Transcripts

The Murder of Peter of Castile, Montiel, Spain, 1369

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

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America. (Meow) Oh, and that’s Samhain. She just… she literally just walked over to the mic and meowed into it.

Anne:  Thank you, Samhain.

At the time that we’re recording — you’ll be hearing this at least two weeks later, if not more — at the time that we’re recording we, in New Mexico, are under a stay-at-home order, unless we have essential businesses. What is the order where you are, Michelle?

Michelle:  We are… everything that is a nonessential business is closed. Our schools are closed. We’re not under a shelter-in-place order, but we’re under a “stay at home unless you absolutely have to go out.”

Anne:  Right. Right. Yeah, that’s exactly what we’ve got. Part of, of course, what’s going on is that, although we are recording more or less in the same place as we usually do, we have our entire households with us. So, Michelle’s cat is hanging out and my parrot, who usually does not bother us, has now walked over and is attempting to eat both the microphone and the notes, and so I don’t know how long peace is going to reign there. And we may get interrupted by various humans and animals, and that’s just how it is. You don’t mess with plague. That’s where we’re at.

Michelle:  I was actually wondering whether we have historical instances of people using plague bodies as weapons of war. You know, if we could think of war crimes for a future episode.

Anne:  We do. I remember this clearly, as a thing, but I don’t remember where it comes from. But, yeah. Catapulting plague bodies into besieged towns? Yes. That has happened. Yeah. Biological warfare. 

Michelle and I, before the recording, we’ve been talking a lot about the Black Death, as we would, wouldn’t we? So, that occurred to us.

This podcast contains adult themes and adult language, and so we don’t recommend it for people who are under 13. Please use discretion if you are sharing it or listening to it.

But we don’t have, in this one, any of the horrible, horrible tortures that sometimes show up. We are talking about Pedro of Castile, Peter the Cruel, who is also called Peter the Just. We’ll talk about that.

Peter of Castile and León, who was born in 1334 and died in 1369, being murdered. Now, the crime that we’re focused on is the murder of Peter the Cruel. However, that’s a little, tiny piece of this thing, so we kind of get to it later. Because really, what there is before that is an enormous amount of murder that he did. So, we’re going to go all through that. And then Michelle will tell us all about Chaucer and some ghastly play from 1818.

So. Peter of Castile. At the death of his father, Alfonso, who died of the Black Death — I’m just saying — in 1350, a dynastic conflict in Castile started, which dragged on and got tangled up in the war with Aragon and also got tangled up in the Hundred Years’ War with England and France, because why not? It just depended on who you were allied with, and then you went and fought for them.

Alfonso had married Maria of Portugal who was Pedro’s mother, but after she gave birth to Pedro, his legitimate heir, he exiled them both from court. He had had already a long-standing relationship with Leonor de Guzman, which he continued. They ended up having ten children altogether, including, most important to this story, Enrique, Henry, Enrique de Trastámara, Pedro’s half-brother, and the rival claimant to the throne. So the dynastic fight in Castile at this time for the next few decades is between Pedro and Enrique, who are half brothers.

Pedro was fifteen when he took the throne, and was at first controlled by his mother, but he allied himself with his minister, JoãoAfonso de Alburquerque, who was the sixth duke of Alburquerque, who became his chancellor. And so now a side note because, as has been said at the beginning, I’m recording in Albuquerque. Albuquerque, New Mexico is named for the patron of the expedition that founded the Spanish colony who the tenth duke of Alburquerque, Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, so not this one. But that’s where the name “Albuquerque” comes from.

Michelle:  I figured it probably wasn’t a coincidence, even though it’s spelled just a tiny bit differently. I think there might be an extra “r”.

Anne:  Well, yeah, the original has another “r” in it, and I’ve tried to find out when we dropped ours and I can’t figure… I haven’t been able… you know, I’ve looked for this. I haven’t been able to figure it out. If anybody knows, would you tell us in the comments? Over on our website?

But, Alburquerque favored an alliance with France, and Peter favored England, and so he came to distrust him and, urged on by his mistress, María de Padilla, he ousted Alburquerque and replaced his allies that were at court. Joãofled back to Portugal and allied himself with Henry — with Enrique — Pedro’s brother. Later Pedro’s going to have him poisoned, but that will show up. I’m going to give you, at the end of my little history, an entire list of all the murders, and so that will be there.

Pedro had married his mistress, María, in secret, although later he said he hadn’t. But we think he did. But he was coerced by the court into marrying Blanche of Bourbon in 1352. Her father was Peter of Bourbon, the son of Louis, the Duke of Bourbon. This was all about having an alliance with France. They were married for two days and then he sent her to the town of Medina Sidonia, where she remained in exile until he had her murdered in 1361. So that was his first bigamy. He had another bigamy later, but there’s no murder involved and so I’m not even mentioning it.

Michelle:  But bigamy is, you know, one of his crimes.

Anne:  Yeah. It’s one of his crimes. But bigamy is, like, so low on the list of dreadfulnesses that he does that I don’t even care. Although we might have been making it, like, if… on another podcast it could be our whole focus! But no, not this one.

He was at war with Aragon from 1356 to 1366. Peter of Aragon allied himself with Henry/Enrique, and France allied with him also. Peter of Castile, our subject, allied himself with England. That’s going to be important later when Edward the Black Prince shows up.

In 1366, Enrique de Trastámora took Castile, and Peter fled to Portugal and then to Galicia where he had the archbishop and dean of Santiago murdered, but, again, I’ll get into more of that later. And that summer, Edward the Black Prince, who was the son of King Edward III — he was the heir to the throne but he would never become king because he was going to die before Edward III, did – Edward the Black Prince restored Pedro of Castile to the throne, though he then abandoned him because of Pedro’s bad character and the fact that he didn’t pay Edward back for his expenses.

Yeah, see, that’s another thing. Is that good? No.

Henry returned in 1368, and on the 14^th of March 1369, besieged Montiel. And Pedro took refuge in the fortress and offered Henry’s envoy, Bertrand du Guesclin, money and towns to betray Henry/Enrique. Bertrand told Enrique about this in exchange for a better offer. 

Du Guesclin took Peter, then, to his tent, pretending to take the offer, but Henry was there, and after they figured out who each other was, which took awhile because they had not seen each other since they were children, Henry stabbed him a lot, and killed him. He had the body beheaded, and the head was displayed and the body lay unburied for three days, being desecrated.

Da Da-Da! The brief précis of the life of Peter the Cruel.

There’s an afterwards. Before I get to the list of murders, there’s an afterwards.

Michelle:  Okay.

Anne:  Later on — you’re going to like this — later on, in 1371, John of Gaunt, who was Prince Edward’s brother, married Pedro’s daughter Constance. In 1386 John claimed the throne of Castile in the name of his wife, who was Pedro’s heir according to the Cortes de Seville of 1361, and took several cities, including Santiago de Compostela and Pontevedra. He then asked Henry’s son, John, who was the king at that time, to give up the throne. John declined, but he offered to marry his son, Henry, to John’s daughter Catherine, which happened, and this ended the dynastic conflict in Castile and fortified the relationship of England and Spain.

John of Gaunt married Pedro’s daughter!

Michelle: That’s Constance! Is that who The Book of the Duchess is written for?

Anne:  No, The Book of the Duchess is written for Blanche, John’s first wife. This is his second wife.

Michelle:  This is his second wife.

Anne:  Yes, and then he’s seeing Chaucer’s sister-in-law, Katherine Swynford, throughout all this, and later will marry her, and her children will be caused to be legitimate and they will be the Beauforts, whom you hate.

Michelle:  I had sort of missed Constance in there because I knew about the wife that was the real wife, that got The Book of the Duchess, and then I knew about the mistress who becomes the wife, so I missed the second one.

Anne: Yeah, she’s a real wife.

Michelle:  I was really interested to learn about John of Gaunt and Edward III’s forays into this because I knew they were, of course, all over France, right? With the Hundred Years’ War. I didn’t know that Edward III, or, not Edward III, Edward the Black Prince, was having adventures over in Spain as well. I mean, did he spend any time at all in England as an adult, or is he basically just militar-ing his way through Europe?

Anne:  It was through his work that Pedro got the throne back for awhile. Yeah.

Michelle:Yeah, that… I mean…

Anne:  Because it’s an alliance, you know?

Michelle:  That was really fascinating to me, to learn that, because I thought I knew this history pretty well, of the 14^th century, for, you know, one reason or another, and I did not know that Edward the Black Prince was traipsing over into Spain just, kind of casually restoring Pedro to his throne.

Anne:  Yes. And then that connection explains why John of Gaunt gets involved in things, later, and married Constance, and then his daughter gets married off. Lot of connections.

So, I have our murder list. Are you… So… We will now have our murder list.

Michelle:  Okay.

Anne:  Okay. But, to start the murder list, it’s not even a murder he did. It’s his mother. His mother, Maria, had Leonor imprisoned after the death of Alfonso and then had her killed. So that’s what happened to the mother of Enrique.

Michelle:  Oh!

Anne:  So that’s the beginning of everything. Yeah!

Michelle:  I think that one of the public services we’re providing here is people who dream about living in the past, you know, think about that they should be royalty? I think it would be way safer to just be a miller or a blacksmith or, you know, somebody who’s not royalty.

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  There’s an awful lot of killing.

Anne:  No, there’s way too much. You’re going to die, at any rate. They’re all dead, I mean, just to, like, be clear. None of them are alive now. But, yeah, there’s… about this murdering that goes on, it’s just… yeah… it’s sobering. 

Okay. So. Pedro. The list of murders.

So this is going kind of in chronological order.

The town of Burgos had been allied with Henry and when Pedro took it, he invited the head official, who was Garci Lasso de la Vega, to court, where he was received and then murdered and his body was thrown in the bull-fighting ring, and then Pedro executed three of the burgesses. He probably had the Duke de Alburquerque poisoned, pretty sure about that. He also liked to go around Seville at night disguised so as to be part of regular life, and at one point a stranger had blocked off a street so that he could sing to his beloved, this was a custom there, but Pedro wanted to go down that street, so he killed the guy. That’s one of the ones I think might be apocryphal, but, I thought I’d… I’m going to give you the apocryphal ones anyway.

At one point he heard four judges discussing a bribe and so he had them beheaded on the spot.

He had Pedro Ruiz de Villegas, a Castilian noble who supported Henry, and Sancho de Rojas, his squire, murdered while they were sleeping.

Henry and his men entered Toledo in 1355 and massacred the Jews, which is horrendous, and at some point we’re going to be doing probably several podcasts on crimes against the Jews, this would be one of them. And Pedro — he’s often called a protector of the Jews — he was very upset by this. He retook Toledo and beheaded twenty-two townsmen and three knights. Which I think really is sort of fair but it was without a trial so, hence, not good.

After besieging Toro, he pardoned some of the leaders and then had them murdered in front of his mother who was lovers with one of them.

Michelle:  Ew!

Anne:  I know!

In 1354 his half-brother, Fadrique — who had joined Toledo in rebellion and of course had supported his brother — Enrique, came to court because he was invited to give counsel. This reminds us of the young Earl of Douglas who was invited to Edinburgh to give counsel. It’s like, really? Really, guys! Pay attention. At any rate, he was invited to give counsel and be forgiven, so he came and he was visiting Maria and his nieces and kind of realized what was going on and tried to get away but he was slaughtered in the courtyard along with the one knight of his who had not escaped. And then, we are told that the king ate lunch where he could look at the body. That might be apocryphal, but I like the detail.

As part of the suppression of the rebellion, Peter had knights and squires throughout the land executed. See, trials aren’t happening, it’s just, you know, murdering.

Don Juan of Aragon was summoned to court and murdered.

I got pages more of this.

He had his aunt, Doña Leonor, who was the sister of Alfonso and the Queen of Aragon, murdered, and also poisoned Doña Isabel de Lara, her daughter-in-law.

Michelle:  Well, they’re switching up their M.O.

Anne:   Yeah, he’s a polymath when it comes to this.

Michelle:  Sometimes it’s poisonings…

Anne:  Yeah, sometimes it’s hitting people in the head with a mace. Stabbing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Javelins are going to come in, in a minute. 

Shades of the princes in the Tower, he imprisoned the younger sons of Leonor de Guzman, so this is Enrique’s little brothers, in 1359, this is Juan and Pedro, when they were 19 and 14, had them imprisoned at Carmona and then murdered. So we know he did that. There’s not a wondering. But people were outraged because they were innocents.

He pretended to have forgiven Alvarez Osorio for having defected from his side and invited him to dinner, and murdered him at dinner. Aha! Blood feast! Woohoo!

Michelle:  I like that that is just his sort of, you know, afterthought, that he did this whole blood feast thing, since that’s a thing we’ve been, you know, focusing whole episodes on.

Anne:  Yeah, because the blood feast theme is so important to us that we like to spend entire episodes on it, but in this one, it’s just a thing that went by. Blood feast! Bye! Another one coming up later.

He had Gomez Laso Carillo executed for unclear reasons. He was the brother of some guy who was married to some woman that he fancied, but her husband had fled to Aragon, he killed the brother. Whatever!

He executed Gutier Fernandez, his chief minister, for corresponding with Aragon. And his minister warned him — we have this, this has come down to us — he warned him that if he continued to strike off heads like his he would lose his kingdom and his life. Whatever. We go on.

He murdered Abu Said, Muhannad VI of Granada, the king of Granada, inviting him and 37 of his emirs to Santiago. Abu Said had started negotiations with Aragon. He received them with with great pomp and fed them – blood feast!. At the end of the meal they were all arrested, stripped and thrown in a dungeon. A few days later they were tied to stakes and killed by having javelins thrown at them. Pedro sent the head of Abu Said to Abu Abdallah, Muhammad V of Grenada, who then retook the throne. Because, you know, it was empty, after the whole blood feast and javelin incident.

Michelle:  I’m not a trained psychologist but that seems like a sign that you’re not stable. That doesn’t seem like it’s a good sign of, you know, mental health.

Anne:  Yeah, because there’s just so much of this, you know? There’s a whole lot of ruthless rulers in medieval history but this is just, like, like there’s no end of it!

He held a “tournament” — and there’s air quotes around that — which was actually an elaborate set-up for the murder of Arias de Baamonte, who was defeated by treachery and beheaded.

About that time Blanche had been in prison for ten years, so he murdered her.

Michelle:  It took him a while to get around to it.

Anne:  Yeah, I don’t know why he hadn’t murdered her earlier, but… I don’t know.

Michelle:  He was busy.

Anne:  I guess he was tired. I have no explanation for this. “Oh yeah, my wife! Kill her!”

He put the Archbishop of Santiago, Dom Suero, and Peralvarez, to death. That’s the dean. Murdered at the altar of the church for having supported Henry.

Michelle:  Great. He’s just hitting all the highlights of medieval history by himself, you know? Because there’s the echo of Becket.

Anne:  Mmhm. Now, we’ll get into the sources and how to read this but — because we may be actually dealing with inherited tropes — but yeah.

After the Battle of Nájera, he murdered Iñigo Ortiz d’Estuniga, a prisoner who had been captured by a knight from Gascony, and this disgusted the English because, of course, this is absolutely against the rules of war. They slaughter the non-nobles but if you’re a noble you’re taken prisoner and not only are you not killed, but whoever has captured you gets to have the ransom. So that the English are disgusted is not just that you shouldn’t kill prisoners, but that you shouldn’t steal the ransom from the guys that captured them, if you see what I mean.

Michelle:  Mmhmm.

Anne:  And then he asked that all the Castilian prisoners be given to him, but Edward the Black refused, and he said that no amount of gold would cause him to deliver them to execution. Yeah, so then he gets… then he dies. That’s my list.

Michelle:  It’s an impressive CV.

Anne:  It really is. There’s, like, no end to it. Those are just the ones that we have actual stories of. In between all this he just simply had his rivals murdered, you know? Execution without trial, which is a form of judicial murder. So there’s way more than this, it’s just that these are the ones we have that have come down to us in story.

And as I say, I think some of them are apocryphal, but many of them are not. But part of the problem with this, as it was with Richard III, is that the biography that’s first put together, and upon which a great deal of this is based, was put together by someone who was working for Henry, and so of course it’s going to be biased.

Michelle:  Yeah, that’s a huge but understandable problem. If you’re getting paid by the next guy, you’re of course going to…  even if you’re not making things up you’re going to present the facts in the worst possible light.

Anne:  Yes. And some of this… I mean we know he actually did murder Abu Said, this is part of the history of Granada. And we know he murdered Fadrique, after having invited him. That whole business about going around Seville at night disguised, you know, and killing some guy who’s trying to sing a nice song to his lady? I don’t’ actually believe that.

Michelle:  That one seems a little sketchy. And, frankly, unnecessary given all the rest.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s actually unnecessary. Yeah.

The murder of the prisoner after the battle was apparently done in rage, so he was known for just flying off the handle. Maybe he was going around Seville and flew off the handle. Maybe. Maybe. It’s hard to tell.

Michelle:  I’m astonished to be told that he was reputed to have anger issues. That’s really a stunning revelation.

Anne:  Yeah, because he was so well wrapped.

Michelle:  And calm and, you know, peaceful.

Anne:  But you can see why there would be a lot of defection to Enrique’s side. He wasn’t a ruler who inspired trust and confidence, and a feeling of security in the realm. He was scary as hell, so, there you go.

Michelle:  And the tolerance for the fact that Enrique is, you know, an illegitimate son, tells us a lot. That if they have to pick between the crazy legitimate one…

Anne:  Yeah. Theoretically the legitimate heir… But later some people, some historians call him Peter the Just, and so what this was about was nobody’s saying that he didn’t kill people. I mean, he killed a bunch of people. But “Peter the Just”, as a name, as opposed to “Peter the Cruel” — which seems to naturally fit with this litany of murders I just gave you — Peter the Just is all about the idea that he committed murders that were necessary and right.

Michelle:  So, in some ways, that’s then an argument about royal power, right? Do you, can you… if you think something is being done wrong, can you just take the law into your own hands, or are you… I mean this is something they’re fighting for most of the Middle Ages. If you are a direct ruler, is whatever you do, is that fine? Or is there a law that is above you that you also answer to?

Anne:  And not just being a legitimate ruler, ordained by god, yada yada, but also at war. I think, though, that, even if you’re going to grant that the circumstances are that he is exercising, within some kind of reason, his power to make sure that the realm is safe while they are at war by killing off his rivals, this doesn’t explain Alburquerque, it really doesn’t explain Blanche…

Michelle:  The two little half-brothers.

Anne:  It doesn’t explain the two little brothers who weren’t part of any of this except that they were connected to Enrique. It doesn’t explain killing off his aunt and her daughter-in-law. She had been problematic but she really… she wasn’t doing… she was the Queen of Aragon, I mean, you know? Why kill your aunt just because she’s the Queen of… if you were going to kill her… it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, she’d come to Castile because she’d been thrown out of Aragon. And Gomez Laso Carillo, who happened to be the brother of some guy who was married to a lady he was interested in, that’s not making any sense. And having the Archbishop of Santiago murdered at the altar — I don’t know if he was murdered at the altar or whether that’s a colorful addition but he was murdered — that also is problematic. I mean, the problem is that what’s happening is that Castile is… throughout Castile there are these towns that had gone for Enrique rather than Pedro, and so whoever is in charge would be, you’d think would get to, like, kill off the rivals, but Enrique doesn’t actually do that.

Michelle:  Yes. Yeah, that’s an important piece of this is that the other side – Enrique — is not, you know, answering with reprisals.

Anne:  Yeah, I mean, he’s doing bad things, you know. He led the massacre of the Jews at Toledo and having… he’s doing other things, but not to this degree. Because what Pedro was doing was not just killing off his rivals, but killing off townspeople who were in cities that had given his rivals shelter. I mean, like, it didn’t… if you were in any way associated with Enrique, he might have you killed. And that’s problematic.

Michelle:  Nevertheless, you want to talk about the literature now? You want to talk about Chaucer?

Anne:  Tell me about Chaucer!

Michelle:  Because John of Gaunt had gone and fought for this guy and has this connection with him, through the second wife and everything, he actually gets good press in Chaucer. The Monk’s Tale is a set of stories about high people — people of high degree — who fall into adversity. And he tells stories like Adam, Samson, Hercules. But then one of the stories he tells is about Pedro of Spain. So this is how Chaucer has the monk describe him in there:

“Oh noble, O worthy Pedro, glory of Spain,

Whem Fortune held so high in majesty,

Well oughte men thy piteous death complain.

Out of thy land thy brother made thee flee,”

And actually there are some manuscripts that have that as “Thy bastard brother made thee flee”.

“And after, at a siege, by subtlety,

Thou wert betray’d, and led unto his tent,

Where as he with his owen hand slew thee,

Succeeding in thy regne and in thy rent.”

So he gets really good press in Chaucer. Then there’s this whole weird thing about the heraldry. A giant stanza that goes off about the heraldry and how the heraldry is a metaphor and it’s too hard to explain so let’s not do it.

You can go look that up! An exercise to the listener. If you really want.

Anne:  So what’s interesting about this to me is not just, so, the basic story, yeah. That’s the basic story, he got betrayed and his brother murdered him. Oh yeah, the point of our entire podcast! The murder of Pedro the Cruel. That’s how Chaucer thinks about it. So there you go. But, that he comes down into English lore with this reputation that’s so high, when really Edward the Black Prince really didn’t… he did not have that high a reputation with Edward the Black Prince, who was just disgusted with him.

So has he been rehabilitated in the English mind, and in English lore, because of this marriage? Because John has married his daughter? “Your dad was great!”

Michelle:  “We loved him. It’s not his fault he was… that murder just came out of nowhere!”

Anne:  Through subtlety!

Michelle:  It was all a trick! Somebody tricked him!

Anne:  Is she unclear as to the reputation of her father? Does she not know that he, like, murdered a bunch of her relatives? I don’t know.

Michelle:  It makes me wonder how much Chaucer knew. He did spend time in Europe, so, how much was he aware that this was a whitewashing, and how much had he just been told about this, so he was having to just go with what his sources were telling him? Because Chaucer doesn’t… he doesn’t usually lie. On purpose.

Anne:  Well he often… I don’t think he lies on purpose, but he often sends you down the wrong path on purpose.

Michelle:  Well, he’s part of the politics of his day. He’s not writing in a tower or somewhere off by himself. He’s connected.

Anne:  Yeah, he survived several bloody reign changes. No, he’s not dumb. But I think it’s impossible that… certainly John of Gaunt knew what Pedro’s reputation was. From his brother. I think it’s impossible that this not be known. But, no. So, here he is… he was… it’s not even that he’s just. He’s like an icon, or something.

Michelle:  Yeah, he’s getting burnished. It’s really interesting. He’s getting thrown in to The Monk’s Tale.

Anne:  Tell me the first part again? About how wonderful he is.

Michelle:              “Oh noble, O worthy Pedro, glory of Spain, 

                        Whem Fortune held so high in majesty.”

Anne:  “Glory of Spain.” Well, okay. There you are. Glory of Spain. What about the play?

Michelle:  I’m so ready to tell you about that play!

So usually the things that are closer are more accurate, but Chaucer, for one reason or another, has been tasked with cleaning him up here. Whereas this play, from 1818, he is unambiguously horrific. So the play and the play’s author are fascinating. I almost feel like we need a 19^thcentury scholar on call so when we get a hold of one of these people we can call ‘em up and say, you know, “Quick! To the Bat Phone! We need some help with obscure 19^thcentury authors!”

So the play itself, okay? The play itself is from 1818.

Anne:  This is English, yeah?

Michelle:  It is written in English. It is called Peter the Cruel King of Castile and Leon: An Historical Play in Five Acts.

Anne:  Oh god. Five acts.

Michelle:  Five acts. I read three of them and that’s about as far as I could make it happen.

Anne:  So you didn’t get to the murder? Which is, of course, the point of the whole podcast.

Michelle:  Yeah, no. But the author of this play is really interesting. The play itself is… it’s not atrocious, okay? I don’t want to make it sound like it’s terrible. But it’s very… it is the only play that she wrote. I could find no evidence whatsoever that it was ever produced. It is competent. It is a play written by a B- student, okay? 

So here is a passage. It’s the end of Act I. For reasons that I don’t understand, the brother who is in opposition to Pedro is called Frederick in here. I don’t know. Frederick has found out that even though he fought…

Anne:  Frederick is the name… is close. Frederick is like an English-ing of the name of the next brother, the one that gets murdered at… he’s brought to a blood feast but then he’s killed in the courtyard.

Michelle:Okay.

So Frederick has found out that despite… maybe Henry is going to show up in the two acts that I haven’t read, okay? I did my best.

Anne:  Yeah, who knows?

Michelle:  I can only deal with this so far.

So Frederick has found out that despite the fact that he has just been off fighting on his brother’s behalf, it doesn’t matter. Pedro hates him, is jealous of him, he wants to have him killed. And so here is Frederick’s…

Anne:  Oh, so he’s been fighting for Pedro?

Michelle:  Yes!

Anne:  Okay, so that’s just made up. Alright. Because none of those brothers fought for Pedro. Okay, but… alright. Okay, so here’s one who was, okay.

Michelle:  Yes and he didn’t believe it, right? The buddy, Gutierre, comes to him and says “Look, I think you need to be careful about going to see your brother, because I’m pretty sure he wants you dead.” And he says — Frederick says — “No, no, it’ll be fine. I was just off fighting for my brother. He loves me. It’s great. He’s going to reward me!” And Gutierre says, “I don’t think so.” But he has to finally believe Gutierre when Gutierre tells him this, right? 

“Then Gutierre’s penetration pierced the veil,

 This cruel brother even seeks my life;

 May not her terrors…”

They talk in here about Maria, because that’s where they’re getting their information…

“May not her terrors, be the futile offspring

Of a fevered mind? I’ll fly to find my friend,

His, is an honest, and a valiant heart,

 Which ever guides him right. To die… to die

 Is only fearful to the guilty mind;

 But thus die! die by a brother’s hand…

 Great God!……….  Thy power prevene.”

So it’s not appalling, you know? But it’s very derivative.

Anne: It’s very derivative.

Michelle:  You could have handed me this play and told me that it was written in… 200 years earlier, and I would have believed it. Because it’s basically the same structure that was being used for plays right after Shakespeare’s death. You could have handed me this and said, “John Fletcher wrote this”, this younger contemporary of Shakespeare’s, I would have said “Fine! I’m buying that!”

You know who I appreciated after reading this play? Who I appreciated after reading this play was Jane Austen. Because this is contemporary with Jane Austen.

Anne:  Oh! Thank you. Whoa. Everything just snapped. Yeah.

Michelle:  Isn’t that insane? This is contemporary… this is published and her earlier novels, Ann Doherty’s earlier novels are contemporary with Pride and Prejudice. This feels at least a hundred years, and closer to two hundred years older. It is absolutely wild. She wrote, um… this is the only play she wrote but I have a cool story about it with Robert Southey. But she also wrote one, two, three novels, none of which I could get a hold of. I’m real sorry but she has fallen into some sort of digitization black hole. They’re available on Amazon really expensively if you want to pay thirty bucks for somebody to send you a print-on-demand version of the old thing of it, but I’m sorry, I wasn’t that committed. If I could find a digital copy I would have looked them up.

She wrote a novel called Ronaldsha, in 1808, and I think that’s an island so I think it must be set on that island, but your guess is as good as mine. The Castles of Wolfnorth and Mont Eagle, in 1812, which is exactly contemporary with Pride and Prejudice— these three are all gothic novels. And the third one is The Knight of the Glen and it has a subtitle, something like “a story of an Irish knight” or something, and I really wanted to find that one, but no luck.

When I looked, though, these are definitely in lists of gothic novels, probably the sort of thing that Jane Austen was parodying in Northanger Abbey, of course.

The thing is, I’m pretty sure that Ann Doherty’s life is more interesting than her books. Oh my god, her life is fascinating! So, she was the daughter of Thomas Holmes, who was a wealthy East India merchant. I’m working right now from Romantic Circles dot org, because this was the best biography I found of her, online. So he changes his name to Hunter when he inherited an estate in Hertfordshire from his wife’s grandfather. The daughter, Ann, elopes, age sixteen, with Hugh Doherty, an Irishman who is twice her age, and he was an officer in the Light Dragoons. Also Jane Austen-y but not in the good way, right? We’re thinking of Lydia, at this point.

So this marriage eventually breaks down and the husband is so unhappy about the whole thing that he publishes a version of what went down in a book called The Discoveryin 1807.

Anne:  What went down? That got discovered?

Michelle:  I have no idea. I’m sorry, I didn’t look that up. That felt, you know, a little far afield from Peter the Cruel.

Anne:  Oh yeah. Right. We’re talking about Peter the Cruel. Peter the Cruel, murdered by his brother, that’s the point of the podcast.

Michelle:  I was in the deepest rabbit hole here, with Ann Doherty. For one thing, she’s like a spy. She’s got six different names! She starts her life as Ann Holmes. Then dad changes his name and then she’s Ann Hunter. Then she gets married and she’s Ann Doherty. Then she just starts shacking up… well actually there’s a relationship in here where she doesn’t take the last name, where she is involved with Philip William Wyatt, who is an architect. We know about this because Hugh Doherty sued him for criminal conversation with his wife.

Anne:  Oh, well that’s what the problem was.

Michelle:  Mmhmm. That relationship doesn’t hang together, and by 1818 she was referring to herself as Ann Attersoll because she was living with John Attersoll, who was a wealthy merchant banker and an MP for Wooton Bassett.

Anne:  Whoa! But they weren’t married?

Michelle:  Sorry, what?

Anne:  They weren’t married.

Michelle:  They weren’t married. But she was calling herself… she was living with him and using his last name in 1812.

So then she goes off in 1820… by at least 1820 she’s living in France. Drops the name Attersoll and is calling herself Madame St Anne Holmes. So this biography of her on Romantic Circles dot org has one, two, three, four, five different names that she’s known under. She was really difficult to Google. I’m just telling you.

Anne:  Why did she name herself Madame whatever Holmes?

Michelle:  Number one, it’s anybody’s guess. Oh! And she has another name. As she stays in France, she later uses the surname of de la Pigueliere. It looks like. I’m telling you, she should have written a memoir rather than any of these books, and it would have been fascinating.

Anne:  Especially not the play about Peter the Cruel. Wow.

Michelle:  Yeah. She is so fascinating, and I couldn’t find much of anything about her except that she sends a copy of her play to Robert Southey. And he has a couple of letters in which he’s writing to people saying “Does anybody know who this is?” So here’s one of them.

Anne:  Was he the Poet Laureate at this time, or is before or after? Do you know?

Michelle:The letter that I’m looking at is from February of 1821. And this is also in Romantic Circles dot org from the collected letters of Robert Southey. And I’m probably saything that wrong, I’m so sorry, Southey.

I didn’t know he was Poet Laureate.

Anne:  Yeah. Byron hated him.

Michelle:  Oh my god. So she does this thing where she sends him a copy of the play, that we were just talking about, Peter the Cruel. She sends him a copy of it in 1818, and he writes back to her very politely and says, “Thank you for this thing.” He doesn’t write back for a whole year, but he has reasons he explains in his letter to her, about, you know, “My wife just had a baby and it’s been really busy, I’m sure you can understand, like, stuff happens”. He’s very polite when he writes back to her, but then he has these other letters, to two or three other people, where he says, “Who the hell is this?”

“Can you find out the history of a Mrs. Attersoll?”

Here he’s writing… this is Robert Southey writing to Henry Herbert Southey in 1821.

“Can you find out the history of a Mrs. Attersoll, — a woman of fashion & fortune, who has lately been unmarried, or rather dismarried, I know not by what process, nor for what good cause, & resuming the name of her father now calls herself (writing from France) Madame S. Anne Holmes. Her father lives in Manchester St. Manchester Square. — She’s certainly an odd personage, as well as a clever one, & seems in some things to resemble the poor Senhora. I should tell you that she is the Lady to whom one of the French translations of Roderic…”

So he knew her well enough to dedicate a work to her, the translation of Roderick!

“… & she favours me not only with her high approbation, — but also with letters nicely written upon the finest French paper, & sealed with yellow wax in the most delicate manner.”

So this was really fascinating, that she has this connection to Robert Southey.

Anne:  It’s quite a rabbit hole. Answer to my question, he was indeed Poet Laureate at this time, because he was Poet Laureate for about thirty years.

Michelle:  Okay. So she appears to not just be kind of…. If, I mean, given that connection, she’s not just scribbling off by herself in some corner. She’s got connections to some important people. And her work doesn’t just disappear off the face of the earth because, digging a little further into the rabbit hole, I found an entry in Notes and Queries from November of 1881 in which an R. Inglis is writing in, as a note or a query, “Can anyone give me any information regarding Mrs. Attersoll, author of Peter the Cruel, A Tragedy, published in France in 1818?” So that’s, 1881, all these years later, and R. Inglis is writing into Notes and Queries, it’s one of about six queries he has asking for information on various authors. So probably there’s somebody’s dissertation who has dug into all about Ann Doherty, but I didn’t find it.

Anne:  Oh yeah, Doherty. I forgot her name. Doherty. Yeah, Doherty. 

Michelle:  Well, one of her names. She’s got, like…

Anne:  Attersoll, Holmes…

Michelle:  She’s got a really interesting preface to her play too. Where she explains all about how she did her research, and she worked really hard, and this as far as she can tell how things went, that it’s a historical tragedy.

Anne:  Does she explain why she wants to write about Pedro the Cruel?

Michelle:  Yeah, her preface is really interesting. 

“The character of the Tyrant, whom I have chosen for the Hero of the following Play, is so darkly shadowed by every evil passion, and admits of so few lights, that altho, familiar to many in history, I am fearful it may be deemed, exaggerated by those who are not conversant with the memoirs of his reign.

It was not the dreadful multiplicity of Peter’s crimes, his traditional appellation or bloody renown, which prompted me to form a Play from part of the events in his life; but the succession of momentous incidents, the happy reunion of opposite characters, the tone and contrast of these characters which appeared to offer the outline for a dramatic composition.”

So it sounds like what she’s saying is, it’s not that he killed a lot of people, it’s just that it sounded very dramatic to me. Her preface is fascinating.

Anne:  Not just the litany, but the character of the murders.

Michelle:  She gives a lot of ground to the women, too. She has the wife and the mistress kind of gang up against him. There’s a scene towards the beginning – you know, the part I read – where the wife and the mistress, the mistress comes to the wife and… no, the wife comes to the mistress and the mistress says, “You’re here to kill me!” and the wife says, “Don’t be dumb, we have to gang up on him!”.

Anne:  Now which wife and mistress is this? Because Alfonso and Pedro both had a wife that they didn’t pay attention to and a long-term mistress who had all their kids, so it’s like that pattern got repeated. Is this Blanche and Pedro’s Maria, or is this Alfonso’s Maria and Leonor?

Michelle:  It is Blanche of Bourbon and Maria de Padilla.

Anne:  So she did a lot of research but she took some liberties, because Blanche doesn’t’ meet with Maria because two days after they get married, she’s sent away. Two days! Two. Days. Was how long they were given.

Michelle:  She’s imprisoned in here, but they get together and have a plan to gang up on him. So like I say, it’s not a horrible play, it’s just not… it’s not breaking new ground, shall we say. It doesn’t have the sort of fun, over-the-top melodrama that we saw in Dumas’ play about the Tower. It’s kind of taking itself seriously, you know. In the preface she’s saying:

“I am perfectly conscious, that in the fiery ordeal of closet criticism, this my first dramatic publication, will place me on a dangerous precipice.”

Right? So she says, “I know this is the first one” – she doesn’t write another one, but – “I know this is the first one and it may not stand up to your scrutiny,” but then she says:

 “I have studied to afford stage situations, and opportunity to display the powers of the actors, and therefore, until you have been able to estimate my production on the scene, I shall not esteem myself fairly judged.”

So she’s basically saying, unless this gets produced you’re not really going to see the full potential.

Anne:  Which leads one to believe that she’s counting heavily on the use of the theater space and the use of acting technique in order to pull this off, but when you were reading it that didn’t strike you as a thing which was going to redeem it?

Michelle:  I mean, I’ve probably seen worse plays, but I did not come out of this thinking oh my god, I have discovered a forgotten masterpiece! I definitely did not think that.

Anne:  Right, and you didn’t come out of it thinking, oh hey, we can do this in our back yard, let’s get together a troupe and perform this thing. You didn’t… when you were reading about Gilles de Rais’ play about the siege of Orléans, you actually wanted to produce that. You do not want to produce this.

Michelle:  And I kind of wanted to produce Dumas, because Dumas’ play was so over-the-top ridiculous and, like, having fun with itself. This does not make my fingers itch wanting to produce it. It’s just… it’s competent. It probably wouldn’t suck. But it’s not spectacular either.

Anne:  Are there a lot of wonderful murder scenes? Are there a lot of murder scenes and people getting whacked with javelins?

Michelle:  If there are, they’re in the last two acts. Because the first three are all about talking.

Anne:  So the first three don’t even have the murders in them?

Michelle:  Well, let’s scroll down and see what we see towards the end…

“Frederick, is your noble brother safe?” Peter’s still alive there, so we’re practically at the end here and Peter’s still alive.

Oh, Blanche is getting murdered! So there’s murders towards the end. I think Blanche just got poisoned. But this is way, way at the end. Oh yeah, he says he’s poisoned her.

Anne:  Many murders happened before Blanche got poisoned.

Michelle:  There appears to be quite a lot of talking and none of it is direct address, which is personally annoying to me. The queen’s poisoned, what the hell? That’s the end? What?

Anne:  So he’s not even murdered in this… his murders are not in here, not really, and he’s not murdered.

Michelle:  No! He’s alive! He’s alive on the very last page.

Anne:  What? What? What is this…

Michelle:  He may be about to die, right…

Anne:  Oh my god.

Michelle:  Then, Maria’s poisoned… there’s a lot of poison… Blanche is poisoned, Maria’s poisoned.

Anne:  Well there was, in real life, yeah. What’s fascinating about this is that you really could make quite an interesting potboiler by putting some of the murders in there, especially the blood feast, don’t you think?

Michelle:  He is not dead at the end. He is there feeling bad that Maria is dead.

Anne:  So he has remorse. Which seems to me to be quite a stretch. I don’t think we have any remorse indications from Pedro the Cruel. I don’t think so. He seems pretty focused on just slaughtering people.

Michelle:  Anybody else wants to go and read it and come back and tell us more about it, go ahead. I can’t do any more of it.

Anne:  No. We’re done. So there’s a way in which that still, in the English terms, because she’s writing in English even if it’s published in France and that’s where she is at the time…

Michelle:  yeah.

Anne:  There’s a way in which it’s still this kind of rehabilitation of him because, as she says, I’m not interested in the murders I’m interested in these moments of character but it’s like, mmm, the murders kind of are the character, I’m just saying. There’s a whole bunch of them. Because, you know, there were so many that I didn’t even mention, you have to say to yourself, well, when did he sleep?

Michelle:  And it doesn’t end with his murder, right? So we don’t even really see him… he’s calling the death of Maria retribution but it doesn’t end with his own murder which, you know, is kind of, usually, the way bad people in plays meet their ends.

Anne:  Well, so the English view of him really is about Pedro the Just. I think he’s pretty mean. I think he was sorta bloody. And it’s clear to me from behavior after the battle where Edward the Black Prince wins for him, it’s clear that this is not just about a kind of justice, this is about rage. This is about just killing people. And the ways in which things are done, the way in which the King of Granada is murdered, the whole stripping everybody has to do with taking all their jewels, fair enough, but they’re humiliated. It’s not just killing him, you know, more than that is going on with Pedro the Cruel.

In other words, okay, I’m fine with calling him Pedro the Cruel. I don’t need to call him Pedro the Just. I’m kind of not there.

Michelle:  Yeah, that particular piece of PR isn’t working for me. I am usually… when we run across somebody who is given this sort of epithet, “the Cruel”, usually my approach going into is to go hmm, really? Are we overstating this? Not in this case. 

Anne:  Especially when we know that the first biography is written by someone who is working for his brother, the enemy. We know it’s got to be biased. Nevertheless, if you take off the bias, you’re still left with a bunch of godawfulness. So there you go.

Michelle:  Frederick is murdered. I scrolled back a little bit. He’s murdered in Act IV. 

Anne:  Okay, good.

Michelle:  So there’s a little bit.

Anne:  It takes that far to get to it though.

Michelle:  Apparently he wanders around the earlier two acts being concerned that Peter’s going to kill him. If you make it through to the end, people start dying.

Anne:  I don’t want to read this play. Thank you for reading the play. But I do know The Monk’s Tale and that was very nice of Chaucer to say such nice things about the noble, golden, you know, shiny, shiny, shiny ruler of Spain who was murdered through treachery, and some of that is true and some of it is not. Yep. He was murdered through treachery. This is true. And of course, that’s the point of the podcast. The murder of Peter the Cruel. He was treacherously murdered by someone that he had been trying to bribe to be treacherous against somebody else. But, at any rate, he got murdered in that whole process, so there you are.

So, Michelle, do you have anything else you want to say?

Michelle:  Nope. Just that he’s a bad dude. I have no sympathy for him at all. I’m not planning on lighting a candle.

Anne:  So that is the end of our discussion of Pedro the Cruel, who got murdered, and that’s the crime that we were discussing, briefly. Next time, and this is going to be a surprise to you Michelle, because I don’t think we had talked about this, but next time we’ll be discussing Alice Kyteler and her maid, Petronella…

Michelle:  Oooh!

Anne:  … who are the first people condemned for witchcraft in Ireland.

Michelle:  Our topics are always a surprise to me, because I don’t remember what we’re doing, from week to week. That sounds fun.

Anne:  This is True Crime Medieval. True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just as bad as they are nowadays, only with less technology. Please stay safe. Please stay safe. Plague’s still raging outside our doors. Please subscribe wherever you are listening to us, and if you’re listening to us on Apple please leave a review, so that the algorithms will cough us up on the search functions.

If you go over to truecrimemedieval.com you can leave comments in the Comments section. Let us know if there’s any crimes you want us to discuss, or any other feedback you’ve got. And you can also there find the Show Notes, which Michelle does, and the transcripts, which are done by Laurie Dietrich. And you can also reach all three of us through the “About” tab.

And so we’re signing off. Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

Eustace the Pirate. Battle of Sandwich. England. 1217

Anne: Hello. Welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly.I’m Anne Brannen, one of your hosts, and I am the host who’s recording in Albuquerque.

Michelle: And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America. And currently under a plague warning so even more medieval than we were before.

Anne: The plague has not yet hit New Mexico but it will, so we’re trying to wipe off the grocery store cart handles, you know, things like that. That’s what we’re doing in New Mexico. It seems sort of a frail kind of thing but at least we have more information about this particular plague than we did when the Black Death hit, when basically there was no real information at all other than it was coming which is really, kind of, just scary. 

It’s nice to think there’s something you can do even if it’s, like, stay home, or wipe off the grocery store cart handles.

Michelle: Well if my continued existence relies upon teenage hygiene you’re going to have to find somebody else to do this with you.

Anne: Oh, I hope that things work out over there. Yeah, my teenager sort of grew up and got a fiancé and he kind of stopped, like, he no longer does that kind of thing where it’s like Pig-Pen walking around dropping candy wrappers wherever you go? That doesn’t happen anymore. So I have hope. I have hope for your existence.

Michelle: We’re still very strongly there.

Anne: It’s amazing. It’s like, really, why are you not throwing this in the trash can which is actually right next to you? Well, you know. There’s no reason. 

The podcast contains adult content, and we use adult language, and so please use discretion in listening if you are under thirteen or handing it on to people who are under thirteen.

Today we are discussing Eustace the monk, a pirate. And a mercenary. And actually, briefly, Admiral of the French Fleet.

Michelle: He was a polymath, really.

Anne: I find this hilarious. You know, that this person actually existed is just lovely. We’re going to discuss sources later. But he actually existed.

