

So the Jewish population of Strasbourg does not recover pre-Black Death levels until the nineteenth century, just in time to get hit again when the Nazis show up. And of course we’ve talked about the Pope and his efforts to provide protection, but that just…. And, I think though that it’s useful to point this out because people sometimes… I’ve heard non-medievalists sometimes talk about the Pope as if he kind of can just wave a magic wand and make things happen. Like I hear people talk about the Church being all-powerful and…

Anne:  Everybody obeyed the Church! No, actually, no. They didn’t. They did not. The idea of it. No. That’s too amusing.

Michelle:  Clement did a decent… you know, he tried. He protected… his doctor was Jewish. He had other Jewish… I don’t know if I would say servants, but retainers, people who worked for him in his household. And he made sure that his personal household was protected and he just basically got ignored.

Samuel Cohn, who’s a professor of medieval history at the University of Glasgow, has an article where he’s trying to argue that modern sources talk about these massacres as if they are the work of ignorant peasants. He wants to provide a corrective that just blaming all of this on mobs — ignorant peasants — is really letting people off the hook. Here’s his actual words:

“Few contemporaries placed the blame for these atrocities on artisans, peasants, the poor, or even vaguely on citizens.” He says, “I know of only one source to have made such a suggestion, the World Chronicle and King’s Chronicle that continued into the fifteenth century scripted, by monk Albert of Cologne.”

His point is that this idea of the faceless, stupid mob removes culpability from people who should know better. And I thought it was a useful corrective that he’s making here, that by and large this is people who had something to gain, and it’s being urged by people who have something to gain. Right?

Yay, there’s no massacres in England.

Anne:  There are no massacres in England. So let’s have a little moment where we’re all grateful that — you know, those of us who study medieval English history — that there’s no massacres in England.

Michelle:  There’s no massacres in England because there aren’t enough Jews there left to bother with.

Anne:  No. No. Because they already massacred Jews and then threw them out. No. So.

Michelle:  For crying out loud.

Anne:  Yeah, and they weren’t actually… the Jews were not actually allowed back… after Edward stole all their money and exiled them, the Jews were not actually allowed back in England, technically, until under Cromwell. Under the Protectorate. So, long after our bailiwick.

Michelle:  So, Casimir II of Poland invited Jews to come eastward and settle in his domain such that by, and this is a quote by Cantor again: “By the early seventeenth century, half of the Jewish world population of 3.5 million lived in Poland and the Ukraine.”

Anne:  That is just amazing. Tell me again, that’s by the end of when?

Michelle:  By the early seventeenth century.

Anne:  By the early seventeenth century.

Michelle:  Cantor talks about Casimir a lot, and how what Casimir wanted was this administrative competence. That he was inviting the Jewish Diaspora from the rest of Europe to come to Poland, and he gave them a monopoly on selling alcohol, so he was trying… he wanted this community there because he wanted that expertise in administration.

I also have… there’s a book that I was reading by Susan Einbinder, called After the Black Death, that is attempting to find whatever can be found of Jewish writings about this, about going through this experience.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  It’s a great book. I would point anybody toward it. It mostly talks about laments, inscriptions on gravestones, and archeology. The archeology is providing confirmation about the numbers of victims; the ways in which they’re buried provides evidence for the fact that it is non-Jewish people who are burying them. Because they’re not being buried in the ways that they should have been being buried.

Anne:  Got it. Got it. So it’s not really burial. It’s just getting rid of bodies.

Michelle:   Yeah.

I thought I would share with you a… because it seems wrong to me to talk about all of these massacres without providing a direct Jewish voice…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:… to them. So I thought I would share with you one of the epitaphs on…there are gravestones in Toledo from this time period. There aren’t a whole lot of them that still survive, but we have transcripts from them that were made in the seventeenth century.

This is a really cool part of the book. The whole book is really interesting. He appears to have actually died of the plague, and not in one of the massacres, which is one of those small blessing situations, I suppose. So I’m going to read it, okay?

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle: 

Who are you here, O groom, 

Who has built an eternal dwelling place?

Behold, you are shut in the cleft of the rock. 

Why did you hasten to leave 

With the woman you loved?

I am the man

Who has seen desolation and destruction

Blood and pestilence

The days of my youth were cut short 

Suddenly, in the prime of my life, 

Young and tender in years,

 Evil, unending illnesses snatched me away…

It is I who must say, here I am! 

And let the one who hears what befell me have pity on me

 Joseph the son of Reb Meir, may his rest be honorable, known as Abulafia haMerari 

That is my name forever and this is my memorial.

Anne:  Thank you. Thank you.

That’s our discussion of the massacres of the Jews during the Black Death, and how they fit into medieval European history. And we wish all of our listeners well. Please stay safe. At the time of this recording, New Mexico has flattened the curve, and we expect to not run out of ventilators. What’s going on in Maryland, Michelle?

Michelle:  Things are still developing out here. We have a lower rate of growth, but our governor is still stepping very cautiously.

Anne:  Okay.

Next time, when we come back, we intend to do Vlad the Impaler. Just mentioning this made Michelle very happy. So there you go. And that’s it for True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are, I’m so sorry to say, the crimes are just like they are today…

Michelle:  Distressingly

Anne:  Just like they are today, but with less technology. 

We’re on Apple podcasts, iHeartRadio podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. Please leave a review, because we’d really appreciate this. And you can reach us at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find the show notes, which are provided by Michelle, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich. And, you can also reach all three of us through the webpage. And you can leave comments on the webpage also. We would love to hear from you. And if you have medieval crimes that we should discuss, please let us know.

And that’s it for today. Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

Accusations of Witchcraft against Alice Kyteler, Kilkenny 1324

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly.I’m Anne Brannen, your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.

Anne:  The last podcast we recorded was fairly early on in the Everybody Staying at Home. Both of our states, New Mexico and Maryland, are continuing this, and so we’re still at the beginning of the plague. Which means that we’re all home and so sometimes we get interrupted by cats or children or parrots or dogs or spouses. I think that’s it. The chickens aren’t bothering anybody are they, Michelle?

Michelle:  They live in their coop outdoors so it would be quite an adventure for them to manage to get inside.

Anne:  So we’re not expecting the chickens.

This podcast will contain adult language and adult topics and so please use discretion if you are handing it on to people under thirteen, or if you yourself are. And, with that…

Today we’re discussing the 1324 accusations of witchcraft, especially against Alice Kyteler, although other people got involved, and her servant, Petronilla de Meath was actually burned at the stake for witchcraft. Kyteler got away. Spoiler there.

This was in Kilkenny, right?

Michelle:  Yep, we’re in Kilkenny and there’s… you can still go to a pub in Kilkenny that’s called Kyteler’s Inn.

Anne:  Yes, because as Michelle will be explaining later, she’s very famous and we hear a lot about her.

In 1324 she had been married four times. She had gotten married sometime around 1280 to William Outlawe, and he died in 1285. She had a son, also named William Outlawe, with him, and he comes into the story later.

She then married Adam le Blund sometime by 1302, and they were both briefly accused of murdering William but that, then, went to nothing. She then married Richard de Valle by 1309, and he was dead by 1316. At which point she proceeded with a legal suit against her stepson to get her dower back.

She was very wealthy, by the way, we’re not talking about a commoner, we’re talking about someone who actually was well-heeled.

Last she married John le Poer, sometime around 1316, and he died in 1324. He fell ill in 1324 and he believed that he had been poisoned. Her stepchildren – this is not just his children but also the children of at least de Valle – accused her of poisoning, sorcery, and favoring William Outlawe, her son. They accused her of denying Christ in the church and cutting up animals to demons at the crossroads, and holding black magic meetings, secret black magic meetings in churches, which was a blasphemous thing to do in churches, and using sorcery and various spells against Christians, and having a familiar who was named Robin, the son of art, sometimes called Robin Artison, and murdering her husbands. So there. So that was the accusation. And this turned into quite a tussle between the canon law and secular law.

What happened was the bishop of Ossory, a Richard Ledrede, tried to have her arrested. She called on powerful friends. Arnold le Poer was the seneschal of Kilkenny, and they arrested the bishop, who renewed his persecution of Kyteler after he was released. He wrote to the Chancellor of Ireland, Roger Outlawe, who we think was related to William Outlawe in some way — some way closely — and perhaps even his brother, and he demanded that the secular powers concede to the church because what we have here is the fight between canon law and secular law. If you were Christian in Europe during the Middle Ages you were subject to the religious law and the secular law, and often what canon law would do would require the secular law to arrest people and carry out punishments like, you know, burning them at the stake, that kind of thing.

The chancellor delayed proceedings, then, by demanding that she be first excommunicated for forty days, which the bishop did, and so during that time she was able to flee to Dublin and he took her in, and so the bishop accused the chancellor of harboring heretics.

Her servant, Petronilla de Meath, was tortured and confessed to witchcraft. Almost all of the evidence against Kyteler comes from that confession, which was extracted by torture. So it’s problematic.

She fled to England after that and she disappears from history. We don’t actually know what happened to Alice Kyteler. Petronilla was flogged and burnt at the stake. And her daughter Basilia, I’ve read, fled with Kyteler, but I don’t know that this… I’m not sure about these sources.

Kyteler’s son, William Outlawe, was accused of heresy, usury, perjury, adultery, and clericide. Which is really sort of a big deal. If you’re gonna, you know, accuse people, this is murder. But he recanted so they didn’t kill him. He was ordered to hear three masses a day for a year, and feed the poor. He didn’t do that so they excommunicated him.

What we think of, nowadays, as the witch craze, the giant wave of witch persecutions, are not at this time. They belong to Early Modern history, they do not belong to the Middle Ages. So this is very early. But it’s a kind of perfect storm.

Pope John XII had listed witchcraft as a heresy, and this trial followed soon after that. It’s the first witchcraft-as-heresy trial. Before this witchcraft had been treated as a petty criminal offense.

Ledrede, the bishop, was a papal appointee, and he was also very, very focused on rules and regulation and upholding the liberties of the church and so often clashed with the local Anglo-Irish secular authority. The pope feared sorcery and thought his life was in danger from witchcraft, that’s why he changed the rulings about witchcraft, and so Ledrede also took it very seriously.

Michelle:  There’s also other instances… We’re in a time period in which the church and the secular authorities are duking it out over which of them has authority in what areas, right? We saw John clash with the pope over the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the 13^th century. We saw Henry clash with Becket in the late 12^th century, about, basically, “Are you going to be my lackey?” And Becket insisted on being an independent authority who, surprisingly after all of the drinking parties they went to, took his job as a bishop seriously, which I’m sure we’ll deal with at some point since he got murdered for it.

Anne:  Yes, he’s on our list.