He was born around 1170 in Boulogne to a minor noble family. I think it’s the romance source that says that he studied black magic in Toledo, so I’m not really buying that. But he did become a Benedictine monk. And I found this interesting. It’s not just that he’s a monk, he’s a Benedictine monk. I mean, those are, like, the reasonable monks, you know? The ones that feed you stuff if you come by and know how to make medicines and are known for hospitality. Apparently he didn’t fit in. Oh well.

He was a monk in an abbey near Calais, but he left the monastery – there’s some talk about he was doing gambling and misbehaving and whatnot, this may or may not have been true – but he left after his father was murdered in about 1190. He wanted to bring the supposed murderer to justice, this was Hainfrois de Heresinghen. So they fought a duel, by using champions, and Eustace’s lost so therefore Hainfrois was innocent. Because that’s… and that’s real! Because if your champion wins then your side is right. And if your champion loses, your side is wrong and that’s just how it is.

Michelle: There’s a really funny moment in Malory where Lancelot offers to fight a duel to protect Guinevere’s, you know, she’s been accused of adultery, which she’s totally guilty of, with Lancelot, and he offers to fight a duel and the other knights say “You know what, no, because you always win and we’re not so sure that reflects the truth.”

Anne: “We’re going to, like, put our thumbs on the Scales of Justice here and make it be real because…” No.

At any rate, so that’s very sad, so Hainfrois was innocent. Eustace went into the service at the Court of Boulogne, and the source there is saying Renaud de Dammartin — I don’t know if that’s actually true or if that gets added in to the romances, but at any rate, because there is a Renaud de Dammartin and I don’t know if he actually went to work for the real person. But at any rate he went to be a seneschal, and then he was accused of mishandling his stewardship which I think means embezzlement, and it is possible that Hainfrois was involved in getting him accused because that guy’s still around, why not? So he appealed this case to court but then he fled before the case could be decided, and so that way the court knew that he was guilty because, obviously, that’s true. So, he fled, so therefore he was guilty, and he was declared outlaw in 1204.

And the term “outlaw” is actually really specific. I mean, we use it now to mean people who are misbehaving badly and have broken the law, but that’s not actually what it meant. It meant someone who was declared outside the law. Now, usually you had been bad and that was the whole deal, but being outside the law meant that you had no legal rights, you had no legal recourse, people could kill you if they wanted to, they weren’t supposed to feed you. It had been inherited from Roman law, and this was in France, like, a thousand years later, but the same thing happened to Eustace as happened with Romans declared outlaw; his property was confiscated, his fields were burned, he was exiled and anybody could kill him if they wanted to.

So the thing is, once you’re an outlaw, you still do have to, like, survive. Because humans. So what he did was he became a pirate.

I remember we were going to talk about what was the difference between a pirate and an outlaw. He was declared outlaw, he became a pirate. That’s what happened. And along with his brothers they worked their piratical ways in the English Channel, in the Strait of Dover. He worked as a mercenary for both the French and the English, we’ll get to that, but his pirate crew established a holding in the Channel Islands. So he had a really powerful little pirate crew.

So King John hired him. King John of England hired him and gave him some ships, I saw, like, the number is thirty but that makes no sense at all, that’s got to be an exaggeration. But King John hired him, gave him some ships, and so then he was harassing the French, but in 1215 he switched sides and he supported the rebel barons of England who had, in 1215, forced King John to sign what we now know as the Magna Carta. This was the first iteration of the Magna Carta, and the rebel barons had… England had fallen into civil war after this because John signed it but he, like, took it back… this is what happens when you force people to sign things they don’t necessarily really like, well… at any rate.

So he took it back, there was a civil war, and Louis, who was the heir to the throne of France, put his lot in with the rebel barons, to help them in the civil war, because also he wanted to be King of England, because why not? And I will remind you that all these people are cousins. They are all cousins. The people who signed the Magna Carta, what was it 24, 26 of them, however many? The only two who weren’t related to everybody else were the mayors of York and London. That was it. Everybody else, they’re all cousins. They all know each other.

Michelle: And of course when we’re talking about England and France at this point, the Capetian part of France is not all of what we would, now, recognize as France, because the Angevins, who also hold England, have significant holdings in France as well.

Anne: Mmhm, down through the Dordogne, yeah.

Michelle: Right, so, I mean, infamously Richard I, who supposedly was King of… well he was King of England but from 1189 to 1199 only spent three months of that time in England because that was the backwater part of his empire. He spent his time over in his holdings in France.

Anne: Yeah, which he got from his mother. And if you go there now, and you’re traveling around, and you’re looking at castles, and the tour guides notice that you are speaking English, they assume that you’re from England. And so then they explain to you how bad the English were, when they were doing things in the Dordogne, and that the French had to pour boiling oil on their heads, and they show you where this was.

I always, like, “I know about how bad the English might have been, really. I know this.” But any rate. They get really really clear about how horrible the English were, because they haven’t forgotten.

Yeah, so Louis is helping with the barons and Eustace switched sides and then was working for France. So this war, eventually, led to the Battle of Sandwich. The Battle of Sandwich is a naval battle. And at that point King John was dead and so the child, his child Henry was king at that point. We have yet another child king. The French fleet got surrounded by the English. The English fleet was led by Philip d’Aubigny, because of course they still all have French names because they’re Anglo-Normans. And the French force was larger, it had larger ships, and Eustace was, at that point, the Admiral of the Fleet. I just think this is hilarious. “Here, pirate mercenary, you run things!”

So what happened is the English let the French sail by and then they sailed after them. This was Hubert de Burgh, feinted an attack and then retreated and the French warships followed him. To be fair Eustace — who theoretically is the Admiral of all this — Eustace had advised against following the feint, which I think he must have known that was what it was, but Robert de Courtenai did not obey the pirate mercenary, and he pursued and attacked the English fleet. Part of the English fleet, then, was attacking and sinking the French transport ships, so they were busy doing that. And the English were using their longbows — which they were infamous for –the English were using longbows against the French fighting ships, which kind of helped keep the soldiers and the sailors from getting much done. They’re kind of pinned down. I think we can imagine what it’s like if we’re on board a ship and people are shooting arrows at us. We might not get a lot done.

And they also strewed lime on their decks so that when the French forces were boarding they were blinded, because the English had been very careful to situate themselves…. This is one of the reasons they were letting them go by and then feinting. They needed to be on a particular side so that the wind would blow the lime into the boarders rather than into the English, while they were trying to take care of their ships, because then I think we would have had a different story. But the wind did what the English wanted it to do.

You had said something about you were looking into lime as a weapon. Did you have anything else there?

Michelle: Yeah, it was really interesting because I did not really know that that was a thing that would happen, although it’s fascinating, right? They used the powdered lime, and you can use catapults or trebuchets to launch it over.

Anne: Ah! No, I had not heard of lime as a weapon, and so this made sense to me, just putting the lime on the…

Michelle: Mmhm.

Anne: …on the decks, but they also, so, in other places…

Michelle: Yep.

Anne: … they used to, they catapulted it?

Michelle: Yep.

Anne: Whoa.

Michelle: So it’s not just in naval battles, but in sieges…

Anne: Ah!

Michelle: Like tear gas, basically.

Anne: Yes, like tear gas. So you would use it at a particular time? You would need it while you were trying to get in, you know, because it’s a temporary kind of deterrent. So you would need it right at particular times for particular purposes? But, no that makes a whole lot of sense.

And it’s interesting in its simplicity. It’s like “Here! Now you can’t see!”

Michelle: Yeah. 

Anne: Awesome.

Michelle: It’s like pepper spray.

Anne: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

Michelle: It makes your eyes water, and burn, and then you can’t see.

Anne: Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Michelle: I just want to give a little shout out to William Marshal who was… after King John died he was named Regent…

Anne: That’s right. Because we had a child king, we remind ourselves.

Michelle: … of nine-year-old Henry II, and he was seventy years old.

Anne: I didn’t realize that. Wow.

Michelle: William Marshal is a badass from start to finish.

Anne: We do like Billy Marshal.

Michelle: Oh my god. He is running the place. He’s putting down the rebels. And he’s seventy years old.

Anne: But he wasn’t… during the Battle of Sandwich he was on shore, yeah?

Michelle: Yes, he wasn’t out on the ships. But he was in charge of managing both the land war and the sea war.

Anne: Right, OK.

Michelle: And this was pretty early for, I mean, this is one of the first major English battles at sea.

Anne: Yes, and it’s just brilliantly done. D’Aubigny was reporting, then, to Marshal, OK.

Michelle: Yeah.

Anne: it’s just brilliantly done. Alas, for the French.

The French flagship had been – this is the one that Eustace is on and also our de Courtenai – the French flagship had been engaged with the English ship that was captained by Richard Fitz-John, who was one of the illegitimate sons of King John. And the English ships, as soon as they could, you know, after each one of them was done sinking transports, the English ships would come up and they surrounded the flagship and so that was the end of the battle.

Robert de Courtenai and the knights were captured and held for ransom, as was usual. The soldiers and sailors were slaughtered. And Eustace was beheaded by a man we are told was named Stephen Crabbe. There’s a story that he was hiding in the bilge, and they dragged him out, and he promised them all kinds of money but they refused it, and then they cut his head off. And that might or might not be true. Part of the problem with Eustace is that we know that he exists from the documents, but we have so many inherited stories about him that it is sometimes hard to tell what is true and what is not true. Maybe he was hiding in the bilge, maybe not. I myself think that that’s probably apocryphal.

But that battle ended French involvement in the First Barons’ War. By that time most of the barons had defected anyway. Louis gave up his claim to the English throne. The Scottish and Welsh forces also laid down their arms and so — side note: the Welsh forces were led by Llewelyn Fawr, Llewelyn the Great, who was actually John’s son-in-law. King John had married his illegitimate daughter Joan off to Llewelyn Fawr. It was one of those things like “Then we’ll have peace that way and the Welsh will leave us alone.” I think there’s some kind of deal involved but, you know, it’s the Welsh, we don’t necessarily behave.

Michelle: Because Wales is still an independent country at this point.

Anne: Yes, Wales was still an independent country. But there was a lot of energy being put on making Wales behave but yeah, no.

Michelle: Because it wasn’t too much before this that Henry – because, if I’m remembering correctly here, it’s Henry II who has that staged dig at Glastonbury where he’s trying to persuade the Welsh that King Arthur is not in fact coming back to help them kick the English out and take back over their country? “Oh look, we’ve conveniently found his grave, he’s super dead!”

Anne: “Yeah, well, OK, but we’re going to have Owen Glendower so, you know, like whatever! We just have to wait a little bit.”

Michelle: The Welsh were not dissuaded by dead King Arthur.

Anne: Yeah. “OK, so King Arthur’s dead. Big deal. Boo hoo.”

Michelle: No matter what Henry II tried.

Anne: Yeah, no. It’s going to be Edward I who really makes headway with all those castles that he builds.

Michelle: Wales has more castles per square acre than anywhere else on earth. Which tells you how hard it was to subdue Wales.

Anne: Yes. It was really hard to subdue Wales. It was really hard. And even now, like, it’s theoretically behaved but I remember when I was in England in 1970 what? Six? 70… Whenever the Jubilee… there was a jubilee, the first jubilee and I was there. I was in England and there was, like, bunting all over, you know? You couldn’t breathe without breathing in Union Jacks, and every time you go to the post office — where you know you don’t just buy stamps at the post office in England, you also buy all kinds of other stuff — and so you could buy, you know, cake stands with the Queen on it, tea sets with the Queen on it and tea towels with the Queen on it. Little mugs with the Queen on it. Little notebooks with the Queen on it and pencils with the Queen, you know, the Queen’s all over everything. And then I went to Wales. I was in Holyhead, and I needed to get some stamps, so I went to the post office and in the post… there was no bunting all over the street, in Wales. I didn’t see any bunting in Wales and I got to the post office and there was a plate. “Here’s a plate if you have to buy a plate.” That was it. Yeah.

Michelle: They’re required to have one little thing just in case a tourist wanders in.

Anne: Yeah. “They made us sell something, here’s the plate.” Oh yeah. Wales. At any rate. Yeah. The Welsh. There’s this part in The Crown — where there’s the horrible tragedy where the sludge pile flows into the town and kills the children — and there’s a line in The Crown where Queen Elizabeth is being advised, and the advice is “Please remember these are the Welsh, not English, they’re going to expect you to show some emotion.” I turned to Laura, I said “See! See!” At any rate. Where were we? Oh yeah.

So the war is over and Eustace is dead. But he was a pirate and he had a fairly successful career for a pirate. After he died, one part of the negotiations were that his brothers and the rest of his crew were thrown out of their stronghold in the Channel Islands. But I don’t see that they were executed. Apparently they got away. But they didn’t get to live there anymore, and you don’t hear anything about the fleet that they put together. I don’t know what they did. I don’t think they could go home because I’m pretty sure by that time they were all outlaws.

Michelle: So not surprisingly, for somebody who lived such an interesting life, he gets a ripped-from-the-headlines story pretty quickly. He’s executed on August 24, 1217, and somewhere between 1228 — maybe as late as 1280 but the experts I’m consulting think it’s more likely to be before 1235 — there is a poetical romance written about him which Wikipedia far too credulously refers to as a “biography”.

Anne: Wikipedia. Wikipedia can be very useful, but you have got to check out the footnotes, I tell you. No, that’s not a biography. That’s a story.

Michelle:Ugh. Yeah no. It’s… mm no. But it’s really, really fascinating. And it’s interesting this is how I had run across this first. When we first started talking about this, I didn’t realize I had heard about this before because I hadn’t heard about it in its historical relevance. I had heard about it in this Robin Hood connection when I was doing some Robin Hood research. 

Eustace is one of several outlaw tales from this time period. So it’s him, it’s Hereward the Wake, slightly earlier, Fulk FitzWarin. So there’s a number of outlaw tales, and of those Robin Hood then becomes the one that gets told the most in English. But in no way the only… there is something about the early 13^thcentury that is making people on both sides of the Channel, in France and in England, really interested in trickster figures who pull one over on their feudal lord. 

We need to say here clearly that at this point Robin Hood is in no way – first of all we don’t have any Robin Hood text from this time period. The earliest Robin Hood text we have in England is more than 200 years later, it’s the 1450s and it’s tiny little scraps of stuff. In England we don’t have good Robin Hood texts until printing. Which tells you important things about who is consuming those stories. It’s not rich people. Because compared to Arthur — you could read Arthur stories until you drop, for an entire semester, and you would maybe read 5-10% of what survives. You can read, or teach, say, all the Robin Hood texts that survive before the 20^th century, easily, in a semester. Even when you’re making your poor students slog through it in Middle English and they’re whining. Because there’s just not very much of it. But Eustace.. so this is where I had found him before. And then I pull books off the shelf. “I’ve got notes in here! What the hell!”

Anne: Yeah. See, you do know! You do know some criminals of the Middle Ages. Yay!

Michelle: I just didn’t realize it was anything but fictional. And to be fair, Eustace’s so-called biography, really romance, is 80% fictional.

Anne: It’s got to be, yeah.

Michelle: This is where we get the story of him going off and studying necromancy in Spain and then… So here’s my impression of the romance: This is written by somebody who knows every single thing that is popular at that moment. It is written by somebody who has written the medieval equivalent of Save the Cat! That scriptwriting guide? And throws everything in that is popular at that moment. 

There are… there’s a whole set of pranks he pulls with his magic. Such as the Innkeeper’s wife annoys him and so he makes everybody at the inn partially disrobe and dance around. And then he does the same thing when he returns to the monastery. He uses the magic to make the monks swear instead of saying their prayers. It’s very childish, actually, what he does. He pulls a lot of childish pranks with the magic.

Anne: Like Faustus. Like Marlowe’s Faustus.

Michelle: Exactly like that.

Anne: Where he’s going to do incredibly wonderful things, which is why he has to sell his soul to the devil, but then basically it’s just nonsense from then on out. Yeah.

Michelle: The lion’s share of the romance is him antagonizing and then escaping from the Count. Disguised in a profoundly huge number of ways. So sometimes he’s disguised as a pilgrim. Sometimes he disguises himself as a coal-seller. Sometimes he disguises himself as a shepherd. Most of what he does when he is having this little outlaw period is just silly pranks, but there’s the occasional moment of real nasty violence. He cuts out a boy’s tongue and then tells him “Go tell the Count what happened to you.” And of course the boy can’t. He finds out that one of his men has betrayed him and then makes the man braid a rope and then climb up a tree and hang himself. Which is nasty.

Anne: As a biography this is somewhat alarming. 

Michelle: If it’s really a biography, here’s the thing: Eustace missed his calling. Because he should have been an actor. The number of times he disguises himself and successfully convinces the Count he’s somebody else, and then the Count says… he says everything except “Curses! Foiled again!”

Anne: Well, if we’re going to accept it as a biography, we also have to believe in black magic such as one learns in Toledo in the Middle Ages as being, and being able to, you know, do all kinds of things with magic.

Michelle: At one point he climbs up in a tree and pretends to be a nightingale making whatever noise, I have no idea what…

Anne: It’s really pretty.

Michelle: … a nightingale’s song sounds like. But then when the Count comes underneath the tree he starts talking to him as if he is the bird and telling him what to do, right? “Where Eustace is! Go find him over there!” There are fart jokes in it. The first two anecdotes involve butt jokes. There is a fabliau section where Eustace is disguised as a woman and persuades a soldier that if he just rides out of town with her on his horse wink wink nudge nudge guess what’ll happen? And then of course what really happens is that he beats him up and takes the horse. But the language in it is pretty… I don’t run across a whole lot of medieval translations that just liberally put the f-word in there. Usually they like to go off and use “screw” or something just to pretend like the language isn’t as rough as it probably was, but the notes for it are yeah, this fabliau language. So that’s really interesting. 

It’s a variety show. There’s something for everybody in The Romance of Eustace the Monk. He does the trick of having the horse’s horseshoes taken off and put on backwards so that it can look like they’re going the other direction. So there are places where there are exact parallels with Robin Hood stories. He captures somebody and then, depending on whether they tell him the truth about how much money he has or lies, he either takes everything or leaves them alone. So it’s a very fascinating, fast-moving, often profane story that does take us all the way through his death but the last piece of it — where he ends up as the pirate and then ends up as the Admiral and then ends up captured and dead — it’s really, really fast. You know, three, four pages. And then it has an entirely unpersuasive moral that says no man who spends his days doing evil can live a long life. This is not what the romance… no…

Anne: Yeah. No.

Michelle: No.

Anne: That hasn’t been shown, that’s just been told to us as a little extra “Oh ok thanks.”

Michelle: Now what the story actually says is: This is hilariously awesome and a lot of fun. You might end badly but you’ll have a great time getting there.

Anne: Right.

Michelle: Plus you’ll collect a lot of money because, you know, nobody’s robbing the rich and feeding the poor. That’s a way later development in the Robin Hood legend. These guys are in it for themselves.

Anne: So, yeah, so the lure is not that here is someone who is our secret protector…

Michelle: Hm-mm. 

Anne: … if we’re poor. The lure is “Here is someone who can actually make the upper class look bad.”

Michelle: He doesn’t generally mistreat the poor. When he uses disguises, like from the shepherd or from the coal-monger, he bought those things from them.

Anne: Aha. That’s interesting.

Michelle: So he doesn’t mistreat the poor, but neither is he working on their behalf. This is a revenge story, is what this is. It’s actually a little bit different than the Robin Hood story because this is strictly about him revenging himself on the Count and thumbing his nose at the Count. 

It’s interesting because we see those things later in Robin Hood with Robin and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and actually it’s really interesting that Eustace is a nobleman who has been disinherited, because that’s something that then makes the leap over into Robin Hood where he doesn’t… you know inRobin Hood we end up with this incompatible thing of him being both a nobleman who’s been disinherited and this commoner who is fighting for the commons against the excesses of King John, and it feels very much like in the later Robin Hood legend it is pulling other outlaw legends into itself and rewriting them because this one has a real nobleman being disinherited who then becomes an outlaw. Yeah, it’s really fascinating with a totally unpersuasive moral.

Anne: So the stance of the “biography”…

Michelle: “Biography.”

Anne: … is that Eustace had – there were air quotes there. It’s really hard to do air quotes, you know, when you’re just getting recorded, but that was air quotes – the stance of the “biography” is that Eustace was not mishandling funds, then, he was falsely accused?

Michelle: Yeah. That is the stance. He disguises himself as so many things. Once he disguises himself as a baker and puts the work in, right? He’s really good at everything. He’s like, remember Quantum Leap, where whatever Sam ended up in…

Anne: Yes.

Michelle: … he could do? That’s what Eustace does! No matter what he disguises himself as, he’s competent to that task.

Anne: He can bake. He can take care of sheep.

Michelle: He makes tarts but they’re filled with tow, pitch, and wax, so that then when they’re delivered…

Anne: OK, that’s not really good baking.

Michelle: No.

Anne: That’s actually bad baking.

Michelle: But it’s bad on purpose, because they get delivered to the Count’s dinner and then there is a whole entire paragraph about what happens to the Count’s guests when they bite into this and their teeth get stuck and they can’t open their mouths. It’s actually really funny.

Anne: Well, as we know from watching British baking shows, the issue is do those tarts have soggy bottoms?

Michelle: I have no information about this.

Anne: Why does the biography not address this?

Michelle: I’m just impressed with his ability. He is absolutely a polymath in this romance. He can do everything. No matter what he’s disguised as, he’s competent to handle it. And he doesn’t just escape from the Count when he finds him, when the Count accidentally stumbles over him, he goes out of his way to kind of thumb his nose at the Count and say “You’re never going to catch me!” You know, so he puts himself in danger, that’s the part of Robin Hood — you know he’s often called “Bold Sir Robin,” right? In the romances? — And Eustace has that in spades. He must have been a really interesting person in real life to have inspired this kind of legend so quickly.

Anne: But the piracy. The piracy is not taking up much space at all.

Michelle: No! It’s not! It’s just not. It’s mostly this stuff he was supposedly doing while he was on the run in France, before he ever got to the boats.

Anne: And of course it’s the piracy that interests us.

Michelle: It’s closest to what we’re supposed to be talking about.

Anne: Well no, when I say “us” I didn’t mean “us, you and me” I meant “us” culturally, because Eustace is all over the web…

Michelle: Oh! Gotcha.

Anne: All over the web. And it’s the piracy that you’re hearing about. What I find is that if you go looking for Eustace — and we’ll have some of these links in the show notes — you know you get the stories and some pieces of those stories are coming out of obviously the romance part of the supposed biography. Like, for instance, that he studied black magic. That he went to Toledo to study black magic, and I think we can say that probably that’s just not true. He didn’t do that. He went to the monastery and then he left the monastery. The part about his father getting murdered? That seems a reasonable sort of thing, that’s OK, but it’s the piracy that people focus on. That is what is of interest to the 21^stcentury.

Michelle: I don’t know, I just… I have mixed feelings about using the word “pirate” to describe him.

Anne: Well let’s, yeah, why?

Michelle: Because I feel like it’s misleading, given our understanding, you know? What pops into our head when we think about pirates.

Anne: Yeah, which is, apparently, Captain Jack. As I know because when I said on Facebook that we were going to be doing this, I got sent privately a bunch of those little GIFs and it was all Captain Jack, Captain Jack. He didn’t look like that! It’s not the 18^thcentury.

Michelle: Yeah, I mean, for one thing he’s a nobleman. He is a nobleman who has been outlawed, possibly unfairly, so his motivation for piracy has to do more with trying to re-establish his place in society.

Anne: Huh.

Michelle: Or at least have a place. Rather than personal enrichment. I feel like it’s not necessarily an accurate description of what he’s up to. He is still part of the society. He is working for King John, he switches and works for the King of France, and so I think it implies that he’s more of an outsider than what he is. See! I knew if I kept talking I would figure out what I thought.

Anne: OK. I see it. OK. Ok. But here’s the thing; he is an outsider, you know, he is outlaw. He is outlawed, so he is an outsider. And he’s a pirate, he’s practicing piracy, at the beginning there, because he has no way to support himself. Everything that he has, has been taken from him, and his lands confiscated, so he and his brothers are practicing piracy. He’s hired as a mercenary, but he’s a pirate first.

Michelle: But it’s such a small period of time, though. He’s only doing that for maybe two years and then he gets re-integrated back into…

Anne: Yes, I think it’s shorthand…

Michelle:   …. Yeah, he’s working for John.

Anne: Fair enough. He becomes a mercenary, Yeah. Although from the point of view of whoever he’s not working for… like, when he’s a mercenary for John, he’s a pirate to the French. When he’s working for the French, he’s a pirate to the English. So that never actually leaves because he doesn’t… I think you’re right, he does become a part of society, certainly he has this historical significance due to his being in the Battle of Sandwich, but never has the place back that he had, certainly, and it’s not just his lands. I mean, he is always an outlaw from one point of view.

And the fact that he’s working that water in between France and England seems to me to be very much connected to this. He sets up base and remains someone who is not English, not French, you know, in the water, but working for one or the other. It’s this liminal existence always and even when he’s a mercenary, and so therefore, later on… pirates who get hired as mercenaries, we still call it piracy. So he’s got some kind of connection to someone but he’s still not legal. He’s never legal. He becomes Admiral of the Fleet for what, just that one battle? And that doesn’t go so well. So, he maybe has come back at the end but it’s a bizarre trajectory.

Michelle: Yeah.

Anne: But I’m struck by the ways in which he’s a polymath in his real life. That, you know, he’s a monk, for awhile. He’s a pirate for awhile. He’s a mercenary for a while. There’s a short stint as an Admiral until the ship gets boarded. You know, it’s like he does have a lot going on. 

But yeah, why? Why is Eustace… why does he get turned into this figure? Because the business about him having all these revenges against the Count? That’s just, like, that’s not true. So that gets put onto him — these inherited stories or this inherited genre that’s really beloved, it gets put onto him — but I’m wondering if it kind of resonates and fits with him because of this going back and forth in between France and England? So that he works for John for awhile, and then he’s, like, doing tricks against John by fighting with the French. Leaves the French, you know, and he works for John so he’s harassing his former countrymen. So there’s an element to that theory. But yeah, I don’t know.

But the word “pirate” to you doesn’t really cover this except for a tiny piece?

Michelle: I looked it up to check the etymology, because first I was bothered that maybe it was a later word and that was why it was feeling off to me…

Anne: OK.

Michelle: … but it actually is a medieval word that exists. It’s coming from Latin, and they do use a version of it in the chronicles to refer to him. 

Anne: Uh-huh.

Michelle: But in terms of an accurate description of him for a 21^st-century audience, I feel like we have to asterisk a little bit because, you know, our understanding of what a pirate is, is that 18^th-century Jolly Roger, Blackbeard kinda guy…

Anne: Right.

Michelle: Whereas he does sort of remind me of what Sir Walter Raleigh was doing for Queen Elizabeth, right? “As long as you’re harassing the Spanish, it’s fine!”

Anne: Right. Right. Which was piracy. Yes. 

So what would you call him? Because Eustace the Monk is sort of ironic, and Eustace the Mercenary doesn’t really cover it. What would you call him?

Michelle: I don’t know if I have a better name for him than Pirate, I just can try to make sure that we are clear about what that means.

Anne: Eustace the asterisk-Pirate.

Michelle: He’s not in the Caribbean, he’s not, you know… there’s all these pieces connected with piracy in our heads that are Colonial and having to do with a much later understanding of what that is.

Anne: Well, that’s a recent piece of the history of piracy, which doesn’t count the fact that the first recorded piracy is before Common Era, and also doesn’t really count the fact that pirates are operating now. I mean, “piracy” means, basically, taking a boat and going and stealing some stuff, sometimes from people on the sea, sometimes from people on the land. The Vikings were pirates. That was a nice controversial little statement that I threw in there, wasn’t it?

Michelle: Yeah. I agree though. 

Anne: Because they were also Colonists, you know?

Michelle: Mmhmm. Sometimes.

Anne: That the pirates had to live someplace, they couldn’t just stay on ships, so they did have to have places where they lived. But yeah, getting in your boat, or your ship, and going and getting some stuff illegally is being a pirate. Going and getting some stuff illegally but with the sanction of a king or queen, that’s piracy.

Michelle: And, really, raiding is land-based piracy, you know?

Anne: Mmhmm.

Michelle: So…

Anne: Yeah, he was an outlaw. He was a thief.

Michelle: I have been waiting and waiting for you to say his last name. 

Anne: Oh, that’s right!  Because we do know it. Part of my problem with this is that it’s given to us in the romances, I think, and so I wonder the extent to which it’s true. Because I can’t actually find his family.

Michelle: But I’ve been waiting and waiting because it sets up a brilliant little joke, right? Because…

Anne: I’m so sorry! Sugar!

Michelle: It’s Keeping Up Appearances, right?

Anne: Yeah.

Michelle: His name is Eustace… it looks like Busket, right?

Anne: Yes.

Michelle: And I can just imagine him saying it’s not Bus-KET it’s Bus-KAY.

Anne: I’m so sorry that I did not set up that joke for you, because it’s a good one. Yeah, Eustace Busket.

Michelle:  Bummer.

Anne: Even the English would not have been calling him “Bus-KET” at that point.

Michelle: Well, they’re not very English yet.

Anne: No.

Michelle: They’re not back to being English.

Anne: But you know, medieval French… you actually said everything so medieval French wasn’t… you could still understand but it wasn’t pronounced like it is now.

Michelle: The translators of the romance are really entertaining because they’re kind of crying in their beer in the intros about how this is written in rhyming couplets in Old French and there’s a lot of wordplay, there’s a lot of puns, and there’s a lot of double entendre and “We can’t get it” and they were so sorry…

Anne: Oh.

Michelle: … “This is totally shitty and it’s only presenting what it actually says and it’s really funny I swear.”

Anne: Translation is hard.

Michelle: And it’s actually the same verse form that Chretien de Troyes uses. Isn’t that interesting?

Anne: Only not as well, I’m just guessing.

Michelle: Probably. The translator doesn’t say that but I think it’s a fair guess.

Anne: Well, it’s like iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter can be okay, and be just really brilliant, and then it can also just sound like duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh… You know it can go either way.

Michelle: But Chaucer does that on purpose with Sir Thopas.

Anne: Yes.

Michelle: Sir Thopas is terrible on purpose.

Anne: Yes he is. Yes he is.

Michelle: He hadde a semely nose

Anne:  Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee!

Michelle:  Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!

Anne:  Yeah. I do love me some Sir Thopas.

OK. We’re going to do a little brief explanation here of the inside joke. In The Canterbury Tales… yeah, I realized what we were doing. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer is one of the pilgrims, and the hilarious joke running all through The Canterbury Tales is that Chaucer, the pilgrim, is a horrible, horrible poet and doesn’t know anything about courtly love, and so when it comes time to tell his, you know, he has to tell a tale, the first thing he tells is a really, really badly written romance that is just hilarious and gets interrupted by the host… “Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee!” You know, “Shut up, for the love of god!” Then he tells the very boring thing. But yeah, so that’s the joke. Sorry.

Michelle: He tells him his dastardly rhyming is not worth a turd.

Anne: Yes. Yes.

Michelle: That’s the part I was quoting, because it’s funny. And also I really enjoy scatological humor. I’m twelve. It’s no wonder I have all boys because I completely deserve to have all boys. Because my sense of humor is roughly that of a twelve-year-old boy. “Ha ha! They said poop! Ha ha!”

Anne: I’m very glad that you got to re-read the lying story of Eustace.

Michelle: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that most of that is not true.

Anne: Yeah, no, but there were…

Michelle: There are pieces, you know, where he’s clearly gotten a hold of somebody, because it mentions the use of the lime.

Anne: Yes.

Michelle: But the vast majority of it is him just magpie-ing everything that is popular at that point and shoving it in. 

Anne: Oh, how many manuscripts is this thing in? How popular was it?

Michelle: Just one!

Anne: Ah!

Michelle: But! But, there’s a record of it being in the royal library in the 14^th century.

Anne: Which royal library?

Michelle: Isn’t that interesting? Hold on I can look at…

Anne: Like, France, or England, or?

Michelle: Oh, in France.

Anne: Uh-huh.

Michelle: There’s a record of it being… uh… there was an inventory of the library of King Charles V of France made by Gilles Malet In 1373. Repeated in 1380 by Jean Blanchet. Two manuscripts containing the romance were found in the collection.

Anne: So there’s two manuscripts at that point.

Michelle: Yeah, in the royal collection.

Anne: But those were the only ones extant.

Michelle: “Charles V’s collection of books, which forms the nucleus of that now housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale, was soon to be pillaged and dispersed, and those Eustace manuscripts remained lost.” 

Anne: Oh.

Michelle: This one is a different one. The surviving one is a different one.

Anne: OK. So there’s only one which survives. OK.

Michelle: Yep, and it’s not one of those two.

Anne: OK but we know that there were two others that were in the royal library. 

Michelle: Mmhmm.

Anne: So it got around some. OK.

Michelle: And the translator is — I’m looking at Glyn Burgess’ book at this point — he is making the point that this is showing us the audience. That the King of France is apparently interested enough in it to have two copies of it.

Anne: Right. Right. Because it’s hilarious. Even though this is a story which, in its historical piece, is about France getting beat and losing the war, it’s still hilarious enough. And then the part about the piracy and the Battle of Sandwich, that’s a very tiny piece. So really this is about how hilarious… this is a very popular genre.

Michelle: It’s really similar in tone to Snidely Whiplash and Dudley Do-Right, you know?

Anne: Mmhmm.

Michelle: Nobody gets tied to a railroad track as far as I can tell, but that probably has to do with them not being invented yet.

Anne: Yeah.

Michelle: He would tie somebody to the railroad track if there had been railroad tracks to tie them to. 

Anne: So. Eustace. He did exist. He shows up in documents. People can find this translation on the web, can’t they? I think I saw it go by.

Michelle: Yeah. Probably. I happen to have books for this one so mostly I was looking at books.

Anne: Yeah, but let’s put a link to the enormously hilarious Robin Hood-type story that Eustace provides.

Michelle: There is a link to at least sections of the romance, there may not be the whole entire thing, but the TEAMS text, Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales, is online and that at least has a section of it. 

Anne: Oh. OK. Yeah, so we can put those in.

Michelle: There is one point where he disguises himself so effectively as a cripple — it says, I know that’s not the right word but that’s what’s in the translation – “Having tied” (this is a quote), “Having tied one leg to his buttock he knew exactly how to handle a crutch and walk one-legged with it. He also cut up a cow’s lung and tied it to his thigh with a blood-stained bandage before he made his way into the church.” And he’s so persuasive that he’s missing one leg and the other one is crusty and withered that the priest actually takes up a collection for him. I think this might be my favorite part. There are many to choose from, but this, I mean, he’s like a spy at this moment, those spies with their powers of disguise.

Anne: Yeah with their shoes that have the little phones in them and things, yeah.

Michelle: It’s so theatrical. Because then, then I was thinking Ooh! I wonder if they did that in the plays? Did they use, if you had somebody who had to look disfigured, did you maybe use cow’s lungs, to look like you had messed-up flesh?

Anne: You’d have to have a new one every day, really, though.

Michelle: Yeah, it would start to stink.

Anne: Yeah. It’s not going to last for long.

Michelle: And dry up.

Anne: Mmhmm.

Michelle: But probably there were a pretty good supply of entrails about, as long as you knew a butcher. 

Anne: So that’s our investigation of Eustace the monk, outlaw, pirate, mercenary, Admiral, hero of romance. He really did exist and he became this hero of romance. Ah, quite a life.

Michelle: It’s probably no more fictional than Vikingsis. I mean, have you seen that?

Anne: I was unable to watch Vikings because I started watching it and it made me annoyed and so I had to turn it off. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t… sometimes I can make the leap and just enjoy something, like I did that for The White Queen, which I just found hilarious, but sometimes I can’t make the leap. I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it. Sorry. Did you like it?

Michelle: Well, I have an advantage here of finding shirtless dudes to be a major attraction.

AMme:  Oh right yeah. OK. Yeah. And I… that didn’t get to me so, yeah..

Michelle: Rollo goes around without his shirt so much.

Anne: I see, so.

Michelle: So.

Anne: So it’s hard. So you were able to watch it for reasons that did not affect me.

Michelle: Yeah.

Anne: Well there you go then. That’s the thing about being an artist, you never really know how your work is going to be taken by people. “Darn. The shirtlessness. OK. That was the main selling point.”

Michelle: There are little pieces of history here and there and then, you know, you look at what people are wearing and you’re like, oh no.

Anne: Yeah, no I can’t. And the whole costuming thing. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t even.

Michelle: I had to kind of set that aside. But, you know, what’s going on here with Eustace is not all that uncommon. We do this all the time. We find something that is interesting or inspiring and then it becomes this fictionalized version.

Anne: Yeah, it takes on a life of its own.

Michelle: So I don’t want to throw the guy who wrote this, whose name we don’t really know, under the bus or anything for writing a bad biography, because I don’t think he meant to write a biography. He was writing an entertaining yarn, that had some tenuous connection to this real person, but was mostly supposed to entertain people.

Anne: No, I have no quarrel with the creation of things like these hilarious stories focused on someone who’s actually real. It’s interesting to me, you know, that we have here… that we’re still, like, passing this stuff around and it’s on the web. You look up Eustace the pirate and you find many kinds of things. It becomes hard to separate truth from fiction. But no, I have no problem with that part.

Michelle: Guess what I just found?

Anne: What?

Micelle:  I just found a thing about something called “Performing Medieval Narrative Today,”  and they did Eustace.

Anne: Oh my god. So you just found a contemporary production, a contemporary with us production, of Eustace…

Michelle: Right, because, yeah, the post is from 2012. They did a solo performer reading aloud, acting out scenes from the romance. The performer does Eustace as a pot-seller, a charcoal-burner, a nightingale, and a woman of easy virtue. Oh that is just fascinating.

Anne: Now we don’t have a video of that, do we? That’s not on YouTube?

Michelle: I am not sure that they have a clip of that. That’s a bummer. But they do list on their website that they did it. Very cool.

Anne: At any rate, if you go to look him up you will find… you can find the story, and you can find a lot of people talking about him, and some of it is true and some if it is not true. He did exist. He did join a monastery. He did leave the monastery and he was an outlaw and he became a pirate and then he worked for the French government and he worked for the English government and then he died in the Battle of Sandwich and that, those things, are true. Farewell Eustace.

Michelle: He was fun.

Anne: Yeah, he’s fun. So next time we are talking, we’re going to Spain! We’re talking about the murder of Peter the Cruel, who’s also sometimes called Peter the Just — that was about trying to rehabilitate his reputation and so both those things show up. That’s what we’ll be doing next. 

And, if you’re listening to us on Apple please leave a review, and we can be found on Spotify and Stitcher and Apple and other places that you listen to podcasts.

If you go to truecrimemedieval.com, that’s our website where you can find our show notes, which Michelle does, and the transcripts, which are done for us by Laurie Dietrich, and you can also leave comments, if you would like, You can also find us on Facebook and on the website are places where you can reach us at annebrannen.com, michellemarkeybutler.com, lauriedietrich.com, we’re all there.

And so, I think that’s it. We’re signing off. Bye!

Michelle: Bye!

OUTTAKES

Michelle: And it makes complete sense to me that this would be eminently performable because it felt, it feels, very theatrical, when I was reading it. It really makes me, you know, think about… the line between drama and romance is much mushier than what… We typically talk about these as being separate genres, but it’s really not, right? You have a lot of romances that are very dramatic…

Anne: Right, and they’re to be spoken, in court, and so they are to be performed.

Michelle: I mean, if you had a feast, and then between one course, you know, course one and course two, you have somebody come out and recite part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and then after course two and three somebody comes out and performs a section of The Castle of Perseverance, and you were to ask the people at dinner “Did those feel like separate types of entertainment to you?” They probably would say no.

Anne: No.

Michelle: These are performed things that are happening during the dinner. It’s just us who need things to be genres, who make a distinction between this poetry and this drama over here. And I think that seeing this romance performed has got to be a hoot, because all of those fast costume changes. And seeing him do that must be really, really interesting.

This was done in New York City.

Anne: New York City where? What kind of venue?

Michelle:“This performance was created for a group independent study with prof Timmie (E.B.) Vitz in fall 2005. It took place on December 15, 2005, as part of an event titled “Making it Real: Performing the Middle Ages” at an Off-off-Broadway venue in New York City — The American Place Theatre.”

Anne: What year?

Michelle: 2005.

Anne: 2005. OK.

Michelle: “The performance was also sponsored by “Storytelling in Performance”, a workshop funded by the Humanities Council of New York University.”

Anne: Hmm. And they chose Eustace. 

Michelle: Mmhmm.

Anne: Yeah. So funny. I’m so much more interested in the actual human than I am in the romance stories, you know… that’s just me. That’s me.

Michelle: Yeah, but I’m more interested in the story and what people are doing with it…

Anne: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

Michelle: … and how it’s basically exactly like drama.

Anne: Mmhmm. Well that’s how we do. That’s why we are able to divide things up so easily most of the time. Yeah, because all of our people, except for Els, of whom no one had ever heard, they have an inherited story. They get changed as time goes on. And this is available, in translation. It’s on the web.

Michelle: Can you pause for one second? I’ve got to go… oh, you can talk, but I have to go unlock the front door to let Mark in. Be right back.

Anne: Oh yeah, just go and do that, and come back.

Michelle: OK. Be right back.

Anne: Nothing going on and we’re still waiting. Door getting opened downstairs. By Michelle. We’re at our house where no one is downstairs opening the door. Oop. Still downstairs. Oop. I hear footsteps. 

Michelle: Sorry, we don’t normally get into that but we had a whole thing at the beginning where I had to deal with that play.

Anne: Yes, yes yes yes. I may keep this as outtakes because I kind of narrated as you were gone. “Yep, Michelle is back.”

Michelle: OK, good.

Anne: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Michelle: It was either that or let my kid sit out there banging on the door and it seemed better to let him in.

Anne: No, no that’s just wrong.

The Black Dinner, Edinburgh Castle, 1440

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:  This podcast will contain adult language and adult subjects, and so we advise listener discretion for people under 13.

Today we are discussing the Black Dinner at Edinburgh Castle in 1440, where supposedly two young Douglas boys were lured to the castle, at the invitation of the child-king James II, for a feast. At the feast a black bull’s head was supposedly brought out as a signal for slaughter, and the Douglases were dragged outside and beheaded, supposedly, while the boy King cried and pleaded for their lives.

Some bits of this happened. The two Douglas boys did indeed end up dead. But we’re going to be discussing the details.

Michelle:  It’s such a great story though.

Anne:  It is a good story. It’s a very good story. So is Alice in Wonderland but I don’t think it happened.

Michelle: But you can see why it really has legs because, I mean, that’s a great story. Giving the little King a trauma.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  Possibly a warning.

Anne:  Yes.

And the bull’s head, that’s a nice touch. Yeah, I’ve got a lot to say about that too later, yeah.

Michelle:  And, as we’ve already established, the number of people who are lured to dinners for the express purpose of killing them is pretty high, and that makes this plausible.

Anne:  Mmhm. Yes. We’re including this in our slaughter-feast theme, because that’s what we were… “Oh! Look! Here’s a feast where people died.” Then we did our research and discovered some things. But it counts. It absolutely counts, because it is a famous story. And indeed we’ve got George R.R. Martin coming back in here. This is one of the sources for The Red Wedding, which also didn’t happen, just saying.

Truth and fiction. Oh my god.

Well, I have a lot of background. You want the background, Michelle?

Michelle:  Yeah. Absolutely. Try to make this make sense.

Anne:  I totally make sense of this because, you know, that’s really one of the things I like best about our little podcast, is making sense of humans.

James II was ten years old in 1440, the time of the supposed Black Dinner. He had become king, at the age of seven, when his father, James I, was murdered in 1437. And this is necessary background so I’m going to explain.

James I, who was married to Joan Beaufort, one of John of Gaunt’s granddaughters…

Michelle:  The Beauforts are back again! I’d seen that. If there’s trouble, a Beaufort’s gonna be involved.

Anne: I knew you’d like that. I knew you’d like that.

Yeah, the Beauforts, they’re just all over the place. And Michelle doesn’t like them.