Michelle:  We have two hundred years here of repeated clashes between both of them, both sets of powers are centralizing. The church is centralizing around the pope, various nation-states are starting to emerge and there is conflict about which powers prevail in which areas, and ultimately if you have a head-to-head conflict, who comes out on top? And you have the same thing happening in Germany. I had forgotten about that but you have fussing going on in the 13^th century between whoever the Holy Roman Emperor is at that point and whether… and it’s the same thing. “Do I get to appoint bishops or do you get to?” 

Anne:  And much the same thing is going on in Italy with the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yeah, you know Italy, generally, a lot better than I do. It’s not something I know particularly well.

Anne:  I did not before we started this. 

Michelle:  And it definitely doesn’t spring to my mind as quickly as France or Ireland or Germany.

Anne:  Yes. One of those things I’m enjoying about this is that we cast our net wide so we get to… we’re learning stuff ourselves.

Yeah, so there’s that going on. That’s going on in terms of the trial and who gets to do what, and what happens. And Kyteler’s able to leverage her position and actually get away, that’s what happens.

But the background to her being accused of witchcraft goes back very far. And I’m now going to tell you… are you ready for that, Michelle?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  In ancient Greece and Rome, black magic was a capital offense. And this is… witches who killed another person through an enchantment. Humans. Humans who did this. Because the whole concept of witches, that’s not really where we’re at. But humans who killed another person through enchantment were burned alive, in Rome. And the forbidden magic has to do with the intent. So malicious intent is how you know that something is black magic. 

Other than that there’s all kinds of stuff going on and you can do omens and everything, that’s not a problem. The Christians, by the 4^th century, connected black magic to idolatry because, in their belief system, you have to ally yourself with the devil in order to do it. Doesn’t that make sense? But early medieval Europe saw a belief in witchcraft as superstition. Charlemagne declared, when he imposed Christianity on Saxony, which is, like, 788, that anyone who killed another person because they thought that they were a witch was to be put to death. 

And this is all connected to… this is St. Augustine’s thinking. That the belief in witchcraft itself is heretical. So this early on, even in the church, it’s going back and forth.

By the 9^th century, under the influence of Louis the Pious, the church asked the secular law to carry out punishments ordained by the church, and the punishment for witchcraft was death. This was not uncommon, and it was connected to the suppression of pagan rites, so by the 9^th century this was a thing that was going on.

The 10^th century Canon Episcopi, which would become part of canon law, stated that some women believed that they were witches, but that was because they had been fooled by demons, and other people should not be deceived by this because there is no power except God. So again, it becomes a kind of heresy to even think that this might be… that black magic might be possible.

Michelle:  It makes logical sense to me that believing in black magic would be considered a heresy, because then you’re believing in a source of power that is not divine. And it’s a source of extreme power. If you can kill somebody with black magic, that is absolutely usurping God’s authority.

Anne:  Yeah. And so, early on, accusations of witchcraft get used as a way to suppress paganism, but this line in between what is problematic legally and what is problematic spiritually, just, it goes back and forth and I think that’s fascinating. You could get killed for practicing some kinds of witchcraft at many different pieces of the Middle Ages, but for different reasons.

Michelle:  And lest we think – this might be an outtake thing – this has gone away: Just yesterday I was reading in our paper here that locally there was a young man arrested for the murder of another young man and his defense was that the young man he killed had used sorcery to cast a spell on the murderer’s girlfriend, causing her to become ill and lose a bunch of weight and become sick.

Anne:  As we say, at the end of our podcast, the crimes are just the same as they are now, only with less technology.

Michelle:  And sometimes they’re exactly the same.

Anne:  And sometimes they’re exactly the damn same.

So by 1500 the idea of making a pact with the devil, thereby becoming a witch and being a heretic, had been coalesced. So this is new. The pact with the devil thing. So that’s crucial, because that would become the witch craze.

Since the common people couldn’t read or use the text that had been inherited from the Islamic world after the Crusades, which is when much of Europe got a great deal of useful pieces of things, including roses! All the yellow roses are descended from one rose from Turkey. Did you know that?

Michelle:  I didn’t know that! That’s amazing!

Anne:  I know. Like, we have our little segues. Yeah, that’s… they’re all susceptible to the same kind of disease. Yeah, all the yellow roses.

Any rate. Where was I? So, because the common people couldn’t read the necromancy texts, if you were going to be accusing them of things like witchcraft, there had to be another door there. You remember our podcast about Gilles de Rais? He is someone who had been studying alchemy and then turned it into black magic. Fair enough? But he could read! He could read, and he could write that excellent play.

Michelle:  And Eustace was supposedly off studying necromancy before he went off and became a monk, because that’s completely a flex that would work.

Anne:  Yeah. Eustace could have read, yeah, no problem.

So it would make sense then that what the common people were doing, they were making pacts with the devil. That’s what bridges that gap. Like, how is it that you drag a bunch of common people into the courts for witchcraft? It’s because, not that they’re able to read the text to tell them what to do, but that they make pacts with the devil, who then explains what they should do, I gather. Don’t know this first-hand but I’m guessing that that’s how this is supposed to be working.

So that’s what was going on by 1500. By 1300, accusations against people who could read, mostly clergymen but also learned laypeople, had become common. So that’s the background of this. That’s the group of people against whom this accusation was first leveled.

Pope Boniface VIII was posthumously accused of witchcraft, and the Templars, for instance, were also. That was one of the accusations. And! And – you’re going to like this – the accusations were very much like the accusations that we have coming to us from Rome against the early Christians. In other words, the denying the deity of whatever deity the government was sanctioning, having secret night meetings, indulging in excessive sexual activity, worshipping animals and various sexual things, and also killing babies and eating them. This is, like, a major theme throughout, like, the killing of babies and eating them. So yeah, same accusations as against the early Christians.

In 1398 the University of Paris declared that you didn’t have to make a formal pact with the devil, even, just summoning a demon was enough, and there you were, you were a heretic.

Later on, in 1486, Heinrich Kramer will publish The Malleus Maleficarum, which then the church bans in 1490. It shows up a lot in texts about the witch craze. But it’s not clear how much it was used. The Spanish church thought it was full of errors. And throughout the 15^th and 16^th century the Protestants and the Catholics continued witchcraft executions. The worst period of the witch craze was between 1560 and 1660, and even then, in places, there were laws about moderation. Different branches of the church, different places kept trying to reel things in.

In 1603, though, James I, James who was King of Scotland, became King of England, and he instituted the Witchcraft Act of 1604, which made witchcraft a felony, because he himself was really obsessed about witchcraft.

So that’s the witch craze. After 1700, what was punished was pretending to have occult powers, and so by 1700 everything would be over.

Michelle:  That’s really interesting. I had… if I had known I had forgotten that the first accusations would have been against literate people. But it was of course reminding me that the connection between magic and literacy is built into English.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  Right? Because “spell” – the word “spell” – means both. To put together words and also to put together magic. Usually when I lay that down in the classroom my student’s eyes turn into half dollars.

Anne:  It’s very mind-blowing. But it makes total sense. 

Michelle:  Because it sounds kind of occult-y, right? You know, when you think about the process of creating books, that first you have to kill an animal and skin it. And then do some kind of bizarre things to its skin to make it so that it will last, and then you have to make an ink, and you have to make marks on the dead… I mean, you can make the process of making a book sound exactly like the process of doing some extremely nasty magic.

Anne:  Yes. And then after you have that artifact, there’s these people who can look at it and say stuff, and say it says things which obviously it doesn’t, I mean it’s just little marks on a page. Obviously people are either making that stuff up or are, you know, have gotten some kind of secret power from someplace. Yeah.

Michelle:  Somebody who’s been dead for two hundred years is telling you what to do. Sounds sketchy. 

Anne:  Obviously. No. No. 

Michelle:  Yeah, attacking experts is not something that’s left either, unfortunately.

Anne:  No, attacking the experts is a thing which…

Michelle:  There’s a real time-honored tradition of that.

Anne:  There really is. Yeah. Yeah, tearing mathematicians apart in the marketplace, it starts early.

Michelle:  I’m pretty sure – maybe this is apocryphal, but it’s a great story even if it isn’t, strictly speaking, true – about the theologian who was stabbed to death by his students, because he told them that Song of Solomon might not be an allegory of the church. It might actually just have to do about sex.

Anne:  It might actually be a love song. I do not know this story, but I like this story, so I will choose to believe in it…

Michelle:  I certainly don’t want to claim that I know for sure it’s a fact, because I ran across it and then when I tried to find the reference again I was not finding it. So I think it’s possible it’s apocryphal, but it’s also awesome.

Anne:  Yeah, and it’s completely believable. 

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Yeah, completely believable.

Yeah, we’re going to get into… we’ll get into the rise of the universities at some point, because we’ll talk about Abelard.

Michelle:  Yeah, we have to talk about Abelard.

Anne:  Yeah so. No, the learned people, they’re…. the learned people, sometimes we get into trouble. 

So, recapping, the charges against Alice Kyteler and her colleagues, when it finally comes down to the church… because there’s what her stepchildren accused her of and then there’s what comes down with the actual charges from the church. There’s supposed to be a band of heretical sorcerers in the area. This is what the bishop was so upset about. And she was the leader of them. And they were accused of denying Christ and not attending Mass. Like, they hadn’t been to Mass for, like, a year, and they wouldn’t go in the church. I’m like, is this really true? That they sacrificed living animals to demons, and they got advice from demons, and they committed blasphemy, and they used various items in spells, which would be really hard to get a lot of them, like, I don’t know, the skull of some executed thief, something like that. It’s hard…

But also there’s a part of the using animals… they were supposed to be… they had used nine red cocks and nine peacock’s eyes. And I want to put it to you that these things are not easily come by. I mean, what are you… because especially the peacock’s eyes, how many peacocks have you got wandering around whatever your mansion that you can just, like, kill them and get their eyes out? I just… I’m not believing this whatsoever.

Michelle:  Why on earth would you use an odd number?

Anne:  Well the nine, because, you know, that’s like, that’s a… yeah, that’s a good occult number. Nine. Yeah. I can do that. But you’ve wasted one of the peacock’s eyes, is what you’re thinking.

Michelle:  Yeah. That’s, yeah. That’s not efficient. 

Anne:  Obviously you just would not make a good occult person because there you are. I mean, you don’t question these things! If Robin Artison tells you to go get nine peacock’s eyes, you just do it. You just don’t… you don’t say to yourself “Well what do I do with the other one? Put it on the stew? Like, what do I do?” You don’t say…

Michelle:  It’s wasteful!

Anne:  But you can’t use ten because that’s right out, because that’s the number of completion. No, we’re having nine. And, lastly, that Dame Alice had killed all her husbands by poison and stultified the stepchildren to where they gave her all their goods.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Oh, and that Robin Artison was her incubus and that she’d had a lot of sex with him. Yeah. That’s one of the things that Petronilla said.