They had been helping Henry V of England in his wars against France, which was an unpopular move in Scotland because, one, it was helping the English, sometimes fighting against Scottish forces and, two, the enterprise was extremely expensive and the nobles got tired of having to ransom the hostages, who were, of course, their relations.

Starting in 1425, James I started attacking his own nobles. In 1425 Murdoch Stewart, the Duke of Albany, who had been governor of Scotland until 1424, was arrested and found guilty of treason and executed, along with two of his sons. His youngest son had been leading a rebellion, but he hadn’t. This mostly was about getting the Albanys slaughtered and out of the way.

In 1428, James I arrested Alexander MacDonald, who was the Earl of Ross, along with his mother and about 50 followers for, basically, being the Earl of Ross. He was released, after which he went to war with the king.

In 1431, King James arrested Archibald Douglas. He was the head of the Black Douglases, the Fifth Earl of Douglas, as Douglas was trying to expand his power beyond the Douglas lands to include Galloway. So that was the excuse for that.

In 1434, he arrested George de Dunbar, the Earl of Dunbar and March, after he came back from a visit to England, and accused him of holding lands and earldoms that had been forfeited by his father, even though his father had been pardoned. He diverted money… James I diverted money that was supposed to go to the ransomed hostages and he built castles and whatnot and was highly extravagant and ordered frivolities from Flanders and whatnot.

Finally Robert Graham attempted to arrest him at Parliament in 1436. It didn’t work, he denounced him and it didn’t come to anything, but he didn’t get in trouble. Graham was pissed off because of the slaughter of Albany, the confiscation of the Earldom of Strathearn from Robert’s nephew Malise, and the king’s failed siege of Roxburgh Castle, which also had been highly expensive.

Arresting him didn’t work, and Graham was banished, but he came on back and James was murdered in February of 1437. Walter Stewart, the Earl of Atholl, had led an attempted coup. The king and queen were at Blackfriars, separated from their servants. Robert Stewart – everybody’s named Stewart, I just got to tell you all this, they’re all cousins of one sort or another and there’s different branches of them and believe me, if you’re working on the genealogy, it’s a headache. But hey.

Robert Stewart, the Chamberlain, and Walter’s grandson let the conspirators in – his included Robert Graham, who had come back from banishment – into the building. James – you’re going to like this part – James was trapped in a sewer. He tried to get away but he was trapped trying to get through a sewer which it turned out had been blocked off because they were trying to save tennis balls from going on into the river.

Michelle:  This is James I?

Anne:  Yeah, this is James I. So he’s dead on account of saving the tennis balls instead. At any rate, he was murdered. Joan was wounded but she escaped and managed to get to her son, and she tried to position herself as regent. The coup had failed but in August Archibald Douglas, the Fifth Earl, that one that got arrested earlier, that I told you about, was appointed Lieutenant General of the kingdom. 

Okay, so here we are. A little bitty boy is now King. But you need a regent when you’re, like, a baby king, so it’s shared between Archibald Douglas and Joan Beaufort.

Archibald was James II’s first cousin, by the way. And he died in 1439 and then there was a power vacuum.

William Crichton, the Lord Chancellor, and Sir Alexander Livingston, who was the warden of Stirling Castle where James was living, made an alliance, and Livingston put Queen Joan and James Stewart, the Black Knight of Lorn*, to whom she was then married, under house arrest until they agreed that James would be in the Livingston’s custody, and that Joan would pay her dowry for his maintenance, and that they would issue a statement that Livingston had been acting through zeal for the king’s safety. I really like that part. “So you have to sign this that I wasn’t breaking the law. No! You totally were not breaking the law by abducting me and kidnapping me and putting me under house arrest, that was fine.”

At any rate. The Douglases, though without a strong leader at that point – on account of you remember Archibald Douglas, the Fifth Earl, was dead – they were still a powerful force, and the young Douglases were going to be, you know, not being young anymore after awhile. So that was, you know, so that was an issue.

So the next November… we following along here?

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  The next November Livingston and Crichton lured William Douglas, the 16-year-old Earl of Douglas, and his younger brother David, who I think was about 11 at that point – they were the sons of Archibald Douglas – to Edinburgh in the name of James II, the boy King. They gave them a mock trial. They were found guilty of high treason like… I think that, as far as we know, because it didn’t go to Parliament. If it had been a real trial for treason, Parliament would have heard about it. I think basically it went like this:

“You’re accused of high treason! And we find you guilty!” I think that was it.

At any rate, they beheaded the Douglases immediately and then Malcolm Fleming, their advisor, had come along with them, and they beheaded him three days later.

Livingston and Crichton had spies taking note of young Douglas’ doings. The Scottish historian Thomas Wright, writing in 1852, says that it seems that he had been talking about his claim to the throne as having been better than the young King, so that’s something that doesn’t show up in the legend, that the high treason accusations, although that was not a real trial, that’s basically judicial murder, it looks like it did not come out of thin air. It wasn’t just that this was, like, killing off the Douglases to try and get them out of power, although it was killing the Douglases off because they wanted to get them out of power. Still, there may have been, like, reason for this.

So Crichton invited Douglas to Edinburgh to… and what he said was that he was trying to get… he needed… he apologized for their treatment and he wanted their advice and that’s how they got the young King there, he went with his brother and Fleming and it was sad. It was sad. And his attendants had urged him to be cautious but he ignored them, so, at any rate, so he went on to Edinburgh. It was very sad.

Now, while they were there, it’s possible that there was a dinner. But there’s not notice of this in the chronicles. The contemporary chronicle at the time says that they were sent for to Edinburgh and they were accused of high treason and beheaded and then their advisor was beheaded three days later. That’s it. That’s the contemporary history. But maybe there was a dinner? Why not? I don’t know. But they were accused of treason, they were tried hurriedly and they were beheaded.

Alright.

And I want to give you a little bit of stuff after this because we keep going. James grew to adulthood. And in 1449 the Douglases managed to throw the Livingstons out of the agreement that had been going on. You know, the Douglases, they didn’t just disappear. James was possibly cooperating with them because he’d been annoyed at the Livingstons on account of their having done that house arrest of his mother but really, who know? But then, James wanted to get out from under the power of the Douglases and he finally murdered William Douglas, the Eighth Earl of Douglas. I’m now going to explain some genealogy.

The boy Douglases, the boy Earl and his brother who were killed in 1440, were first cousins once removed of William the Eighth Earl of Douglas, who was killed in 1452*.

I keep threatening to put genealogical charts in the show notes. I might just have to do… at any rate, so, they were cousins.

Michelle:  It’s not a bad idea.

Anne:  I’d have to, like, create them, you know, and make little drawings… I don’t know. We could have used it for the three kings of Denmark, couldn’t we?

At any rate, so, that murder: William the Eighth Earl had been in Rome, and while he was there James II, who is now grown up, as we remember, attacked his lands, and then in 1452 he was given a safe conduct to attend the King at Stirling, and so, while he was there, he refused to dissolve an agreement that he had made with Alexander Lindsay and John of Islay, so the King stabbed him. James… this was at dinner… James II just stabbed him, several times, and after which other men stabbed him a bunch, and then Sir Patrick Gray bashed his brains out with a pole ax, and then they threw him out the window. Da-da-dah! Da-da-da-dah!

A few years later, in 1455, James Douglas, the Ninth Earl, rebelled, but he was defeated at the Battle of Arkinholm by forces that were commanded by George Douglas, the Fourth Earl of Angus, so, and he was the Red Douglas, and so that was the end of the Black Douglases. At any rate.

The Black Dinner, which didn’t happen, was in the middle of all this, and so I gave you all of that.

Michelle:  But the Black Dinner, I mean, it’s not like everybody knows that this is a fabrication. We were finding lots of sources when we were trying to research this that just flat-up said “this is a thing that happened.”

Anne:  Yes. It is given as history. Sometimes it’s given… they say “the legend is” and then it’s repeated as history, but sometimes it’s actually just given as history, so, Michelle and I are here to tell you, oh listeners to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly, that there was indeed bad behavior but it did not include a bull’s head at dinner and traumatizing the young King, just saying. That didn’t happen.

Yeah, tell us about the stories about this Michelle.

Michelle:  So that’s what I was trying to track down is where this – 

it’s not a fabrication exactly because there were some executions that happened, the Sixth Earl of Douglas ended up dead, as did his brother, as did their advisor, so those things really happened. So we have more of an embellishment here, or an embroidery – into the story of the bull’s head getting dragged in and slapped on the table.

Anne:  Okay, and the little King sobbing and pleaded for the lives of his new companions, that he’d enjoyed so much at dinner, they were basically all the same age, and yet, so… to your mind this is an embroidery and not a lie, because I’m thinking about it as a lie. But… embroidery. An exaggeration. Hmm.

Michelle:  Yeah. And I went around trying to track this down, what I found is that nineteenth-century historians have who they think is to blame for this. And he’s a historian named Hector Boece. It is a Scottishness of Boethius.

Anne:  Yeah, that’s what it looked like.

Michelle:  So he’s a fifteenth-century historian who writes a history of Scotland and it is one… it’s only the second one printed. There are other histories, that are circulating in manuscript, that the implication is are better histories, is where these nineteenth-century historians are going with that. But that this was published and is fairly cheap but he tends to… sometimes people are nice and say he’s a little credulous, other people kind of want to say he’s a liar. 

Anne:  So that would be me. I’m on the “liar” list.

Michelle:  There are suggestions… but not just about this thing, okay? He includes, for example, a complete legend as if it were real, that Scotland, the name of Scotland, comes from Scota, who was a daughter of a pharaoh. So he has… it’s not just this thing, okay? Where there are questions about his accuracy. But I’m not buying that he’s alone under the bus, there, by himself, as the source of this hyperbolic reimagining of this as, instead of being, kind of, a struggle for power, a flat-out, unmitigated murder that has these drama-queen tendencies, in terms of the bull’s head, and stuff.

For one thing, he’s writing in Latin. That limits the audience for this. It gets translated by John Bellenden, but we can’t blame him either. I was willing to take a crack at the Latin if I could have found a scanned edition of Boece, but I didn’t, but I did find John Bellenden’s translation. John Bellenden is completely innocent. His translation stops with the assassination of James I.

Anne:  Oh OK, so he doesn’t get to the dinner at all.

Michelle:  No, he is not to blame.

Anne:  Does he mention the tennis balls?

Michelle:  Nope. I don’t believe so.

Anne:  I’m sorry.

Michelle: I wasn’t looking for that so I would have to go back and check, if we really need to know about that.

Anne:  It’s not very heroic to get murdered in a sewer. It’s especially not heroic to get murdered in a sewer that has been blocked off in order to save the tennis balls. That’s just sort of sad. The sad death of James I. Too much tennis.

Michelle:  Yeah, block off… you know you’re trying to do this thing to keep the tennis balls and you accidentally cut off your escape route. Who could have predicted?

Anne: Who could? Who could have predicted?

Michelle:  Nobody.

Anne:  Well, we could now, so now we’re careful. Careful! Careful blocking off the sewers, guys, because you never know when you need to escape. Don’t block them off.

Michelle:  I think it’s far more likely that David Hume’s history is the originator or the instigator of this. He wrote A History of the House and Race of Douglas and Angus, and it is in no way attempting to be objective. 

Anne:  It’s about both the Black and the Red Douglases.

Michelle:  He is a partisan. And he writes ten extremely…right in the middle of this thing, right? So starting at about page 145 and going up to page 155, and this I did find having been digitized so I took one for the team and slogged through these ten pages of extremely purple prose.

Anne:  You should share some with us now so that we can share in your angst.

Michelle:  Yeah, you have to have the misery with me.

Anne:  Yeah. Got it.

Michelle:  So let me find the exact moment where he talks about bringing in the… not there, it’s a little bit above that… oh there it is, there it is… 

“At the very instant comes the Governor, as was before appointed betwixt them, to play his part of the tragedy, and both he and the chancellor might be alike embarked in the action, and bear the envy of so ugly a fact, that the weight thereof might not be on one alone. Yet to play out their treacherous parts, they welcome him most courteously, set him to dinner with the king at the same table, feast him royally, entertain him cheerfully, and that for a long time. At last, about the end of dinner, they compass him about with armed men and cause present a bull’s head before him on the board. The bull’s head was in those days a token of death, say our histories; but how it hath come in use to be taken and signify, neither do they nor any else tell us; neither is it to be found, that I remember, anywhere in history, save in this one place; neither can we conjecture what affinity it can have therewith, unless to exprobate grossness, according to the French and our own reproaching dull and gross wits, by calling him calf’s-head but not bull’s head.”

And it just goes on and on and on…

Anne:  And on and on.

Michelle:  There’s ten…

Anne:  Never happened!

Michelle:  … solid pages of him being completely horrified and upset and aggrieved that these very lovely children were murdered in this horrific way, and then, as you know, when we’re dealing with old histories like this, when they get really, really worked up they start throwing poetry in.

Anne:  Yes. Poetry is important.

Michelle:  And he has three of them.

Anne:  I’m sorry.

Michelle:  Yeah, you can tell it’s important because you have to break into verse.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  So he has the one that pops up… he’s the one who cites the one that pops up with everything that we saw with this: 

Edinburgh Castle, town and tower

God grant ye sinke for sinne;

And that for the bloody dinner

Earl Douglas got therein.

So it’s got a, you know, nice little rhyme to it, and this pops up with all the sources that we saw.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s all over the net.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s the thing that’s connected to this the most, but it’s kind of interesting because, later on, Walter Scott quotes it and then some sources attribute it to him.

Anne:  Maybe Robbie Burns wrote it, only much later. It’s too bad for Robbie Burns, Robbie Burns only writes good stuff.

Michelle:  The Hume book I’m quoting from at the moment is 1644, so then he throws in a Latin verse…

Anne:  That really ups the tenor of the discourse, when you start, like, throwing in poems and Latin, yeah.

Michelle:  … where he’s frustrated, and then he claims that he is going to give you the same exact poem in English, but it’s not really. “In English thus,” (it’s not exactly the same, no):

Your murther may deserve a tragic muse,

Your horrid dinner justly might excuse

Thyestes’ feast, by a more treacherous train

Drawn to the ax, more barbarously slain

Than was his son: your prince’s guiltless eye

Stained with the sight, wept at the cruelty.

Is this these rulers’ wisdom? this their love

To justice? this the prudence men approve

So much? O black example! fit to be

Mark’d in eternal scrolls of infamy.

Yeah, it is hyperbolic.

So I think that the claim that Hector Boece all by himself created this is probably not accurate. It is far more likely that David Hume, being angry all over the place – righteous, righteous anger – is much more likely to be the actual source of this.

And it gets cited in weird places. I mean, Childe, right? You know the English and Scottish popular ballads?

Anne:  Uh-huh, I do.

Michelle:  Cites this verse, from Hume, which I thought was really interesting, that it pops up in there. 

I don’t know for sure for sure that Hume is responsible, but my gut’s feel is that it is far more likely that his really, really, really long, extensive snit-fit about it is more affecting than Boece which is, you know… really his crime is he’s writing in the wrong century. You could get away with that nonsense in the twelfth-century when Geoffrey of Monmouth is making stuff up left and right about we’re descended from… Britain/Brutus… and that’s why it’s called Britain.

Anne:  Or repeating things that other people have made up. All your inherited nonsense.

Michelle:  “I have a source, I’m not going to tell you what it is!”

Anne:  No! Much like Chaucer. Totally, “I read this in a book and, totally, I read this. Yeah. I did not make this up!”

Michelle:  And then it shows also in Robert Lindsay writes a continuation, and I read you the title of this earlier because it’s just really, really funny:

“Written and collected by Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie, being a continuation of the translation of the chronicles written by Hector Boece and translated by John Bellenden, now first published from two of the eldest Manuscripts, one bequeathed by Sir David Laing to the University of Edinburgh, and the other in the Library of John Scott of Halkshill. Edited by A.J.G. Mackay.”

His first name’s Aeneas, by the way, which is cool.

Anne:  That is nice.

Michelle:  So that’s not published until 17… I actually sat down and did the… well this edition is 1899, it’s published earlier than that but this particular edition… this edition is interesting because there’s a “notes” section where Mackay tries to talk about “yeah, so people  think this and I think it’s probably not true…” 

He talks in the Notes section about the bull’s head thing and how… actually his note is really interesting, I was really grateful to find it because finally somebody was citing sources with page numbers and I could look things up. As opposed to everybody else who says things like “Pinkerton and his modern history of Scotland is of course well-known.” Not a hundred years later! Tell me what the book is! And I had to go find out what it was.

His note is really, really interesting because he’s trying to deal in a scholarly fashion with this perplexing proverbial… he’s like, “What is this talking… What is this claiming that this is this, you know, a bull’s head…” – he’s citing from the text – “A bull’s head was one sign… token of being condemned to death” and he says “I just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Because he tries to connect it – he makes a real workman’s effort here – he tries to connect it to The Black Bull of Norroway, where the children are threatened that they’ll be taken away by the Black Bull of Norroway…

Anne:  Yeah. It doesn’t make any sense.

Michelle:  He cites the verse that David Hume included, and Hume saying that, I love this… He cites the thing about Hume saying “Well I don’t know where it comes from either” and this editor’s like “Hmm, yeah, I have no idea,” and then he kind of judiciously says “it looks as if there was a mingling or confusion of different superstitions in this story.”

Anne:  Wow.

Michelle:  Which I find really entertaining, right? I find his editorial, kind of throwing his hands up and saying “Man this is a mess but maybe something’s going on here?” He’s being very judicious.

Anne:  Nothing’s going on here. Nothing’s going on here. It’s not just that there was probably no dinner, and it’s not just that it certainly wasn’t all happening in front of the little King, and it’s not just that… I mean the eleven-year-old, you know, he was innocent, but the sixteen-year-old had been… there’s evidence that he was thinking about treason. 

So that gets all given as truth, truth, truth. The other thing that gets repeated over and over and over is that the bull’s head is an ancient Scottish symbol of death. No it’s not. I was, like, really? I’ve never heard of this. And Walter Scott says, about the bull’s head, “This circumstance staggers the belief of modern historians.” Yeah, it staggers my belief, I’ll just tell ya. “The bull’s head used as the sign of death is repeatedly mentioned in Highland tradition and the custom may have been Celtic.” Whatever this, like, “repeatedly mentioned”? No. No it’s not. So it’s like this, “Well, we all know!” I think it’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes. “Well, you know, I knew about the bull, I knew about the Bull of Death!” You know it’s not… there’s no there there. Bulls have been symbols of fertility, maybe, but there’s no, like, Death Bulls. There’s no Death Bulls. There’s no Scottish custom of whacking the heads off bulls and sticking them on the table so as to let you know you’re about to kill your guests. It is not the Scottish equivalent of “Bring the fruit!” You know? It’s just not.

Michelle:  Bring the Bull!

Anne:  Bring the bull! And that just gets passed on and I’m fascinated by this because it’s so… it’s a great story but it’s entirely made up and it’s in the service of the Douglases, this is all about the Douglases, bad things were done to the Douglases. Which is true, bad things were done to the Douglases, but this didn’t happen. Those two Douglas brothers were summarily executed for… you know, without any kind of judicial rights, it was very, very wrong, that’s the crime here. But it was not a horrible dinner scene. It wasn’t. And there was no bull. There’s no damn bull.

And you know, the other thing is, it’s like, and then after that… I would have loved this, if then after that you found lots of bulls stuck on tables all over Scotland signifying something… no, it isn’t. This is it. The reason this is the only time you hear about it, is that this is the only time you hear about it. It’s part of a story. But it’s a good story. It’s a good story. And people are very willing to believe it, you know, except for a few. There’s a,you know, as you said, there’s a historian going “Ehhh, I don’t know, well it staggers the belief of modern historians.” Mister Walter Scott sir.

Michelle:  It’s funny how these kinds of stories take on a life of their own, because once they’ve been repeated enough, even if you know it’s not true, you have to repeat it because if you don’t then the person who is reading or listening to your work thinks that you don’t know it, and therefore they question your authority. So these things end up self-perpetuating, because you have to include it since it’s the thing people are likely to have heard of.

Anne:  Yes, and nowadays… so, recently, if you go and you’re looking for, you know, “real life history that inspired George R.R. Martin,” this is a piece of “real life history.” Well, no. This is a real life story which inspired… You see, I don’t like to think of it as a legend because I… although it is sometimes called legend… I don’t like to think of it as a legend. Like, Paul Bunyan is a legend, you know. There’s a big guy and he had a blue ox. Okay. That’s a legend. This is not a legend. I’m willing to accept your talking about it as an embroidering of the truth, I just think it’s lies myself, but it’s not a legend, you know? It’s a thing that got made up and then passed off as the truth. Paul Bunyan is not getting passed off as the truth.

Michelle:  It seems like it’s political propaganda, right? Where you had these… to make the executions into a travesty, right? They were already a travesty because they weren’t being given their due process, but this takes it to that next level of making them entirely innocent victims.

Anne:  Yes, there’s nothing in the story about the young Earl might have been talking to people about how he had a claim to the throne. I mean, they were all Stewarts and Douglases, you know? There’s nothing in the story about that. He’s got to be a noble… in fact the illustrations of it from the nineteenth-century are great, I’ll see if I can find one for our website. Because he’s very noble. He’s very noble. And the little King is so upset! “No, no, don’t kill my new friends by cutting off their heads in the backyard! No! Plus get that nasty dead bull’s head out of here!” The whole head cutting off thing is just too much. No, it’s propaganda.

Michelle:  Yeah, this is like the little princes, where it’s useful story to… the princes, actually, almost certainly got dead, sadly, but these guys were not necessarily innocent victims, but it is useful to cast them in that light.

This is why history is so hard. That, you know, not everybody is passing along information and even attempting to do so in an objective fashion. Everybody is passing along the information they want you to have.

Anne:  Mmhm. That first chronicle entry that we’ve got, the contemporary chronicle entry, is completely dispassionate so, for me, it’s the most believable. The two Earls were summoned to the castle and they, sort of, were given a hasty execution and they were murdered. They were beheaded. And it wasn’t really a trial. Absolutely. Absolutely. But there’s nothing in there about dinner, the laws of hospitality being completely smashed.

Michelle:  Well that’s dragging out the big guns to make it into a PR moment. If you are, you know – despite the fact that this happens apparently all the time – it’s still a big breach of custom to murder your guests at dinner. This was utterly fascinating; I really enjoyed reading about all of these…

Anne:  Well I was so shocked, because we put this on our scheme, because we said “Oh, good, here’s another death dinner! That’ll be great.” And then we get into it and we discover that there’s no there there. Not something we’d expected at all. Not what he had expected.

Michelle:  This one is a useful object lesson in why you have to dig past the first page of Google when you are researching any kind of medieval topic. Because sometimes what you’re getting a hold of is the received wisdom that is being passed along, not, you know, what have we actually found when we went and did research.

Anne:  Yeah, and if you go, for instance, to Wikipedia, the page on Clan Douglas presents this as absolute fact. Well, I’m not surprised because yeah, the Douglases present the horrible story as absolute fact. It’s a Douglas story.

And, you know, the other piece of it is that everybody’s behaving so badly that it’s not like any of this… could this have happened? Yes, it could have, except for the part about the Black Bull of Death being the Black Bull of Death, that’s just a thing that got made up. But you could still, like, you could stick it on the table just as, you know, as a horrible declaration of war. You know, “Ah hah! Smash! Here’s your dead bull’s head, and now we kill you!” You know. But it’s not a legend. “Our traditional sticking of a dead bull’s head on the table.” Nah, never happened. Didn’t even happen this time.

Michelle:  It’s really…  of all the things that you could make up.

Anne:  It would be very dramatic though. It certainly would. And costly! You know, go around killing your bulls just so as to annoy people… to scare people you’re about to kill. I mean, see, that’s the other thing. It’s totally unnecessary. Even in the story as it’s being presented by Hume, you know, there’s some kind of signal and the young Earls are surrounded by soldiers, armed men, well you kind of don’t need to stick a bull’s head on the table to tell them that something’s wrong, you know? That’s just… there’s no need for this. That’s just ridiculous.

Michelle:  Yeah. That’s a good point though, when something seems over the top and melodramatic, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. If it seems a lot like fiction, it probably is fiction. Nobody is going to kill a perfectly good bull that is worth… I mean, even now, even now a bull is worth $1500. Are you really going to drop $1500 just for a melodramatic, over-the-top gesture?

Anne:  No.

Michelle. Just kill them! 

Anne:  You’re not.

Michelle:  People are very pragmatic when it comes to whacking.

Anne:  No, the dinner part is not over the top, although we don’t have any evidence that it happened, because, as we know, inviting people to dinner and making them feel all good is a good way of getting their guard down and maybe you can cut their heads off, we understand this, this got explained to me in our last dinner. Michelle explained this. So that’s okay. So maybe a dinner, but the bull’s head? That’s just ridiculous.

Michelle:  Can you imagine how much work it would be to cut off a bull’s head?

Anne:  Oh good lord. I mean, nobody’s going to do that. Like, the thing is, the only reason you would actually do that is if it really wasa custom, if there was some kind of custom that you needed to uphold, you know, “This is the Black Bull of Death, the sign of your ancestors,” you know, that kind of ritual you could go into trouble and expense for. Otherwise not. And there is no ritual, this is made up. So it didn’t happen. So I’m annoyed at Walter Scott for saying, you know, “It shows up all over the Highlands as a symbol of death.” I’m not seeing it anywhere. And I have never heard of it amongst the Celts. The Celts are big on heads, but all of the bull imagery is about fertility.

And I find it really interesting, also, that added-in stuff about the little King. Since we’ve got no evidence that there was a dinner and they were dragged out of it, we don’t have any evidence that the little King was pleading for their lives, but it makes a really good addition, doesn’t it?

But all of those additions come after the rest of the history, which is that this particular King is going to murder their first cousin once removed a few years down the road, so why put that in? Just embellishment.

Michelle:  I don’t have a good answer for why, unless we’re wanting to, you know, mess with his reputation after.

Anne:  Like he was a good guy and then he became a bad guy? When he was a child he was okay, then he grew up and not? Maybe. 

Yeah the bull makes more sense to me than the little crying thing. The little crying child that just… that’s such an interesting addition to me. And I had originally thought, I mean, I thought oh, this was the story. You know. I’m like, I was fascinated by the whole “Well what does that tell you about this little child?” He was not there. He was not there when his father was murdered and his mother wounded, he wasn’t there, he was elsewhere. She got to him. So he wasn’t there for that. But this would indeed be highly traumatic, but it didn’t happen.

Michelle:  Apparently one of the stories that Hector Boece tells, that he gets kind of harassed by later historians as “Yeah, that never happened,” is that she smuggled him – Joan? The Queen? James I’s widow? – smuggles James II into the castle in a trunk to keep him safe.

Anne: Yeah. Yeah, no. That didn’t happen either.

Michelle:  Another good story though.

Anne:  It is another good story. There’s something formulaic about them though.

Michelle:  I think that a whole lot of this has to do with the post-medieval belief that, you know, those heathen Catholics would do anything.

Anne:  Yeah. There’s a kind of over-the-top drama that’s just kind of ascribed to medieval people.

Michelle:  So here’s what Samuel Johnson has to say about Hector Boece, and it’s so… here, I’ll just read it to you:

“His history is written with elegance and vigor, but his fabulousness and credulity are justly blamed. His fabulousness, if he was the author of the fictions, is a fault for which no apology can be made; but his credulity may be excused in an age when all men were credulous. Learning was then rising on the world; but ages so long accustomed to darkness were too much dazzled with its light to see anything distinctly. The first race of scholars in the fifteenth century, and some time after, were, for the most part, learning to speak, rather than to think, and were therefore more studious of elegance than of truth.”

Oh yeah, it’s just dripping with this condescending bullshit…. I wanted to slap him across three centuries.

Anne:  Got it. Yeah. This is not long after the time when the whole “dark ages”…

Michelle:  Yes, that is what this is. He basically says… he says “What could you expect?”

Anne:  Mmhm. Yeah. Because it’s the Age of Rationalism. Yeah. Because they were children, they were like little children. They couldn’t think yet. They couldn’t, they just sort of made stuff up. “There was a bull and it scared us!”

Michelle:  Anything before the fifteenth century doesn’t count as a scholar apparently, because he’s counting these guys as the first generation of scholars. Yeah, very frustrating.

I didn’t, as I was talking, have a good place to talk about Dr. Johnson’s damning the Middle Ages with faint praise.

Anne:  It has to do with why it is that we would believe this story. We would believe this story because that’s what we think of the Middle Ages. So it isn’t just that the Middle Ages make up some stuff, it’s that when the Middle Ages make up some stuff, we think that this stuff might be true because they’re so childish and nuts.

Michelle:  Of course they would believe it. Because they just don’t know any better.

Anne:  Of course.

Yeah, but it’s double-edged, you know? That, first of all, medieval people would believe this story because they don’t know any better, and second of all, medieval people would make this story up, because they don’t know any… it’s like both of these things are operating.

Michelle: Yeah.

Anne:  So, there’s our explanation of the Black Dinner. One of the sources for George R.R. Martin’s The Red Wedding, which was a slaughter at a banquet which never happened, and the Black Dinner was a slaughter at a banquet which never happened and so it makes a good little… the real-life story is that it was a story, and it’s a good story and Martin used it, so there you go. It inspired him.

Michelle:  I wonder if we’ve had a single episode where George R.R. Martin hasn’t popped up?

Anne:  Yes, the murder of the three kings of Denmark where one of them murders the rest, I don’t think that shows up in George R.R. Martin. Does the scandal, Tour de Nesle, does it show up in Martin?

Michelle:  Yeah, because he writes the foreward for that set of historical novels.

Anne:  Oh right, he writes the foreward. Beatrice Cenci, I don’t think she’s in George R.R. Martin. Beatrice Cenci, no.

Michelle:  Yeah, nobody in Martin commits a murder that incompetently.

Anne:  Fra Alberigo, no. Cangrande, no. But yeah, but Martin shows up a lot. He knew his medieval history. And he does, I don’t mean to speak of him in the past tense. He lives, like, you know, sixty miles away from here up in Santa Fe.

Michelle:  Really? I didn’t know that.

Anne:  He’s still alive. 

Michelle:  Oh! Oh!

Anne:  Oh yes. Oh yes.

Michelle:  I didn’t know.

Anne:  Yeah, I know somebody who was in his writer’s group.

Michelle:  Oh wow. Well, hopefully he’s going to finish that last book.

Anne:  Next up, do you remember what we’re doing?

Michelle:  I don’t. I’m sorry. I never remember the next. You’re steering.

Anne:  I do! I do. I look it up. Next up is Eustace the Monk, who was operating in France and England. He died in 1217 and he was a pirate.

Michelle:  Oh! A pirate! Awesome.

Anne:  I know! A pirate! A monk-pirate! Eustace the Monk-Pirate. And so if we go into that and we discover that there’s really no there there, we’ll make some stuff up to tell you.

Michelle:  Being told that you have misinformation in your head, so that you can now label it as misinformation, is useful information.

Anne:  I think so. I really like knowing that the Black Dinner is basically Douglas propaganda. I like knowing that.

Michelle:  I do too. I would rather know than go on thinking…

Anne:  Yeah. I wouldn’t want to be part of repeating the Black Dinner as absolute truth. “And then the little King cried and cried and had to go to therapy! And it took the servants forever to clean the table!”

Michelle:  Waste of a perfectly good bull.

Anne:  I’m glad that I was able to point that out.

You can reach us through our website at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find show notes and transcripts. The transcripts are done by Laurie Dietrich and we’re very grateful to her.

You can listen to us on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher and other podcast places, and directly through the website. Please leave a review. Please leave us a review if you’re listening to us, especially on Apple, because that will mean that we’ll start showing up in the search. If you were to search on Apple Podcasts “True Crime,” True Crime Medievaldoesn’t come up because it would need reviews to do that and so, please leave a review. And also let us know in the comments if you have a medieval crime that you would like for us to investigate.

Michelle:  Oooh. Yeah.

Anne:  Because we welcome suggestions. If we move on to doing extra things like for Patreon or something, we’ve got some crimes which are not medieval and which actually fall outside our mandate, things that we’re thinking of like Guy Fawkes or Elizabeth Bathory, although that might be like Giles de Rais, it might be too much for us. Giles de Rais took a lot out of us. That was so sad. We all paid heavily for that one. Let us know if you’ve got a true crime that you think that we should talk about. 

And we’re signing off. True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are nowadays, only with not as much technology.

Michelle:  Bye!

*Transcriptionist Note: Yes, the audio says something different. Because humans. Especially humans who are passionate and excited about the topics on which they are speaking, and therefore speak quickly. We like these humans! We also like the opportunity to correct any charmingly passionate misspeakages (alas not a word but should be) in the transcript. Et voila.

The Tour de Nesle Scandal. Paris, 1314

Anne:  This episode contains adult language and adult content, so we advise listener discretion for children under thirteen. It also contains descriptions of violence which may be disturbing to some people. If this is true for you, please skip ahead for a minute when we get to any piece where we’re talking about what happened to the Norman knights.

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. In this case today, very badly indeed. Pretty much as badly as you can behave without actually killing people. This is 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 have many details on why Maryland is the most medieval state in America. You have to go back to the previous podcast to hear about the jousting and the flag.

Today we’re talking about the Tour de Nesle scandal from Paris in 1314. It was sad. It was a really sad thing. Philip IV of France had been born in 1268, and he was King of France from 1285 to 1314. The fact that the Tour de Nesle scandal is in 1314 does tell you something. Are these things connected? Yes they are.

He was called “le Bel” because he was handsome, but was not charismatic. He was cold, he was aloof, he was unemotional. As indeed at least one of his kids was. At least two, now that I come to think of it.

Under his rule, France became powerful. Everything seemed great. He was very ambitious and he was fairly ruthless. He expelled the Jews from France in 1306. He’s the one who annihilated the Knights Templar in 1307. In both cases he owed these entities a great deal of money and then after everybody had been either expelled or slaughtered he didn’t owe them any more money and I’m thinking that’s the motive.

Michelle:  Super convenient.

Anne:  Yeah, I think that’s what it was all about. 

So that had all happened.

He started a conflict with Pope Boniface VIII, which then led to the whole papal court being transferred to Avignon in 1309. That wasn’t a really great piece of papal history. So, you know, but he was handsome. I mean, there’s that. He was handsome.

But the Tour de Nesle scandal probably killed him. And also led to the Hundred Years’ War. I mean, really. So that’s what we’re talking about. Oh, and the end of Courtly Love, which is… you know, I actually like that part sort of, because Courtly Love annoys me.

So here’s the foundations of the scandal: Philip had married Joan of Navarre in 1284, when he was 16 and she was 11. And they had children. In 1288, when Joan was 15, they had Margaret, who died in childhood. Louis, who would become Louis X, King of France; Blanche, who died in childhood; Philip, who would become Philip V, King of France; Charles, who would become Charles IV, King of France; Isabella, who would become Isabella the She-Wolf, Queen of England; and Robert, who died in youth.

So, basically, if you survived your childhood with Philip and Joan, you got to be royalty! Although in some cases not for very long.

Okay, so. He married his children off, these ones that had survived. When Louis was 25, he married Margaret who was the daughter of Robert, the Duke of Burgundy. They had one daughter, Joan. She’ll show up later. Margaret was about 24 at the time. The ages that I’m giving you –  25 and 24 – this is at the time of the scandal. Because that was what I was interested in.

At the time of the scandal Philip was about 21 and he was married to Joan, the daughter of Otto, Count of Burgundy, who was about 22.

At the time of the scandal Charles was about 20, and he was married to Blanche, Joan’s sister, who was about 18. So, nicely in order.

So Blanche and Joan are sisters. They’re all from Burgundy.

Louis and Margaret had a very problematic marriage. Louis liked playing tennis rather than being with his wife, and they both had really bad tempers.

Philip and Joan had a solid marriage. They had a lot of children in a very short time and Philip wrote her love letters, like, forever! And they’re really bad and annoying, formulaic love letters but they were love letters and I’m trying to skim through my knowledge of European history and marriages amongst the kings and queens and royalty and I’m not coming up with a whole lot of literary collections of love letters, are you? Michelle do you know of any, like, “and then he wrote her love letters for decades”? Do you know anybody else…?

Michelle:  Charles d’Orleans, who is taken captive at the Battle of Agincourt…

Anne:  Ahh!

Michelle:  …writes love letters to his wife the whole time and she actually dies while he’s still in prison because he’s in prison for maybe 25 years after the Battle of Agincourt.

Anne:  Why didn’t they ransom him? They didn’t ransom him? Why?

Michelle:  I don’t know.

Anne:  Were they keeping him as some kind of like, you know, little hostage-y chess thing?

Michelle:  I mean, things fall apart pretty quickly after the Battle of Agincourt, so possibly…

Anne:  They did. They did.

Michelle:  Edward I is quite attached to his first wife, Eleanor. He’s a hot mess when she dies.

Anne:  So there are other noble people writing lots of letters.

Michelle:  I mean he was kind of a hot mess already, but…

Anne:  Yeah, I don’t even… well he, what? He’s the scourge of Scotland and Wales but whatever.

At any rate. Back to – that’s our little segue into the love lives of European nobility – so they had a solid marriage.

Charles and Blanche, nobody knows. I like it, it’s mostly called “unremarkable”. And that’s because no one remarked on it. At any rate, that’s who was in here.

The adulterous affairs – what the scandal is, is that there’s some adulterous affairs – I mean, that’s what happened. And they were going at least by 1313. Michelle is going to go more into Isabella the She-Wolf, but I’m just going to give you a plot.

When Isabella and her husband, Edward II, visited France in 1313, Isabella gave her sisters-in-law embroidered purses. You’re going to talk about the puppet show too, right, Michelle?

Michelle:  We know that there is a puppet show during that time.

Anne:  Because its’ the puppet show, that’s the occasion…

Michelle:  Right.

Anne:  There’s the puppet show, so whatever occasion the puppet show is being given at, that’s when she gives these presents.

Michelle:  Right. Exactly.

Anne:  And we also know it was a satirical puppet show. Do we know anything about what it was satirizing? 

Michelle:  I have no idea. And I wanted to try to find it but I couldn’t dig it up. I just thought it was awesome that there was, you know, drama again.

Anne:  There’s always drama. Yeah, and there was probably subtleties. I’m just guessing. But you know. Okay.

So she gave them embroidered purses. Now here’s my little hobbyhorse: I wanted to know what the embroidery pattern was. But I couldn’t find that either.

So she gave them these purses. Then – that was, like, in the summer of 1313 – in November of 1313, Isabella and Edward were back in London and they were having a party because they were having this big giant triumph thing because they were back in London, so hence party, I don’t know, ergo whatever. And there were two knights of Normandy there who were carrying those embroidered purses. Which Isabella noticed because this is sort of….

First of all, they would have been bespoke, they would have been one of a kind, each, you know, they were special. And she had purchased them and given them to her sisters-in-law, all three of them I gather. Isabella told her father about this, not right then, it’s not like she wrote a letter; “Dear Dad, I think my sisters-in-law are messing around,” no no. She waited until 1314 when she and Edward were going back. Because there was a lot of going back and forth, everybody was related and they weren’t actually at war at the moment so hey, so the fact that she doesn’t write her father, the fact that she waits until she goes the next time, you know, there’s been discussion about this and what exactly does that mean? Okay, they’re tacky. It was really tacky of my sisters-in –law to give these things away, but why to them? You know it wasn’t just immediate. She thought this through.

Michelle:  But if she waits to tell him, I mean that’s an indication of how explosive she knows this can potentially be. She doesn’t want to put it in writing. She wants to wait until she can tell him, you know, you don’t want to put something like that on paper – parchment – until you know, you don’t want to do that. Because somebody could get hold of that then you no longer are in control of the scandal. She has to wait until she can tell him personally.

Anne:  Okay.

Michelle:  Yeah. Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that, but that makes complete sense. She’s trying to control the message.

Anne:  Okay. I’ve got it. That makes a whole lot of sense.

Michelle:  She was so good.

Anne:  That… yeah. Yeah, she is. She’s actually brilliant.

Michelle:  Yeah, she… I’m quite impressed.

Anne:  She’s scary. She’s really scary.

Michelle:  Yeah, well, yes.

Anne:  And he, Philip, conducted surveillance, and after the surveillance – and historians are agreed on this. I mean it may be that Isabella… it’s like why did Isabella do this? Some people have said well, it’s so that her heirs would, you know, be in contention for the throne, but at the point at which this happens she has three brothers, all of whom are married and all of whom, if they could be having children… I mean there’s no way to think that she, that any children of hers would be in line for the French throne. That information comes later. But so, nah.

No, I think she just told her dad because she was…I  think she was mean. This is my guess: Meanness. But, at any rate, he had surveillance and they figured it out and historians are agreed, this is true, that Margaret and Blanche were indeed committing adultery and they believed that Joan knew about it although Joan was not ever accused of the adultery.

He had all three of them arrested and the knights, the knights were arrested and tortured, and these knights, these two knights were Walter and Philip d’Aunay, they were brothers. Their father had some other brothers but he’s losing these, let me tell you.

They were tortured. They confessed to adultery. That meant that they had confessed to lèse majesté, to a crime against the King’s dignity. It was treason. Exact accounts differ but there’s this, like, whole slew of things that are said to have been done to them. They end up dead at the end of it. But it’s probable that they were beaten. It’s also probable that they were castrated. They seem to have been skinned alive and decapitated. They may also have, while their skins were off, had boiling lead poured on them.

Michelle:  They had… it was bad. Bad. Their executions were bad.

Anne:  They were really bad, and these were nobles.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne: They were Norman knights. They were knights of the household, which meant that they were close in to the goings-on, they were part of the goings-on of the court. They were part of the daily life of the court and should they have had to have gone to war, they would have been in the vanguard.

Their father, Walter d’Aunay, what was that like? Discovering that you were going to lose two of your boys to torture and execution because they were stupidly having affairs with the princesses of France? You send your boys off to be knights of the household, you think you might lose them in war, for instance, but you don’t think that, you know, they’re going to be quite such dummies. Nobody thinks that! Nobody thinks that.

So they had high positions, as far as knights go, they weren’t royal but they were noble. And these were very bad executions. These were extremely bad. It was treason.

Michelle:  So far these are the worst executions that we’ve covered.

Anne:  Yes, they are the worst executions that we have covered so far.

Michelle:  There really isn’t anything else that they could have thrown at these guys. I actually… of everybody, I feel kind of bad for them because this is way, way excessive.

Anne:  It was extremely…

Michelle:  But it’s an indication of how seriously Philip is taking this. I mean, my son and I were actually just talking this morning about male anxiety about their children not being their children…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  And that’s, that is a lot of what’s going on here. That there is this…

Anne:  That is absolutely what’s going on.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  That is absolutely… and it will indeed lead to the Hundred Years’ War.

So Blanche and Margaret were tried by Parliament and they were found guilty. They didn’t immediately die from this. Their heads were shaved and they were both sentenced to life imprisonment. Joan was found innocent, in large part because her husband Philip influenced this. The extent to which she actually knew about what was going on or perhaps even facilitated it is unclear, but she was never accused of the adultery. But she was found innocent.

Margaret’s marriage could not be annulled because she already had a child. She was imprisoned in a dungeon in Château Gaillard in Normandy. Louis became king in August of 1315, because his father had died in 1314 soon after the scandal from a cerebral hemorrhage and historians are… we believe that the stress of the scandal brought that on. So there’s that.

Margaret died mysteriously soon after Louis became king. Very mysteriously. We don’t know from what.

Michelle:  This is a bonus crime episode because there’s a number of them…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  … that come into this. She was… I think she was probably murdered. I mean…

Anne:  We all think she was murdered.

Michelle:  … he had to get rid of her because he needed to be able to remarry and have an heir that was less questionable.

Anne:  He got married five days later, after she died. Five days.

Michelle:  Yeah. So it doesn’t…

Anne:  Really. You can’t make this stuff up. Yeah, so she got… she was murdered.

But! But! Did he end up with an heir? He did not. Because he died in 1316 after a very strenuous game of tennis.

Michelle:  That’s the part you can’t make up either.

Anne:  No you can’t make this stuff up.