Yeah. Yeah, so. So that’s the recap of what they all did. Of what they were supposed to do. Here’s the list of who it was that… she fled. She fled Dublin before she could get arrested there. She went to England. We think. But we don’t know, as I say, we never hear from her again. Which I find, I find interesting. Because she had all those connections. Somebody knew where she was, but she’s gone to England. And at that point the bishop arrested what he believed to be a whole bunch of accomplices and they were:

Robert of Bristol, who was a clerk; John Galrussyn; Elen Galrussyn; Syssock Galrussyn; William Payne de Boly; Petronilla de Meath and her daughter Sarah; Alice, the wife of Henry Faber; Annota Lange; and Eve de Brownestown.

None of those are Irish names. This is the Anglo-Norman community in Kilkenny. One wouldn’t expect them really to be hanging out with each other. And one source says that they confessed. That they…. And I don’t know about the torture but that they confessed to the crimes and other crimes which aren’t even mentioned, and were punished variously by being burnt alive, whipped through the town, some banished or excommunicated, and some ran and got away. That’s the Alice de Kyteler.

Kyteler had accused Ledrede of defamation of character, and the Dublin court summoned the bishop to appear, and this went back and forth. The case swung to Ledrede’s favor, because they had been insulting and attacking the church, that’s the point at which he arrested everybody.

Michelle:  It’s so much messier of a story than what we’re used to thinking about the kind of stereotypical witch trial, where you grab her and you go through some hasty thing and then you burn her. This is really complicated. She’s got resources.

Anne:  We know Salem, and the later Scottish, yeah, but the bishop would lose his seat. He had to… he went to Avignon to try and get it back. He got reinstated at some point. He got accused of some other stuff. He just… because he just got worse and worse. Because the fact of the matter was that the bishop was a megalomaniac, so there you are. And it seems real clear to me – this is my assessment of the whole thing – that Alice Kyteler was not actually a witch. I don’t think this was going on at all. I think this was totally made up.

What I do think is that she poisoned at least her last husband, and the reason I think that is that the description of him on his deathbed looks like arsenic poisoning. So that’s where I’m at. So I think she really actually was quite badly behaved, but not because she was a witch! She was just, kinda like, badly behaved in a much less interesting manner.

But Petronilla, Petronilla of Meath, was burned at the stake, after having been flogged through the city, and that is very, very sad. Because she hadn’t done any of this stuff. If I’m right, and there was absolutely no group of people meeting secretly at night in the church – I really love this, this was going on for years and nobody notices? I mean, you know, all the, it’s like… people’s chickens are disappearing…

Oh, oh, another thing that supposedly they did was they went through the town sweeping dirt toward the doors of the good Christians and putting spells on them that bad things should happen to them. In my mind that’s fairly mild, maybe they did that, but I’m not believing the whole, you know, the whole elaborate schema. The summoning of demons and whatnot. I’m not there.

But the poisoning, yeah. I think what happened is that Alice de Kyteler, who was good at making money, made a great deal of her money by losing husbands and having the stepchildren sign over the goods. And I think the stepchildren got annoyed by this and so… that’s what I’m thinking.

But I think she actually did poison John le Poer.

Michelle:  At least him. 

Anne:  At least him.

Michelle:  The rate at which she’s going through husbands is itself suspicious.

Anne:  Yeah. One of the reasons I don’t think that she actually killed her first husband is that her son, William Outlawe, doesn’t seem to think that she murdered his father. So. But, all the rest? I don’t know. Certainly the last one.

Michelle:Well, I did my best to find primary sources but I’m just going to own up right now that I completely struck out trying to find primary sources.

Anne:  They’re all in Latin, for one thing, yeah?

Michelle:  That is one problem. Guess who shows back up in the story at this point? William Marshal!

Anne:  Billy Marshal! We love him!

Michelle:  He’s back! Because he’s the guy who signs off on the charter for Kilkenny. He gives Kilkenny its charter.

Anne:  By the way, those of you who may not have listened to every single podcast, the reason we’re saying William Marshal comes back is that he was the head general of everything during the Battle of Sandwich, which we were talking about in the Eustace the Pirate-Monk episode, so there you go.

Michelle:  Yeah, that was towards the end of his life when he was being the amazing seventy-year-old regent for the nine-year-old king. This is earlier, when he is still an Anglo-Norman lord, in Kilkenny, and signs off on Kilkenny’s charter and so there is a book called The Liber Primus Kilkennius, that was the charter that he gave them, and then goes on from there. And there’s a lovely record for it in the Irish National Library that tells you that it’s in Kilkenny and you can go see it there. It hasn’t been digitized, you can’t go see it there if you’re, say, in Maryland.

Anne:  Yeah, you can’t go anywhere now that everybody has to stay in their houses and all the borders are closed, but theoretically, some day, we will be able to cross borders again. Or perhaps even go shopping without our masks. Don’t know! Looking forward to it.

Michelle:  There’s a contemporary account of the trial which I, you know, we’ll put the link in the show notes but, just, it’s in Latin. Have fun.

Yeah, I did order a volume of the translation but both Powells and Amazon are swamped and it just didn’t get here. So, in a couple more weeks I’ll probably have that.