So Philip, after that… so Louis died. So Philip was king and Joan, although she had been found innocent, was held under house arrest at Dourdan in southwest France. Why, I don’t know. I think really it’s just like, “oh god, we’re just,… you just stay there! All the women just, like, stay! In your room. We’re just saying.”

Michelle:  She’s also the sister, though, of one of the other princesses, and I think the assumption… the assumption probably is there is no way your sister was up to this and you didn’t know. So I think she’s getting a little guilt by association.

Anne:  I think so. I think so. And I’ve got no opinions as to whether or not she had been in on it. It seems to me pretty obvious that the whole thing was… the two sisters-in-law were having affairs at the same time with a pair of brothers, in a tower, and it seems pretty clear that the older one, Margaret, who was in the godawful marriage, she would be the instigating force around this and Blanche, she was just, I mean, she was 18, she just went along with this. Joan, I don’t know what she’s thinking.

Michelle:  This is a different type of teenage dumb then the White Ship, but we’re in the same ballpark.

Anne:  Yes, we’re in the same ballpark of we have not actually built our frontal lobes up to, you know… but Margaret had. Margaret was just… the chances that these women were taking are just stupid chances. But, any rate, yeah, because they’re having this affair with these two brothers, that was really problematic to begin with but, you know, then the re-gifting…

At any rate, so Philip became king. Joan had been under house arrest. Philip managed to get her released and she returned to court where she remained Queen Consort until Philip’s death. So of all of these, I think of anybody in here, Joan gets off easiest.

Blanche was imprisoned at Château Gaillard, in the same place where Margaret was, until 1322, when Charles became king, because Philip was dead. He refused to release her and instead annulled the marriage and had her sent to a nunnery, and he remarried. She died the next year because her health had been broken being in the dungeon all those years. So, you know, Blanche. Mistakes you make as a teenager which haunt you your entire short life. Yeah.

Michelle:  It’s utterly amazing that he had three – Philip IV had three sons that survived to adulthood and the Capetian line still comes to an end here.

Anne:  It is over. It is over because of those three sons, the marriages are ruined and there’s… Philip and Joan could have had but didn’t, I suppose, and there’s the one daughter.

Michelle:  Louis has, with the second wife, a son who is born posthumously, but the baby only lives six days.

Anne:  Good lord.

Michelle:  And of course some people think, hmm, somebody smothered that baby. But he’s called John the Posthumous and he’s the only apparently… like there was this succession crisis because she’s pregnant but the king is dead, what are we going to do? And so they wait and they get rewarded by a baby who is born, like the youngest person ever to be King of France because he’s king from the instant he’s born, but of course he doesn’t live.

Anne:  Good lord. You know, and you think of all the trouble that Henry VIII went to, to try and get a male heir, you know, and he ends up with one. And Philip has three living male heirs who all become king and there are no male heirs after that. Yeah. Okay. So. So outcomes of all this: So when Louis died, his daughter Joan, she did not inherit the throne. Now there were suspicions as to her legitimacy, as there would be, I mean that’s… that is what’s going on. That’s kind of like the bottom line of why it is you might freak out when your daughters-in-law had affairs with Norman knights, it’s because it casts doubt on the entire legitimacy of the line. Joan had been… Margaret already had Joan at the time of the affair but who’s to know when she started messing around with the d’Aunay boys?

And also, the general kind of view of women at the court was completely undermined. It did not do the cause of women any help at all. The piece of Salic Law that had been inherited by the Franks – specifically Clovis I – but at any rate that piece of Salic Law that had to do with female inheritance of the throne, i.e. not. They don’t. That became invoked which soon affected English/French relations because Philip took the throne rather than Joan, when Charles died England claimed the French throne because Edward III was the son of Isabella the She-Wolf and therefore, in English law, next in line. Hence, the One Hundred Years’ War.

Michelle:  So Isabella was married off to Edward II in 1308. There had been discussions between her father, Philip IV, and Edward’s father, Edward I, for a number of years before that, but Edward I was, you know, a savvy operator and a hard-minded, you know, so-and-so, and he had kept the negotiations going, trying to, you know, get more out of them. “Oh maybe I’ll marry my son to this other princess over there,” you know really trying to work the system. By the time the marriage actually goes through, Edward I had died so she marries Edward II in 1308. She was 12, he was 23.

Anne:  His life had already been, kind of like, really well established by that point.

Michelle:  He had just come to the throne, right? So he’s his own boss by that point. Although he does go through with the marriage, you know, it’s… Isabella is tricky, right? Because by the time of the scandal she’s an adult, she’s a young adult, but she’s a very different type of young adult than her sisters-in-law who are off, you know, doing the party girl thing. She’s also a hard-minded so-and-so but…

Anne:  She really is, yeah.

Michelle:  She appears to be, in the first part of her marriage, you know, giving it her all. She’s trying to make it work. They have a number of children together. Not as many as Edward I and Eleanor who had 15 children — and Edward II is the last of them! But they have quite a number of children together and she tries to work out… you know, Edward has either lovers or close companions or something going on but she kind of works it out with Gaveston and when he’s exiled – the barons force Edward to exile Gaveston, 1308, but then in 1309 the three them kind of work something out. But then in 1312 the barons rise against Edward again and this time they manage to get hold of Gaveston and execute him.

Anne:  Yeah. So tell me again, that’s 1312?

Michelle:  1312.

Anne: So one year, year-and-a-half, before she discovers that her sisters-in-law are not behaving.

Michelle:  So I, on the one hand I can kind of see why she might be angry with them, because she is over here giving it the college try, trying to make this work with Edward, who is subject, at the very minimum he is subject to favoritism, and you can’t do this as king. It’s actually a very similar problem to what we saw with Edward IV, you know, when he marries…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  … Elizabeth and starts doling out stuff to her family, that’s what is ticking the lords off, you know?

Anne:  Yeah, you don’t want to annoy the barons. Annoying the barons is kind of like a little theme in English royal history and it never ends well.

Michelle:  They’re less concerned about who you’re taking to bed than who you’re giving stuff to. You know, once you start handing out property and titles they get really really annoyed.

Anne:  Yeah, they’re willing to use who you’re going to bed with against you, but that’s not what ticks them off in the first place. They just kind of add it on to the pile of charges.

Michelle:  So, you know, she’s doing her best over there in England, trying to make this work with Edward II, and to find out that these sisters-in-law, who apparently… can we just talk for one second about the three obvious and simple rules of re-gifting, that apparently they have not mastered? Because it’s not hard. There are three rules.

Anne:  What are the Three Rules of Re-Gifting, so that our audience can know them and not get into trouble with Norman knights?

Michelle:  And don’t start a Hundred Years’ War.

Anne:  Or even annoy Aunt Matilda.

Michelle:  Number One: Wait six to eighteen months. Put it in the closet for a, you know, about a year and a half. Number Two: Remember who gave it to you.

Anne:  Mmm. Yes. Mmm.

Michelle:  And obviously do not give it back to them.

Anne:  Yeah. I think I did that once. It was not good. No.

Michelle:  Three… you know Post-It Notes are great for this, by the way, 

Anne:  Oh!

Michelle:  …if you’re sticking it in the closet you just put a little Post-It Note on it to remind yourself who gave it to you…

Anne:  Oh smart!

Michelle:  And Three: you also cannot give it to somebody who will be back in contact with the person who gave it to you.

Anne:  In this case it seems to me that’s the most important rule that should have been kept.

Michelle:  This is mind-bogglingly stupid. That they did this. 

Anne:  Yeah, and what we don’t know is did the boys know where the gifts had come from? Because I’m thinking that they probably did because these were public gifts. They were given in a public situation. So didn’t they know where those gifts had come from? And if that’s true, if they were parading these things around as a kind of um, you know, in-your-face snottiness, well… I think they got more than they deserved but certainly, you know, they were getting into something.

Michelle:  Arrogance on a level that is incomprehensible when you think that, you know, you’re going to rub the Queen of England’s nose in the fact that you are walking around now with this one-of-a-kind thing on your belt and just letting her know. No good can come of that. I mean, Isabella, even as a young woman, was not to be screwed with.

Anne:  I can’t believe that they, all those girls had just a lovely relationship, you know? The sisters with their dear sister Isabella, and everybody just loved each other, great? I don’t believe this for a minute. There had to have been… for one thing, Margaret was not making her brother Louis happy although, really, they both sound like dreadful people. And Blanche, whatever. Nah. Nah. So it was already just pushing it.

Michelle:  It’s the same kind of young person arrogance, though, that thinks it’s a great idea to party on the beach until midnight and then get in the boat and head across…

Anne:  Yeah, and I can really see it happening. I think that it’s most likely that the Norman knights who were wearing those embroidered purses did know where they had come from and did know that Isabella might get annoyed, but never in a million years thought that what was going to happen was that they were going to get tortured and executed.

Michelle:  If they didn’t know, it was reprehensible of the princesses to do that to them, because that’s basically a setup.

Anne:  Yes. Yes, if the princesses just handed them over and didn’t say “please don’t take this to London because our sister Isabella gave them”, if they didn’t know, that makes the women just that more godawful.

Michelle:  But I feel like they would have to have known.

Anne:  You’re right.

Michelle:  Because surely it was a public… you know those kinds of gifts happen in a public…

Anne:  Mmmhmm.

Michelle:  …presentation. So hopefully…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  I mean not that any of it gets better by that.

Anne:  No. It’s just so awful. Just dreadful. Oh lord.

Michelle:  So this is one of our crimes that not only affects medieval history, it reverberates through the years.

Anne:  It most certainly does. So it reverberates through, well, it reverberates through medieval history because, as has been explained, we have the Hundred Years’ War. And it reverberates through art and culture because really, amazingly soon after this whole scandal, the entire theme of Courtly Love where, you know, the young lover is having this adulterous affair with a noble lady, just sort of dropped out. Dropped right out of French. Courtly Love, that was it. Bye! Not a theme that you want to be reciting in your little troubadour poems at court. No, it was over. So that was it. No more Tristan and Isolde for you!

Michelle:  One of those places where it’s just not as much fun in real life.

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  I remember very few scenes of torture in Chrétien de Troyes.

Anne:  No. Or Marie de France. Nobody gets tortured… well there’s some torture but it hadn’t got anything to do with getting caught. You know, no. No! You love your lady and you maybe even have adulterous affairs and it’s all just fun and games. Fun and games! Until you know, you get your skin pulled off and boiling lead poured on it… no, that’s not in there. That is absolutely… there is no scene in Courtly Love where that happens.

And, you know, we know that the whole Courtly Love idea had some effect in real life. That as a game, for instance, discussions about who had it worse in certain of kind of love triangles, that kind of thing, that was like part of having fun at court sometimes. Some places. But I think that one of the things that happens is that art art can have a kind of reverberation affect on your little brains, you know, like you can believe that things are as they are in art, and discover that they’re not. Now you grow out of this stuff, theoretically, but, and I know from having been a teenager in, you know, in the sixties and seventies, you can really believe a whole lot of nonsense that you discover later to be untrue, and I do wonder to what extent that actually is part of it? That infected by the Courtly Love tradition, these people just did not really pay attention to the reality of the situation. Because they were not, as it turns out, living in a Courtly Love poem, they were actually at the court of Philip IV and that’s different.

Michelle:  I want to hand Philip some props for doing some surveillance as opposed to just taking action. 

Anne:  You know that’s true! Alright, OK, I’ll go along with that. 

MichelleI’m impressed with his kind of taking the cool-headed “let’s just make sure before I do something” because, you know, it’s in his best interest to not overreact, because it’s certainly not in his best interest for this to be true. That’s one of the reasons I think it probably was true, is it is absolutely not in his best interest…

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  … to blow the lid off this…

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  … unless he is 110% convinced.

Anne:  No. Yeah, it was true. Two of those women were having affairs.

Michelle:  I think this is also an important crime because it points out that, just because we use that same word now, it means something different, right? The idea that now if you were to have an affair with Prince Harry – sorry, Prince Harry , I think you’re awesome, and another ginger, so special royal for me! – If somebody were to be having an affair with Prince Harry it’s, as far as I know, not a crime. It would be a scandal,…

Anne:  Yes. It will show up, you know, in the Mirror. It’ll be all over the tabloids. All over Facebook. And the Queen would get annoyed. And might make you go to Canada. Oh wait! You already went there! But no, it’s not a crime.

Michelle:  But this was actual, honest-to-god, against-the-law crime.

Anne:  Lèse majesté. Yeah. Well and it can only be a crime in a particular set-up where the king is absolute. That’s it.

And it can only be a crime if you absolutely need legitimacy and heirs and whatnot.

Michelle:  Oh, speaking of which, I think we’re obligated to remind everybody that although Braveheartshowed William Wallace fathering Edward III, he is not in fact the father of Edward III.

Anne:  No. Thank you for reminding us of that. Yet another instance where art and real life are not actually the same thing. Thanks for that. No, he is not the father of Edward III.

Michelle:  That’s just making stuff up. There’s no way that happened.

Anne:  Although Isabella the She-Wolf did indeed have an affair, ironically she did! And then this is going to lead to the death of Edward II which I believe will be on a different podcast because that’s a whole ‘nother crime, although it’s got some of the same people in it.

Michelle:  So one of the things that we have to talk about is the later literary afterlives because these are awesome.

Anne:  They are! They are. Yes. Please do.

Michelle:  And it is not at all surprising that a story this lurid makes the leap back over into fiction. You know, real life and fiction don’t… these are not categories that actually stay separate. They go back and forth. So this is our friend Dumas again.

Anne:  Where did we see him before?

Michelle:  Oh he was..

Anne:  Oh!

Michelle:  Do you remember?

Anne:  The Cenci?

Michelle:  Yes! Oh, hold on… oh yeah, he’s one of the… Yes! Yes, yes remember? He had that early true crime compilation and she was in that.

Anne:  Yeah. Beatrice Cenci.

Michelle:  So, what, we’re on our tenth episode and Dumas’ showing up?

Anne:  Something like that, I don’t know.

Michelle: I’m starting to see a pattern… Dante… Actually, you know, this might be tiny, tiny bit relating to Dante losing his crap so hard over the adulterers. Remember he has them in the second circle of Hell?

Anne: Uh huh

Michelle: Because this might be something that was in the back of his head because this whole thing was blowing up about the same time he’s writing. I’d have to double-check the dates but…

Anne:  Well and, you know, it affected France and secondarily England the most, but it was news! It was news, you know, and since everybody was all interested in the intermarrying and “who did you marry?” and Spain and here’s Holland and here’s Russia and here’s Italy and I mean you really… Everybody’s keeping track of who the contenders are for legitimate royal marriages such as will lead to legitimate heirs and not war, and France is sort of out of the running. There you go.

Michelle:  So, Dumas, in 1832, has a play called La Tour de Nesle, alright? I’m super bad – I think we’ve covered this already – at French pronunciation.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s OK. You know, we all have different talents.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  It looks like Tour de Nesle. I mean, there you go.

Michelle:  I read quite a lot of this play.

Anne:  Because it was research for the podcast!

Michelle:  And also it was awesome! I mean it’s just as frenetic and hyperbolic and over-the-top as you could absolutely… like, my melodramatic little heart was so happy. 

So the play opens, the play… because the story wasn’t lurid enough, right? By the time Dumas got a hold of it, what’s going on is that the Queen of France – she’s become the Queen of France – and it’s not that there’s an affair with one specific but always the same knight? Oh no, no! When Dumas is telling the story it’s become a Hundred and One Arabian Nights and she has a different lover every night and he is executed every night and thrown out of the tower so that nobody can give away her secret, although she’s also wearing a mask.

Anne:  Uh huh.

Michelle:  So I guess it’s just, you know…

Anne:  Is it one of the half-masks? Because really you only wear half-masks. And nobody knows who you are if you wear them! It’s so magical!

Michelle: It just says in the play a mask. I don’t know what kind of mask…

Anne:  It’s a half-mask, I’m just saying. I know this from the later version of the movie. But we get to that later.

Michelle:  So the other piece that made the medieval drama part of my heart super happy is that there are nine tableaux in this.

Anne:  Oh!

Michelle:  I’m so excited to find out that in 1832 they’re still using tableaux.

Anne:  And in England too. There was a whole big… and this was also in America… that on through the 19^th century tableaux were performed as entertainment. You know, if you read, for instance, I’m thinking of bizarre things that I know in my head not from my education but from my childhood, sorry to tell you, if you read Two Little Knights of Kentucky, and all the books that come after that, that’s one of the things they do, they put on tableaux. Oh yeah! Yeah, from out of books. From, you know, The Arabian Nights and from history, and whatnot.

Michelle:  I would produce this play. It has five acts. Nine tableaux. It’s super melodramatic. It opens like this alternate universe version of Hamlet where you have two guards talking about “how many dead bodies have been pulled out of the river today? Well gee Philippe, I don’t know! I heard, like, four or five yesterday!”

Anne:  The knights of the court are just getting slaughtered by we don’t know what! Because there’s not surveillance, obviously, that’s not a realistic thing. They just, they go out the door and then they never come back.

Michelle:  They talk in this first scene about how “has anybody noticed, do you think, that the bodies that are getting out of the river are always under this one tower and they’re always really good looking young knights, like doesn’t that strike anybody else as weird? Because I’m pretty sure that people who die in the river are usually kind of poor or maybe old or maybe children but it’s never those, it’s always just these really good-looking knights.”

Anne:  The fact that France has an infinite supply of them amuses me.

Michelle: I love this play.

Anne:  This does sound like a very hilarious play. Do you know, was it popular? Because I had never heard of it, but I know Dumas’ novels better. Did they love it?

Michelle:  It was in fact performed and then they haven’t forgotten it because it is the source for that 1955 movie called in English The Tower of Lust.

Anne:  Yes, which is easier to pronounce than Tour de Nesle.

Michelle:  That was, you know, it’s done in French.

Anne:  The Tower of Lust.

Michelle: The Tower of Lust.

Anne:  Yes, this is absolutely a French movie and could not have been filmed in America because if you go on YouTube and you search for it you can’t find the whole original French thing, much to my annoyance, but you can find trailers and stuff that have been modernly re-created and it has a lot of, like, pictures of ladies with no tops on. But they have masks on so you don’t know who they are.

Michelle:  Oh really? Oh so they’re actually? Yeah, no, in 1955 you could have not have had topless… in the 1920s in the US you could have but not in…

Anne:  Yeah, but not in America, but you could in France, which is one of the reasons that some actresses went to France to get their careers going. In fact that turns out to be a theme in Valley of the Dolls, but that really has nothing to do with what we’re talking about, but I just mentioned it because it was there.

Michelle:  All the women have amazing headdresses at least. 

Anne:  Yes, they do.

Michelle:  Which is a personal annoyance about movies that are made now that are supposedly set in the Middle Ages, that apparently their costumers have decided to ignore the fact that women had things on their heads.

Anne:  Yeah, often lots of things on their heads. 

I’m just so sad about this though because I was immediately, like, “Well we’re going to watch this!” So here’s the deal. You cannot watch this movie. You cannot buy it. You cannot rent it. It is not being shown on any of the channels that show things. If you go to YouTube you cannot find it except if you want it dubbed in Italian or if you want it in the original French with Russian dubbed over it. That’s it. You can’t get the original.

Michelle:  So if you’re super multi-lingual you can make this happen?

Anne:  Yeah. I don’t know Italian but I could just watch it in Italian because I think the plot would be pretty clear from the visuals.

Michelle:  But you can read is a set of seven historical novels by Maurice Druon. The first one was The Iron King, also 1955. The series itself is called The Accursed Kings and here’s George R.R. Martin showing up again. George R.R. Martin cites this series, The Accursed Kings, as a source for Game of Thrones, and actually wrote a forward for the English translation.

Anne:  No!

Michelle:  In which he sings its praises.

Anne:  Oh! So!

Michelle:  I’ve started reading this too and actually I am enjoying it better… I tried really hard to read the set of novels about the Wars of the Roses, the ones about the queens…

Anne:  Oh, The White Queen and whatnot?

Michelle:  Uh huh. Tried really hard. Couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

Anne:  I read all… I watched all the stuff and explained the fake history to Laura, as we went along, as is my wont, and why many of you would not want to watch TV with me. And I read all the books. I found them sort of hilarious but yeah. But these are good?

Michelle:  I’m enjoying this more than I did… I couldn’t make myself… the other one.

Anne:  From 1955. Yeah well.

Michelle:  I could not get past Elizabeth being “oh, oh oh”.

Anne:  I know.

Michelle:  I just couldn’t do it.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s all about how wonderful Elizabeth was which, if you have actually listened to our podcast – the first part of Princes in the Tower — you will know what it is that we think of Elizabeth the White Queen, which is that we don’t think much of her whatsoever, but that’s where we review that.

What piece of Game of Thrones is informed by this? I’m trying to figure this out.

Michelle:  So he’s talking not only about the scandal in here but he’s going through all of them from Philip IV down through Charles, the end of the Capetian line…

Anne:  Because that’s the curse.

Michelle:  Yeah. Yeah, that these kings just keep dropping dead.

Anne:  Well tennis! Hello! Tennis will kill anybody!

Michelle:  And actually the tennis they’re describing sounds more like racquetball.

Anne:  It’s pretty fierce, yeah.

Michelle:  I’m glad I get to do this part because it dovetails with my interest in adaptation.

Anne:  Uh huh.

Michelle:  This series was the source for two separate miniseries in France. At different times. 

Anne:  So maybe we can find those on YouTube.

Michelle:  I haven’t been digging around for that but I’m reading The Iron King and so far I’m enjoying it. So we’ll see. And I very much enjoyed George R.R. Martin’s foreword where he says, you know, “this is a mess and I enjoyed it and I used it as a source for Game of Thrones.”

Anne:  Huh. Well I’m going to have to look it up.

Michelle:  We need little counters for people who keep recurring. George R.R. Martin. Dumas. Dante.

Anne:  It’s all literary.

Michelle:  So this is another episode of historic stupidity that I find reassuring that people were super dumb in the past as well as now.

Anne:  No, that hasn’t changed about the humans whatsoever. It isn’t just the technology that’s changed, the consequences have often changed as we have been changing but no, people are just as dumb.

You had some stuff about the tower itself, the Tour de Nesle?

Michelle:  I have. I watched that video that you had sent about the building of it and then I read about where it came from but it’s not… it’s just kind of a building. Poor old Philip probably felt bad because he just bought the darn place in 1308 so I’m sure he wasn’t thinking “Ha ha, there my daughters-in-law will have a space to conduct their affairs, let me buy a tower!”

Anne:  Yeah it was a watchtower on the Seine before you got to Île-de-France. Yeah, that’s what it was, was a tower. We’ll put the link to the video on the making of the tower but really the tower is just where they supposedly met and it works out well for Dumas because then you can throw people out the window so, you know, there’s that. But they didn’t, they were just meeting there. They needed someplace away from the castle, obviously, so that no one would notice them. That worked really well. That was a good plan.

What we don’t know is how long those affairs were going on because all we know that was that they certainly were happening by 1313, the time that Isabella and Edward showed up and there was the puppet show and the gift-giving. We don’t know how long it was going on, that being the issue, of course, with the legitimacy of Joan.

Michelle:  And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t…

Anne:  You know, they might well have. Although I will say, having been a human, and having lived a very human life so far, one of the things that I notice about things like this that you’re trying to keep secret is that you tend to get messier as time goes on. So maybe the whole gift-giving thing was an emblem of how long it had been going on, that they were getting messier. Maybe they were just idiots, but if they had kept going and even if they hadn’t given the purses, at some point somebody was going to notice something, that is just the way it works. Very hard to keep this kind of thing under wraps. Especially when it’s two of you. I mean, one couple, maybe, you could keep this going for a while. Two of you? No, they were going to get found out. They were playing absolutely with fire.

Michelle:  Which makes it very interesting that Isabella ends up – as we’re going to talk about in some future episode – ends up in an affair herself. Because she watched this. She would have seen this all go down.

Anne:  Mmmhmm.

Michelle:  Shoot, I think I’m more surprised that Roger Mortimer gets involved after what happened to those knights.

Anne:  Well I do think that one of the things that would be different is that I think that Isabella did not see her husband as being as much of a danger and a hardass as her father and, well, I think that’s true. And also the issue of legitimacy had already… I mean there wasn’t any question about the legitimacy of Edward III. So that was over. The affair with Roger Mortimer is further along in her history, the arc of her life, than the affairs that her sisters-in-law had. So. But still it is ironic. Because she did have an affair! And she even killed her husband. But, as we say, a different podcast. We’re not going to connect these two.

Michelle:  A story for another time.

Anne:  Another time.

Anything else on our Tour de Nesle?

Michelle:  I had not heard of this! You keep finding things that I have never heard of. I have got to find something you have never heard of.

Anne:  I have full faith. You know, I am a little bit older. This was ironical, I’m actually quite older, those of you who don’t know us.

Michelle:  Obviously I missed a class in lurid medieval history that I totally would have taken!

Anne:  No, see this is just me. I never had a class in lurid medieval history, I went and found this stuff on my own, over the course of decades of being interested in things because, you know, I would go “Well, wait a minute, why?” The White Ship: “Well wait, why?” And then I’d go find out. Yeah, because I had heard of this, although I did not know as much about it as I do now. 

Next up… do you remember what we’re doing next? Because I do!

Michelle:  Oh, no, go ahead, I don’t remember right this instant.

Anne:  Next up we’re having another one of the horrible feasts. In fact it’s George R.R. Martin time again because this definitely one of the bloodfeasts that inspired him. The Black Dinner! The Black Dinner, at which two of the teenage Douglases were killed, at a dinner that was being given by the young –- I mean very young, a child – James II who pled for their lives – this was in 1440 – pled for their lives to no avail. I can’t help but think that wouldn’t, like, really affect your emotional upbringing. 

Yeah, so we’re going to have another horrible feast. We’ll have Scottish recipes! I’ll go looking for something.

Michelle:  We might need to be warning people. This is not the podcast to listen to while you’re trying to eat your lunch.

Anne:  Especially, yeah, don’t eat lunch. 

The last bloodfeast we had, I put the first recipe for lasagna, extant, into the show notes and it has the wonderful piece that, you know, you’re actually told, in Latin, to eat it with a pointy stick. I still haven’t figured that out. I don’t know how you eat lasagna with a pointy stick, but those are your instructions and so. I’ll find something for us to eat for the Scottish feast too.

By the way, I’m not eating any of these things. I’m just passing them on. And I am definitely not eating lasagna with a pointy stick. However, if somebody else wants to do it and post pictures of it in the comments I’d be so happy.

Michelle:  I just can’t imagine how that would work.

Anne:  Yeah. A pointed stick. You know, is this the precursor to the fork? Maybe. Maybe, but you really are going to have to invent another point to the stick because one of them doesn’t do it. And you can’t use it as a chopstick because you really need two, for that. And stabbing the lasagna is not going to go anywhere. I don’t know, are you rolling the lasagna around it? I don’t know.

Michelle:  I mean I’m kind of envisioning the lasagna noodle on the stick like a ribbon, but then you’re going to lose all the cheese. So this is not going to work.

Anne:  No, I don’t think it’s going to work well at all. I think the recipe itself sounds actually really good, and quite doable, and that would be nice, but the pointy stick part is just… for me it’s off the table. I’m just not… no. Bring the fruit!

Michelle:  If there’s just some drama. Maybe they have, you know, drama or entertainment going on in between the courses before they killed them. That would be nice.

Anne:  We’ll see.

So that’s it for this episode of True Crime Medieval, you can find us at truecrimemedieval.com. If you are listening to us on Apple, please go give a review. Oh! Did you know we had a review? We had a review! Yes! We do! 

Michelle: That’s cool.

Anne:  I know! It’s five stars but nobody wrote anything, but any rate. We need reviews on Apple in order for its little algorithm to find us and cough us up. If you are searching for “true crime” on Apple, we don’t come up yet, so that’s actually our goal is to have True Crime Medieval show up if you are just searching for “true crime”. Because we are a true crime podcast.

Michelle:  Among other things. We talk about lots of things.

Anne:  We are here to tell no lies. We tell no lies but we do amuse ourselves.

True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are nowadays only with less technology. And as we have pointed out, sometimes way different consequences.

Michelle:  But just as much stupidity.

Anne:  The stupidity, I tell ya, it just, you know, it doesn’t stop. It’s how the humans actually made it this far I often wonder, but there you go.

Well, these didn’t, they got tortured and executed or stuck in dungeons and so that’s us signing off.

Michelle: Bye!Anne: Bye.

Fra Alberigo, Faenza 1285

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

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

Anne:  Which we have discovered is mostly about jousting being the state sport.

Michelle:  And our flag is a heraldic device! We’re the only state… there’s a lot of states and counties and cities that have heraldic devices as part of their flag, but our whole entire flag is a heraldic device. It’s not technically a medieval device, it’s technically early modern, but if you look at it, it is utterly medieval in its sensibilities.

Anne:  Whose heraldic device is it?

Michelle:  Lord Baltimore.

Anne:  Oh! Of course! Silly me.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s Lord Baltimore’s, and he took two busy heraldic devices – one he inherited from his mom and one he inherited from dad – and they were already busy. One is black and yellow and the other is white and red. And then he quartered them together so we now have the most appallingly gaudy, lovely medieval flag.

Anne:  I have to go find this now. Perhaps we can put a picture of it in the Show Notes.

Michelle:  It is not technically medieval but it is completely in keeping with a medieval sensibility. Less is not more, more is more.

Anne:  More is more! More is always more. And you have to take things very literally.

Michelle:  He of course, you know, he was a Catholic lord, right? So that’s why he got sent here by James to Maryland, to help run Maryland. And then of course he got booted out by the Protestants who didn’t really want there to be a Catholic colony. So there was a whole coup against him, it was a thing.

Anne:  It was a bad a time to be a Catholic associated with England, and English things.

Michelle:  I have no fewer than eleven relatives who were sent here by the English after being on the wrong side of the Battle of the Boyne. All of them were transported.

Anne:  Eleven! That’s a lot. 

Michelle:  And plus one! Plus one who in the records… no, no, they were all on the wrong side of the Battle of the Boyne… and a twelfth came along and the records say he self-transported. Everybody else was getting sent so he just came along.

Anne:  That’s a nice history. I like that. The Battle of the Boyne. I’m sorry about that though, because that did not go well, from my point of view.

Michelle:  Naw, they got sent to Maryland in 1689.

Anne:  Unfortunately that’s outside of our brief so it’s, you know, we’re not going to get to do much with it. Oh well.

Well what are we discussing today, Michelle? Other than Maryland and Baltimore?

Michelle:  This is a great state! I love Maryland.

So I think it’s really interesting that here we are on Episode 8 and Dante is back in our sights.

Anne:  Yeah. Yeah, I think really Dante’s going to show up again. I’m just thinking probably.

Michelle:  I had not really thought about Dante as essentially being a true crime compilation of the 14^th century, but he absolutely is!

Anne:  It’s good to know: Dante, the true crime aficionado.

Michelle:  Well, and he’s taking revenge on people he’s got problems with. So here he is, right? He’s got Friar Al…

Anne:  Fra Alberigo…

Michelle:  He’s got him in Hell.

Anne:  Okay, well, let’s get to Dante in a minute.

Fra Alberigo does indeed end up in Dante’s version of Hell, when he’s not dead yet, because Dante, I don’t know, just says his crime is so terrible. Michelle will tell us more about that. But in 1285 – he died in 1307 – in 1285 he murdered a couple of his kinsmen at dinner, and so that’s what we’re talking about today. Because one of the things we’re noticing is how often, in the Middle Ages, true crimes take place at dinner.

Michelle:  It makes sense of the hospitality rules. We kind of think about those as being, oh, the quaint customs of the days of yore, when really what’s going on is no, we have to have this as an understanding: You don’t murder people when they’re under your roof! Because it was a big problem!

Anne:  It’s one of those things where you just… I did not raise my child, I did not say things like now make sure you don’t kill anybody at dinner. I never did. Because it was just not an issue. But apparently it used to be an issue.

Michelle:  We take it as a given but it turns out that it was not.

Anne:  Dinner was dangerous!

This was in Faenza, in 1285. Fra Alberigo belonged to the Guelph family of the Manfredi. In our first episode we talked about the Guelphs and the Ghibellines and today we don’t really need to go back to that because this family is in a Guelph faction but they don’t really have a lot to do with the Ghibellines.

The Guelphs had loyalty to the Pope, the Ghibellines had loyalty to the Holy Roman Emperor, and that’s basically where they’re at. All of Northern Italy goes back and forth and things are bad for a while, a couple few hundred years.

The Guelph family of the Manfredi had been banished from Faenza in 1274 but they came back in 1280. There was some kind of treachery and they were allowed back in. And they became a very powerful family, basically the rulers of Faenza, but what we’re talking about now, we’re kind of at the beginning of that.

Fra Alberigo’s close relative – he’s just called a “close relative,” he wouldn’t have been a brother, he’s some kind of cousin probably – Manfred, plotted against Alberigo to take the lordship of Faenza, that’s basically all he did. Although I have also seen some things that said that he insulted Fra Alberigo. So, that’s what he did. Let’s all think about how, really, that’s a capital crime. Okay, not! Any rate…

So Alberigo invited Manfred and his son to a banquet and after the dinner was over – I want to get back to that – after the dinner he called out “Bring the fruit!” and so a bunch of assassins jumped out from behind the tapestries and murdered the two kinsmen. Tada. That’s the true crime.

Later on, a few years after that, one of Alberigo’s brothers got murdered by a nephew – this was in 1327 – and they said that, like his uncle, he gave his guests “bad fruit.”

Here’s what I want to get back to, and Michelle I want your input on this; it strikes me as interesting that all of these bloodfeasts that we’re going to be talking about happen after pretty much the dinner has been consumed. I’m thinking isn’t that really a waste? I mean, why feed these people all this expensive food and then slaughter them? Why don’t you just, like, have them all sit down, hi, you sit here, ah yes, lovely to see you, oh here’s your napkin or whatever we’re using this year, you know, your spoon, and here’s your trencher bread, and then slaughter them, before you have to actually waste all this food on them? I just think it doesn’t make any sense to me. Michelle, why are people getting killed after they eat all their food and not before?

Michelle:  I would assume that you kill them afterwards because they’re going to be slower and possibly tipsy.

Anne:  All right.

Michelle:  Put people off their guard a little bit.

Anne:  Okay. That makes sense.

Michelle:  Now they’re a little sleepy and they’re a little slow and they’re ready to go head off to the couch for a nap…

Anne:  Too much turkey on Thanksgiving. 

Michelle:  Mmmhmm.

Anne:  Okay. This makes sense to me. That had not occurred to me at all. Thank god I work with you. Because I thought that, really, what a waste of food! But I see your point. 

Michelle:  It’s an investment.

Anne:  It’s an investment in your future!

Michelle: Because you’re less likely to lose one of your own people.

Anne:  Yeah, they’re less likely to be fighting back.

Michelle:  Now I do feel kind of bad for the assassins who have to hang out there behind the tapestries for two and a half hours while the banquet’s going on.

Anne:  I’m just hoping they’re getting paid well. Yeah, not until the fruit, and then you give your guests “bad fruit”.

Yeah, and if you just attack them immediately they’re still probably on their guard, because surely if you had insulted your kinsmen in a time and place where people were getting murdered fairly regularly over politics and, I don’t know, just dissing people, you might be a little on edge at first and so that’s right, so you need to feed people and also, you know, make small talk. Everybody feels better. And then you can kill them after they’ve eaten. Because I think, without exception, the red banquets that we’re going to be dealing with – I mean certainly the last one, Sweyn, it was after a three-day feast, was it not?

Michelle:  Oh yeah.

Anne:  Three days they ate food! And then he killed them.

Michelle:  And we didn’t know how long it was even planned to go. That was just how long it went.

Anne:  Yes, if you want to learn about that one you have to go back to our second podcast. I think that this was the second one we did.

So. Back to our background.

Central and Northern Italy in the 12^th and 13^th century, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines going back and forth. Faenza had been loyal at first to the Holy Roman Empire but then had changed sides in 1178. The Guelph Manfredi family would rule over Faenza for about two hundred years when the Borgias took the city. But that’s past our time, the Borgias.

At the time of our true crime, we’re near the beginning of the Manfredi rule, right after their banishment and their re-entry of 1280.

Now Fra Alberigo was one of the Jovial Friars. Michelle, had you heard about the Jovial Friars? Because I hadn’t.

Michelle:  Nope, that was new to me.

Anne:  Yeah! Well, and rightly so. They’re technically the Knights of St. Mary. They were a military order founded in 1261 by Pope Urban IV who stated, and I’m quoting here, “They are to be allowed to bear arms for the defense of the Catholic faith and ecclesiastical freedom when specifically required to do so by the Roman Church. For subduing civil discord” – which I think, actually, frankly, would include whacking people at dinner, but maybe not – “for subduing civil discord they may carry only defensive weapons provided they have the permission of the diocese.” End of quote. 

And they did not live in poverty. And women could join. And they were mostly supposed to help pacify the Lombard cities but since those were actually ruled by the Holy Roman Empire that didn’t work so well since they were papal forces, obviously. But they did manage to forge some connections between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines but essentially they fell into dissolution and un-monk-like behavior which is why they became called the Jovial Friars, fratres gaudentes, and they were suppressed in 1558 by Sixtus V.

It’s like the stupidest military order ever!

Michelle:  I had no idea that Friar Tuck had a historical background.

Anne:  He has a historical background! He really does! Because, you know, we’re not talking about the Templars here. No no no.

Michelle:  No.

Anne:  We’re talking about a bunch of people who are going around with weapons and basically indulging in un-monk-like behavior. Which I hate to think what that is given the fact that they’re actually allowed to get married and they don’t live in poverty, you know, they must be behaving very badly to have been getting called the Jovial Friars.

Michelle:  I bet they don’t have any secret tunnels under Antioch.

Anne:  No. Go to Antioch? Are you kidding? That’s hard work.

And they weren’t doing so much for, you know, helping subdue Lombardy. At any rate, yeah, I don’t know, I’m not having a whole lot of respect for this order. I’m going to talk about a feast later but why don’t you explain the Dante connection?

Michelle:  So this part is really fun.

Anne:  Is it more fun than the Jovial Friars and a bunch of medieval lasagna? That’s what I want to know.

Michelle:  Well, possibly not, but I thought this was amazing.

So he puts him in Hell, really, really deep in Hell, so not, like, a little bit, you know, the First or Second Circle or something. He’s all the way down here in the Ninth Circle. And I actually went on a little bit of an adventure looking up illustrations of Dante’s Hell, because it turns out that people started doing that really quickly. Well, relatively quickly after he wrote it. Artists start responding to his work and creating maps, essentially, of Hell.

Anne:  I’m not surprised, because when you read any of those volumes the putting it together in your brain takes up a lot of space. I’m not at all surprised that artists wanted to draw maps. Did they just do the Inferno or did they do…?

Michelle:  No, they did all. They did all three of them. But of course Inferno is the most fun. And it fits, you know, with the kind of artwork that’s happening in the late Middle Ages in terms of judgment. One of the most famous early ones was done by Botticelli! Botticelli did a series of ninety illustrations for commission by Lorenzo de‘Medici. Isn’t that wild!

Anne:  I love that! Does it include the Ninth Circle then? It must.

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  Well we’ll see if we can find it for the website.

Michelle:  So, just a recap, just in case Dante wasn’t the thing you were reading last week: Nine circles in Hell, they’re concentric so as you go down they get smaller and smaller which means that the Ninth is the smallest, inner circle reserved for the worst sins. It’s a frozen lake. We modern people have a concept of Hell that it’s hot but for a significant portion of the Middle Ages, and in significant places, they think about it as being cold. Which makes lots of sense right? In a time when you don’t have indoor heating, cold is pretty bad.

Anne:  I’ve lived through the polar vortex in Pittsburgh, I can speak to this. Yeah, cold is not great. Why would one move to New Mexico? Though we had a blizzard yesterday.

Michelle:  I think you’ve had more snow this winter than we have had. We have had no winter at all.

Anne:  It is cold here today but it is not the polar vortex.

Michelle:  It was 65 yesterday. I had the pool robot in the pool, getting the sand and stuff out that has washed into it.

So, in the Ninth circle of Hell there are four little rings, right? So Dante is all about the bureaucracy of Hell and everything is really organized and he’s thought a lot about, you know, this sin compared to that sin, and so you have the subdivision. So you have him dividing up the first ring within the Ninth Circle is Caina, named for Cain, and that’s for treachery to kin, which you’d think is where he is but it’s not.

Anne:  Yeah, because really Fra Alberigo was very treacherous to some kinfolk.

Michelle:  But that’s not where he ends up. The second one is Antenora, which is named for Antenor, the counselor to King Priam of Troy, who betrayed Troy to the Greeks. So that’s treachery to country.

Ptolomea is the third circle which is named for Ptolemy the captain of Jericho who murdered his father-in-law Simon Maccabee and his two brothers-in-law after treating them to a feast. This is treachery to guests and hosts, so that’s where he puts him.

And of course then the last ring is Judecca named for Judas Iscariot, treachery to one’s master.

So here he is, right? He’s in the Ninth Circle, in the third realm! There’s only one step further down.

Anne:  So treachery to guests and hosts is worse than treachery to country and kinfolk?

Michelle:  Apparently. Which tells us a lot about how important this was considered, that if you come in under the rule of hospitality and you break it, on either side, you are a horrible human being.

The punishment here – Dante expends a lot of creative energy thinking up horrible things that are happening to people in Hell, and describing them in loving and possibly frightening detail – the punishment here is that they are frozen in ice but their faces are half above the ice, so half the face is under the ice and half is above, and so they try to cry and feel sorry for what they’ve done but the tears freeze in their eyes. So they’re not even allowed the comfort of weeping and it ends up forming an ice goggle over it, over their face, so that they can’t see what’s going on and when Dante shows up down there, in Ptolomea, the soul that he sees there begs him to, you know, break that off and “talk to me and let me find out what’s going on in the world.” So he promises him “I’ll do that if you,” – Dante promises, you know – “if you tell me a little bit about who you are.”

“I am Friar Alberigo,” he answered therefore,

             “the same who called for the fruits from the bad garden.

            “Here I am given dates for figs full store.”

“What! Are you dead already?” I said to him.

            And he then: “How my body stands in the world

            I do not know. So privileged is this rim

of Ptolomea, that often souls falls to it

            before dark Atropos has cut their thread.

            And that you may more willingly free my spirit

of this glaze of frozen tears that shrouds my face,

            I will tell you this: when a soul betrays as I did,

            it falls from flesh, and a demon takes its place,

ruling the body till its time is spent.

So this is some interesting theology that Dante pulls out here, which I had forgotten. It’s been probably two decades since I read Inferno and I had completely forgotten that, in order to put Friar Alberigo here in Hell, he has to come up with this questionable theology that it is possible to do something so bad that you are instantly damned – do not pass Go! – and your body is then inhabited by a demon who’s just apparently going through your date book and doing what you normally would do because you don’t have free will anymore.

Anne:  Well, and being a Jovial Friar, in this case, you know they were pretty badly behaved, apparently, so there you go.

Michelle:  You want to know something really funny? My kid, my youngest child, is listening to a podcast right now called Good Morning From Hell in which the premise of the podcast is that the Host has died and his punishment is that he has to do a podcast from Hell every day with Satan’s younger brother Clayton. But they actually whip this theology out! In the episode that he and I were listening to this morning this theology is presented, that somebody can be damned even though they’re alive and their body is just being kind of steered around by a demon for a while.

Anne:  That is just so problematic.

Michelle:  Oh my gosh, yes.

Anne:  Why does Dante care so much about being able to talk about the dreadfulness of Fra Alberigo that he puts him in Hell when he actually isn’t dead yet? What it is that draws Dante to this? Do you know?

Michelle:  I have no idea what particular horse he has in this race. Something about this is deeply personal to Dante.

Anne:  Aren’t there some other people that he could stick down in Hell who killed their guests? He doesn’t need to use Fra Alberigo unless there’s some personal reason.

Michelle:  He puts people in Hell the same way that the aliens destroy the world and it always starts with Washington D.C. unless it’s in Doctor Who in which case it’s always London, right?

Anne:  It’s always London, yeah.

Michelle:  Hell is very local.

Anne:  Well then I wonder how much it has to do with Fra Alberigo having completely gotten away with this, because the only thing that happens to him after he notoriously murders his kinsmen at dinner, as far as I can tell, is that Dante puts him in a poem. He doesn’t go to jail, he doesn’t get arrested, there isn’t any trial, there’s just a boy is he a very bad Jovial Friar, even worse than usual! That’s it. So maybe Dante’s annoyed about that.

Michelle:  And slightly after he talks to him he goes on to the next one who has committed exactly the same thing, Branca d’Oria.

Anne:  Is he actually dead at the time of the writing?

Michelle:  Nope! He also has the same questionable theology of being stuck in Hell where Dante has put him even though he is not dead.

Anne:  Well it makes you really want to be careful about going out to dinner because you never know when your host is going to actually be a demon. I see a movie franchise here.

Michelle:  I’m trying really hard to come up with a Fantastic Beasts joke and I’m not getting there. You know, Fantastic Feasts and How to Survive Them? You know, like that? That’s what I was going for. But I came up with it too late.

Anne:  Sorry it didn’t work. Oh well. I’m going to leave that in.

So what about the – who’s the other person next to Fra Alberigo in Dante’s Hell, by the way? Let’s take a little segue. I want to know.

Michelle:  His name is Branca d’Oria, and he commits almost exactly the same thing. He is a Genoese Ghibelline…

Anne:  Ah! So the opposite side. 

Michelle:  Yeah, fair and balanced here.

In 1275 he invited his father-in-law, he went to a banquet and had him and his companions cut to pieces. So he killed his father-in-law and his father-in-law’s companions.

Anne:  Why?

Michelle:  I don’t know. That’s not in the footnote.

Anne:  They dissed him, obviously. This is what happens to you. You make some cutting remark because you’re having a bad day and then you go to dinner and you get killed. It’s hard in Italy in the 13^th century. It’s just hard. How anybody survived I don’t know.

Michelle:  And they’re pre-damned. They’re not even dead yet but they got the TSA pre-check and there they are.

Anne:  And so there they are still in that particular reality. To the extent to which this is true, that’s still happening. Alrighty then. There’s maybe a Jovial Friars club down there, you know?

Michelle:  So I found a poem about him, not just Dante’s poem of course but a contemporary, written-now poem called Friar Alberigo’s Bad Fruit and it was submitted to Non-Binary Review’s Dante’s Inferno issue. This is an amazing literary magazine to have discovered. They send out calls for each issue, and each issue is themed, and it’s a response to something else literary. So this whole issue ended up being people responding to Dante’s Inferno in some way. This particular poem was not actually accepted for the issue but they did a really cool podcast where they read the poem and then explained what they liked about it and what they thought could have been better. But they had really interesting things to say about it, and the whole concept that there is a literary magazine where everything, you know, each issue is some other work of literature and then you send in a response to it, is really interesting.

Anne:  I like that. Do we have the poem?

Michelle:  I have the website for it. 

Anne:  Oh, we’ll put the website in the Show Notes. And what’s the name of the podcast again, that it was on?

Michelle:  It’s the Non-Binary Review and it was their editorial podcast.

Anne:  It’s amazing to me that people are actually still talking about Fra Alberigo. Although I guess we are, so there’s that. 

It’s like, he’s nothing! The only reason he shows up in history is that Dante is annoyed with him. That’s it. This is not a famous guy. He just murdered his guests before the fruit course, and that’s it.

Michelle:  Yeah, he would not be remembered if Dante had not decided that it was time to shove him into some eternal punishment. It’s actually pretty difficult to dig up…  I was amazed at how much you found about him because I was finding nothing.

Anne:  I worked hard on this, believe me.

Michelle:  Hence my deep dive into Dante.

Anne:  Yeah. Well you know we think these things up, oh look here’s a crime, and then we just, you know, we figure we’ll find out some stuff and then we’ll say some stuff and I’m like, Fra Alberigo, basically he’s Dante’s show pony, that’s about it.

But, I did find some things out. And I also, I went looking for details about 13^th century Italian feasts. When we had the last bloodfeast –  Denmark , what was that? 10^th century? 8^th century? Something like that. And the recipe that I chose to focus on there was some ghastly thing made out of some wheat…

Michelle:  Oh yeah! The white pudding, or something disgusting.

Anne:  Very very bad. But first of all we’re some few hundred years along and we’re in Italy, and the Italian feasts in 13^th century Europe were the best in Europe at the time because of the Mediterranean spice trade. French food would win out later, but it’s Italian feasts at the moment.

By the 13^th century everybody was eating pasta, which was made from rice, not wheat. This made me cheery because the pasta that I eat now is made from rice, not wheat, since I can’t eat wheat, so it’s very timely. Pasta way pre-dates Marco Polo, so forget that. By the 13^th century everybody was eating it, and Italian banquets had a great many courses with two or more dishes in every course. They might start with pasta. The feast would include soups, meats, roast, cheesecakes, and of course fruit at the end of it. In the Show Notes I’ll add a recipe for lasagna. The earliest recipe for lasagna we’ve got is from the Liber de Coquina, it’s the oldest known recipe book. It’s Italian from the 13^th century and it says: Roll pasta very thin, cook in boiling salted water, serve with grated cheese. That’s it. 

Michelle:  That sounds lots better than the White Mash.

Anne:   Way better. There’s a later recipe from the 1300s that adds ground walnuts and you serve it with spices and sugar. Same time period; there’s alternate lasagna – you add what’s called “fatty cheese,” so I think that’s a soft cheese. And also they deep-fried the pasta and served it with spices and sugar. Or cut it small and mixed it with grated cheese and butter and that will become macaroni and cheese. So both macaroni and cheese and lasagna have medieval roots in Italy. So. We’ll give you a lasagna recipe in the Show Notes.

Michelle:  And apparently deep-fried.

Anne:  Deep-fried! Deep-fried pasta! You cook the pasta first, and then the medieval recipes don’t say this but you want to shake the water off, you do not want to add water into your deep fryer! Then you deep-fry it and you put sugar and spices on it and I believe I’ve had something much like that at church fairs, yeah?

Michelle:  Yeah, probably. I was thinking state fairs, where you deep-fry everything, including Oreos.

Anne:  Okay that’s too much.  But yeah, lasagna.

So it was a lovely feast. They had a lovely, lovely feast and then he called for fruit. Fra Alberigo called for fruit, as he says to Dante one of the things he’s being tormented with is not being given figs but being given dates instead.

Michelle:  The Dante companion I looked at said that what’s going on there is that dates were more expensive, so he’s whining that he’s being punished out of proportion with what he did. So here he is in Hell whining…

Anne:  Is he getting figs instead of dates?

Michelle:  He’s getting dates. He called for figs but he’s getting dates back. This is a disproportionate response! It’s not fair! Which is really far…

Anne:  He’s whining because he’s being given dates in Hell?

Michelle:  No, it’s a metaphor. That he called for figs but he’s being repaid more than what he committed.

Anne:  Oh I see. I see, he called for figs…

Michelle:  He’s whining about his punishment.

Anne:  Oh, okay, which is eternal damnation. Okay, fair enough. I can see that.

Michelle:  So I love that Dante not only is punishing him, he’s making him whine about his punishment.

Anne:  Yes, with a fruit metaphor. Because it’s all about fruit. “Bring the fruit!” Next time you come to visit I’m going to have courses and I’ll say “Bring the fruit” and we’ll just laugh and laugh.

Michelle:  And then I’ll be worried.

Anne:  No, I’m not going to be slaughtering anybody at my dinner table. 

So that’s it, I believe, for Fra Alberigo. We’ve been edified with whole bunches of stuff about Dante and medieval lasagna and a little bit about Fra Alberigo who really, basically, exists in the pages of Dante. That’s basically where he is, mostly. Anything to add on this?

Michelle:  I suppose the lesson is that if you want to go for immortality, annoy a poet.

Anne:  You know that really is one way to think of it. You know you think you don’t want to annoy the poets or they’ll put you in their poems but, you know, hey, you could annoy the poets and then people would still be talking about you hundreds and hundreds of years later, even though really they knew not much about you except what the poet said.

I don’t know. I don’t want to annoy poets. I think it’s a bad move.

See, the thing is, I have absolute faith that you can pick any crime up and there’s going to be something to talk about. There’s always background and there’s always interesting connections. So. I just have faith.

Michelle:  This one, this was pretty thin on the ground. It was really difficult to find stuff about him, so I finally just threw my hands up and said I’m going to research Dante.

Anne:  Yeah, so we had Dante, we had lasagna, we had the Jovial Friars. But that actually is one of the things that fascinates me, that there is so little to find out about him. This is not one of the…. It’s an awful crime but it’s not one of the great crimes of the Middle Ages. It’s like medieval Italians whacking each other at dinner, it’s like it goes unnoticed, you know? Beatrice Cenci, there’s a lot about that, that was a whole trial. They didn’t even arrest this guy! If it wasn’t for Dante nobody else cared, as far as I can tell.

Michelle:  Nobody would know.

Anne:  Nobody would know.

Michelle:  And it’s not like the other one, the one that follows, Branca D’Oria, is any better-known. They’re both kind of, you know, footnotes that matter because Dante cared about them.

Anne:  Right. Yeah, so a great deal of the information comes from footnotes in editions of Dante. There’s no trial stuff to go back to, even in the history of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines it’s just not that big a deal. One of the interesting things to me, what the hell, both why does Dante make such a big deal out of this guy and why isn’t he a bigger deal already? Both those things. Very odd.

Michelle:  Well it is, I mean, it’s pretty darn interesting that he makes the very last stop before, you know, the mouth of Satan, treachery to hosts and guests.

Anne:  Right. Because after that it’s Judas and you can’t get any lower than Judas.

Michelle:  Yeah, you have Judecca and that’s treachery to your masters and mostly there you just have Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius. 

Anne:  Yup.

Michelle:  Getting chewed on by…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  So he’s just about the lowest you can get. There’s only one step further.

Anne:  Yeah and so many of the other true crimes that Dante talks about actually are famous. Are known. This one not.

The next time we meet we are going to be talking about the Tour de Nesle scandal so we’re going to go to France and that will be lovely. That will be the end of courtly love. That’s going to be the death knell of courtly love, and plus we’ll get to talk some about Isabel the She-Wolf who will later go on to have Edward II murdered. Because it’s like murder all the time!

Michelle:  So we’ll probably be talking about…

Anne:  About what?

Michelle:  We’ll probably be talking about her again then, if she had him murdered.

Anne:  Yes, yes because we’ll want to talk about Edward II, absolutely, we’re just not there yet.

But when we talk about the Tour de Nesle scandal there won’t actually be any technical murder, although there will be some executions. So that’s our teaser. So we are True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just as bad as they are nowadays only with less technology. If you are listening to us on Apple please leave a review. We’re on Spotify. What else are we on? We’re on…

Michelle:  Stitcher. That’s what I use.

Anne:  Oh we’re on Stitcher! Yes we’re on Stiticher.

So you can listen to us on various places, leave us reviews. That would be great, and for now we’re signing off.

Michelle:  Bye!

Els von Eystett, Nördlingen 1471

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

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

Anne:  Someday I’m going to figure out what you mean by that.

Michelle:  Oh, gosh, have you not seen our flag?

Anne: Oh, it’s your flag!

Michelle:  Our state sport is jousting!

Anne:  The state sport is jousting? We don’t have a state sport. We have a state cookie. But we don’t have a state sport, I’m pretty sure about that.

Michelle:  Jousting. How the hell did this happen?

Anne:  That is hilarious. 

So, on to what we’re talking about today. What are we talking about today, Michelle?

Michelle:  So we are talking about the case of Els von Eystett. In 1471, Els was working at a brothel – possibly not voluntarily – in Nördlingen, Germany, when rumors began to circulate that she had been pregnant but the brothel-keeper and his wife had forced her to drink a concoction that aborted her pregnancy.

Anne:  That was it. And so that led to a giant investigation and so we’ll talk about all that. If you were paying attention you noticed that we sort of dropped out of sight for a few weeks and the reason was that it was Christmas and our recording of Gilles de Rais and the badnesses of him had gotten lost in cyberspace for awhile and we couldn’t re-record it because one of us was really busy, being in the Midwest on Christmas, and also we didn’t want to, really, because we had had enough of Gilles de Rais just talking about him once. But we got him back! And so that got released a couple weeks ago, now we’re on Els von Eystett and so that’s where we were. Just wanted to let you know. Because there’s some kind of curse on Gilles de Rais. It ate your show notes too, Michelle, isn’t that true?

Michelle:  Which was super creepy because I had them when I wrote the show notes but then when I went back to re-look at them, the thing that I had saved it under was actually a copy of my Svein prep notes. So I want to reconsider the question of whether Gilles sold his soul to the devil, because I’m thinking the answer might be different.

Anne:  We have to find out if anything goes wrong with Laurie’s transcripts. By the time ya’ll hear this, this will all have been settled out and, you know, put onto the website, but the Gilles de Rais episode cost us dearly in our mental stability, we’re just saying. We’re so relieved to be getting to talk about abortion and prostitution in Germany in the Middle Ages, which seems much less horrendous than Gilles de Rais who may, as Michelle says, maybe he did sell his soul to the devil. I might have been all wrong about that. 

Michelle:  Something’s going on with him.

Anne:  Something’s going on, yeah. Something’s going on. Maybe the efforts to rehabilitate him kind of, like, raised him from obscurity. We don’t have limbo anymore, that got thrown out, but there may be some other kind of place where people just wander around, maybe the efforts to rehabilitate his reputation have given him a new life and so that’s even… that makes the rehabilitation efforts even worse than they were, really. 

Michelle:  Yeah, I’m really happy that we don’t have to re-record that episode because I really wasn’t looking forward to spending more time with him.

Anne:  No, we don’t like him.

Michelle:  Creepy dude that he is.

Anne:  We don’t like him, and we don’t like the people who are rehabilitating him. We like Joan of Arc! Joan of Arc’s great, but she didn’t really have anything to do with it, except for the play. Oh, and we like the play! The play was good.

Michelle:  The play is interesting.

Anne:  We’ll move on to the case of Els von Eystett. The background of this is that she was working in Nördlingen, in the public brothel there. Throughout the late Middle Ages, across Europe, public brothels were an institution. This is not a piece of medieval culture that Michelle and I had spent a lot of time on and we didn’t know this, so we’re fascinated.

Throughout Western Europe – I read someplace where they said not England, but actually there was stuff being regulated in England too, for instance in Southwark, rather than in London.

The brothel-keeper would swear an oath to the city. They had a license, they paid an annual fee, and the women working there paid for their room and board and gave a percentage of their earnings, typically about a third, to the brothel-keeper. They were supposedly allowed to keep tips. Theoretically this kept everything well-regulated and, theoretically, it gave the women some sort of protection, but once a woman was in a brothel it was very hard to get out. The debts to the brothel-keeper accumulated through various means, mostly not… it was mostly unsavory. The practice actually, looking forward, the practice died out at the Reformation. Brothels didn’t disappear, of course, but they were no longer civic institutions and, although we won’t be talking about them, at least in this episode, the public licensed brothels were, of course, not the only game in town. There would be people operating brothels out of their home, there would be streetwalking, so it was the only form of prostitution but that was the regulated form across Europe.

In Els’ case there was a brothel madam named Barbara Tarscheinfeindin, and a brothel-keeper named Lienhart Fryermut. Els, yeah, she was forced into prostitution, she had been the kitchen maid – this is according… all of the information we’ve got is from the trials and the witnesses were the other prostitutes and Els herself. More on that later.

She was forced into prostitution and she got pregnant and Barbara forced her to drink a concoction of – and we’re told specifically – it’s periwinkle, clove, wild carrot, which is Queen Anne’s Lace, and wine. We’re going to talk more about abortion in the Middle Ages later, but that’s what she was given to drink. She had strong abdominal pains and she miscarried a twenty-week-old male fetus. And she was forced to go back to work immediately and she told clients what had been going on, and the other prostitutes knew because they had been taking care of her, and the rumor of the crime – it’s the abortion, it’s the late-term abortion that’s specifically a crime – the rumor of the crime reached the city council and the authorities came by to tell them, to tell Lienhart, that there was going to be an investigation. So he beat Els, who told him that he could hack off her arms and legs and she wouldn’t stop talking. This is one of my favorite things about Els, is that she would not shut up. I love this.

So the brothel-keepers made a deal with her. They dropped her debt, in other words they freed her, in exchange for her silence and for her slipping away quietly. So she was supposed to just get out of the brothel. At dinner, I think, they were sending her to, like, go get some milk or something and she was supposed to disappear. So she did leave and she left the city but she had already told the other girls about the plan so they all knew.

So the inquiry! The inquiry went forward. The inquiry was two-pronged. One piece had to do with the abortion, and that evidence came from the prostitutes who had tended to her, and also from Els, whose testimony was recording in Weissenburg, where she had gone after she had left Nördlingen. But they also investigated the conditions in the brothel, because in order to keep your brothel license, you took an oath and you were supposed to adhere to some certain standards, and they had not.

Michelle:  The conditions in that brothel, the particular one she was working in, are pretty reminiscent of how coal-mining worked, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, where they’re having to buy things at an exorbitant rate from the brothel-keeper and his wife. It’s a “company town” situation, they’re never getting out of debt because they’re being overcharged for their clothing, they’re being overcharged for their food, for their lodging. It wasn’t supposed to work like that, but that clearly is how they were…

Anne:  There’s a lot of work done on this. If you go off to research not just this case but prostitution in the Middle Ages, there’s so much wonderful work that’s been done on it. And so it’s pretty clear that this was – the whole “company town” method was – a rather common way of keeping women essentially enslaved. But also many of them had been – in fact in this case it was almost all of them – had been sold to the brothel in the first place. Their families had needed money and so that was getting worked off. This is sex trafficking. That was getting worked off. So there’s this list… I’ve got this wonderful list of what the prostitutes said has been going on. I don’t know whether you ran into this Michelle, but I wrote it all down.

So they said that most of them had been sold to the brothel and were heavily in debt from the beginning. That they were beaten when they tried to refuse customers. That they were forced to work both on holy days and when they were menstruating. These things were illegal in terms of the contract. That Lienhart confiscated their tips, which was also illegal, and forced them to give him cash gifts periodically, like on the high holy days, and that he increased their debts by forcing them to buy goods, their food for instance – this is the “company store” situation – at high, inflated prices. That their clothes… when they went into the brothel their clothes were confiscated so they were essentially naked – they had their underwear – they couldn’t go out of the brothel. When “sleeping” customers – those were the customers who contracted… they wanted to not just come and visit but they wanted to spend the night, that cost extra – when sleeping customers didn’t show up the women were forced to pay the extra money that they would have been charged anyway. They were forced to spin as extra work, which was allowed in some places but not in Nördlingen. They were not allowed to hear Mass. They were given disgusting food and they were not given extra food when they were menstruating, which was legally required. They were beaten with a bullwhip, sometimes with a rod or a belt. In other words, in that particular brothel, the usually bad conditions were especially godawful. Do you want to add anything to the stuff about brothels in the Middle Ages?

Michelle:  There’s a couple things about this that I thought were really, really interesting. About this case in particular, but about the way that they worked in general. I was fascinated, I didn’t know, as you had said, that this was a thing. That the municipal brothels… like you’d have municipal baths, you would have municipal brothels. My absolute favorite piece of this was discovering that during civic pageants, when you’re welcoming foreign dignitaries in, you might well have the municipal sex workers there, as part of the pageant, demonstrating the hospitality that is available in the city. Isn’t that fascinating?

Anne:  Do you have details for how that was, um, was that staged as part of a pageant tableau, or were they just around handing out flowers and little wafers? Do you know how that was done?

Michelle:  I don’t but it’s in more than one source so I believe it is a thing. It’s in this History Todayarticle that just showed up in June of 2019 called “Inside the Medieval Brothel,” and then it’s also in the prostitution chapter in The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, although it would be really interesting to know, you know, as a drama person, how exactly was that done? No, that would be very fascinating.

I think it’s really fascinating that there are these rules about how they were supposed to be treated, you know? And it would be really interesting to know whether most municipal brothels were like this, where everybody is just getting treated as badly as the brothel-keeper can manage, or whether you have more people who are kind of trying to follow the rules and basically treat people decently. Given the reaction, the shocked and horrified reaction to this and how hard they come done on them implies that there… however much mistreatment there is, these guys are over the top, and it’s not going to be tolerated.

Anne:  I think that’s pretty clear. There’s an idea that, even though these women basically, as far as society is concerned, they just don’t count, even so they are not to be treated like this. This was too far.

Michelle:  So I found that really fascinating. I also found fascinating that the reason this is a crime is because of when it’s happening in pregnancy, not that it’s happening. The nuances of when a pregnancy is considered to exist were really, really interesting. I didn’t know that it wasn’t, you know, abortion wasn’t on the books in England as a crime until 1803.

Anne:  Oh really?

Michelle:  Isn’t that interesting? I know! It’s not until 1803, and it’s not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX drops, basically quoting now: “Dropped the distinction between formed and unformed fetus and therefore the point where ensoulment occurred. The practical and perceived result was that the Catholic Church recognized that life, hence ensoulment, begins at conception.” This, every piece of this is fascinating. 

The whole argument about when the soul shows up was a really fascinating sort of rabbit hole that I went down, during this research, because there are deeply troubled theologians worrying about when does the soul show up? And they took it for granted that it can’t be at the beginning because you cannot possibly have a soul that is attached to this tiny little thing that looks like an animal, because of course they know what fetuses look like from miscarriages, right? And tiny little early fetuses, they can’t possibly be a soul because what will they do at the Resurrection of the Dead? You can’t have a soul attached to that, it can’t move, it doesn’t really have a body. So they decide that can’t be a thing. So they decide that it has to look basically… they come up with this whole thing where early on in pregnancy it’s an animal and then, once it gets the soul, it starts to look like a person. So basically they take the very sort of practical perspective that once it starts to look like a human, it’s a human. You know, around 18-20 weeks.

Anne:  This is late enough then.

Michelle:  Yeah, this was too late. But if they had, you know, had her take the miscarriage drug earlier – 8 weeks, 10 weeks – everything would have been fine because it wasn’t even considered a pregnancy it was just considered knocking your period lose because it got stuck.

Anne:  Right. And so that would have been, probably, fairly common. We can talk more about how that worked, but yeah. It’s the 20 weeks.

Yeah, so, Barbara and Lienhart were dismissed from their post, obviously. They had not behaved well as civil servants, and they were banished from the city, specifically across the Rhine. They were supposed to leave. Barbara was also branded on the forehead for her role in aborting the child, and so that’s how that all ended up.

We don’t know anything about what happened to Els after the trial. There’s no more record of her.

Michelle:  But her testimony implies that she wanted that child, and I thought that that was interesting too.

Anne:  Yeah, because if she had not, it would have been very easy. She would have simply said earlier that she wanted that… no, she hadn’t wanted to do the work and she wanted to keep the child and it’s so clear that she sees herself as having had her rights violated. The whole business about “you can hack me up and I’m not going to start talking,” that’s lovely. That’s lovely. I honor this woman.

Because all of this, all of this hinges on everything being kept secret and she refused to do it. And the other prostitutes talked too, so that forced abortion was appalling to all of them, and was actually quite dangerous.

Abortion was known in the Middle Ages but usually early, because the later it is the more danger you’re in. The problem with all of the herbs is that, especially for the later developments in pregnancy, is that if the herb is toxic to the fetus it’s toxic to the mother, and so that’s especially an issue.

I have some stuff about the later abortion herbs. Do you want to talk about the essentially “morning after” herbs that you ran into?

Michelle:  So there’s a chapter in this Handbook of Medieval Sexuality which talks a lot about the herbs that were referred to, kind of, as “menstrual regulators,” which everybody knew meant… some of them function actually as contraceptives but most of them function as kind of “morning after” pills. Things like rue, myrrh, and the list is enormous, there’s about thirty of them! Rue, myrrh, tansy, pennyroyal. So things like ginger, celery, fennel, Queen Anne’s Lace is one of them, which I thought was really interesting. Tansy… the chapter makes the point that some of these things are still sold in natural stores with no warning whatsoever that, you know, modern women could very easily be harming themselves with a wanted pregnancy because this knowledge was passed down from women to woman but not apparently now.

Anne:  Well, yes, and now it’s very easily available on the Internet, and many herbal books, yeah.

Michelle:  Artemisia – am I saying this correctly? The chapter talks specifically about that one, and about juniper.

Anne:  Juniper? Like the little buds that you use in gin? Or the leaves? What? Does it tell you?

Michelle:  It’s the berries. The juniper berries.

Anne:  The berries, yeah. Huh. And of course you’re never told exactly how much to use.

Michelle:  There’s a pretty fascinating recipe from… this is in the Benedictine Abbey at Lorsch, in what is now Germany, has a manuscript that is medicine…

Anne:  When is it from?

Michelle:  This was written about the year 800. So pretty early.

Anne:  Very early Middle Ages.

Michelle:  Very early. And it has a medical… it has a recipe for a very bland-sounding “a cure for all kinds of stomach-ache.” But then when you read into the description of it, it says “for women who cannot purge themselves, it moves the menses,” and all but one of the ingredients were not only known then to be in this category of contraceptive, anti-fertility drugs, but have been shown with modern experimentation… the chapter’s really interesting because it makes the point that not only in the Middle Ages do we see the use of anti-fertility herbs that were known in classical times, but clearly experimentation is going on because new ones are being added that are not known in classical texts.

Anne:  Uh huh.

Michelle:  Well, you know, there’s a lot of motivation, right? I can tell you a story that we can cut out later about my grandmother with the eleven children who, after about the eighth…

Anne:  Tell me the story and we can talk about whether or not we cut it out. Tell me the story.

Michelle:  So my grandmother had eleven children, nine with one ovary. She was told after she had to have the ovary removed, “Well, it’s a good thing you already have your son and your daughter because we had to remove this one ovary and you probably won’t have any more children.” Well, she has nine more with just the one ovary. After about the eighth one, she was known to say that if eating dog shit would keep you from getting pregnant, she would have been entirely on board with that.

Anne:  That’s actually very close to… eating various forms of shit in the Middle Ages was indeed supposed to be… that was actually in one of the recipes, yeah.

Michelle:  So actually… oh Hildegard knows about this too! This was another really interesting thing in this chapter, that Hildegard, the Abbess of Bingen – Hildegard of Bingen – in some of her writing is deeply familiar with these anti-fertility drugs which, you know, is not as surprising as it might be, right? If you’re the head of a convent, every once in a while it might come up as a thing you need to deal with.

Anne:  Yeah, I suppose it would. Yeah, if you’re just around women in general.

So Els found herself in this place where she wasn’t able to get out of being a prostitute. I don’t know if… had she been sold as a kitchen maid? We don’t know that part. But she wasn’t able to escape that. She got pregnant. One of her clients later had said that he had been kind of, like, amazed that she had been so big and then she was so much smaller. Because he really was astute!

What the trial transcripts tell us she was given was a mixture of periwinkle* and clove and wild carrot – what here we call Queen Anne’s Lace – in wine. This is so interesting to me because the wild carrot is useful, according to everything I can find, as a bringing-on-the-menses, “morning after” type of drug, but I don’t see it being used as an actual abortion drug. And the clove wouldn’t do it and the wine wouldn’t do it and the periwinkle* wouldn’t do it so it would have to be the wild carrot that’s in action here and I don’t know how much of it you would have to take in order to have the late miscarriage brought on that she had.

If you go to see, like, what was the advice that we get – written down, the word of mouth of course is gone but what – the advice that we get written down for how to abort in the Middle Ages, there’s a lot of advice for methods that just simply would not work. But I guess at least gave you something to do. I mean wouldn’t work at all, and wouldn’t kill either you or the child. But there were some methods that would work but the thing was they were all incredibly dangerous. It’s just very, very dangerous.

The most common for the later were tansy, which, in large doses, can cause liver damage, brain damage, convulsion. It’s not usually considered that toxic, you have to take it in large doses for anything to happen at all. So there’s that. And pennyroyal, which I know in the ‘70s, was very well-known, it was something we all knew about. Often, nowadays, people are working with pennyroyal oil, which is extraordinarily toxic. This was not the case in the Middle Ages, they were using the dried leaves, they were using pennyroyal tea. Which is a very good insect repellent which kind of like, I think, says some stuff. But even the tea itself has been known – this is actually cases this is not rumor – has been known to kill infants and children and elderly people. The tea is not as toxic as the oil but in large doses, even with adults it can cause dizziness, weakness, hallucination, liver failure. But the wild carrot! There’ve been studies in Europe. This hasn’t been an issue in America but there’ve been studies in Europe about horses and cattle – livestock – eating wild carrot and spontaneously aborting. It’s used medicinally for digestive disorders, kidney and bladder diseases, but also if you look it up you will see that it says “not recommended for pregnant women,” because it can cause uterine contractions. So that’s what it’s being used for in this case.

Michelle:  Pills of this stuff were being sold well into the nineteenth century, through newspapers, under the “French renovating pills” or “female monthly pills” or “menstrual regulators”. So you could basically just buy the morning-after pill.

Anne:  Wild carrot?

Michelle:  That, but also rue. You know, concoctions with basically all of those. Pennyroyal…

Anne:  Pennyroyal pills were being sold?

Michelle:  Mmm hmm. Just over the counter, you know. But also the same newspapers were selling vibrators, so, we’re not… you know, the nineteenth century isn’t the way people think it is. 

Anne:  No, the nineteenth century is very scary, actually. I feel safer in the Middle Ages than in the nineteenth century.

Michelle:  Yeah, I’m reading a book right now in which it turns out that Gabriel – you know, Rossetti, the painter – was paid by someone else to paint Fanny Cornforth, who they were both sleeping and everybody knew it. We have this idea of the Victorians that is just really not OK. Really wrong.

Anne:  Yeah, I don’t have that idea. I don’t have that idea at all.

So usually we have so much more to talk about. That seems so interesting, because really, basically…

Michelle:  We gotta talk about the city now, just in general, because oh my god, the city! Yeah let’s talk about the city a little bit because this is an amazing city. Now I want to visit this city. It’s built in a crater, a meteor crater…

Anne:  Oh really?

Michelle:  So that’s awesome, to begin with. Yeah. It’s built in this ancient meteor-strike crater. When you look at it on Google Maps, it’s one of three cities in Germany that has intact its medieval walls.

Anne:  That is so rare.

Michelle:  Isn’t that awesome! Oh my god! You can walk around the medieval walls.

Anne:  Chester has almost all of its but London… I mean London, there’s this little bitty tiny fragment left. You have to know where it is to go find it.

Michelle. Yeah, and Dublin, there’s this tiny little piece of the Dublin city walls but not only do the walls that were started in 1327 exist, when you look at it on Google Maps you can see where the 1215 ones were because there’s still the outline of it which is now a road, basically. But when you look at it and you know to be looking, you can see that circle inside the existing city walls which is so cool. Oh my god.

Anne:  That is really… Where in Germany is it?

Michelle:  It’s to the south. Yeah, it’s in the south.

Anne:  We have to go now!

Michelle:  Pretty far to the south, actually. But three kilometers… It’s three kilometers to go walk the city walls so it’s not very big. When the walls were built in 1327, right, and expanded out from the 1215 walls it times-ed by four – for which there is a word, quadruple maybe? – the size of the city. So it quadrupled the size of the city that was inside the walls. But it’s still not real huge. I mean if you think about the diameter being three kilometers, what is that, a mile and half? That’s not an enormous, you know, for our purposes, enclosed city. There’s a big fifteenth-century church in the middle of this, St. George, and it looks amazing. It’s so much bigger than everything else. And there’s a museum about the crater. And, apparently, there are what are called Nördlingen diamonds, from the meteor strike! There are minerals that have been crystallized…

Anne:  No!

Michelle:  Isn’t that awesome! Oh my god! Yeah. Which is not medieval but it’s way cool.

Anne:  Yeah, we’re down with this. Here’s my side story: Whenever the Brannens are driving in between Albuquerque and various things in Arizona, we require to stop at Meteor Crater, which is this giant hole where a meteor hit once. We have done this since we were children because this is one of our favorite places and they have – it’s not a state park, it’s private so it’s expensive to get there – but now they have a little museum, which they didn’t have, and you can watch lovely movies about meteors and stuff and we have loved this all our lives. So we were driving with Laura, you know, going off to the Grand Canyon, so we had to stop and so Laura said “OK, this is fine,” and great, but then we wanted to stop on the way back and she’s like “It’s a hole in the dirt. There’s no reason to see this again!” We’re like, “Are you kidding us? It’s a meteor!”

Michelle:  Nördlingen has a crater museum.

Anne:  Brannen heaven!

Michelle:  Where you can go and they will explain to you.

Anne:  Yeah meteors. We like meteors. We’re in favor of meteors.

Michelle:  And it was an important city at this time because it’s at the intersection of two crossroads, so it has a major trading role. Which explains one of the reasons you would have a municipal brothel, right, because you’re going to have not just your own population but these travelers that you need to provide hospitality.

Anne:  And since it’s in Bavaria, not surprisingly later on – after, when we’re out of the Middle Ages and on into Early Modern – this is going to be one of the witch trial places. There were 34 women and one man burned at the stake for witchcraft in between 1589 and 1598. Yeah. So. That’s very common all through Bavaria. Not as good as the meteor. We approve of the meteor! We do not approve of the witch burnings!

Michelle:  Yeah. No. The chapter about prostitution tries to claim that the Reformation isn’t responsible for the, you know, going away of the municipal brothels, and I have to say I don’t buy that argument at all.

Anne:  No, it totally is. Martin Luther, in particular, is responsible for the going away of the… it’s like the brothels didn’t disappear, the civic engagement in them disappeared, and one of the reasons that people didn’t want this to do is, like, they were getting a lot of money from the brothels. This was quite a money making institution but no, it did not survive the Reformation.

Michelle:  And apparently that change happens even in countries that remained Catholic, but, you know, that doesn’t disprove the claim that the Reformation was responsible for that. Because once you have the Protestants over there saying “This is against our morality,” and, like, the Catholics can’t then say “No, we’re totally cool with it.” We’re in the area of things that work as long as it’s on the down low. Once it becomes a public conversation, then everybody has to behave the way they have to publicly show that they’re behaving. It does not work once it’s dragged out in public. So I am firmly believing that the Reformation is at the back of this, no matter what the chapter said.

Anne:  Yeah, and the moral reasoning – the monetary reasoning I think is pretty clear – the moral reasoning had been that the young men and the unattached guys they needed some place to… uh… I don’t know, they needed an outlet. And in order to keep the honor of the honorable women safe, there had to be an outlet. And so, since there had to be an outlet, that needed to get regulated. 

Michelle:  Yeah, they make the argument that this prevents rape.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  If you have a brothel then you have fewer young men… and it’s worth remembering that, you know, people married late. You know, if you’re a normal person. If you’re royalty you might get married when you’re very young, but the working class married much later, right? So, you know, you do have a lot of unattached young men wandering about. You know, we can talk about the morality of claiming that they can’t control themselves, but the perception was that they’re not going to control themselves and so it is better to have… and this is high, this is well-known theologians who are saying this! Everything from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. So this isn’t theological slouches.

Anne:  No. No, it was this idea that this was going to happen, and there was going to be sex happening because, you know, if you’ve met the humans then you know that this is true, sex does happen. And so best to regulate it. Yeah, and the regulations, I mean, essentially this is about trying to keep it in some kind of control, although naturally it didn’t keep it entirely controlled because although Nördlingen had one brothel, according to the books, you know very well that it had more than that that were off the books. And it had a lot of women working who were not in brothels at all but streetwalking. This is just the truth of it. So it’s on the down low in terms of you don’t make an enormously big deal about it, the brothel-keepers are not of high social status. But you regulate it because it’s like a necessary evil of some sort. But even the regulations aren’t really… the regulations aren’t really regulating much except that one licensed brothel in every town. And, as we can see from this particular case, it may have been so over the top that once things got brought to light the brothel-keeper lost his license, but I’m not under any… I certainly don’t believe that all through Europe the brothels were well-regulated and maintained and the women were cheerful and happy and got to wear more than their underwear. I’m not thinking that for a minute.

Michelle:  Seems unlikely.

Anne:  So it’s really about a way, I think, of how it is we can get more corporate money out of licensed sex trafficking, is what’s going on.

Michelle:  The fact that she was actually able to get justice is almost surprising, really.

Anne:  That is actually true.

Michelle:  That she was able, you know, that the case actually came, that that investigation happened, they didn’t just blow this off.

Anne:  They did not.

Michelle:  They grappled with it in a way that is kind of surprising.

Anne:  Yeah. I don’t know what kind of other motives might have been going on. For all we know the brothel-keeper and the madam were such horrendous people to have in the town that it was great to get rid of them because, you know, it’s like they kept the brothel, they just gave it to somebody else. We don’t know that but they did. They took the testimony of the prostitutes very seriously. That’s what they had, they had the word of prostitutes and they wrote it all down and it’s in the books and they actually made a… you know, they actually had to work with the other city that Els had gone to, to get her testimony there and written down and taken back and put into the books. They took it seriously and so…. Although I do have, like, my little suspicions that there was something else going on, I would like to say the officials did well in this instance. Which is nice because we’ve had a bunch of trials that, you know, were problematic. Beatrice and Gilles both.

Michelle:  So I don’t really have anything else to say about this.

Anne:  I don’t either. It’s one of our shorter ones. Gilles went on and on and on. 

So yeah, so you’re going to get into the Show Notes a bunch of links for places to read more, not just about Els but about the background and medieval abortion and prostitution?

Michelle:  Yeah, the History Today article is very good. The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality is fun.

Anne:  Yeah. So Els. Els von Eystett. Not the perpetrator of this crime, the victim of it. And she spoke out. She said. So yay. I’d like to know when her birthday was so I could remember because she’s one of my little heroines now.

Michelle:  And actually got justice.

Anne:  Yeah. She did. She actually got justice.

What are we doing next, do you remember? Fra Alberigo. We’re doing Fra Alberigo, I think.

Michelle:  Yes. Friar Alberigo.

Anne:  It is Fra Alberigo! Alright. Yay! So we’ll be having, next time, another blood feast, this time an Italian cleric kills people at dinner. In fact, I think this might be one of the recurring themes, on and off, of True Crime Medieval, where we have, like, basically people slaughtering their guests at dinner. It’s so rude! It’s just wrong. But that’s what we’ll be next time.

Michelle:  And this is back, we’re back roughly into the time period of Cangrande.

Anne: Yeah, we’re going back to, about to the same time period.

So that’s what we’re doing next time. And we’re wrapping up Els von Eystett now and so that’s it for us. We’re saying goodbye from True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are nowadays, except with not as good technology. It’s just so obvious every time that this is true. So signing off! Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

*Transcriber’s note: While you’ll hear “primrose” at this point in the podcast, because we work without a net, please know that the correct ingredient in this particular recipe is, indeed, as said earlier in the conversation, periwinkle.

Gilles de Rais. Nantes, 1440

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. In this case, today, very badly. I’m Anne Brannen and I’m your host who’s recording in Albuquerque.

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

Anne:  And we want to have a disclaimer. The podcast today is not suitable for children. We are not going to get into details of the crimes of Gilles de Rais, which are easily found in many places, including actually even the Wikipedia article, but we’ll be mentioning what they are so… we always use language that kids aren’t supposed to be using but today the subject matter’s especially distasteful. 

We are talking about Gilles de Rais, who was born in France in 1405 and died on the 26^th of October, 1440, on account of being executed that morning.

Michelle:  Deservedly.

Anne:  What?

Michelle: Deservedly.

Anne: Well, deservedly for at least something, and we’ll get into whatever that is.

Gilles de Rais was one of the richest nobles in France at the time, not of his death but basically of the point when he was doing very well. He was born in 1405. His father and mother both were dead by 1411, his father in one of those awful hunting accidents that involved a wild boar. Boars were the most dangerous animals to hunt in the Middle Ages, and it was not uncommon for the hunting dogs or squires or even the noble hunters themselves to die in trying to kill them. I was mentioning that once in a class that I was teaching — and we were in Pittsburgh, it’s in Western Pennsylvania, there’s a lot of hunters there — and one of the students said “It’s still the most dangerous game!” I’m like, “Thank you!” So it was then, it is now. Even with the better technology.

When his father died, he became the ward of his grandfather, and over time he inherited and amassed an enormous fortune. He was a military leader, a very renowned and great military leader. He fought in the Hundred Years’ War and most notably, for history, he fought with Joan of Arc. He was with her at the Siege of Orléans. When they lifted the siege, it involved a great deal of both brilliant military tactics, much of which were supplied by Gilles de Rais, and wonderful rallying of the troops, that being supplied by Joan of Arc. He was with her, and after that he was created a Marshal of France, and he was granted the right to display his coat of arms on a background of blue with fleurs-de-lis on it, the royal fleur-de-lis.

Michelle:  Mmmhmm

Anne:  He was quite renowned. Anything you want in there? 

Michelle: Honestly I was really impressed with this early part of his career. It’s hard to evaluate it without knowing what’s coming, right? But when we just look at this part there isn’t much to indicate that he’s going to be the kind of person who’s going to go directly and entirely off the rails.

Anne:  No, there isn’t. I’ve seen historians say that there’s evidence… that he shows evidence of violent nature but, well, yeah, because he was a medieval soldier! There’s nothing that seems to me to be out of line in his activity as a medieval soldier other than that none of us would want to run into them, you know? Basically you want to stay out of their way. It was all within the realm of normal reality for who he was.

The siege was lifted in May of 1429. Joan of Arc was caught by the English and burned at the stake in 1431, and there’s a lot of speculation that that’s one of the things that sent him off the rails. I think it’s pretty clear that he was extremely religious. This will seem odd given the rest of his history but not within the scope of the time. He was extremely religious and thought very highly of Jean d’Arc and would have been quite affected by her being… it isn’t just that she was killed by the English but that she’d been deserted by the King of France, which is why she got burned by the English. So that’s possible.

The first indication that he was going off the rails was that he started depleting his fortune. He starts spending money just amazingly quickly. For instance he built the very expensive Chapel of the Holy Innocents, which he was a dean of, and had special robes. He put on a play about the siege of Orléans, which we are going to get to in a minute. But the first thing really that shows up is that he starts spending an enormous amount of money. And so now… now Michelle is going to tell us about the play because here’s our disclaimer: If a couple of medieval drama historians start looking at Gilles de Rais, one of the things they notice is the play. Michelle, tell us about Le Mistère du Siège d’Orléans.

Michelle:  So this is really interesting. And it’s really unusual. I mean, I’m not an expert in French medieval drama — I am an expert in English medieval drama — but it’s a really unusual play even by French standards. It’s based on the history that just happened. You know there are secular plays going on at this time about, like, the Siege of Troy, but that’s a different kind of historical play than the one that you’re putting on in 1435 where anybody who survived it is still alive. This is recent history, you know, more of a Law and Order kind of, ripped from the headlines scenario than we’re re-telling classical history.

Anne:  Right. And we have none of that kind of thing surviving from England.

Michelle:  No. Do we even know that it existed? Is one of the questions, because you know the records better than I do but I’m not recalling that we have records of…

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  … contemporary history being made into drama.

Anne:  No. That most of English medieval drama is gone is because of the Reformation, which would have had no reason to get rid of texts that were secular. But, no, it’s not showing up in the records. That doesn’t happen until after the Middle Ages. So, yeah, so it’s lovely to know that even in France this is unusual. This is not what you write plays about. You write plays about religious history. You write plays about morality. And you write classical plays, clearly, the Siege of Troy, but to write – this is an aggrandizement, because this is essentially a play about himself, is it not? And, well, and Jean d’Arc.

Michelle:  And it… you know I kept getting struck by the title. That it’s “the mystery,” you know, that doesn’t mean what it means now, it means this story of, you know, it’s canonizing her…

Anne:  Mmmhmm

Michelle:  … in the popular imagination by saying…

Anne:  Mmmhmm

Michelle:  … the story of Joan of Arc is just as much of a religious experience as these other ones.