Anne:  I like it that you are actually spending money on translations to try and get this…

Michelle:  Trying. Trying to do the right thing here. I did find Holinshed. Now Holinshed cannot, in any way, be considered a primary because this is the late 16^th century, there’s one edition from 1577 and then 1587, so we’re three hundred… not three hundred but…

Anne:  Two… is it two? Yes it’s two hundred.

Michelle:  Yeah, two hundred and fifty years later. So not a primary source in any way. But very fun. This is what he has to say about Alice:

“In theſe dayes liued in the Dioces of Oſſorie the Ladie Alice Ketell, whom the Biſhop aſcited to purge hirſelfe of the fame of inchantment and witchcraft impoſed vnto hir, & to one Petronille and Baſill hir complices. She was charged to haue nightly cõference with a ſpirit called Robin Artiſſon, to whõ ſhe ſacrificed in the high way .ix. red cockes, & .ix. peacocks eies…”

Anne:  There they are!

Michelle:  There they are. 

“Alſo that ſhe ſwept the ſtreetes of Kilkenny betwene Cõpleine & twi|light, raking al the filth towardes the doores of hir ſon William Outlaw, murmuring theſe words: 

To the houſe of VVilliam my ſonne,

Hie all the wealth of Kilkenny towne.”

And so she’s got a nice rhyme to that.

Anne:  Yes. Because part of the idea here is that you have to use rhymes when you’re talking to the spirits, because… I don’t know why this is but apparently they just love the rhymes. They’re into rhymes. And they don’t mind if they’re bad rhymes. You don’t have to write good poetry. You just have to do rhyme-y things. Yeah.

Michelle:  The devil has no taste. You can do bad poetry.

So there’s more of this. That first they abjured and did their penance, then they were found in relapse, then they burnt Petronilla at Kilkenny, the others disappeared, then – oh then this part is nice – when they go through her stuff they find (Alice’s stuff) “they found a Wafer of ſacra|mentall bread, hauing the diuels name ſtamped thereon…”

Anne:  Yes, I’d forgotten that. Yes.

Michelle:“…in ſtead of Ieſus Chriſt, and a Pipe of ointment…” 

I liked this part too…

…” wherewith ſhe greaſed a ſtaffe, vpõ the which ſhe ambled and galloped through thick and thin, when and in what maner ſhe liſted.”

Anne:  So these are later additions…

Michelle:  Yeah. Clearly.

Anne:  Yeah. Because that’s not in the original stuff.

Michelle:  But Holinshed I think is important to mention, because Holinshed is so widely read. It’s the source for everything in the 16^th century, you know? Every play Shakespeare writes dips into Holinshed in one way or another, and so this is how the story is getting passed down.

Anne:  I just want to point something out, that’s logically bothering me about one of the accusations that comes up later.

So she has… she has a sacramental host that has the devil stamped into it instead of Jesus, well that would mean that it was stamped in there before it was baked, and so then it’s not a sacramental host because she would have had to bless it and she can’t. Even if she isn’t a heretic she couldn’t have because she wasn’t a priest. So, I’m just saying that logically this makes no sense. Unless the idea is that you’re stealing the sacramental host and then by some magical godawfulness replacing a cross or an image of Jesus with an image of the devil. I don’t know why, though? I mean, isn’t this, like, why bother? Why… if you’re going to be needing the sacramental host for some kind of black magic can’t you just use it as it is? I mean, wouldn’t that make it worse? Any rate.

So I’m hung up on the logic of that particular bit of nonsense but I’ll let it go.

Michelle:  Well, if you’re going to get hung up on nonsense we’re going to have problems because…

Anne:  Yeah, there was already the peacock’s eyes.

Michelle:  The way that gets used later is real interesting. I poked around a lot looking for the adaptations. She’s experiencing quite a rediscovery in the last twenty years, I would say. There’s a number of novels that draw upon this story. And they’re interesting because they don’t all take the same approach to it.

There’s one that starts being told from Petronilla’s point of view, there’s one that starts being told from Alice’s point of view as a child, so it starts with Alice’s childhood. There’s another one that starts from the bishop’s point of view.

Anne:  Oh my.

Michelle:  Which is really interesting because we meet him and we’re following him around but it’s not really sympathetic to his point of view. Very quickly we meet this Irish priest named Brendan, and we’re much more sympathetic to Brendan, even though we’re following the Bishop Richard around.

Anne:  The bishop is our unreliable narrator?

Michelle:  Kind of. Yeah. I didn’t… I mean there were half a dozen of these novels, I didn’t read all of them. And I couldn’t get a hold of all of them. One in particular that is very, very good is a story named Looking for Petronilla, it’s by Emma Donoghue…

Anne:  Oh, she’s brilliant. I used to… there’s…Ladies and Gentleman is a play of hers that I used to teach, that’s out of print. It’s hard to find. Oh yeah, and all her novels are just brilliant. So I’m going to look for that. Okay. Thank you.

Michelle:  So this is a short story in a book called The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits and if you’re going to go read it I won’t tell you any more about it because it’s better to read it without knowing any more about the plot.

Anne:  Okay, so we’re recommending to everybody that they go find Emma Donoghue’s short story because it’s Emma Donoghue, so duh.

Michelle:  Yes, it’s very good. 

There are… let’s see, what else do I have here… there’s a reference to Alice in William Butler Yeats’ poem Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.

Anne:  Yep, there is.

Michelle:  So that’s really interesting. There’s a couple of folktales… folk songs… that reference her, and I’ll just give you links to that. 

There’s a really interesting art installation that I found on the Brooklyn Museum’s website that has both Alice and Petronilla, and it’s interesting and I found it to be a little bit problematic because it’s pulling on them as part of a ensemble that is looking at women’s power, and about women who have been suppressed, and I don’t know how I feel about Alice being picked up as this kind of symbol.

Anne:  Is this The Dinner Table?

Michelle:  Yes, this is The Dinner Table.

Anne:  Ah, yes. I saw that. It came through San Francisco when it was first put together, so I’ve seen the whole thing.

Michelle:  Oh, interesting.

Anne:  It’s gorgeous. It’s just gorgeous. Judy Chicago. Yeah.

Michelle:  So there’s quite a lot of references… there’s quite a lot of picking up of her story. The novels look to me as if most of them interpret her through the lens of the later understandings of witchcraft. So, for example, the one that is told from Petronilla’s point of view posits that Petronilla is an herbalist and knows a lot about how to do… you know, she’s a midwife, she knows how to do things with herbs.

Anne:  We have no evidence of that.

Michelle:  Yeah, so it’s real interesting the approach that various ones of them take. I think it’s interesting. Do I think that any of them are spectacular? Looking for Petronilla is spectacular. It’s hard to say about the other ones because there’s literally five novels. I did not, in fact, read five novels. 

I’m conflicted about the idea of picking up Alice as a feminist icon because I do think she probably killed at least one husband. I mean, do women have to be perfect in order to be feminist icons? No. Probably they shouldn’t be murderers. Yeah, she’s getting reclaimed as this kind of, you know, icon that… I’m real uncomfortable.

But she’s a powerful woman and rich on her own, and that that’s why she’s attracting this male attention that is bringing her down in any way that it can, which I think is problematic since she probably is not as pure as the driven snow.

Anne:  I think that definitely there’s a strongly gendered aspect to bringing her down. I think the bishop is definitely… that’s one of the things going on with him. It’s kind of like part of the construction of why it is that this witchcraft is so bad is that this woman is leading everything. But her stepchildren actually have a connection into here, it’s not just, like, they’re just afraid of her and they want to bring her down. They believe that she killed her husband, and I think they’re right. I think they go overboard with the witchcraft stuff but, so that… I think this is very gendered but she’s not…

Michelle:  No, I agree. But the bishop’s fanaticism does not make her then a good figure. Like, that is not working for me as an “if one then the other”. I think they’re both pretty well political operatives who just kind of, you know… the immovable object and the unstoppable force are hitting.

Anne:  And even in the construction of the canon law versus secular law, that’s really how this plays out, and that’s what’s going on. Yeah, it’s a false dichotomy. But she certainly saw herself as someone who had power and who had connections, and she used them as best she could in the end. She wasn’t able to stay where she was, but I don’t think she could have. I mean, she seems not to have been enormously well liked. So.

Michelle:  So this was interesting. I enjoyed reading about all of this. I would have liked getting to see the primary sources, but that did not happen.

Anne:  Well, when she is being upheld as a figure of suppression or a figure of suppressed power, what exactly is going on? Are you able to tell? Is the assumption that… I guess what I’m asking… Here’s what I’m asking. In the texts that you are running across nowadays, is the idea that she was indeed practicing some form of witchcraft but not the kind that should get, like, burnt at the stake for? It was like a kind of misunderstanding of herbs and powers such as that that will come along in the early modern era? Is that what’s going on?

Michelle:  They’re really different. It’s really hard to generalize among them because they all take really different approaches since they’re taking, you know, different starting points to the story. I actually have been a little bit surprised at the number of them that are willing to work from the positing that maybe she is doing some… because that’s not… if I was going to tell the story, if it was me going to write a historical novel about it, I would not have her doing any form of witchcraft at all. I would have her being a poisoner who accidentally gets her comeuppance in this other way.

Anne:  I think that I agree with that. Yeah, that’s how I’m thinking. That’s why I’m calling it the perfect storm, I mean she poisons her husbands and annoys her stepchildren. There’s a long-standing connection of poison with witchcraft, with sorcery, and that’s enough to drag all that in. And then there’s all the other accusations which are rote by this time.

Michelle:  But the various books take different approaches to how to approach the witchcraft. Whether she’s actually doing witchcraft, whether it’s more like an herbalist sort of thing. I will say that Kilkenny is quite happy to claim her as a tourist attraction. I found a number…

Anne:  Is it like Salem? Do you get to get lots… you can go anywhere and buy lots of little tchotchkes that are all about witches?

Michelle:  I don’t know what there is to purchase…

Anne:  I betcha there is.

Michelle:  But I did find a number of Kilkenny tourism sites that are quite happy to claim her and talk about… so whether they were embarrassed about her before, they’re certainly not now. Which is actually how I found the William Marshal connection, was through a Kilkenny heritage site.  I’ve never been to Kilkenny. It’s been suggested to me a number of times since it was the seat of the Butlers.

Anne:  So you need to go. I can’t believe you haven’t been to Kilkenny. I mean, I haven’t, but the Courtneys weren’t from there so you know…

Michelle:  I’ll get there eventually. But I haven’t yet. I also want to get to the Rock of Cashel, but I haven’t done that yet either.

Anne:  Well I had gone into this… I had heard of her and I had read briefly, but I had gone in assuming that I was going to be reading about a witch, and I don’t think I read about a witch. I didn’t see any actual witchcraft happening. 