Anne:  It’s like a saints play.

Michelle:  That’s exactly what this is. And it’s absolutely enormous. It’s twenty thousand lines of verse. I looked up some numbers to compare this. I got The Castle of Perseverance out. It is five and a half times as long as The Castle of Perseverance.

Anne:  OK. Context. How long does it take to actually perform The Castle of Perseverance, Michelle?

Michelle:  Three to four hours.

Anne:  Three to four hours. Which is why we’ve never done it. We just did pieces.

Michelle:  It is roughly… I did not sit down with each of the forty-seven York plays and add up the lines in them because I didn’t find somebody else doing that, having already done it. But roughly it’s as long as the York plays. You know, which takes the entire day to do.

Anne:  The entire day. What was the audience for this?

Michelle:  Oh, hold on! I’m still doing scope. There are a hundred and forty speaking parts.

Anne:  No.

Michelle:  Yes. There are five hundred what they called “extras” which must mean, you know, just people who are there who aren’t talking. I mean from a medieval drama point of view what I found really interesting about this is that this is kind of… can be seen as proof that the cycle plays had to have been done by the community because one individual trying to fund this bankrupted himself.

Anne:  Absolutely.

Michelle:  Good lord.

Anne:  Besides the fact that he’s bankrupted himself and it’s a really bad fiscal decision, there’s something, like… were you able to tell the extent to which this aggrandizes him, or is it just Joan of Arc?

Michelle:  It’s not, no, it’s more about.. it’s more for her. He’s in it, but it’s not his dog and pony show.

Anne:  That is so fascinating.

Michelle:  And I’m gonna just own up that I don’t read or speak Old French and so I’m relying at this point on the dissertation that is… what is her name? I’ve met her at Kalamazoo. Oh, um, Vicki Lou Hamblin. Her dissertation is from 1984 in which she provides a new edition of the play — but it’s still of course in Old French which I don’t really read — and a really nice discussion of its manuscript history, and so there’s about sixty pages of introduction which is really nice and very helpful. So she was who talked about the amount that he is present versus her.

Anne:  Right. And this is actually a performed play, it’s not that this is a giant script that’s never performed. This was… he did this.

Michelle:  Surprisingly. Yeah. There is discussion in the dissertation about whether or not the version that survives is the version that was performed, but that is a constant problem with medieval drama.

Anne:  So the version that was performed could have been, oh, I don’t know, instead of nine hours it could have been maybe six?

Michelle:  It might have been smaller. There does seem to be layers of composition in the play but, you know, that seems like a question of scope and not concept.

Anne:  How is it performed? Is it one stage? Could you tell?

Michelle:  It’s like Mary Magdalene. Not so much in the round but you have different stages and things go between the stages. And she has a really nice description about what you would need to do this.

Anne:  I like this much better than the child murders, I’ll tell you that.

Michelle:  “As the action shifts from England to Rouen… blah blah… they have a simple flag or a banner to indicate the new site.”

Anne:  Ah.

Michelle:  “The actors themselves refer to the banners. In fact there seems to be no difficulty whatsoever in including a number of different towns or fortresses in such a mistère. These multiplicity of sites evidently added veracity to the story being recounted, while the props and engines used to recreate battle, floods, angels, falling bodies and the like fascinated fifteenth-century audiences. With this in mind, in order…”, this is the part I really love because oh my god the stage effects! I can’t imagine what these stage effects must have cost!

Anne:  I’m so sorry that we’re no longer working together on the Medieval Players because we totally were going to do this although, I think, in small form. Because it’s very long. But any rate. Go ahead.

Michelle: “In order to recreate the siege in its present form we would need ships, fortresses, tents, breakaway towers, walls, a bridge with detachable parts, a river and an ocean, a means for hovering saints above the stage, canons, and various dead bodies, one of which can lose it’s head at will.”

Anne:  Huh.

Michelle:  So, not only is this thing enormous, the special effects budget is going to be significant. Yeah, I got a little drool-y reading. Oh, oh, there’s more. “Since the pause descriptions in the siege generally move action”… Oh god, French… so, some French… “this may imply a single large stage or a scaffold divided in half or perhaps two adjacent stages. Above them or between them a third area would encompass le ciel and its saints.” So we have a two-stage performance. We have one in English like this too, where it’s two stages and then you use the space in between them. Is it, no it’s not St. Paul because St. Paul moves from place to place. I’ll remember. Is it the one with the oven, Croxton! The Croxton Play of the Sacrament! And I think that one or two of the Towneley plays give this indication as well.

Anne:  It’s a really nice technique because you’ve got a couple of places that you can use that are up above, and then you come down and you’re working within the audience for a variety of other places, which it sounds like they’re delineating with changeable banners which totally makes sense and actually in some ways has a lot of feel of the battle, where you have a space where the people within change and those people represent different places so, like, so there’s the English and there’s Orléans and they’re fighting in the same vicinity, the same place, but they move back and forth and you say that… that makes sense. That makes sense to me. I like that.

Michelle:  Some sources say that Gilles was the author, but not the dissertation. She doesn’t seem to think that. She thinks it’s far more likely that somebody else wrote it or it’s a collection of authors. You know, authorship. I think probably the other sources that are saying that are kind of confusing the roles of producer and author, you know, and not really getting that that’s really complicated when you’re dealing with medieval drama.

Anne:  True, although it’s also true that de Rais was highly educated, he could read and write Latin, he illustrated manuscripts, so he could well have had a hand in writing.

Michelle:  She does make the point in the dissertation that the author knew Orléans really really well. That there are things mentioned in it about the city that only a local, somebody who had been there, would know. Like shifting place names that don’t show up in written documents until later but are already being used by the locals at that point.

Anne:  Interesting.

Michelle:  Which would imply that if he’s not the author he might be at least making suggestions.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  Or providing information.

Anne:  Right. Well, yeah, so. Gilles de Rais. He was a great soldier, a great leader. He was a Marshal of France. He was very religious. And he was interested in medieval drama which is always a good thing as far as we’re concerned. And then things fell to hell and gone. Oh well.

Michelle:  Yeah. That’s upsetting.

Anne: Yeah, it’s very upsetting. 

So that was fun. We liked that. Thank you, Gilles de Rais, for giving us a play to talk about. Things get bad from here on out. The play, as you can tell from Michelle’s description of it, was really expensive. Really really really expensive. And the chapel was really expensive, and he depleted his fortune. He just completely depleted it. And in 1435 his relatives managed to get the King to declare him essentially incompetent. He was declared a spendthrift and…

Michelle:  Because he had sold all but two of his castles by that point. They had… the family had about thirty of them and he sold all but two to fund…

Anne:  He was not allowed to sell any more. Charles VII ruled that no one was allowed to do business with him in the realms that were governed by Charles, which is why, at that point, he left for Brittany, because Brittany was not under Charles since, you know, Brittany was under the Duke of Brittany, it was not covered by the edict. So he went to Brittany and he was bankrupt. He still owned some things, including some lands in Brittany, but he was really in need of money and he was highly educated and it’s at that point that he turned to alchemy.

Now alchemy was a science and so there’s nothing awful about alchemy at that point. You know, he’s trying to turn things into gold. It didn’t work. Because that would have been great, that would have stopped the story right there. “And then Gilles de Rais got all his money back by doing something with science!” But that didn’t happen. And he fell into the hands of a cleric named FrançoisPrelati ,who convinced him that he had contact with a demon named Barron and they had to do these various things to get Barron to show up. Gilles de Rais did not want to sell his soul to the devil, he just wanted to do whatever it was that would cause the demon to show up and be helpful in his monetary problems. Barron, by the way, never showed up. I’m just saying, don’t wait for the demon to show up. He’s never going to show up to Gilles de Rais, although Prelati was apparently seeing him a lot, but Gilles de Rais never did.

One of the things that Prelati said they needed to do in order to get Barron to show, since he wasn’t, was they had to provide pieces of a murdered child. So that’s probably… I’m thinking that probably happened. By the way, I want to say that this providing murdered children for either spells or alchemy to get money, that’s just not a thing. It’s not a thing that was happening. It doesn’t show up in manuscripts at all. This is Prelati and what the hell he wanted about this I don’t know. But as far as we can tell that’s when the child murders started. And the story is, well, we’re going to have to talk about trying to untangle what exactly is true and what is not, but the story is that de Rais was… when the child murders started they became horrendous.

It was happening in various castles. But the first documented story is of a boy who was from a family called Jeudon. He was a furrier’s apprentice and couple of cousins of de Rais’ said “can we borrow him?” They said to the furrier “Can we borrow him? we need him to run a message to Machecoul,” which is the castle where de Rais was at that time, in Brittany. And he never came back.

At the trial Étienne Corrillaut, who was also called Poitou, who was one of de Rais’ servants said that the… he testified that the boy got to the castle, he was well dressed, he was well fed, and then he was taken into a private upper room where he was tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered. And that’s essentially what happened to at least a hundred children, the estimated number varies. And these children were peasant children, many of whom were beggars and so not reported missing. Not even known to be missing. But the community seems to have known that children were missing. The place got a reputation as a place where children got eaten.

So that, theoretically, and I think probably at least to some extent was going on, but what happened to bring all this to a halt was that on the 15^th of May, 1440, de Rais entered a church, armed, and with an armed cohort, and kidnapped a cleric. It had to do with a dispute about his lands, which were being confiscated by the Duke of Brittany, and that’s what led to his arrest because the Bishop had an investigation and the investigation led to the uncovering of the allegations of child murder and torture. Anything you want to add in here before I keep going?

Michelle:  Well it’s only, I mean, it’s really striking that it’s only a five year period at most.

Anne:  At the trial it was said to be fourteen years but the actual evidence does not go back fourteen years.

Michelle:  No, we have him pulling himself out of society in, you know, roughly 1435 and then he is discovered in 1440 so his unchecked reign of terror is really, really short.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  And clearly efficient.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  Doing a lot in that time period.

Anne:  And getting rid of all the evidence really really well, apparently.

Michelle:  I thought it was interesting that he was tried in both the ecclesiastical and civil courts simultaneously.

Anne:  Yeah, the ecclesiastical court really taking the lead.

Michelle:  I think you might have to take, like, one minute here and explain why there are separate ecclesiastical and civil courts in the Middle Ages.

Anne:  This is quick and dirty. The Europeans in the realms that are governed by Christian governments are subject to two forms of law. One is secular law, which is, you know, your usual “Don’t whack people on the head and steal their money, don’t murder other humans,” that kind of thing. And one is canon law, which is “Don’t do crimes against the Church.” You know, “Don’t be a heretic and don’t hurt clerics.” So those are two different laws although they often govern the same happenings or pieces of the same happenings, and if you are a cleric and you do bad things you can choose to be tried in ecclesiastical court rather than secular court because the ecclesiastical court is your main boss. Was that quick and dirty enough? Did that make sense?

Michelle:  Yes. Thank you. Because if we didn’t explain that it would be a little bit confusing, I think, because we no longer… we don’t have, you know, church courts in this way, at this point.

Anne:  We could get excommunicated if we’re Catholic, that could still happen, but it’s a whole other thing and doesn’t affect our livelihood most of the time.

Michelle:  And, you know, the ecclesiastical courts can do things to you. You can get excommunicated now but the ecclesiastical courts had muscle in this time.

Anne:  Yes. They would not condemn you to death, but they could condemn you and excommunicate you and hand you over to the secular court and then they could condemn you to death, which they often did, actually. Much of medieval history has to do with this. And it’s going to happen here, too. There ya go. OK, so we explained that.

At the trial the charges were that de Rais had been torturing and murdering children for fourteen years, which would of course take us back to the Siege of Orléans. And the ecclesiastical court counted a total of a hundred and forty victims. The secular court counted two hundred. But there are only two victims who are actually identified in the indictment, and during the trial itself a total of ten by name and twenty-nine by relation so certainly named children murdered, but not evidence of two hundred of them.

Michelle:  And of course that doesn’t mean much in terms of reliability because even now, when we catch a serial killer, we don’t necessarily identify… there are victims of John Wayne Gacy who are still not identified.

Anne:  Oh yeah. Yes. There’s a lot of serial killers for whom we have high estimates of victims and not evidence of a lot of them. Oh yeah. So there could be. And I’ve seen estimates of up to six hundred. There could be a great many, but the evidence itself is… some people consider problematic. We’ll get to that.

The Duke of Brittany presided over the secular trial. The Bishop of Nantes presided over the ecclesiastical trial. The charges included murder, sodomy and heresy. De Rais’ servants Poitou (that’s Étienne Corrillaut) and Henriet testified against him. On October 23^rd, 1440 the servants were condemned to death. De Rais was condemned on the 25^th of October and they were all three of them executed on October 26^th. They were hung and then burned although de Rais’ body was taken out of the flames so that he could be buried by some nice noble ladies.

Michelle:  And that was really the only concession he got, to being a nobleman. He was given the more ignominious death of hanging rather than beheading, you know, he wasn’t given anything as a concession to his rank except “OK, we won’t burn you publicly, you’re allowed to be buried.”

Anne:  Right. He had not been tortured. He had confessed to everything. It’s been pointed out that he confessed under threat of torture but I myself am not really convinced that Gilles de Rais the soldier confessed because he was afraid of torture. Generals in the Middle Ages were in the battle field. He was someone who was used to pain and hardship. I am convinced that he confessed because it meant that he was not excommunicated. That I think was very serious to him. He never sold his soul to the devil. He went bankrupt producing a play about the saintliness of Joan of Arc. He was very clearly quite religious, although not well behaved. I think he did behave very badly, but he confessed. He confessed to everything.

Michelle:  Yeah, and I think that’s important. There is, and I know we’re going to talk about this, a disturbing modern movement to try to argue that he was set up and was innocent and I have to say I find this reprehensible.

Anne:  Yeah and it’s fairly recent. It’s really fairly recent although given what it is people are saying about the charges that would make sense. Let’s talk about why various people are rehabilitating him and then we can go on back and look at why it is that neither one of us are convinced that he’s totally innocent.

Michelle:  So there was a re-trial — I mean, the mind boggles – in 1992, that attempted to re-try him and found him innocent but it was so weird. It was so weird.

Anne:  Yes. Why is it weird Michelle?

Michelle:  Because nobody involved with it knew anything.

Anne:  There were no medievalists on the panel, and the panel did not talk to any medieval historians. It was put together by the Freemason Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France and he convened an air-quote court and the court found him not guilty, but they had no people who were actually familiar with medieval history and medieval courts and medieval law and how it is that… you know, what the language of these things and what it is that might mean… they didn’t have anybody there. But any rate. Ta-da! What you will find is the proclamation that France has found him not guilty. Alrighty. No. That’s not really it.

Michelle:  He seems to be attracting conspiracy theorists, anti-church types. There’s a real strand of anti-Catholicism in some of these things, wanting to say “Well of course the Church set him up, what would you expect?”

Anne:  Because they’re totally bad at all times!

Michelle:  At all times.

Anne:  The Church was made up of humans and there was a bunch of behaving badly but that doesn’t mean that the trial was rigged.

Michelle:  There’s that godawful documentary that I sent you the link to, that will be in our source list which is… I think I need to point out at this moment just because something’s listed as a source that’s so that you can find it, not because we are saying we agree with these people. Because the documentary… I’ve listed several articles by people who are trying to rehabilitate his reputation, and this amazingly awful French documentary that is trying everything to mitigate what happened here. They’re arguing quite obnoxiously, from the perspective of a medievalist, that things were so violent, at that time, that this is really more of a matter of degree, that somebody who was raised with this kind of violence and to perpetuate this kind of violence, that he takes this next step, this is more of a matter of degree rather than of type.

Anne:  Yeah. Everybody was committing sodomy and torture on children and throwing them in the latrine.

Michelle:  Nobody blinked an eye. It was fine.

Anne:  Yeah! No. Ok, so no. This is not a thing that was going on. It was a thing that many people got accused of who hadn’t necessarily done it. It was a very, kind of common sort of, lots of popular accusations against unpopular groups and people but no. This is not life in the Middle Ages. Now what I do like about that French documentary is that they actually have some medieval historians on there who are very politely and carefully trying to actually hold the reality line. I love those guys, I really do. Male and female. They’re wonderful.

Michelle: They’re doing their best and then it goes back over to the host and his hand-picked group who are talking over one another and absolutely ignoring everything the experts just told them.

Anne:  But the experts are good. So it’s actually… I mean if you can manage to slough through the dramatic nonsense, the experts though, there’s some experts that are just wonderful and I really am grateful to them because… and they’re trying so hard! “Yes. Yes that’s my book that was published by the Sorbonne. Yes. On account of I’m an expert…” but at any rate they don’t say that part.

Michelle:  And there appears to be a group of people who are attracted to it because of the alchemy angle. And want to argue that all this information has been suppressed! There’s a thing on Amazon, oh man what is his name? Aleister… what is his last name? You know who this is.

Anne:  Aleister Crowley?

Michelle:  Yes! Who has a really kind of breathless thing about “the suppressed lecture, the thing they don’t want you to know.”

Anne:  Yeah, well, what Aleister Crowley says is that really the whole problem is that Gilles de Rais was being punished for seeking knowledge and it was only on account of he was seeking knowledge that he murdered babies, so I don’t know that Crowley is actually rehabilitating him that much.

Michelle:  He and Galileo, they were like this. It’s the same exact thing.

Anne:  Yes. Because you totally have to murder babies in order to learn stuff. I mean everybody know that, obviously.

Michelle:  It’s just the cost of tuition.

Anne:  Nah, you don’t. You don’t. Nobody really thinks that.

Michelle:  I’m actually truly appalled at the number of articles I found wanting to argue that he got a raw deal.

Anne:  Well there’s Margaret Murray, the anthropologist. She believed that Gilles de Rais was actually a worshipper of Diana and member of a fertility cult. I’m not quite sure whether that means that that’s why he was murdering children, or whether he didn’t murder children, he was just being in a fertility cult, but for someone who was so really concerned about his eternal soul and being excommunicated, I’m thinking no. And there’s just not evidence for this. Nobody believes this at any rate, Margaret Murray thought that so that’s…

There’s a couple of main problems with the trial as it stands as far as I’m concerned. One is that it is absolutely true that the Duke of Brittany is running the secular trial and the Duke of Brittany gets all the stuff. He gets to have all the stuff and so that is absolutely true. And the other is that the evidence of, like, fourteen years of six hundred dead children, that’s just not there. It’s just not there. There’s no real allegations of these children disappearing, and six hundred, even if they were all beggars on the street, six hundred you’d be hearing more about. There were never any bodies, they didn’t find bodies. And to have it be going back the fourteen years is just kind of not making any sense. So that I think is an exaggeration.

Michelle:  That seems reasonable to me.

Anne:  However, I think that the evidence that he was interested in alchemy and needing money, that’s pretty evident. And a move from his intellectual work into alchemy, totally makes sense. That it goes on over the edge into murdering children for the sake of some bizarre occult thing that actually is completely unattested in medieval manuscripts but had been made up by the con man Prelati that he’d run into, that I can also believe. 

I’m concerned about the children that we know to have been missing and whose parents were looking for them, and I think for me that that’s the sticking point. That it bothers me completely that those children are being ignored in the rehabilitation of Gilles de Rais. It’s like they didn’t matter then because they were peasant children, and they don’t matter because they are peasant children, and I’m not down with that. I simply am not. We even know some of them by name.

I think that there were not hundreds of victims. I think that there were some victims. I also kind of doubt the… I don’t kind of doubt, I completely doubt the allegations of sodomy and torture, those are the kinds of things that do get invented in a bunch of medieval allegations and I don’t know that there’s actual evidence of that other than the servants who were getting tortured weren’t they? Did you find that?

Michelle:  Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t. I didn’t look that up.

Anne:  I’m assuming that they were.

Michelle:  I was reading about a play…

Anne:  Because the play is much more fun than, you know… so what I think is that Gilles de Rais murdered some children in the pursuit of money. This didn’t work and it was a bad thing and he confessed in order to save his soul. And why not confess to everything?

Michelle:  Right? At that point he doesn’t want to run any risks in terms of being excommunicated. 

I mean… exaggeration absolutely is a thing that happens. Throwing in extra allegations… we didn’t just do Beatrice but Beatrice kept coming to mind for me with this, because he’s an interesting counterpoint to Beatrice. Beatrice is on the other side of this, right? Where she’s desperate and the Church won’t help her because it’s better for them? So we have these two cases, one in which the Church didn’t act and one in which they did, and you both have people who say “Well they shouldn’t have done that”. So that’s interesting but also, you know, he isn’t tortured, and he just is a really interesting figure to compare to Beatrice, I thought.

So the idea that he was entirely set up does not pass the sniff test for me. There’s too many people involved to have that kind of conspiracy working. And he’s not powerful enough after 1430, he’s not as juicy of a target after he’s working really hard to impoverish himself by putting on a massive play all by himself on the scope that normally a whole town would do, and a rich town at that, given York and Chester. So I don’t find the argument that he was targeted by the authorities at that point to be persuasive because why? He’s busy ruining himself.

Anne:  Yeah. The Duke of Brittany does indeed get all the stuff but there’s just not as much stuff left as… if you were gonna get all the stuff, you would want it a lot earlier than this.

Michelle:  I do think that there’s a desire to rehabilitate him because there’s a perceived splashback onto Joan, which is not really fair, she didn’t know anything about… I mean she was dead! She’s not responsible for anything he did. He’s just a comrade in arms. But I think there’s a perceived… as if that looks bad on her and it’s illogical but I think people do perceive that if they can clean him up then that kind of helps burnish her, which is not really rational.

Anne:  And Joan is so shiny. Joan does not need more shining up. The extent of the shininess of Joan is infinite.

Michelle:  At least one of the articles I looked at was talking about how isn’t it interesting that pretty well all of the efforts to rehabilitate him are coming out of France?

Anne:  Are coming out of where?

Michelle:  France.

Anne:  Ah. One of the things that’s interesting about that also is that up until like, what, about fifty years ago? He wasn’t known outside of France. He was a figure to scare children with. We’re told that Perrault’s Bluebeard was based on him. I was trying to track this down, I never was able to, because this kind of makes no sense to me because really the only thing that Gilles de Rais and Bluebeard have in common is that they supposedly murdered people in their house. But very different sorts of people. It’s very different to be someone whose targeting a series of wives, and someone who’s massacring the local peasant children, those are just not the same thing. But at any rate, OK, so Bluebeard. And cautionary tale. And then I’m thinking really that, you know, it’s the point at which he becomes known to the rest of the world that he starts getting really… there’s this attempt to rehabilitate him, although Crowley and our anthropologist, that was earlier in the twentieth century.

Partly I wonder about the extent to which it’s difficult to reconcile that early hero of France with the later vicious torturer and murderer of children. It’s so difficult to make sense of those things. I make sense of it by noting that spiral out of control after the death of Joan of Arc, and the wasting all the money… something happens. Something happens to him. So I don’t actually have trouble making that jump from the renowned hero to someone who is beyond despicable.

Michelle:  But I mean that takes me back to John Wayne Gacy, right? Who cultivated a reputation as being a community man, which made his ability to continue his crimes go on much longer than if he’d been hanging out in parks leering at people, obviously, because, I mean, we still have this, right? When somebody does something and we find out that they have this appalling set of deeds that have been… people always say “Well he was such a quiet man. He was so nice.” So, I mean, that’s still something we’re grappling with but that difficulty grappling with it cannot then become, “Because it’s in the past it must not be true.”

Anne:  Yes, I mean and it’s perfectly possible for de Rais to have been murdering children in secret even during the Siege of Orléans. It’s possible to do that. I don’t think that’s what was going on. The spiral makes sense to me. I do think that he murdered children. I don’t think it was to the extent that people… to the extent that got put into the trial record.

Michelle:  I just… this is an Occam’s Razor scenario for me.

Anne:  And how do you come down on it?

Michelle:  I think he definitely killed somebody, and killed several somebodies, and it’s really awful that there is a movement that seems to be gathering speed to try to argue that that’s not true. I just, I find that very troubling.

Anne:  Yeah. 

Michelle:  Now I will say that I am super frustrated about the fact that the whacko books about him are in print and easy to get ahold of, and the 1971 biography is entirely out of print but has not been digitized so you either have to buy a used copy so, you know, that’s hard to get ahold of. The translation into English of the trial documents are hard to get ahold of. So it’s very frustrating that the more reliable texts are harder to get ahold of than the ones that are these more recent conspiracy theory ones. When you go to Amazon and search him, the conspiracy theory ones are the ones that come up first, not the more reliable texts.

The man who wrote, and you and I were talking about this earlier that the man who wrote the 1971 biography is himself really interesting, who clearly clearly got into Gilles because of the play. He’s a theatre historian. Jean Benedetti, you know, born in 1930, he lives until 2012, he is a renowned actor and drama scholar. This is his only kind of history book, it’s a biography but then he writes other books about Stanislavski, so he has several other scholarly books and there isn’t a shred to suggest that his first book in 1971 he was completely out in left field and then he managed to get back on track and write some decent books, so there isn’t any indication by anybody that that book is as unreliable as what the later conspiracy theorists are trying to claim that it is.

Anne:  Were you able to figure out… even though we don’t have the text, were you able to figure out where he comes down on the extent to which de Rais was guilty?

Michelle:  He thinks he’s guilty. There are people who are trying to argue that you can see these shreds of doubt in his text but I don’t think that that’s especially persuasive. Benedetti thinks he’s guilty, but I would have preferred to have been able to get ahold of a copy of it.

Anne:  Yeah. I think he spiraled out of control. I think he murdered children. Whether or not he tortured them before he killed them I don’t really know. Do I think that he might have done? Certainly. Certainly, perhaps, it may well have gone that far. I don’t know. But I don’t think he killed six hundred.

Michelle:  I would be really fascinated to know why Éloi Firmin Féron, who is the painter of that…

Anne:  The heroic…

Michelle:  … the 1835, I would really like to know why he painted that painting.

Anne:  I’ll see if I can track that down.

Michelle:  I was able to just look up who the artist was, but I can’t at this moment hunt down whether that was a commission or… but he does that… it’s a really interesting painting. It’s, you know, full length, in armor, 1835 which is in itself interesting, and it’s… he looks very heroic, he’s got his battle axe, he’s got… I mean it’s very much a 19^th century understanding of the medieval past, when you look at him. It is highly improbable that a knight carried that weapon that he’s holding. 

I found it! I found it! I found it! It was commissioned by the Military Gallery of Versailles and they paid twelve hundred francs for it.

Anne:  And so it’s specifically of Gilles de Rais, military hero.

Michelle:  Yeah, he did not out of the blue decide “I’m going to paint this thing,” he was hired to paint this.

Anne:  That’s interesting. Well what the hell was going on in 1835?

Michelle:   Yeah I have no idea why the Military Gallery of Versailles suddenly decided “We’ve got a missing dude, we need to get a painting of him in here.”

Anne:  The story of Gilles de Rais just makes me very sad. I’m sad for the murdered children, I believe that they existed. I’m sad that children could disappear and there was so little that could be done to protect them because they were peasants. I’m sad that this great military hero basically became insane as far as I can tell, and I’m sad at all that wasted education. I’m sad at the denigration of alchemy, which is a noble science, really, and I’m sad at the denigration of the occult which actually does not involve murdering children. The whole thing’s just sad.

Michelle:  I wonder how much of trying to come back and reconsider his trial is coming from the post-Inquisition, post-witch-hunt lens, that just sees all of these kinds of things as suspect. That if you had a trial like this, with these kinds of accusations it’s automatically…

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  … contrived.

Anne:  Right. And that’s it’s all connected and that once it’s been tainted with the Inquisition or witchcraft brush then nothing in the trial can be trusted. Right. You have to throw it all out. That’s very problematic.

Michelle:  And we know that this stuff shows up and it’s not necessarily for it’s contemporaries problematic. We had accusations of witchcraft with Edward IV, that Elizabeth had bewitched him into marrying her, and meant to be taken seriously not, you now, an indication that the person who made them is cracked.

Anne:  But it’s also true that there are limits to what we can, now, from our point of view, accept as true. Gilles de Rais did not murder six hundred children and hide the bodies in the latrine. It’s just, you know, supposedly they burned everything and… no. They were missing some of our technology. They had dogs but they didn’t have them trained as cadaver dogs. They didn’t have the kind of infrared which would allow you to see… to find all kinds of bodies. There were stories that some skeletons had been found but there was no evidence of that. So yeah, you could get rid of some bodies but six hundred? I don’t think so. One hundred? No. It’s just… no. Not in that brief space. It’s not like he was a trucker and he could go up and down the highways of America. He had a lot of land, in different places, but he had limited space and he had to use it where he was. Nah. Nah. But I do believe that there were some children murdered and I believe he did that.

Michelle:  I think that the arguments trying to explain his psychology, what happened to his father, being raised by his grandfather, what happened with Joan… you know on the one hand I find them a little sketchy because that comes very close to trying to excuse him, but on the other hand, you know, he may well be an example of somebody who… for whom the normal kind of violent experience of living as a knight can push a psyche over into dysfunction and into insanity.

Anne:  Well if we had evidence that he had been dropped on his head as a child, you know, because, like, a very high percentage of serial murderers have had head injuries. That would just explain the whole damn thing.

Michelle:  Well I would be willing to bet he got hit on the head once or twice in some of these battles.

Anne:  Probably. And all that learning to joust.

Michelle:  Honestly given the amount of fighting these guys did maybe it’s more surprising that more of them don’t go off the edge.

Anne:  Yes. Well the stories we’ve got are really over the edge. So, Gilles de Rais. You can’t have a true crime podcast, True Crime Medieval podcast, without talking about Gilles de Rais. So we did that. Yay.

Michelle:  Yeah, this was another one I’d never heard of. I’m learning so many things. Which makes me really happy.

Anne:  Had you never heard of Gilles de Rais? Honestly?

Michelle:  It had never come up. Now maybe if Shakespeare had put him in, you know, Henry VI, because I’ve read almost all of Shakespeare’s plays.

Anne:  You wound like, “If only Shakespeare had mentioned him!”

Well, join us for our next episode, which will be a couple weeks from now, on Els von Eystatt, who was a woman forced into prostitution and forced to have an abortion in Germany in 1471 so, yeah, so that’s what we’re doing next.

So find us… you can find our website at truecrimemedieval.com and through there you can leave us comments which we’d love to see. You can also go on our Facebook page and join up on that and leave comments. Please subscribe to the podcast through any of the places where you listen to podcasts, however you’re doing it. And if you’re on Apple oh please leave us a review! Because we need reviews in order to be picked up by, I don’t know, some algorithm bot-ly thing, I don’t know what it is, that’s looking for stuff, but we need reviews.

Michelle:  It’s the modern alchemy.

Anne:  It’s the modern alchemy! It is.

Michelle:  And nobody has to die to make it work. So this is a win/win.

Anne:  Theoretically not, no. 

So we’re signing off. This is True Crime Medieval dot com, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. Sorry about that, but it’s true. Bye.

Michelle: Bye!

6. The White Ship Disaster, Barfleur 1120

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen and I’m recording in Albuquerque…

Michelle:  … and I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America. Oh, I was going to say and today we’re discussing the White Ship Disaster!

Anne:  Yes we are, it’s the White Ship Disaster. This makes me very happy. 

Michelle:  On November 25, 1120, the White Ship sank in the English Channel. There was only one survivor but it was not, unfortunately, the only legitimate son and heir of King Henry I of England. It was actually, I don’t know, a butcher or something. From France.

Anne:  It was a butcher. A butcher from Rouen.

Michelle:  William, the prince, along with 300 other souls, went to the bottom, or somewhere, because I don’t think William’s body was ever found, actually.

Anne:  No. Some of the bodies washed up on shore along with a great deal of the treasure, but most of the bodies were not found, ever, and William’s was one of them that was not recovered.

Michelle:  So, do we have a drunken party gone terribly, terribly (but predictably) wrong? Or a political assassination?

Anne:  It’s a drunken party. But that some people have argued that it’s a political assassination means that we get to put it in True Crime Medieval! Yay! But it’s really not, it’s just Dumb, Medieval. Well, dumb and sad. Very sad.

So the background to all this. In 1120, Henry I, who was the fourth son of William the Conqueror, had been King of England for about twenty years. He had become King of England after his older brother, William Rufus, had died in a hunting accident. Then he took Normandy from his brother Robert in 1106. Neither one of these had been his to begin with. So some years on, he had been opposed by French rulers who did not want him to have Normandy but their rebellion finally was over in 1119, after the Battle of Brémule, and the treaty was agreed on in 1120.

So at the point that this disaster happens, Henry has made a treaty in Normandy, he is ruler of England outright, and his son, William the Ætheling, has just a few weeks before been made liege, in a lovely ceremony, to Louis VI, I believe it was, and so everything is great. Giant celebration, and he and his court are ready to go home to England to get ready for Christmas. It was nice. It was cold on November 25, 1120. It was cold and it was going to be a dark night. There was a new moon, but it was a clear night.

At any rate, they’re ready to leave, and Henry left in good time that day. He and his court were set to sail back and Thomas FitzStephen had a new, fancy ship – what we call the White Ship, La Blanche-Nef – and he offered it to Henry for his passage over to England. His grandfather had been a pilot for the ship that took William, Henry’s father, to England in order to conquer it from the English, and so he offered this because it was a fancy, fancy new ship. They had re-fitted it, it was supposed to be the fastest in the fleet and it had a fancy steering thing – this is going to be important later – which was that the rudder was on the right side, not in the center, which meant that the steering was blind on the port side.

Michelle:  And reverting to the Viking way of doing things, which of course they’re descended from, so that’s really interesting.

Anne:  It totally makes sense doesn’t it? I like that. And it isn’t a problem if you’re having good communication on the ship. This comes up later. Any rate, Henry decided to keep to his arrangements but he allowed his beloved son, William the Ætheling, and a bunch of members of the court to go in the different ship, and so this was great.

Now, William the Ætheling, at that point he was 17 years old and he was Henry’s only legitimate heir, legitimate male heir, Henry had two children by Matilda of Scotland, William the Ætheling and another Matilda, and he had a whole bunch of other children but they were all illegitimate. He recognized them, they were at court, the kids grew up together, but they weren’t in line for the throne, according to all the rules.

William himself, at that point, he was Duke of Normandy. He’d just pledged liege to Louis VI. From 1118 on he’d been Regent of England whenever Henry was over fighting in France. He’d been married to Matilda of Anjou in June, 1119, and I think we can agree he was pampered and Henry set great store by him, and he was really important to the Norman line in the kingdom of England because he was the only legitimate heir.

Henry of Huntingdon called him “a prince so pampered” that he was “destined to be food for the fire,” but this is also the same guy – I’m sure you’re going to be talking about him later, Michelle –

Michelle:  Uh huh.

Anne:  Henry of Huntingdon is the same guy that thinks the ship went down because it was full of sodomites so I think we can think of Henry of Huntingdon as being a rather overly moralistic chronicler who was out more for the moral than reality, so I don’t know that he was that pampered, but he seems to have had immoderate arrogance. But at any rate…

His dad leaves on the ship and instead of leaving immediately on the White Ship, the young people and older people, which is somewhat bizarre, decided to stay in port drinking. So they had a party. They were having a party. They didn’t actually leave until about midnight and by the time they left they were really drunk. The crew was really drunk because they had asked for wine and William had given them a lot of wine. They were drunk, the crew was drunk and the pilot wanted to prove that this was of course the fastest ship, like, ever, in Normandy, and so they were going to overtake Henry’s ship which had left many hours before, you understand. And so they left at about midnight on a cold night and it was very dark and they went really fast. Because he was going fast, that almost certainly led to the horrible disaster. They were at Barfleur, and Barfleur was full of rocks. The harbor was full of rocks that were not visible at high tide but well known. All the pilots knew where they were. So it wasn’t like you were really sailing blind just because you couldn’t see these rocks…

Michelle:  I read that there’s a lighthouse there now, to help modern…

Anne:  Oh! Did they put it on the rock that sank the White Ship, because that would be, like, totally nice. Did they do that?

Michelle:  No, I don’t think it’s on that one, but there is a lighthouse there now, because, you know, it’s not like the rocks have left.

Anne:  No, the rocks… they’re not like those ones in Chaucer. “Oh my god! Make the black rocks go!”

Michelle:  No. They’re still there.

Anne:  They’re still there. They’re still dangerous, I think, if you’re wandering around in wooden ships. This should not have been a dangerous trip, but it was crucial to sail to the south, to sail on the south line, rather than on the north line, out of Barfleur. But the north line was quicker and so that’s what Thomas FitzStephen, the pilot, did. And, the rocks were on the wrong side of the ship. Like, over on the other side where the steering wasn’t? At any rate, so they hit Quilleboef, they hit the rock which is so well known it was named! It was named even then, it’s not like they named it later. This is a well-known rock. So they hit the rock and they sank.

Michelle:  The rock totally was not hiding.

Anne:  No. The rock… you couldn’t see the rock, but everybody knew the rock was there. The rock was named and they ran right into it. They ran right into it and they sank. This is very sad. Oh, it’s half a mile offshore. I mean, they were just a few minutes out and they went down. The reason I’m laughing is that it just seems so ridiculous to think of this as some conspiracy, a bunch of people got drunk and they steered their ship into a rock. It’s not even an act of God, it’s just a thing that humans did.

So it went down fast. There was one skiff – reminding us of the Titanic – I’ve seen stories about “there was a lifeboat.” No, there were no lifeboats. They did not think of it as a lifeboat. They had a skiff in case you needed to get into a small thing and go someplace else. That’s all they had. They got William Ætheling into it and he and whoever was in that skiff with him, they were rowing off. The story is that William heard his half-sister Matilda calling for help and took the skiff on back at which point a bunch of drowning people pulled it on down and so they all died. We don’t actually know that that is a true story because in some ways it seems so apocryphally wonderful, and proof of an excellent character of the young prince, you know? So it may have been made up, but we like that story so we’re keeping it in.

So they were dead. Two men actually managed to hang on to either one of the masts or a rock, the chronicles differ. One of them was Geoffroy de L’Aigle, who was one of the many cousins who were on board, and one was Berold, who was a butcher from Rouen who had come to get some money he was owed and then, I don’t know, got stuck on the ship. But he survived. He had wrapped himself in sheepskin so that he actually had some insulation, which all the nobles and apparently the oarsmen didn’t have, and he just hung on. Geoffroy slipped away, he couldn’t hold on all night. It was cold. Even if the people who had fallen into the ocean had been able to swim they would have died of hyperthermia, but the nobles couldn’t swim. Swimming wasn’t a thing you did.

But any rate, the butcher from Rouen managed to save himself and so he is the only witness that we’ve got. Another story is that while the two men were hanging on this mast or the rock, Thomas FitzStephen came up out of the water and asked what had happened to William Ætheling and, told that William Ætheling was dead, he threw himself back into the water and died because, really, there was no point, after this there would have been no point in him staying alive because it would not have been for long, and it wouldn’t have been pleasant. So he killed himself. And again we don’t actually know that that’s true, it may also be apocryphal, but it’s also a very good story.

So the news of all this didn’t get to England for a few days. Henry’s boat got back and some other people got back in different boats and so they’re all in England, they’re getting ready for Christmas and they just assumed that the White Ship had gone to a different port. But a few days after the sinking, finally, Henry was told… they sent a child to tell him because everybody was afraid to tell him because they thought he might smite them. So they sent a little boy. And Henry collapsed in grief and he never smiled again. It was a horrendous tragedy. It wasn’t just that his beloved son, and several of his children, had died. All those cousins – they were all cousins! Everybody is related! Everybody is related all through medieval history, they all knew each other. It was a shattering blow

Michelle:  And they’re all named Matilda.

Anne:  They are all named Matilda. And not only that, but Maude is the same name as Matilda. So it’s all Matilda/Maude. This confuses people sometimes when they’re doing genealogy. 

Michelle:  It is confusing. There’s at least three different Matildas in this one episode. There may be more.

Anne:  Yes. There are at least three. I think there’s more.

Michelle:  And obviously, Henry is attached to all of his children. He brings the illegitimate ones in. I mean it’s a disaster for him. He loses his heir but he also has an illegitimate son and the daughter, Matilda, who William was supposedly going back for. He lost three children in this accident.

Anne: Yes. Three children and some nieces and nephews and various cousins. Oh yeah. I will admit that I like to describe it as the worst drunken teenage party in history, in reality William Ætheling was 17, but the other main people involved… his sister was 34, his brother was 24, the Earl of Chester was 26 and his wife was 23… so a bunch of people were young but not really teenagers. I just like to call it a drunken teenage party and I actually am kind of not sorry for that because William Ætheling was the leader of everything so I think we can pretty much blame him. Thomas FitzStephen was 62, the pilot should have known better. William Bigod was 34. Matilda D’Avranches, she was 45. Geoffrey Ridel was 45. Gilbert d’Aigle was 47. You know, there were people on board who were older and wiser and the voices of sanity and advisement of England, and nobody did anything about this. Some people got off the boat, to be fair. Famously Stephen of Blois got off the boat. He said he had diarrhea and maybe he did. But we don’t really know whether he was ill or whether he said to himself “Oh my god this is insane.” But he got off the boat, because the party on the boat, that was one thing. Party! Party! Party on the boat! Party! Okay that was one thing. At midnight when they decided that they were going to now leave, and go really fast to England? That would be the point that, even if you’d been down for the party you might have wanted to get off that boat.

Michelle:  If you substitute “tour bus” for “boat” and set this two days ago, it’s still a bad idea. You know? The fact that it’s a boat really doesn’t change anything.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Having everybody together on a vessel where you’re going to go fast and the people in charge of directing it have had way too much to drink, this is not going to go well.

Anne:  Right. And the people on it, even, having had so much to drink, so they themselves were not really paying attention. It does seem to me that even though William Ætheling is the only actual 17-year-old person, it’s that kind of energy.

Michelle:  Well who wants to be the one to step up the 17-year-old gonna-be your boss any day now and say “You know what, maybe we oughta dial this down”? That requires quite a lot of fortitude.

Anne:  And the decision to give barrels of wine to the crew? It’s just… ah God. And at that point what is Thomas FitzStephen going to say? “Well no! You can’t give wine to the crew, Mister King-to-be, because we’ve got to get safely to England.” No, because the whole premise was “We’re fast! Fast fast fast! We are, like, fast, and we are, like, real quick and we have fancy steering over on the other side. Don’t think about the rocks just go! Just go!”

There’s a story that one of the reasons the whole thing happened was that they didn’t allow any clergymen on board, which is patently untrue since some clergymen died, but what they did do, and this story I believe, is they were really drunk by the time that the priest came to bless the ship before they took off and so they jeered and cat-called and wouldn’t let him do it and okay, so that was rude. I don’t think it’s why the ship went down, but it’s an indication of how people were thinking which was, like, not.

Michelle:  I find it a little bit reassuring, actually, that people made such colossally bad decisions 800, 900 years ago, and we have documentation of them. I find that reassuring. I find it reassuring to know that we are not actually uniquely stupid.

Anne:  No. We are pretty much the same. We do have better technology, so that we could, indeed, get into, I don’t know, our cars, after the prom and drive really fast down the highway and sometimes do, but as you say, “tour buses,” this could take you down. The fact that humans have done colossally stupid things when they were drunk, this is pretty much a thing we see throughout history. The magnitude of this is more than you generally get but I think it’s a combination of these factors, you know, that William Æthelingis orchestrating the whole thing and he’s 17 and has a lot of both perceived power and some real power, and there’s all these young people, they’re all cousins, they’ve been partying all day, and you’ve got this fancy new technology that’s going to get you home quicker than Henry, let’s go! I think there’s a bunch of factors but I think they’re all really kind of normal human factors, God help us. You know? They just happened to coalesce in a certain way that changed history.

Michelle:  A lot of the sources I read, the modern sources, compare this to the Titanic and I think that that’s a useful comparison because, you know, any one of these factors would not have caused the disaster, it’s the lining up of them…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  … that add up to this being a disaster. The fact that you have a cold water in there, that is also a useful point of comparison, but it is a lot like the Titanic. You have too much faith in the technology and so that leads you to make bad decisions.

Anne:  Too much arrogance.

Michelle:  You aren’t paying attention to the fact that it’s really cold, right, so you’re not taking that into consideration. You’re not really planning ahead for what could happen if there is a problem so you end up with a problem because one risk too many. You and I were talking earlier about how these guys accomplish in one night what took the Wars of the Roses decades, in terms of wiping out almost an entire generation of the nobility.

Anne:  Oh lord. Yeah, that was a bad Christmas. That was a really bad Christmas, 1120. 

Michelle:  And of course it leads directly to that civil war, you know, where Henry tries to get his barons to accept Matilda, then, as his heir, which they promise they’ll do but they’re not really excited about it because she’s married to Geoffrey of Anjou and he’s kind of, now, a problem. He’d not always on their side. And so after he dies they throw their lot in with Stephen, Henry’s nephew.

Anne:  The very Stephen of Blois, we remind ourselves, who got off the boat, on account of either being sick or being smart. Or both. It could be both.

Michelle:  Yeah, that was a really good choice on his part.

Anne:  That really was.

Michelle:  So the sources for this are really fascinating. There are no fewer than seven roughly contemporary accounts of this.

Anne:  I know! Well of course, because it was such a big deal.

Michelle:  It’s also partially because the Anglo-Normans really really like commissioning histories. They’re really really trying to pretend like, you know, the Norman Conquest was really not such a big deal, there’s humongous continuity with the past, you know, the England that existed before. It’s really just a minor change, which, you know, isn’t nuts. I mean they’re intermarrying back and forth all the time so, you know, William just didn’t pop out of the ground and look across the Channel one day say “Ha! I think I’ll take over that place!” He had connections with them.

Anne:  He had a lot of connections. He even had what you could make into a case for the throne, although really, Godwinson had a better one. But whatever.

Michelle:  I mean the Normans are descended from the Vikings anyway, so there’s an argument for the idea that the Norman Conquest is just the last Viking invasion of England.

Anne:  Well that’s how I think of it, actually. It is. I have to admit. Then later there’s the last Norman invasion of Ireland, but that will come 100 years later.

Michelle:  So we have these interesting sources and I looked up the ones that were available on the web because, you know, leaving my house is a thing I don’t actually do. I just don’t. I’m sorry.

Anne:  You live in the most medieval state in America – which some day you’re going to explain to me what the hell this means, but at the moment I’m liking to keep it just as “It’s the most medieval state in America” – obviously, you can’t leave your house! I understand this. I’m in Albuquerque, I drive around. But whatever.

Michelle:  I can’t leave my house because there’s people outside, is the problem.

Anne:  Oh yeah. Ah yes, the Introvert’s Cry. I get that.

Michelle:  So we have Orderic Vitalis, who was a really interesting dude, actually. He is the product of a mixed marriage. French priest and an English woman and he’s born in England, he’s sent off to France to be educated, he’s got a really fascinating biography. He doesn’t speak any French when he gets there, and he’s sent as an oblate to a monastery and they of course raise him up, you know. Anyhow, doesn’t matter, I just thought it was really fascinating. He is a contemporary source. He gets assigned by his monastery to write a history of the monastery and he sort of passive-aggressively ignores that and just writes a general history.

Anne:  Well, you know, the monastery in context…

Michelle:  So he’s the one who provides us, you know, I think it’s fair to be dubious about a lot of the details that we’re given because we only do have that one survivor and there’s no reason to believe that he, while trying not to drown or freeze to death, was noting all these details.

Anne:  I think there’s a lot of reason to believe that, as the decades went on and he kept being bought beers at the tavern, that he remembered more details and the stories got better. I’ve met the humans.

Michelle:  Actually most of these accounts are pretty damn close. They’re written down pretty close because Simeon of Durham dies 1129 maybe? So he doesn’t live too much longer after…

Anne:  Okay, so it’s not decades that the butcher is making this stuff up.

Michelle:  Most of these seven are written down pretty quickly. So he’s the one who tells the story about the young people on board pelting things at the priests who came to try to bless the boat. He’s the one who tells the story about the ship’s captain deciding to drown rather than face the king. He doesn’t tell us anything about William dying trying to rescue his half-sister Matilda. That’s over in William of Malmesbury, which is also, you know, very very contemporary. Henry of Huntingdon is the one who throws out the “they all died because it was a boat full of sodomites” which is just coming out of nowhere. What the hell? Thanks for having some evidence while you’re slinging accusations!

Anne:  Henry of Huntingdon, was he Anglo-Norman or was he English?

Michelle:  You know, that’s a good question.

Anne:  I’m going to look this up while you’re saying stuff.

Michelle:  So I looked him up. He’s very sort of, um, what’s the word I want here… he’s sort of, like, gleeful in how bad it was, you know? “All or most of whom were said to have been tainted with the sin of sodomy. Behold the terrible vengeance of God. Suddenly death swallowed them up unshriven though there was no wind and the sea was calm!”

And then he breaks out in poetry “Of whom the poet thus wrote…” and then he has a poem, he never tells us which poet, we’re just supposed to know.

Anne:  Uh huh.

Michelle:  And actually Vitalis does that too, where he just plops in poetry. I guess if it’s a really important moment you plop in a poem.

Anne:  Yeah. And Rossetti hadn’t been born yet, so they had to have something. Huntingdon was Anglo-Norman.

Michelle:  I remember! He’s the one who writes his account because he’s commissioned by Stephen, later. I remember this now.

Anne:  Oh! Well of course then, if he’s commissioned by Stephen that would explain, because I was thinking why would a Norman source be dissing the Norman dead, ah but see Stephen! Stephen was saved by God by being given diarrhea so that he was not on the ship with all the sodomites. I gather that’s what the story is here, yeah?

Michelle:  And the way was cleared for Stephen…

Anne:  Whom God loved!

Michelle:  … by wiping out all of his cousins.

Anne:  Also, Stephen did not throw things at the priest when he came by. Pretty sure about that. Ah yeah. This is the pro-Stephen history. Fair enough.

Michelle:  The Simeon of Durham account is really dry, though. There isn’t any of the juicy detail about, you know, why William was coming back or the captain dying or the sodomy or the priests or any of that stuff. But it doesn’t cast any blame on the victims either, it just kind of says…

Anne:  Yay.

Michelle:  … you know, stuff happens.

Anne:  Yay. I mean, they were drunk but, you know, they weren’t evil. Well some of them were evil in their private lives but the whole ship going down was not about things being evil. Just stupid. And alcohol contributed mightily to this.

Michelle:  Yeah, he just says that “He had furnished his son and the whole of his suite a vessel that which none in all the fleet seemed better but as it proved none was more unlucky.” So he sees it as “stuff happens, it was bad.” And actually he doesn’t… oh this is why I kept this one up in a tab because he very much blames this on, you know, the passive forces of fortune. “Not far from the land, from the very force of it’s sailing the ship…

Anne:  The Wheel of Fortune!

Michelle:  No, no he doesn’t actually say that but what he says is he doesn’t cast blame on anybody. He says, “The ship was driven upon the rocks as it left the harbor and was shattered.” There is no blame at all. He doesn’t mention that everybody was drinking, he doesn’t mention that they were trying to go too fast, he just says they were blown on the rocks, that’s bad. It’s very careful to just say, you know, it happened and I’m not blaming anybody, it just happened.

Anne:  There was a ship. It went down.

Michelle:  As opposed to the other two. William of Malmesbury and Orderic very much want to see a moral. “Henry thought his future was secure!” You know? “He had done this, he had done this, oh how quickly things can change!” The sailors too, this is now William of Malmesbury – William of Malmesbury is over the top – “The sailors, too immoderately filled with wine, with that seaman’s hilarity which their cups excited, exclaimed, that those who were now a-head must soon be left astern; for the ship was of the best construction and recently fitted with new materials. When, therefore, it was now dark night, these impudent youths, overwhelmed with wine, launched the vessel from the shore.” It’s really over the top. As opposed to Simeon who’s just very much “just the facts”.

Anne:  It’s really hard for me not to see some sort of moral in this. I certainly don’t think that it’s because God was smashing the ship on account of sexual habits of the people inside of it. I don’t think that was true. And, I don’t know, the extent to which over-reaching ambition has brought the ship down, I think that that’s problematic. But I think that it’s a really clear story about how if you all get drunk you’re liable to make stupid decisions. I think that’s very clear. And no shame no blame but obviously, if you have an entire ship full of drunk people you are in more danger than if you had an entire ship full of people who could actually see the rock.

Michelle:  With Beatrice the Romantics were all over her. This gets picked up a little bit by the Romantics – Rossetti has a thoroughly, thoroughly purple-y prose poem about it.

Anne:  It’s not his best work.

Michelle:  Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, paints a picture of it.

Anne:  It might be her best work, but it’s not very good. But it’s very lovely, it’s all about Matilda. Matilda crying for help and all these people trying to save her but they’re all drowning! Drowning I tell you!

Michelle:  The good prince, yeah, this is why he dies, it’s not that it was a bad decision, nobody was dumb, he’s just trying to save his sister.

Anne:  It was noble and heroic.

Michelle:  So Rossetti’s poem is really interesting. It’s from 1880. I am not going to read the whole thing to you because it’s quite long.

Anne:  No, because we love our listeners and we don’t want to send them away.

Michelle:  You can go look this up on your own if you really want to see it. But it takes the point of view of the one survivor:

“By none but me can the tale be told

The Butcher of Rouen, poor Berold.

(Lands are swayed by a King on a throne)”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

It’s very… mmm… you know everybody is allowed to have a bad day.

Anne:  I actually like Rossetti, so I’m willing to forgive him this.

Michelle:  I do too. And I love Keats but Keats still wrote a truly atrocious poem about Robin Hood that contains the line “Hurray for Little John and the horse he rode in on.”

Anne:  Yeah. No. No stop.

Michelle:  So it’s not great. The one that really surprised me was Edward Arlington Robinson having written a poem in 1891 about the White Ship. He’s a modernist, or at least he’s going to be a modernist. He’s an American from Maine. What on God’s green earth is he doing writing a poem about the White Ship? And it’s not as long of a poem as Rossetti’s is, Rossetti’s goes on forever. This is just three stanzas.

Anne:  Oh yay.

Michelle:  And you can… I’ll read you a couple lines of it because you can tell it’s romantic versus modernist even though they’re only ten years apart.

“Down by the flash of the restless water

The dim White Ship like a white bird lay;

Laughing at life and the world they sought her,

And out she swung to the silvering bay.”

Edward Arlington Robinson

Anne:  Ooh. I like that.

Michelle:  This is some of his early work. Yeah, actually I like this poem. And it’s some of his earlier work. Edward Arlington Robinson is, you know, Miniver Cheevy is one of his more well-known one’s. Richard Cory, of course, which is a marvelous poem. So it’s a good poem. But. What on earth is he doing writing about the White Ship? He has no obvious connection to this. He’s not even English. 

So it’s very interesting that this traffic accident, essentially, from the twelfth century ends up becoming a thing that rings a bell for certain people and not in the same way that Beatrice did. Beatrice Cenci kind of attracts a certain kind of creepy type of man. This appears to be attracting people who find the pathos of the story really really touching and the Matilda/William relationship really interesting. That he goes back for her.

So you want to talk about the modern conspiracy theories, which are hysterical? Nobody in the Middle Ages seems to have thought this was an actual crime.

Anne:  Wait, give me a second. I want to go… let’s come back… because I want to just say, I’m interested also in, like, where it comes down and how. Because, like, you were telling me that you were not familiar with this story.

Michelle:  No. I had known of it but I didn’t know very much about it. It certainly wasn’t something I had spent a bunch of time with. Whereas the Wars of the Roses is something I had read about.

Anne:  I remember in my undergraduate class in medieval history, Medieval English History, I remember being told that there was this succession crisis which was due to Henry I’s only legitimate heir, William the Ætheling, dying in a shipwreck. That was it. This is so interesting to me because if I were teaching that class I would totally spend a little more time on the White Ship disaster. But it just went by like that. “And then William Ætheling died,” you know? Like “Nothing to see here, move along.” 

So it wasn’t until much later that I ran into this and I’m like, this is an incredibly interesting story. To me. And I wonder is it the pathos of William going back for Matilda? Nah, because I don’t actually really think that probably happened although I think it’s a great story. Or, the ship captain kind of raising his head above the waves and then choosing to drown? I don’t actually think that happened either but again, good story.

No, I like the sheer, I like the way in which a very normal sort of happening, which is that a bunch of people who know each other really well decide to drink all day, how that becomes a thing which brings a nation into chaos for quite some time. It wasn’t until 1139 that the civil war was going to be over. It was bad. It was just, it was bad.

Henry died in 1135 and Stephen went across the channel immediately and took the throne. Matilda’s forces fought but he had trouble immediately. Scotland invaded the North. Wales rebelled. Geoffrey of Anjou invaded Normandy and then in 1138 Robert, Earl of Gloucester, who was one of Henry’s illegitimate sons that had happened not to be on the boat, also led a rebellion that became a civil war and it went on and finally ended with a truce and the next year Stephen died and Matilda’s son Henry became Henry II in 1154. So. That’s a lot of repercussions from one afternoon of getting drunk with cousins. Do you see what I mean? That’s what gets to me about this story.

Michelle:  Well it’s, because, as far as we can tell nobody actually did anything with bad intent, right? I mean, it’s one thing to have terrible things happen to you because you did something that you knew to be bad. These guys just make bad decisions.

Anne:  Yeah. There was really nothing wrong with drinking wine with the cousins. There was an enormous amount of stupidity in giving wine to the oarsmen, that was really dumb. By that time, you know, the wheels are in motion, people don’t think real well when they’re drunk. We just take this as a given, nobody has to prove this. So of course it’s going to seem, really, like a good idea to go really really fast in the fancy new ship. Yeah, so I find it very sad. And I also think there were certainly a number of factors that came together but I think that there’s a way in which the story, at its base, is astonishingly trite. It’s the same old same old. “We all got drunk and then we crashed the car.”

Michelle:  All the time. But most of us aren’t, you know, the children of really important people.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  And you really have to feel for Henry in this, you know, he has worked his whole life to put this together. He’s not William’s oldest child, he’s the fourth one, so he’s worked very hard to pull this all together. His William is obviously the child of his age, right, because Henry, when this goes down is maybe 51? Is that right? I’m in the ballpark. He’s not a young man himself. Well he has illegitimate children who are in their forties, so he can’t be that young.

Anne:  And at the point at which this happens he’s been a widower for a couple of years, I think. He immediately marries again after William dies and attempts to produce another heir. It doesn’t happen.

Michelle:  You feel bad for him. He did everything he could to, you know, put the kingdom together, make sure he had all of his ducks in a row, and he had just gotten things ironed out in France and then this happens to him and throws everything back into chaos.

Anne:  Yep. He had just brought it all together. Yeah, the ways in which the Scots and the Welsh immediately move in after Henry is dead it’s just, like, it’s so predictable. Yeah.

Michelle:  And of course it’s worth mentioning that, when we were dealing with the Wars of the Roses, we were seeing the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, but with Matilda and her husband Geoffrey we’re at the beginning of it.

Anne:  The Angevins. Yeah.

Michelle:  Yep, it’s her son, Henry II, who is the first of the Plantagenets.

Anne:  So shall we, we need to pay the piper and explain the true crime aspect of what actually…

Michelle:  Yes!

Anne:  The very truth of this is that we’re doing the White Ship Disaster because I’m really fond of the story and we’re able to shoehorn it into True Crime Medieval because some people have theories as to how this was actually mass murder. Alright!

Michelle:  But what’s really fascinating about that is that those are all post-medieval.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Nobody, none of the contemporaries, unless of course you consider the idea of God smiting you down to be a true crime option, nobody thinks “Oh my God! This is a political assassination! Somebody sabotaged the boat! Somebody paid off the captain!” Like, nobody is floating that kind of conspiracy theory in the twelfth century. They’re all, like, “Well this is what happened.”

Anne:  Yeah. It happens sometimes when you get drunk and steer your boat onto rocks. Who knew? 

Okay. But. Alright. True crime! So one of the theories is that… I’m sorry, this is too silly… one of the theories is that Stephen of Blois who, you remember, had a fit of either sanity or diarrhea or both and got off the ship – that he actually orchestrated the entire thing so that he could become King of England. Michelle, do you have any logical problems with that?

Michelle:  Logical problems? Is that where we’re going to start?

Anne:  Well, yes. Because I have Occam’s Razor to hand!

Michelle:  If you want… I mean really? You’re going to take out 298 other people while you’re… so really Stephen is this much of a cold-blooded so-and-so? Really? Okay.

Anne:  Yeah. So there’s that. But even if….

Michelle:  I mean, it really is one thing to whack a cousin, you know, to move yourself up…

Anne:  Or two of them, for instance, as we saw in The Bloodfeast of Roskilde.

Michelle:  Yeah. I mean that’s like one thing. But to cold-bloodedly take out a ship with 300 people on it. Oh my gosh, no. And really, it seems relevant that nobody floats this theory until, like, five years ago.

Anne: Yeah. No, I’m not going with this. But the other thing is that even if Stephen of Blois were so evil as to wish to take out an entire ship with 300 people on it so that he could possibly become King of England, how did he manage it? 

Michelle:  Because of course there are other cousins, you know?

Anne:  There are other cousins.

Michelle:  Yeah. It’s not like it’s obvious that he would then become the leading contender. Despite the ship disaster there are still other cousins.

Anne:  Yeah. No. No just taking out the Ætheling won’t work, no matter how many other cousins were on the ship they weren’t all on, as we have seen. But there’s this other thing which is, I think, the logistics of it. If you wanted to get rid of William the Ætheling basically the easiest thing to do in the Middle Ages is arrange a hunting “accident.” Now you couldn’t see my air quotes but they were there. Because hunting accidents are quite common and the thing is they were actually just quite common and people died from them. But they are also a way in which it’s pretty clear people got rid of other people. You know, you could have a hunting “accident.” So that would be the easy way to do it. One person dead. “Oh my goodness this is so sad! Oh look, I’m here, I’ll take over.” You know? But no.

Michelle:  Which indeed is what happened to William Rufus.

Anne:  That is exactly what happened to William Rufus. Walter Tirel ran out of the country after that probably because people thought he had done it, but it seems pretty clear to have been an accident. But, maybe not. You know, there were people who wanted to be rid of William Rufus. 

But the other thing is that, as a murder method, getting a bunch of people drunk and sending them on a boat is I think just really chancy. You know? Poisoning the wine would have been a smarter way to do it. But just assuming that they’re going to run into horror and grief is not a good murder method. Because you know they could have just actually gotten to England. Like maybe just a few feet to the south and they could have gotten to England. So I think it was dumb. Any rate, no. So, do we believe that Stephen of Blois mass murdered people on the White Ship disaster? I believe I am right in this in saying no we do not. That we stand… unlike the whole thing with the princes in the Tower, we stand in accord on this, do we not?

Michelle:  I agree. What’s the other one? I know you said that you had another modern conspiracy theory.

Anne:  Yeah this is proposed by Victoria Chandler who died in 1999. So I will explain this to you. She believed that Ranulf Meschin, who was a nephew of the Earl of Chester, the one that went down in the boat, the Earl of Chester was on board with his whole family. She thought that Ranulf orchestrated the death of everybody on the White Ship in order to get rid of the Earl of Chester and his family because that would mean that then he would inherit everything. Okay, I’ll tell you some more…

Michelle:  I… Okay…

Anne:  Again we’re like, really? An entire ship? Okay. Ranulf was on Henry’s ship and his step-son left the ship when Stephen of Blois did so she believed that they saw that there was this opportunity because you couldn’t have orchestrated this – let’s make William Ætheling get everybody drunk – you know orchestrating that ahead of time wouldn’t work but you could premeditate it, according to Ms. Chandler, you could premeditate it at the point at which you saw that everybody was drunk on the White Ship. Okay. You still need somebody on board to get everybody misdirected onto the rock and so her candidate for this is William of Pirou, a steward who is on the list of the dead on the White Ship but he appears in 1121, the year after, as a witness to a document that’s also signed by Ranulf. Okay, so there you go.

Michelle:  And he faked his own death, apparently.

Anne:  How he got off the ship and didn’t die is unclear to us. He wasn’t on the rock that the butcher was hanging on, but maybe he was able to swim. I don’t know.

Michelle:  I think what these modern conspiracy theories are really about is that we’re really used to the idea that things don’t happen unless somebody meant for them to happen. We’re really uncomfortable with random chance. These seem to me like they’re about that, right? That, if this many people die, there must have been a plan! This many people can’t just die!

Anne:  But of course, you know, the Titanic went down and it wasn’t actually a conspiracy, it was some bad engineering and stupid decisions. You know, it does happen.

Michelle:  Yeah, this really didn’t even get very far. I was thinking about the Vasa with that. It wasn’t even out of sight of land.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  And not really cleared the harbor in any meaningful sense.

Anne:  And nobody could get saved because, you know, the water was cold, it was dark, you could hear the screams but you couldn’t get to them and they didn’t have, like, a Coast Guard. So we’re in agreement that this makes no sense. Whatever the chronicler’s mistake was about…

Michelle:  It makes no sense but it speaks to our need for there to be a reason.

Anne:  Right. And it’s interesting to me that it’s not enough of a reason to just simply say people got really drunk and made stupid decisions, because that seems to me to be a fairly…. That’s my Occam’s Razor. What’s the easiest way and cleanest and clearest to explain this? Hello! It’s right there.

Michelle:  So we could actually do William Rufus.

Anne:  Yeah, he’s on my list.

Michelle:  Because I bet that there was a whack.

Anne:  I’m sure there were, which was why Tirel had to leave the country.

Michelle:  But this one is really interesting because nobody contemporary thought it was a crime but modern people have looked back and said hey what if this was a crime? And it’s not but it’s interesting that we want to think that it might have been.

Anne:  Yeah, I don’t know what we get out of that. You know. I don’t know what we get out of that.

Michelle:  Other than a publication?

Anne:  I don’t know. 

But so yeah. That’s the White Ship. It’s not a true crime. We decided it’s not a true crime, so it was just a drunken disaster. It was really sad. And led to chaos. But no true crime. But we put it in here anyway.

Michelle:  It’s possible that Rossetti’s poem is a true crime.

Anne:  It’s possible what?

Michelle:  It’s possible that Rossetti’s poem could be considered a true crime. And maybe that painting.

Anne:  The painting is criminal. Yeah.

Michelle:  If you’re going to go look something up, look up Edward Arlington Robinson’s poem.

Anne:  I don’t know. I think they should look up the painting. Maybe we’ll stick it into the show notes or something. Because on the website I’m liking to use the lovely manuscript.

Michelle:  Can you imagine though, Queen Victoria when Princess Louise comes up and goes “Here I painted this for you!”

Anne:  Thank you.

Michelle:  Queen Victoria’s like “Sweetie, that’s awesome. I’ll hang it on the fridge.”

Anne:  Yeah where do they put those things? When the kids make the perfectly dreadful stuff where is it you put it? Because, you know, she never goes down to see the fridge, does she? It’s like, it’s down… they’re going to torment the kitchen staff by hanging the White Ship Disaster painting on the refrigerator.

So, are we come to the end of our things?

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  So that’s the end of our discussion of the White Ship Disaster. If you think it’s a true crime please let us know. You can leave it in the Comments section on the website. We don’t, but we’d love to hear your theories. I believe next time we’re doing Gilles de Rais, so we’re going into just terrible horrible bloody awful sad crimes as committed by one of Joan of Arc’s main generals. Alrighty, because it’s the Middle Ages!

If you like our podcast and you’re listening to it on Apple please leave us a review because we won’t show up in the search, if you search on “True Crime” without putting “Medieval” in we won’t show up until we actually have some reviews. And you can always subscribe. We’re on Spotify and we’re on Apple and we’re on, what else are we on?

Michelle:  Stitcher.

Anne:  Oh yeah, we’re on Stitcher!

Michelle:  Basically anywhere you listen to podcasts, we’re there.

Anne:  Yeah. Pretty much wherever you listen to podcasts, we are. Please subscribe. And that’s it for us. True Crime Medieval. Where the crimes are pretty much like they are today, only with less technology. As I think has been proven by this story.

Michelle:  Didn’t take much. Alright. Bye!

Anne:  Bye!

5. Beatrice Cenci, Rome 1599

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m recording in Albuquerque, where it’s snowing– pretty soon – and is quite cold.

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

Anne:  Is it snowing where you are?

Michelle:  Nope. We have wind but it’s not snowing. We don’t really get a lot of snow. No, it’s pleasant. I like cooler weather. It’s pleasant. We don’t get a lot of snow here.

Anne:  I didn’t know that. I think of the whole East Coast as having enormous amounts of snow all the time.

Michelle:  We’re below the Mason-Dixon line. 

Anne:  Oh of course. Silly me. There’s the East Coast and then there’s the South, those being different things. Yeah. I forgot that entirely. Because I think, “You’re Washington DC, obviously that’s the Northeast.” But that was a little point of contention during that thing called the Civil War. Which was yet more people behaving badly, but beyond our time.

Michelle:  Lot of tobacco plantations in Maryland.

Anne:  Yeah. That would be a clue. 

Today we are discussing Beatrice Cenci. Actually we’re discussing the whole murder that Beatrice Cenci was part of, but really it’s Beatrice Cenci who comes down to us in history although she was just only one of the players really. But we’ll get to that.

On September 9, 1398, Beatrice Cenci’s father got beat to death with a hammer. Well a hammer and some kind of like, you know, iron pick, is what was going on. It wasn’t just Beatrice who was involved in this, it was the whole family really because the father, Francesco Cenci – who died on September 9, 1398 – he had been really really really really really really horrible and there seemed to be no way of stopping him. And so the family took him out, is what happened. They were all going to die, pretty much, but yeah, that’s what they did.

He had already been jailed a couple of times for murder and horrendous acts. Not clear what they are but god knows. He had been jailed, and then let out of prison, for crimes that other people would have been executed for. But he was let go because he had an enormous amount of money and he bribed people, is what was going on. So this would be the basis for what would come down as Beatrice Cenci being a symbol for resistance to the aristocracy. Now she was inthe aristocracy but she was of course resisting her dad.

Beatrice had reported him to the authorities. Nothing happened. Francesco had sent her and his second wife, Lucrezia, to their country castle to get them out of the way. He came to visit in 1398 and Beatrice had poisoned him. The poisoning didn’t work, he just kind of passed out. There’s conflicting accounts as to whether Beatrice, her brothers, and her stepmother bludgeoned him to death or it was the vassals. It looks like it actually was the vassals. But the issue was that the Cencis had hired them.

Michelle:  Yep.

Anne:  So they bludgeoned him to death and they threw him off the balcony. They made a hole in the floor of the balcony. It was supposed to look like an accident, like he’d fallen through. The hole wasn’t really big enough for him to have fallen through, so that was kind of a problem.

The ways in which this is stupid crime are really fairly infinite.

So the police got involved. That morning Plautilla Calvetti was combing flax. She heard all this clamor over in the castle. Beatrice was standing silent on the balcony, Lucrezia was screaming inside the castle, and Francesco was lying in the rubbish tip – it was this patch of scrub below the castle rock where they threw all their garbage. When men went there – they had to get ladders to get him down – he was dead, even though the branches of an elder tree had broken his fall. So even if he actually had fallen through the balcony, it was really clear that he shouldn’t have died from that. Plus he was cold, which suggested that he had not actually just fallen down, despite the screaming in the castle. He had died some hours before. And once they cleaned up the body they saw several blows to the head which had been done with a sharp instrument, and there was a deep bruise on his arm, and it was really clear from the beginning that it was not an accident, but murder. The Neapolitan authorities conducted a thorough investigation, because although the family had their main residence in Rome, this was all in a castle outside Rome.

The findings were that he was drugged by Lucrezia and, while he was sleeping, one man held him down and the second one drove an iron spike into his head with a hammer. And then the family threw him off the balcony.

Michelle:  This is the oddest mix of well-planned and stupid.

Anne:  I know! Because they planned this for quite some time, as we will come to.

Michelle:  And they recruited people to help them out.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  And yet it’s kind of like they planned right up until the moment, until he died, and then they forgot to plan for “How do we keep this secret.” 

Anne:  That’s the part that they screwed up. And, if he had died from the sleeping draught, how were they going to hide that? Because you don’t take sleeping draughts and throw yourself off the balcony. There’s a giant element of stupid in here.

So the two men who did this werethe murderers, but they had been hired by the Cencis. They’d probably both been given money but one was actually Beatrice’s lover. Not only was he Beatrice’s lover, he was the husband of the flax-combing person who had originally set all this stuff in motion, on account of hearing all the yelling.

Michelle:  Small towns.

Anne:  It was a small town!

The Cencis were arrested and the trial preparation and everything took about a year. Everybody was tortured, the Cencis and the guys that had been hired. Beatrice is the only one who did not confess under torture which, of course, is awesome, and so that’s impressive. But the background of all this: Francesco was the son of a cardinal who had amassed a fortune. That’s where his money came from. So he led this extraordinarily criminal life that everybody in Rome knew about. It wasn’t some secret that he was so godawful. He had seven children by his first wife, one of whom died. He’d been condemned for murders and unnatural crimes and he got out of the sentences through bribery. He sent his three oldest sons – Giacomo, Cristofero and Rocco – to a Spanish university, but didn’t send them any money so they were all penniless and starving, and so they came home. At his third imprisonment those three sons petitioned Pope Clement VIII to execute him for the honor of the house. That was the third time that he’d been imprisoned for crimes that he had done, and for which, under regular circumstances, were he not bribing the Pope, he would be executed.

Michelle:  Mmhmm.

Anne:  And so the sons petitioned that he be executed, but Francesco coughed up a bunch of money and was released and this just totally made things worse. He had been treating his family very badly anyway. He was criminal at all levels. This is one of the cases where the victim is dreadful dreadful dreadful dreadful dreadful. There’s nothing redeemable about this guy. Nevertheless, he should not have an iron spike hammered into his brain. That’s a bottom line for me. What really should have been going on is that Pope Clement VIII should not have been taking so many bribes. But that’s a different thing altogether.

So he would beat his daughters. The oldest daughter, Beatrice’s big sister, petitioned the Pope to allow her to go into a convent. The Pope in some, I don’t know what he was… he didn’t allow her to go into a convent, but what he did was he made a good marriage for her with a local nobleman and that obliged Francesco to cough up a sizeable dowry. This annoyed him no end and so to that end Beatrice, who was fourteen, was shut up into a room, along with Lucrezia  – he put his second wife in there too – and the whole thing was that he was not going to allow Beatrice to make a good marriage because he didn’t want to have to pay anymore dowry. Tuition, dowry, who wants to have to cough that up for people?

Michelle:  Really, the legal system failed these kids.

Anne:  Yes. That is exactly right. They did. Because there was a legal system which should have been working. Francesco actually should have been executed the first time he was convicted of murder. Hello!

Michelle:  You would think. I mean really? 

The older boys get themselves into all kinds of trouble as well, when they’re off running around.

Anne:  Ooh, what did you find? I didn’t find that.

Michelle:  Oh, they got in trouble with your basic love triangles and getting in fights and one of them got killed in a brawl with a lover’s other…

Anne:  OK.

Michelle:  Oh yeah.

Anne:  OK. Because I knew that Rocco had been assassinated.

Michelle:  Because they’re both dead by the time…

Anne:  Yeah. Rocco and Cristofero were both assassinated at different times. Francesco didn’t do it, that wasn’t actually…

Michelle:  No. No.

Anne:  But that’s what it was? It was brawling and love triangles and just not behaving well?

Michelle:  Basically. 

Anne:  Can’t imagine why. After such a good upbringing! Yeah.

Michelle:  I can’t imagine! No. Where they would have learned any of this?

Anne:  I’m so sorry. Yeah and the thing was, when they died? Francesco rejoiced. And he continued to torture his wife and daughter, who petitioned the Pope for help. So, you know, Beatrice petitioned for help and the petition miscarried, it never actually even got to the Pope, as far as we know. Although given the way things were going, I would just assume the Pope would ignore it. Although he hadn’t ignored the older daughter’s petition, he’d just done something that she hadn’t asked for.

Michelle:  “I’m going to help but, not really.”

Anne:  Yeah. “I’m only going to make things worse for everybody.”

There was a cardinal, Monsignor Guerra, who fell in love with Beatrice and would visit the castle with her when her father was gone. This is years later, because by the time Beatrice actually kills her father she’s about twenty. Lucrezia and Beatrice asked him for help. He got Giacomo’s approval because as that point that was the oldest son, and so he got Giacomo’s approval. There were meetings held at the Cardinal’s place. This murder had been planned for quite some time. And yeah, the kids had actually tried to use all the avenues that they had, and none of them actually worked.

Michelle:  You know you’re bad when the stepmom aligns herself with the stepchildren…

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  … to take you out. Those are not natural allies.

Anne:  One of the stories is going to be that Francesco had been committing incest on Beatrice, and this may or may not be true, but those stories don’t actually show up ‘til later. Although one of the servants, well into the trial, will say that Beatrice told her that her father had come to her bed, but Beatrice sent him away. In other words, that he tried. But we do know that he was beating his wife and his daughters regularly. And we do know that were weirdnesses. That, for instance, one of the things that Beatrice had to do was, like, hold the chamber pot while he relieved himself.

Michelle:  Yes, I read that. That he has some kind of weird skin disease that requires him to be…

Anne:  Yes, she had to scratch his mange.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  Including his testicles. That was very specific.

Michelle:  Really, it’s just the icing on the awful cake, for Beatrice.

Anne:  Yeah. So she’s not going to be allowed to marry. She’s beaten. She’s required to, if not actually sleep with her father – I don’t know and god knows we wouldn’t put it past him – be intimate with him in ways that are both disgusting and inappropriate.

Michelle:  Because he’s just being dreadful to make her do that, right? It’s not like he doesn’t have a household full of servants. And even maybe some male ones, you know?

Anne:  Or even the ability to scratch his own testicles? Hello? Is this difficult? I mean I know that I don’t have any but really? Aren’t they reachable? I’m just saying. Why does somebody besides him have to scratch… I mean his back? Fine. But why does somebody besides him have to scratch his testicles? I think it’s just bad behavior.

Michelle:  Yeah, you know what, that didn’t occur to me. But yeah.

Anne:  Many things occur to me. I mean, it’s not necessary even to have servants scratch the mange, except maybe his back. Which would be annoying and disgusting but not maybe reasons to have somebody drive iron spikes in his head.

Any rate, the plan, originally, as far as we can tell, was to make it look like a banditti attack, while Francesco was on the way from Rome to the castle. People were going to attack him, and there it was. But somehow or other that miscarried and he got to the castle in safety. And so Olimpio and Marzio, who were the hired thugs – Olimpio was Beatrice’s lover – were hired to kill Francesco in his bed. OK. Fine. Because the thing is you certainly don’t want to just attack him. Apparently he’s scary beyond belief. So you drug him and then it didn’t work! It was like one of those Rasputin moments, you know? Where you drug people and they don’t die, and then you have to, like, shoot them, they don’t die, you have to throw them in the river, they finally drown. You know, that kind of thing.

So Giacomo and Bernardo who was, at that point, only eleven – the brother – and Lucrezia all confessed under torture. Beatrice did not. Olimpio…

Michelle:  He ends up dead. Before the execution of the family both of the lackeys get dead. 

Do you know that Olimpio might actually have been the father of an illegitimate child with Beatrice?

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  That’s really interesting.

Anne:  Yes. And would make sense, would just make total sense. Would be another reason, actually, to try and kill her father. To get him out of the way.

Michelle:  Because there was that discussion about her will, that her will was finally found?

Anne:  Yes. 

Michelle:  I’m rolling on the ground at the statement of … I have to actually look this up… “the tenacious archival ferret.” I wanted to know, did you want that to be your new tagline? Tenacious archival ferret?

Anne:  I know. It’s a really really good tagline.

Olimpio died by being killed by a bounty hunter.

Michelle:  Oh that’s right! I remember.

Anne:  So he was on the run and got caught. Yes. And Marzio Catalano died under torture. So that’s why they weren’t getting executed at the same time that the Cencis would have been. But I don’t think they would have been executed with the Cencis because the Cencis were noble, so a different thing was happening.

So they had the trial. The two henchmen were dead. Everybody but Beatrice confessed. So it was about a year later, then, they took Giacomo and Beatrice and Bernardo and Lucrezia to be executed. Giacomo and Bernardo were taken in a cart. Giacomo was tortured on the way there with red-hot pinchers. Bernardo, who was eleven, had been condemned to death but his sentence was commuted to being a galley slave for life, and he was forced to watch his kinsmen be executed. After Giacomo had been tortured they cut off his head. Beatrice and Lucrezia had to walk to the gallows behind the cart, and they had their heads cut off. There they were, all dead.

As it turns out, Bernardo did not become a galley slave. He had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and I think at some point he actually got released.

Michelle:  But all of the stuff was appropriated, I believe.

Anne:  Yeah, he wouldn’t have had any stuff. As you can see, if what you are is somebody who’s living off bribery and accumulating people’s stuff, this is great. I mean you get the bribes from Francesco for years, and then you get all the Cenci’s stuff.

Michelle:  This just goes from being this amazing heist to being the Keystone Kops in, like, five minutes.

Anne:  Yeah. And one of the things that really strikes me about this is that, with the exception of the torture – which is of course not OK but at that time was simply part of everything – this was actually, as far as I can tell, a fair trial. The Cencis did not get railroaded. It was very obvious, from the minute they found the body, that it had not been some accident ,where Francesco fell through the balcony to his death. It wasn’t. It was clearly murder. There was a great deal of evidence. Witnesses. So they probably got some information from the torture, which may or may not have been what… but they actually didn’t need that information. They had circumstantial and witness information. And they did it! The Cencis murdered the father. That’s not in question.

Michelle:  I mean, as opposed to something like Guy Fawkes, right? Where he is captured on November 5 and executed on January 31. So it’s two months. They wrapped that up with a bow quite quickly. And this is a full year, which actually pretty well surprised me. That’s a long time.

Anne:  No, I was surprised by that also. It was very careful. And plus the citizens of Rome were putting petitions together to save the Cencis. Because the citizens of Rome understood that Francesco Cenci had been, for decades, misusing any kind of legal system there was by bribing, and using his vast money to get out of things that he should have… he should have been leaving the planet, under those laws. He should have been gone quite some time before then. And they knew how badly behaved he was. And so it was frustrating. It was completely frustrating for the citizens that Francesco had been allowed to get away with things for so long and that the Cencis, who had tried so hard to follow the legal lines for getting him to behave – for bringing him to some kind of justice, to getting some kind of relief – the only one who had managed anything was the eldest sister, who had gotten a marriage and a dowry and was out of there. That was it. Everybody else just, you know, fell under this juggernaut of Francesco Cenci, either because of their upbringing and dying in various kinds of brawls, or because they finally fought back and it was totally wrong and so they got caught for that. They didn’t get pardoned, and they got executed.

Michelle:  So this is probably why it gets picked up by later storytellers as a legend of resistance, and re-imagining her not as, you know, twenty or twenty-two but as a teenager, sixteen or seventeen years old. I’m actually sort of astonished that one of the Jacobean playwrights doesn’t pick this up because this is fodder for a revenge play…

Anne:  I know! 

Michelle:  The closest we get is Massinger, but still the connection is very tenuous. He picks it up for a play in 1606, I think I’m correct. But really, honestly, somebody else should have been writing about this. 

Anne:  Yeah, it’s very Jacobean.

Michelle:  The Jacobeans would have loved this.

Anne:  But no, it gets romanticized instead. Which is a different thing altogether.

Michelle:  Oh, it’s Unnatural Combat, is the play. The Unnatural Combat. But the connections with Cenci are tenuous, right?  It’s not a picking up and retelling the way that Shelley does. Right? It’s not until the Romantics that this really flourishes. I can’t even tell you the depths of weirdness that I’m finding with the retellings. 

Anne:  Yeah, it becomes an entirely different story.

Michelle:  Oh my god! There was this huge missed opportunity with the Jacobean Revengers, which makes me sad but there we go.

Anne:  It makes me sad because I would have liked that play. Why? Why not? Why do we not have this play? Oh well.

Michelle:  Absolutely! Can you imagine? They would have had so much fun with the special effects, right? There’s all this fake blood, and… oh they would have had a great time!

Anne:  Oh yeah, throwing Francesco off the balcony. That would have been great. Yeah.

Michelle:  So it gets picked up, it gets retold in a twelve-volume history of Italy that’s published in the 1740s,  which is how Shelley runs across it.

Anne:  And I’ve read that one. It’s pretty lurid. That’s a pretty lurid version.

Michelle:  Shelley’s play? The Cenci?

Anne:  The one that you’re talking about from the 1740s. Because I came across this when I was a graduate student and they made me take a Romantics class because, you know, I knew the Middle Ages but there was some other stuff I didn’t know. So they made me take a Romantics class so I had to write two papers. I wrote one on Byron’s footnotes in one of his longer poems, that was good, and one… I found this play that Shelley had written and I did a source study. I went and found the 1740 thing and I was like, Aha! I was quite interested in how Shelley had cleaned it up. I didn’t understand then that even the one from the 1740s had already been mutated.

Michelle:  So he writes this play in 1890, a play in verse. He doesn’t acknowledge that there’s this book that’s barely sixty years old that he’s using as a source. Instead he’s claiming there’s an old manuscript that he has found.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  Oh my god. Shelley. I’m not the biggest Shelley fan.

Anne:  I’m not either. OK so, full disclosure: Shelly? Bleeeeah. Just saying. Alright. Moving on.

Michelle:  It’s so scandalous, right? Because of the incest and murder themes. We probably wouldn’t consider it scandalous but it could not be performed in England. There’s a private production in 1886 – and of course he’s already dead by then – that’s sponsored by the Shelley Society, and famous people like Oscar Wilde go to it.

Anne:  I did not know that. I had a little moment where I’m happy about Oscar Wilde going to go see the Shelley play.

Michelle:  So it’s not performed in public in England until 1922, and I was astonished to find out that this thing is still being performed! Like as recently as 2012!

Anne:  Because the legend of Beatrice Cenci, the beautiful beautiful teenager who fought back against oppression. Which is kind of true, and yet not.

Michelle:  Dumas Senior tells the story in an early true crime collection! I’m so excited about this! Called Celebrated Crimes, from 1840. So that’s spectacular. I mean, it gets picked up.. it’s very operatic, right? So it gets picked up and operas are written about it. It shows up in artwork, it shows up in the famous painting by Reni, the one that you’re talking about where, you know, she looks all sad and helpless.

Anne:  It’s not her! We don’t know what she looked like! We’re just saying.

Michelle:  It’s not. My favorite weirdness of people working with this is that Alfred Nobel – that Nobel, the guy who…

Anne:  No, really?

Michelle:  No kidding! Wrote a play that is kind of based on this called…

Anne:   OK I didn’t know this…

Michelle:  … called Nemesis. It was written a year before he died – I don’t know whether he’s gone off the deep end or what – in, like, 1895, and it’s fairly blasphemous. The Swedish public was not happy. It was printed in a bilingual edition in Swedish and Esperanto.

Anne:  Oh Beatrice! Her reach is so far! It’s like infinite Beatrice Cenci, you know, echoing through…

Michelle:  The Esperanto is what pushes it right over the edge for me.

Anne:  You know, Esperanto? I remember when I was young I heard about Esperanto all the time. You just don’t hear about this anymore do you?

Michelle:  Apparently Nobel was on board. 

Anne:  Does anybody learn it?

Michelle:  I don’t think so. I think it was a thing in the70s and it’s not anymore. 

So it was performed recently and even the director said, “Yeah, it’s not a very good play but it tells us something about him”…

Anne:  This is the Nobel play?

Michelle:  The Nobel play called Nemesis.

Anne:  It tells us about Nobel. It doesn’t actually tell us anything about Beatrice.