I saw, you know, confessions of witchcraft that were forced out of somebody under torture, and are just very rote and don’t in any way strike me as being real. So I was surprised by that because I thought, oh, good, we’ll talk about somebody who’s, you know, who’s accused of witchcraft but she gets away. Petronilla doesn’t…. no. No. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that the bishop… it’s the bishop’s fanaticism that causes to him to imagine that not only do you have one person who is using poison in a sorcerous fashion but that, obviously, if somebody’s using poison and they’re doing sorcery, obviously you have a group of people meeting, obviously, at night in the church blah blah blah.

But, you know, I don’t think any of these people were sorcerers. And some of them may well have known all about herbs but we haven’t any evidence of that so, you know, that’s not what’s going on. I think this is… there’s different ways in which the witchcraft accusations get used through time and this is one where it’s about a woman with a lot of power — and I believe some bad behavior — getting taken down, and indeed getting taken down through false accusations, but false accusations except for one. Except for the last one. The murder.

Michelle:  Something really different is going on culturally in the 1320s than two hundred years later, when we actually do start having accusations of witchcraft and it takes off. And then you have this kind of cultural hysteria. Whereas this is a one-off that doesn’t light everybody’s brains on fire.

Anne:  And you have no Witchfinder General. You do have a fanatic bishop, but he’s able to be reined in to some extent, finally. He’s gone.

Michelle:  Yeah, he’s an outlier. He doesn’t manage to create something that becomes a cultural movement or hysteria.

Anne:  No, but two hundred years later that will happen. So yeah. 

So. That’s our medieval witchcraft trial. There weren’t that many of them, not specifically witchcraft. This is the first in Ireland. Later there will be a whole lot but they’re really outside of our bailiwick so we will not be discussing Salem. Because it’s not medieval.

I know so many people who associate the witchcraft trials with the Middle Ages, and it was Early Modern.

Oh, and by the way, in England the witches would be hung, you didn’t burn witches at the stake in England. The reason Petronilla is burned at the stake is that it’s the crime of heresy. She’s not burned at the stake for witchcraft. But it’s a moot point really. If you’re going to get burned at the stake for whatever reason, I think really it sort of doesn’t matter there at the end.

Ooh. Which reminds me, we need to put Joan of Arc on our list.

Michelle:  Yes. Yes, another political assassination. Under the guise of witchcraft.

Anne:  Under the guise of… well, they mention witchcraft but really they burn her for heresy.  Part of which is refusing to stop wearing men’s clothes.

Michelle:  Well, that’s just rude. I really don’t think that your outfit should result in a horrific death.

Anne:  No. But really the English needed to get rid of her is what the thing was going on, and she wouldn’t… you know… she did actually wear women’s clothes for awhile but then she put the men’s clothes back on. She kind of recanted her recanting. And then they had to burn her at the stake.

Any rate. So we’ll do Joan of Arc, but that will be later. We’ll do Joan of Arc. We’ll talk about Thomas à Becket. But the next time we meet, Michelle and I want to talk about massacres of the Jews in medieval Europe. And because we are in plague time it strikes us that unfortunately a very timely subject would be the massacres of the Jews that had to do specifically with the Black Death, and where those were and what leads up to them and what happens later, so that will be our next subject. But we have come to the end of talking about Alice Kyteler and Petronilla de Meath. Poor Petronilla, she really didn’t do anything at all.

Michelle:  Yeah, she really was just… she was really just an innocent bystander, or at the most doing what she was told. She was the maid.

Anne:  Yeah, or… if anything was happening at all. It’s like Gilles de Rais’ servants were apparently in on everything and so they get executed along with him. But if Petronilla de Meath is doing anything it’s helping buy the arsenic. You know, I don’t think she’s helping find the peacock’s eyes! I don’t think it happened! I don’t think there’s any peacock’s eyes! “Petronilla go to the store… go down to the market, Petronilla, and get me nine red cocks and…” uh, let’s see, how many peacocks that would be… four and a half peacocks.

Michelle:  I wonder, when you sacrifice a red rooster to the devil, do you offer it up plucked or unplucked? Because there’s a serious difference in work.

Anne:  On, no, unplucked. Because they’re living. No, they’re living so they’re unplucked.

Michelle:  Well that’s good because plucking a chicken is a lot of work.

Anne:  Yeah, oh no. No no. That’s, no… You wouldn’t… you want to keep the work down, god knows. Although I think getting the skull off the executed thief, that’s kind of some work, so maybe, maybe Petronilla was doing that. No, see I don’t believe this. I don’t think Petronilla did anything at all, is what I think. Wrong place, wrong time is what I think Petronilla was.

Michelle:  Well she clearly wasn’t from there so she didn’t have connections or family.I mean she’s from Meath.

Anne:  Yeah, and she’s a servant.

Michelle:  You know, a whole different county. She’s the expendable one.

Anne:  Yeah, they just kill her off. Yeah. I really dislike a lot of these people. Often when we are doing these things I find somebody I really like. I don’t think there’s anybody I really like in here at all, actually. I don’t like Alice Kyteler. Oh, I like Petronilla. I do. I like Petronilla. So. I’m a fan of Petronilla, everybody else I’m annoyed with.

Michelle:  Well I was glad William Marshal showed up so there was at least one person that…

Anne:  He’s long gone by this time. He’s not actually hanging around in Kilkenny, if he had been, probably then he could have, you know, fixed stuff. I’d like to have Billy Marshal fix everything. So, yeah, so that’s it for us today. True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology.

Michelle:  Okay, bye!

Anne:  Bye.