Michelle:  It’s about Beatrice but it’s also apparently blasphemous, and the Virgin Mary is getting mistreated… I don’t know. It sounds like, because it is written a year before he died, so it sounds like it’s probably not his best work. One of those things that he should have left a note, “Somebody please burn this because I’ve thought better of it.”

But it’s like every famous person, you know, kind of comes into her orbit. There’s a certain kind of man that is really fascinated by this, right? Dickens sees the Reni painting. Hawthorne sees the Reni painting. One of our sources has this hysterical comment about the Victorian antiquarian Edward Cheney who discovered a letter of Beatrice’s, written in her own hand. He publishes the text… at this point I’m actually quoting…

“in a learned periodical in 1861. Half way through his transcription he signals an omission with a note that says ‘Here the manuscript is illegible from tears having blotted it’.”

And then our blogger says

“I have seen a photograph of the original document. There is some deterioration of the paper but no sign whatsoever that this was caused by Cenci’s teardrops. The bibliophile has suffered that characteristic rush of blood to the head which Beatrice excites in all the historians, particularly the male ones.”

Right before he starts talking about the tenacious archival ferret.

Anne:  I love the tenacious archival ferret.

Michelle:  Yeah, I think if we’re going to have a mascot it would have to be a tenacious archival ferret.

Anne:  It would be a good name for a rock band.

And what is it that the tenacious archival ferret found out? Did we already cover this or were we talking about it before we started recording?

Michelle:  He’s the one who dug up her will, in 1879.

Anne:  And he also found the church records that say how old she was, that she…

Michelle:  Yes, that she’s not a teenager. Exactly. And he’s the one that finds the codicil to her will that suggests that she had this illegitimate child, because she is providing a bequest to Madonna Catarina de Santis, a widow, and saying “She knows what to do with it,” which he thinks means that there is this… there’s other evidence that it’s being given for a poor boy…

Anne:  Yeah. It’s an unnamed person, an unnamed poor boy.

Michelle:  Yes.

Anne:  It doesn’t make sense that there’s some unnamed poor boy, that an executor is taking care of, unless there is some strong connection.

Michelle:  And some secret, right? That she is keeping. So it’s not airtight, but it is persuasive.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  It’s a reasonable conclusion that that is her own kid she’s providing for.

Anne:  Yeah. I think that she would have had the child before she was arrested, because if she had the child in prison that would’ve shown up in the trial transcripts.

Michelle:  Sure. Everybody for sure would have known about that.

Anne:  No, if this was her child, she had it before she killed her father and it was being taken care of by this Madonna.

She maintained her innocence, and she also maintained that she had no motive. And she maintained this under torture. The incest, which becomes such a big part of the romanticized version – it’s like the thing which cannot be said but which continually is said – It doesn’t appear until her lawyer’s summation…

Michelle:  Which looks a little sketchy.

Anne:  Yes. Although I like her lawyer. I think it’s a really good legal move. But it didn’t work. In her last examination she said that her stepmother said that her father would harm her honor, but that’s different from that he did. I do think that – even if her father did not actually rape her at any point – I do think that clearly there was a kind of um… the construct was of not just his power and his ability to do whatever he wanted with the members of his family, but also this kind of forced intimacy that, at the very least, was going on. So I don’t think the incest is like… I don’t dismiss it out of hand, but I do note that it doesn’t show up until the lawyer’s summation. And then of course the Romantics run with it.

Michelle:  Because the Romantics are really interesting. By “interesting” I mean largely messed up across the board.

Anne:  That’s more or less how I feel about the Romantics, although I’m very faithful to Byron because Bryon, he’s awesome. But, you know, he’s kind of like the anti-romantic Romantic.

But what strikes me about the legend of Beatrice is that she becomes, in the presentations of her, this… like she’s driven to an extreme, she’s really vulnerable and gorgeous and young, and there’s this kind of brain fever that the male historians get. I think she becomes a kind of… there’s this strong impulse to, you know, take care of her.

Michelle:  Mmmhmm

Anne:  You know what I mean? And the thing is, of women in history who kind of needed to be taken care of, I don’t think Beatrice Cenci was one of them. I mean, the Roman legal system did not take care of her, but she’s kind of formidable! She’s a scary woman! She had her father killed and she didn’t even break under torture and, you know, she had a lot of wherewithal. And so that’s interesting to me because  it makes sense to me that she be a symbol of resistance to aristocratic misuse of power, fair enough, but not a vulnerable child-like one who needs to be taken care of. That’s not what she was. She was someone who, when she got old enough, took matters into her own hands, along with the rest of her family.

Michelle:  They do have to make her younger, though. So she is that vulnerable… I mean, it’s creepy, right? The making of her younger, the emphasis on the sexual abuse. It allows them to both be titillated by that and act like they are defending her so, it’s the same kind of creepy thing that’s always happening in, you know, contemporary entertainment.

Anne:  I actually admire Beatrice Cenci in some ways. I mean, she was treated extremely badly and she did what she could to get out of it. And the not breaking under torture is just like… that’s amazing. She never confessed. Everybody else confessed. She never did.

Michelle:  And if I understood you correctly they tortured the eleven-year-old?

Anne:  Yes. They tortured everybody.

Michelle:  See now, even for then that’s young.

Anne:  If what you are believing is that torture is a useful tool to get information, and you believe that it’s fair, then, you know, all bets are off. Of course it’s not a useful tool to get information because people break under torture. But breaking doesn’t mean you tell the truth. Breaking means you say whatever you need to say, trying to get things to stop. No, she never confessed, and she said she had no motive. She had no motive, why would she have done it?

Michelle:  She’d be running something, in a different time period.

Anne:  Yeah. Well, and so she’s celebrated, still. She’s a beloved figure. There’s stories of her all… it’s not just that she went down in literature, where she lived she’s celebrated, and her headless body still shows up near where she was executed, on the anniversary. I couldn’t find out what she’s doing, is she just walking along headless, is she carrying her head? I’m not clear on this. But at any rate if you go there, you could see. I’m not going.

Michelle:  So it’s a true crime and a ghost story.

Anne:  Yes it’s a ghost story and true crime. Absolutely. Both those things.

That’s it for Beatrice Cenci. I think that’s all we’ve got to say. Next time join us for the White Ship disaster which is the worst teenage drunken party in history, as far as I know. The only one, certainly, that led to civil war. Some people say “No! It wasn’t a teenage drunken party! There were adults on the ship!” I’m like, uh, yeah, sort of not impressed by that but OK, fair enough. They were badly behaved too. Everybody got drunk, they all died, then there was a civil war.

This is True Crime Medieval, signing off. True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are nowadays except with less technology. 

Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

4. The Princes in the Tower, Part II, London 1483

Anne:  Welcome to True Crime Medieval, One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly, that’s our theme. I’m Anne Brannen, your host who’s recording in Albuquerque…

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

Anne:  So we’re doing the second part, today, of our story about the princes in the Tower, the true crime story about what the hell happened to two young boys who were stuck in the Tower in 1483.

If you missed the first one, then probably you should go hear because we explained the Cousins’ War, it was great. And also how the boys ended up in the Tower.

So, at the point at which we are starting, young King Edward – although he hasn’t been crowned, and won’t be on account of, you know, being usurped – and his brother Richard are in the Tower. It’s the summer of 1483. Their uncle Richard has taken the throne and declared them illegitimate. So he’s being King, now, and little Edward did not actually get crowned.

What happens in the summer of 1483 is that they’re seen less and less. They’ve been seen playing, or in the yard, and they show up less and less, and eventually they just aren’t seen again. They are never seen again after the summer is over.

There was an attempt to rescue them in July – whether or not they were still alive at this point we don’t know – but the rescue didn’t work. People weren’t able to get in. And there’s a reference in Richard’s household accounts, in July of 1484, saying that the children should be together at one breakfast, but not only is this, you know, a year later, it’s not at all clear that this was about the boys in the Tower. Richard had several children… his nephew and two nieces were living with him and so it could well be about them.

We also know there’s only one… Michelle’s going to talk about, you’re going to talk about…

Michelle:  Mmmhmm

Anne:  …sources later, right? Do you want to talk them about Dominic Mancini?

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  OK, so you can talk to them about Dominic Mancini. 

I want to mention the rumors, because of course the kids have gone in the Tower, and nobody saw them again, and the rumors started circulating, pretty soon, that they had been murdered. The rumors had gone as far as France by January of 1484. All of the historical accounts, however, other than Mancini’s, date after Richard III’s death and so are somewhat suspect. But the rumors! People thought that the kids were dead, and that they had been killed by Richard.

Michelle, tell us about the sources. I know you’re excited about that.

Michelle:  Yeah, I enjoy the sources. They get increasingly nastier to Richard as we go along in time. Mancini is an interesting one because we just… this is a relatively recent discovery. The 1930s were clearly an amazing time, by the way, in medieval studies.

Anne:  Oh that’s when we found the Winchester Manuscript, the only Malory manuscript. Oh yeah, lots of stuff.

Michelle:  So, when we got the Malory, all kinds of marvelous stuff showing up. 

So this is when this shows up, which is really the only contemporary account we have. It’s not spectacular in that he is still dealing with rumor. He doesn’t have any kind of personal connection when he comes to court. He’s an Italian cleric, he comes to England in 1482, probably late in the year. He’s on a fact-finding – which some of the sources say “read: spying” – mission…

Anne:  Yeah, fact-finding for whom?

Michelle:  I mean, what’s the difference between fact-finding and spying, really?

Anne:  Well it depends on how outward you are about it. “Hello, I’m here to learn some stuff,” is not the same thing as “Hi, I came by to sell brooms.” Those are really different things. It depends on how open you are about it.

Michelle:  So here he is, trying to gather information, but he doesn’t have an actual first-hand… he’s not actually in court. He’s talking to people, he’s gathering rumors, so he’s got contemporary rumors, at least. But it’s interesting, the source that I was reading was talking about how, because he’s writing in Latin, later translations by contemporary scholars – our contemporary scholars, editions from the 60s and the 80s – read backwards when they translate, so his title got translated in one edition as The Usurpation of Richard III even though that’s not really the word. It’s not “usurpazione” it’s “occupazione”.

Anne:  Oh, that’s very different.

Michelle:  So the point was being made there that we kind of tend to read backwards, and make him making a stronger statement than he really is.

Anne:  Right. He wasn’t actually calling Richard a usurper. Wecall Richard a usurper. And I’m OK with that.

Michelle:  I… well we can talk about this later, I guess, after the sources. I’m reasonably sympathetic to Richard’s… I mean it just makes me more angry with Edward, that he put him in this position.

Anne:  Fair enough.

Michelle:  “Here, take on my wife’s entire family. Good luck! I’m going to die now.”

Anne:  Right

Michelle:  Jerk.

Anne:  Yeah. We can talk about this in a minute because yeah, Richard’s problematic. I want to be sympathetic to him, I really do, but we’ll get to that. Tell me more sources, tell me more sources.

Michelle:  So we have…

Anne:  Oh wait a minute. What did Mancini say? Because you know, he’s our source.

Michelle:  He says that Richard had been aiming at the throne ever since Edward IV dies. It’s reasonably negative, but it’s not clear how well-informed, because he’s dealing with the rumors he can pick up.

Anne:  But that lets us at least know those are the contemporary rumors.

Michelle:  Yep. But at least he’s not somebody with a dog in the fight. One of the huge problems with the later sources is that so many of them are flat-out Tudor partisans.

Anne:  Right. Well one of the things that was interesting to me was that it’s not just that he says that the boys were seen, you know, that the boys were taken into the inner apartments; he also says that Edward was being visited regularly by a doctor. That I think is really important, and that will come up later.

Michelle:  Mmmhmm.

Anne:  He also says that Edward was concerned about his soul and thought that he would be dying soon.

Michelle:  That is very interesting.

Anne:  I’ve got no reason to doubt that, you know, he wrote this in November of 1483. The kids hadn’t been seen for awhile. That was what was being said in the household.

Michelle:  So another really interesting source, is Rous – Rodents of Unusual Size? That’s a different context – But that is actually his name, Rous, who was a chantry priest, and he wrote, during Richard’s lifetime, a history of the Earls of Warwick and then after Richard’s death he revises it. He writes it first in English and then he translates into Latin.

Anne:  That’s an interesting move.

Michelle:  Isn’t that interesting? So the earlier one, written during Richard’s lifetime, is reasonably positive to Richard:

 “The most mighty prince Richard, by the grace of God King of England, all avarice set aside, ruled his subjects in his realm full commendably, punishing offenders of his laws, especially extortioners and oppressors of his commons, and rewarding those that were virtuous, by the which discreet guiding he gave great thanks to God and love of all his subjects rich and poor, and to the great praise of the people of all other lands about him.” 

So that had to go, when he revised…

Anne:  Yeah, you can’t keep that when the Tudors come in. That’s gone.

Michelle:  And he kind of tries to get back ahold of the English copies but he’s not able to gather them all back up. 

So as we move along, you know, then we move into some chronicles, the Crowland Chronicle, which is one that’s been  continued over the course of a number of years by various people. There’s lots of arguments about who picks it up and keeps it going. It’s originally, of course, a monastic creation, which then gets continued by other people.

So we have this one, and then we have another one, I don’t want to go through every single one of these because we actually have a number of chronicles, but they’re all, you know, they’re written after his death and what happens, generally speaking, is that he gets worse as we go along. So stuff gets added in, right?

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  So, this one written right after his death, the Crowland, is negative but it’s not Thomas More- level negative, right? By the time we get to Molinet, he claims, with no evidence whatsoever, that Richard III plundered the churches.

Anne:  Oh really? Huh. No.

Michelle:  It just snowballs, as we go along. And then we get to the one that first mentions the teeth, being born with teeth.

Anne:  So he becomes more of a monster as time goes on.

Michelle:  This is another work by John Rous who’s really working hard to ingratiate himself with the Tudors after that far-too-nice paragraph…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  He has different work, The History by John Rous – sorry, I’m trying to translate the Latin on the fly, let me go down further into the paragraph to where they’ve done it for me – History of the Kings of England, and it’s dedicated to Henry VII.

Anne:  Ah, yes.

Michelle:  This is the first one that comes up with tale of Richard being born as a baby with teeth and hair, and the pregnancy took two years, right?

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  So stuff keeps being added on, added on, until we finally get, of course, to, infamously, Thomas More, whose The History of King Richard III is very much the basis for the rest of the 16th century developing him into this unmitigated monster.

Anne:  Now this makes me really, really sad, because I highly admire St. Sir Thomas More, and I would like for him not to be a lying liar from Liarland.

Michelle:  The best case we can make for More is that he listened too credulously to his patron, Morton.

Anne:  More’s just not a credulous person.

Michelle:  No. And what truly blows, as far as Thomas More is concerned, is that he still got beheaded!  Here he is, toadying, carrying water for the Tudors and slandering Richard up one side and down the other, and he still gets beheaded by Henry VIII.

Anne:  OK, well, yeah, but, see, the bottom line, the bottom line is the church, you know, that he can’t mess with. He won’t do it.

 I’m laughing because in the year 2000 we were in London, and my child was, what? One and a half or so. , As a piece of the bicentennial celebration they had opened up St. Sir Thomas More’s… the room that he was held in, in the Tower. So you got to go see that, and so I explained all about St. Sir Thomas More to my child who then invented this game which we had to play every morning, where he hid under the kitchen table whilst I was having my tea and biscuits. I was supposed to say “Sign the paper,” and he would say “No, I won’t sign the paper!” and this went on and on. But the problem was that there was no way to end it, you know, because you can’t end it “Then I’m going to cut your head off.” I mean he’s my child. Nor was he willing to do that, so it all kind of petered out as a game. It didn’t work really well, but he was quite taken with St. Sir Thomas More for awhile.

But I digress.

Michelle:  We may want to talk about this later, rather than right now, but I think that one of the things that’s really, really, ultimately fascinating about the Wars of the Roses are the stories that come out of it. You know, Henry V becomes this figure who was a dissolute youth who grows into his kingship, which has zero to do with what he was actually doing, in real life. He was on the battle field at sixteen, he had a horrific scar from taking the arrow in the face. Richard as the last Plantagenet king has to be made into this figure of monstrosity, I think ,in order to say “OK, we’ve defeated this, now we’re done with it and we can move on.”

Anne:  Yeah, “We’re moving on…”

Michelle:  They essentially load all of the blame for the conflict onto him and then say, “OK, we’ve defeated him, it’s going to be great.”

Anne:  No. No. We can’t even really put all the blame for the conflict on his idiot brother Edward.

Michelle:  I want to put a lot of it on Edward.

Anne:  Oh a lot. A lot. But he had inherited… really, it went on for generations, the Cousins’ War. 

Any rate, so, Sir Thomas More, in one of his less wonderful moments, says what about Richard III, O our Source Girl?

Michelle:  Every single thing that we think we know about him shows up in More. The idea that he was born with a hunchback, that he had the teeth when he was born, that he was born with hair, that it was a two-year pregnancy, that he killed off everybody.

Anne:  So the killing the boys, that’s in there?

Michelle:  Oh, all of it. Shakespeare doesn’t use him really directly as a source, he’s going from Holinshed and Hall, but they use More as a source, so it’s kind of like a grandfather of the play.

Anne:  This makes me sad. Oh well. But that’s our inherited story, that Richard killed the boys in the Tower, and to be fair I actually think that it is probably true, although not necessarily as monstrously as it has been said. You don’t think he killed them?

Michelle:  Uh uh.

Anne:  So we’ll get to that. Alright. Anymore on the sources?

Michelle:  I don’t think so. Did you have one you wanted to talk about, in between there? There’s a whole ton of them but it seemed unnecessary…

Anne:  They’re fairly repetitive, yeah. We hit what was major.

So, any rate, nobody really knows what happened to the boys after the summer of 1483. They weren’t around.

In 1674 there were two bodies, two small bodies, two skeletons found at the bottom of a staircase in the Tower. It was assumed that they were the princes in the Tower, although More’s story is that they were buried in the Tower and then moved elsewhere. Westminster refuses to allow DNA testing. They were moved to Westminster Abbey.

Michelle:  Oh that’s really interesting. I was misremembering that those bodies had just disappeared.

Anne:  No, they didn’t disappear. They’re not in the Tower anymore, but they got moved to Westminster Abbey and Westminster’s refusing to allow DNA testing.

Then, in 1789, workmen were working next to the tombs of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, and they knocked a hole and discovered a small vault that was next to them and it had the skeletons of two children in it, and we do not know who those children were. Queen Elizabeth II would have to allow for DNA testing and she hasn’t allowed that.

But the thing is, if we found the bodies, what we would know is that, indeed, they were dead. I mean, they’re dead anyway, we know that, but we would know that they had died… but we wouldn’t have known when and we wouldn’t know what happened to them. We still wouldn’t. But that’s the bodies.

Michelle:  And not every type of death would leave marks on a skeleton.

Anne:  No. They would not. 

So we a new question. What the hell happened? And there are many, many theories as to what the hell happened. Did you want to take this Michelle? Or is it me?

Michelle:  There’s, I mean, the obvious one, right? The big one, is that Richard killed them…

Anne:  That’s the main…

Michelle:  Or that somebody else did it on his behalf.

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  Buckingham floats around as a candidate for that. And we know that there’s precedent for people thinking they’re going to curry favor with a king by getting rid of somebody who they perceive as being an annoyance to them…

Anne:  Yes, yes.

Michelle: I’m looking at Becket…

Anne:  That troublesome priest!

Michelle:  Yeah. So that’s possible, that somebody thought, “I’m going to do my king a favor, I will get rid of these troublesome children.” 

There are rumors that they were sent to France. Removed from the country but sent over to Margaret Beaufort to be taken care of in Europe, and disappeared over there, which doesn’t really clear anything up, right? Because if they were taken to Europe, where did they go?

Anne:  Yeah. And if they were given to Margaret Beaufort that would be especially stupid, since, you know, it was her son that was going to become king. Margaret Beaufort didn’t necessarily want them around.

Michelle:  That would not be a trustworthy person to hand them off to.

Anne:  Margaret of York, who became Margaret of Burgundy, thatmight have been a choice.

Michelle:  And then, of course, we have the pretenders, right? Perkin Warbeck, pretending to be him, so one option is that at least Richard survived and showed back up trying to claim his rights and nobody believed him. Which, by the way, would completely stink as an option, from poor Richard’s point of view, right? “Here I am!” “Oh, nobody believes you.”

Anne:  Well, Margaret of Burgundy did. Or she says she did, but Margaret of Burgundy…

Michelle:  Or pretended to.

Anne:  … who would be Richard’s aunt, backed both Lambert Simnel, who was the first of the pretenders, and then Perkin Warbeck, who was the second, because she was apparently quite interested in bringing Richard down. That she backed both these guys makes it quite suspicious.

Michelle:  That would suggest opportunistic belief rather than true belief.

Anne:  But I love this list of who it is that could have killed them. Like, if they both died, if they both were killed – remembering that the report of Mancini is that Edward had been seeing a doctor regularly and thought he was going to die, and so Richard surviving and not Edward might, you know, that one might make sense. But assuming that they both died, they were both killed…

So there’s the whole Richard III rumor, that totally makes sense. And by late 1483 rumors of their death were circulating, but the thing is Richard never brought them out to prove that they were alive. I have a problem with that. Because the rumors that Richard had killed them were strong enough that it was really problematic for Richard’s reign, and eventually led to the forces aligning for Henry Tudor. So it would make sense, if he knew they were alive, that he’d just bring them out to prove that. I don’t think they were alive.

Michelle:  That is a problem.

Anne:  At the point at which they disappeared, Richard was not in London. He was out processing around in some kingly thing where you go to people’s houses and annoy them. They have to, like, cough up a whole bunch of food for your retainers and what not. He was doing that. So he wasn’t in London at the point at which they disappeared. And later, James Tyrrell was going to confess, under torture, that he had killed them. That was when he was arrested by Henry Tudor, who was, at that point, Henry VII, in 1502, because Tyrrell was supporting a Yorkist rebellion. But it was under torture, and he wasn’t able to say where they were buried which, really, if you had killed them you would know where they were. It’s only Thomas More that tells us anything about their whole burial. But in general people believed that Richard had had the boys murdered.

Michelle:  It would be very advantageous, though, for the Woodvilles to have started that rumor

Anne:  It is true.

Michelle:  But it is really sketchy that he doesn’t bring them out, unless he… I don’t’ know. What a sucky situation to be landed in.

Anne:  It really is. I’m not happy with any of the ways to figure this out, but this is basically why I believe also that he had them murdered and it’s because he never brings them out to show them. The whole thing about Buckingham, later on he was executed for treason. Richard executed him for treason not much later and Buckingham couldn’t have gotten to the boys without Richard’s knowledge, and if Buckingham haddone it, Richard would naturally have said, “The boys are dead, Buckingham did it, I didn’t know anything about it.” He would have added that into the charges. He didn’t. So I don’t believe that.

Michelle:  If they were dead by that point, though, that would have been a useful scapegoat to use.

Anne:  Yeah. He didn’t.

I love the rumor that Henry VII did it, because first of all that means they have to survive until 1485 even though nobody’s seen them, and second of all, you know, even his enemies didn’t think he did it, so I’m not buying that.

And then the idea that Margaret Beaufort… no, she couldn’t get in there.

There’s a lovely rumor, which I think is especially hysterical: Jane Shore, who was one of Edward’s lovers, did it. No she didn’t. She didn’t. She didn’t have the power to get into the Tower, you know, without anybody noticing and also, there’s no reason! It makes no sense for Jane Shore to be killing Edward’s sons. I don’t know why that even comes up.

So if Edward died but Richard survived, then we have the pretenders. If they had survived it would have been really important to bring those kids out to prove that the pretenders were wrong. Those boys are dead.

Michelle:  I really do not want to think that Richard…  I guess what causes trouble for me is that he has been so loyal to Edward for so long.

Anne:  He was. He really was. And he was not the stupid, he wasn’t George, his brother. He wasn’t even Edward, his brother. Richard was actually much smarter, I think, than both of them. But, no, I think he did. And I think that he had it done when he was out of town and that’s the only way he could do it. I think he figured it needed to get done and he had it done when he wasn’t around and I would imagine it broke him, if that makes you feel any better. But I don’t see any other thing that makes sense.

Michelle:  That’s probably true but I feel so bad for him. In this whole mess, you know, Edward had the opportunity to make good choices and doesn’t, right? He has the opportunity to make things go better than he did, and so he introduces the Woodvilles to this, which causes an enormous problem. I mean, they are working very hard to sideline Richard and make it so that he can’t do the job that Edward has given him and, you know, arguably push him into this whole seizing of the throne thing, since they won’t let him do his job, the Protectorate thing…

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  … that Edward has asked him to do? But Edward, oh my god, what a terrible thing to do to your brother. The wife’s family is enormous and he has given them the titles and the position with which to resist his brother, and then he asks his brother “Stand up to them and take care of my kid.” Now I suppose Richard’s other option would have been to stay in the North and say “Go for it.” “You all just do you, down there in London, I will take care of the North up here.”

Anne:  Or keep the Protectorate, kill Anthony Woodville and allow young Edward to be King, and be Regent. That would have been a choice. You have to get rid of the Woodvilles, I mean, you just do.

Michelle:  They go in two generations from being, you know, really not part of the ruling class in England to having their fingers in everything.

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  So the amount of resentment from the traditional nobility has to be enormous. It’s one of the things that… not this Richard, Richard of Gloucester, but Richard of York, you know, rides to his bid.

Anne:  Do you believe that by the end of the summer of 1483 they’re dead? Or do you think they survived?

Michelle:  I have no idea. I really would prefer to think that Richard did not have these kids murdered.

Anne:  I would really prefer to think that St. Sir Thomas More did not write that nasty stuff about Richard but, you know, we don’t always get what we want when we’re historians, Michelle.

Michelle:  And I think that, as much as Shakespeare is an incredible playwright, it’s deeply unfair…

Anne:  I like his whole scene of Richard III with Anne Neville. It was like, “It’s just so sad that she has to marry Richard.” They’d known each other since they were children. He wasn’t, like, some stranger. That’s ridiculous.

Michelle:  But it is really interesting that we ultimately found him. You know, that first he was lost.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  His grave just disappeared and that we did actually… Oh, and we’ve got to talk about the Beauforts at some point. The Beauforts irritate me to no end.

Anne:  I’m so sorry that they do.

Michelle:  There was the whole agreement, you know, because they’re descended from John of Gaunt and his third wife, but when she was his mistress. So they’re all illegitimate and the whole agreement, when they’re legitimized, is “You have no claim to the throne.”

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  Right? And they spend the next two hundred years pushing against that.

Anne:  Yes they do. And by god, they get somebody on the throne. 

Let’s move on to the outcome of all this. There was an uprising in September of 1483 – so right after the end of the summer – that was meant to put Edward V back on the throne. Although of course we don’t know if he was actually even alive then. But the people who were uprising were willing to have Henry Tudor as a candidate if Edward wasn’t around. That’s how early that is. The contemporary understanding that Richard had either murdered his nephews or allowed them to be murdered undermined his legitimacy and therefore, because Henry Tudor has claim to the English throne only through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, and she’s the great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, and it’s in the line that, as you point out, rightfully so…

Michelle:  Is not supposed to have any claim at all.

Anne:  …. has said “No claim to the throne.” So there’s lots of people in England who have more claim to the throne than Henry Tudor, but what he did have, well he had the Beauforts. And his family on the Welsh side had lost their lands because they supported their cousin Owen Glendower. Yay. I just want to say that I am in favor of this. But the children of the executed rebels, including Owen Tudor, were provided for, as was the custom, by Henry V, which is how Owen Tudor was there, where he met Henry V’s soon-to-be…

Michelle:  Widow Catherine.

Anne:  … Catherine of Valois.

At any rate, because I can go on and on about the Welsh, Henry got the support of the Woodvilles, so there’s that. As you point out, they’re pretty powerful. And he promised to marry Elizabeth Woodville, who was the sister of the boys in the Tower. He also got the support of the Yorkists. And he had the support of the Welsh Lancastrians. So although he’s fighting against the Lancastrians, he had the Welsh, so that’s where the Tudor Rose comes from, the Lancasters and the Yorks.

Michelle:  It’s very much a defeat of the old families by the new.

Anne:  Absolutely. It is. And his forces were outnumbered, but some of Richard’s allies deserted, and at any rate Richard was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field on August the 22^nd, 1485, so that’s two years after the boys in the Tower disappeared. It’s not that long, really. And then they buried him in the car park, as we know. So. That’s it for Richard III.

Michelle:  But we know from his skeleton that he went down fighting.

Anne:  Yes, we know that.

Michelle:  He sustained a number of significant injuries.

Anne:  Yeah. He wasn’t a coward. And he had been fighting soldier  since he was a very young teenager. There’s no reason to think that he would just go to war and later be, you know, “Oh no!” That wasn’t him. That’s a bad malignment of his character. He was fighting.

Michelle:  And of course his body also shows that the deformities that are described in More et al are not there. He has minor scoliosis of the spine ,but he doesn’t have a hunchback. He doesn’t have a withered arm.

Anne:  No, he doesn’t. And even the scoliosis, it didn’t show up until he was a teenager. He wasn’t born with it. It’s all lies. 

Michelle:  And it obviously doesn’t prevent him from being an effective fighter.

Anne:  No. Yeah, I would like for him to have behaved better. I would like for Thomas More to have behaved better. I would like for Edward to have behaved better. Elizabeth, I think, couldn’t have behaved any better, I think she was who she was. You know, George of Clarence, what the hell, I don’t know. Warwick? I don’t know. I just wish that…. It was a really bad time. It was, the Cousin’s War? Was a few hundred years of people behaving badly, I’m just saying.

Michelle:  Quite a long time of it. And really, pretty badly.

Anne:  Very badly.

Michelle:  This isn’t, you know, the standard. Like John of Gaunt having a whole lot of mistresses.

Anne:  No, which I don’t actually consider bad behavior. I consider bad behavior if you kill your nephews, or if you tell horrible lies about people that go down in history, or if you murder people who have surrendered after the battle, that’s very bad.

Michelle:  That is all true.

Anne:  Yeah, the Cousins’ War is full of bad behavior. 

But, so that’s the boys in the Tower. I think that Richard had them murdered, although it’s not entirely in what was his character before. I think he was put into really bad circumstances and that’s what he did. Michelle believes that he didn’t because there was some kind of horrible thing that happened that he didn’t even know about, and then he never talked about later. Is that what you believe? Don’t believe that Michelle! I don’t believe you believe that.

Michelle:  I really, really do not want him to have murdered his nephews. I’m sorry, it’s an X Files thing for me. I want to believe.

Anne:  I know you want to believe. But if you can come up with anything, let me know. So far, not. If they weren’t dead by the end of the summer when the rumors were circulating, if they weren’t dead in those two years where the Woodvilles were putting together rebellions against him and pretenders were coming forth, if they weren’t dead why didn’t he bring them out and prove it? Michelle, he didn’t because they were gone.

Michelle:  That’s probably true but it really stinks.

Anne:  Yes it does. And if somebody killed them and he didn’t know about it, why didn’t he drag them forth and say “Oh, look! The horrible murderer of little children!” and then cut their heads off? You know? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s the only thing, to me, that actually makes common sense as to what happened.

Michelle:  I mean the only other thing I can think is if somebody managed to get them out, and he didn’t know where they were. But that shouldn’t be possible in the Tower. I mean, the Tower, at this point, isn’t primarily being used as a prison. It’s still a royal residence, so, you know, the fact that they’re there doesn’t necessarily imply that they were being… but…

Anne:  Well there had been an attempt to rescue them, which failed…

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  …. because people could not get in. So. No, I think that if they had gotten out, we would have more evidence of it. The the two pretenders were not Richard. They weren’t the young prince, they weren’t him. They both come from obscure origins and had to be trained how to act right in court. And even that young boy would have known stuff that they didn’t know. Nope, they died. I’ll tell you what I think, More’s the only one who gives us this detail, that they were buried in the Tower and then moved elsewhere. I think it’s very possible that if the royal family ever allows DNA testing on the bodies, the children’s bodies that were found with Elizabeth and Edward, that they’ll find out that that’s who it is.

Michelle:  That’s an odd thing to not allow. I understand why they’re not allowing anybody to see Edward VII’s papers, because they’re danger there, because he had fascist sympathies…

Anne:  Yes, he did. It was no good.

Michelle:  And they don’t want anybody to see his papers, fine. Okay. Cool. They still want everybody to think his abdication had to do with deeply being in love with Wallis Simpson, fine. We’ll live with that.

Anne:  Blah blah blah blah.

Michelle:  As opposed to them pushing him out because he had Nazi sympathies. 

Anne:  This is all very close in time. The boys in the Tower are pretty far away, really.

Michelle:  Yeah, this is an odd thing for them to be really, really closed about. It’s not even the same royal family anymore.

Anne:  No, it isn’t. Because the Tudors are going to stop after Elizabeth.

Michelle:  At least they turn out to be competent.

Anne:  OK, wait. Are we going to say that Henry VIII is competent? Because this is going to be beyond…

Michelle:  No, Elizabeth is competent.

Anne:  OK, Elizabeth is competent, yes. It’s beyond True Crimes Medieval…

Michelle:  Elizabeth.

Anne:  …but Henry VIII, when it comes to true crimes, there were some.

Michelle:  For sure.

Anne:  You know the whole case against Anne Boleyn is completely…

Michelle:  He is not who I am primarily thinking of.

Anne:  I know. I know.

Michelle:  Elizabeth does an amazing…

Anne:  I know. Elizabeth will be competent. 

Next time we’re meeting we’re discussing Beatrice Cenci. She’s not medieval but she’s only just not medieval, so we’re going to pretend.

Michelle:  It’s a mushy transition. You know it’s…

Anne:  Not in Italy so much.

Michelle:  You can have things happening in Italy…

Anne:  Uh-huh…

Michelle:  … that are happening in the Renaissance, right? But the contemporaneous things that are happening over in England are happening in the Middle Ages…

Anne:  Absolutely.

Michelle:  …because it transitions slowly. So we’re talking about 15^th century stuff here.

Anne:  But this 15^th century stuff is actually in Italy. So it really is the Renaissance.

Michelle:  Yeah. Because it’s Italy. But here stuff that’s happening contemporaneously is very much still the Middle Ages.

Anne: That’s true.

Anyway. So we will be discussing Beatrice Cenci. And so we’re signing off now. Goodbye from True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are nowadays, except with less technology. 

Bye!

Michelle:  Bye!

3. The Princes in the Tower, Part I, London 1483

Anne:  Welcome to True Crime Medieval. One Thousand Years of People Behaving Badly. That’s our theme. I’m Anne Brannen, your host who’s recording in Albuquerque…

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

Anne:  Today we are on the first part of The Princes in the Tower because, really, there’s so much to talk about.

Michelle:  So we are talking today about the princes in the Tower which are King Edward V, who actually never wore the crown but, you know, technically…

Anne:  He was gonna get it but then he didn’t get one.

Michelle:  No.

Anne:  It was sad.

Michelle:  He and his brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, the Duke of York, who were, when last seen in 1483, twelve and nine years old, disappeared into the Tower of London and were never seen again. So of course we have hundreds of years of speculation as to what happened to them.

Anne:  They’re dead by now, to be fair.

Michelle:  For sure. They are no longer with us.

Anne:  The background of all this, it’s one of the last chapters of the Cousins’ Wars, which are popularly referred to as the Wars of the Roses, but which I do not refer to as the Wars of the Roses, because they called it the Cousins’ Wars, and the Wars of the Roses is a romantic name made up by Sir Walter Scott and it annoys me, so I’m calling it the Cousins’ Wars. They were a series of civil wars in England, which lasted from 1455 to 1487. They decimated the country. They were just awful. 

Essentially what was going on was that there were two lines from the Plantagenets, the House of York and the House of Lancaster, and the Wars were about who was going to be on the throne. In the course of them, we like to think that entire noble houses were taken out, this isn’t actually true, but twelve princes died, about two hundred nobles died, maybe about 100,000 gentry and common people. It’s true that two generations of the Somerset and Warwick lines, all the males, were gone. And the male lines of both the Lancasters and the Yorks were done, that was it, which is of course sort of ironic since the whole point was which of them was going to get to be on the throne. At the end of all this what will happen is that the Tudors will take over and the Tudors were descended from…

Michelle:  Henry V’s widow’s bodyguard.

Anne:  From the English point of view, it’s Henry V’s bodyguard. From the Welsh point of view, this is a pretty important family. But at any rate, yeah, from a family that was descended from a Tudur ap Maredudd and one of the descendants of John of Gaunt, so the Plantagenets get back in there although not under that name.

The reason all of this started was King Henry VI, who was nine months old when he became king in 1422, which is a really bad time to take up being king. I mean your executive function is just not there. I don’t know if you’ve noted this in nine-month-old people, but they’re just not good at making decisions. You’ve raised kids too, Michelle, do you agree with me on this?

Michelle:  King of England and France, so he had double duty.

Anne:  Oh! Pardon me! I forgot about the French part. Which is important because it’s one of the reasons his wife gets in on things. 

Civil war broke out in 1455, so that’s the beginning of the Cousins’ Wars. Because of his long mismanagement of, basically, England – they were focusing on France – and Margaret of Anjou taking power because Henry was having mental breakdowns. He was long past the whole nine-month-old period but he wasn’t doing well anyway.

His cousin Richard, the Duke of York, was declared his heir. He attempted to take the throne, Henry regained his senses, they went to war. York captured Henry and theoretically things could have stopped at that point. Richard was declared heir, but Margaret of Anjou refused to accept the English Parliament’s decision about her son’s disinheritance and so there was more war. Richard of York was defeated at 1460 at the Battle of Wakefield, the Lancastrians put his head on a pike over the Micklegate Bar at York.

So he was dead but his son was proclaimed king. He was next in line, and Richard had been in line, so the English declared Edward IV, king, not just because Henry had proclaimed Richard his heir but in large part due to the work of Richard Neville, the 16^th Earl of Warwick, who’s known to us as the Kingmaker.

Michelle:  For good reason.

Anne:  For good reason! Yeah. He was big on kings. 

So Edward IV claimed the throne on March 4. Soon after, on March 29, the Lancastrians lost the bottle of Towton, and so the Yorks are on the throne.

Things were relatively peaceful, as far as that goes. I mean, it’s not like people weren’t beating each other up if they were on different sides, but things were relatively peaceful from 1461 to 1469, at which point things heated up again because the Kingmaker withdrew his support for Edward. Things had been strained ever since Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, which we’ll get to in a moment. Her family had taken more and more power.

At that point Edward fled to Flanders, in 1470, and Henry VI, who was still not dead, was reinstated as king. I think he might have had his brains back at that point but maybe not because, honestly, I get lost as to when it is that he’s mentally stable and when he’s not.

The Lancastrians were defeated at the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1470, which is when Henry’s son was killed and so his only legitimate heir was gone anyway. Edward at that point re-entered London, re-took the throne. Henry also disappears at that point and we believe that he was killed pretty much right after Edward came back in. So Edward was unopposed as king from that point until he died in 1483, at which point his twelve-year-old son became Edward V, one of the little princes in the Tower.

Michelle:  Yeah.

Anne:  You want to fill us in about this lovely love story, as to how Edward V came into being, with his parents?

Michelle:  I want to smack Edward IV so hard. He had…

Anne:  No, it’s romantic. It’s the Wars of the Roses. People have like, little crowns! It’s kings and queens, it’s why people get interested in the Middle Ages, it goes along with turkey legs and the Renaissance fairs. Oh, I’m sorry, was that my outside voice? Your turn.

Michelle:  If Edward had… I mean part of the problem here is that he’s very young. When he becomes king, he’s only a teenager. And Elizabeth is, what, five years older than him, and a widow. He’s young, which excuses a certain amount of dumb but holy crap, you’re king, you cannot be thinking with your dick.

Anne:  I’m going to have to click the “explicit” little box. Yes, we have bad language when we’re talking about the Middle Ages.

Michelle:  Well, I mean particularly when people are dumb, right? So he has become king after a ten-year civil war, right? 

Anne:  That’s right. It wasn’t an easy transition.

Michelle:  Yeah, it’s not like he inherited the thing, you know, easy peasy lemon squeezy, or something. It’s been a decade of civil war, and what you should do at this point is follow the advice of your counselors. Marry a well-connected, rich foreign princess like everybody else since before the Norman Conquest. No kidding, it’s been since the 1040s that anybody married one of their own citizens. 

Anne:  And even before that. This is why there’s so many marriages throughout the Norwegians and the English and the Welsh and the Scots and the Russians. I mean there’s a lot of intermarriage that has been going on with the English and any other family in Europe for a long, long time. On into the Old English period.

Michelle:  There are good reasons why this isn’t done. I mean we tend to see this relationship kind of retrospectively through Pride and Prejudice-colored glasses, but…

Anne:  I don’t. No.

Michelle:  Edward and Elizabeth are not Darcy and Elizabeth. His situation is precarious, he needs to shore up his support. He has to affect the delicate balance of rewarding his followers while putting in place a competent and not incredibly corrupt government. He needs to provide heirs. He really just cannot afford to waste the opportunity to create a viable alliance. So instead, like a moron, he gets married in secret, keeps the marriage secret for months while his lords are debating which foreign princess for him to marry. He’s already been married for, like, four months! So of course when he plops this out, Richard Neville, who’s been doing the backdoor negotiation, the Earl of Warwick, you know, the most powerful dude of his day, he’s like the John of Gaunt of his day.

Anne:  I love it because that’s such a medieval remark. You know, people that aren’t medievalists might not… it wouldn’t come to their mind to go “He’s the John Gaunt of his day.”

Michelle:  He totally is!

Anne:  Who is the John of Gaunt of our day?

Michelle:  Edward is the Bill Clinton. This is so dumb. This is so stupid. I can’t get past it. It’s so stupid.

Anne:  This is actually why we’re working together, because if I was working with a medievalist who thought this was some kind of nice love story I’d just have to kill ‘em.

Michelle:  So Warwick comes back with, “Hey, I’ve got this thing arranged for you and it’s all good, we’re ready to go public,” and Edward’s like “I’m gonna stop you right there, I’ve already been married.” Last time we talked about the connection with Game of Thrones? Here we have a Game of Thrones connection too, right? This is Rob Stark.

Anne:  Oh yeah. Yeah. This is Rob Stark.

Michelle:  This is making the dumb, dumb, you know, crotch-led decision that leads to disaster. I mean, if he had looked around and said “Who can I find that is the least suitable person to marry?” It would be hard to come up with somebody better. I mean she’s the widow…

Anne:  But she was really beautiful.

Michelle:  I bet.

Anne:  I mean, actually, I will grant that, because we know this. This is what everybody says. She was gorgeous.

Michelle:  She’s the widow of a Lancastrian knight. Sir John Grey, who was killed fighting for them at the second Battle of St. Albans. She’s already got two little boys. You just do not want older half siblings of your heir floating around. This is just… oh my god.

Anne:  And she’s not royal.

Michelle:  No. No and, I mean, she’s from this, like ambitious family, right? Her dad, Lord Rivers, had married the widow of John of Bedford, Henry VI’s uncle – so Henry V’s brother – launching the family’s social climb. Oh my god. 

So she’s gorgeous. She refuses to be Edward’s mistress. Edward’s twenty-two, he’s still young enough to think he can do what he wants and get away with it.

Anne:  And it may also have been that there was a piece of him that was figuring out how to get out from under Warwick’s thumb.

Michelle:  Possibly, because he does start flouting him more and more. That’s a bad choice though.

Anne:  Yeah. No.

Michelle:  Because as the Woodville’s leverage their new connection, Warwick finally throws up his hands and says” I’m done with this”. I have a lot of sympathy for Warwick here.

Anne:  It’s odd. It’s really odd. Especially if you’ve been raised on things like, oh I don’t know, that White Queen movie, well obviously Warwick’s so awful.

Michelle:  You know sometimes arranged marriages are arranged for a reason. I have sympathy with Warwick because, I mean, they’re fighting, they’re actively fighting in the North, to preserve Edward’s throne, and here’s Edward screwing things up.

Anne:  I like to remind us, these are all cousins. All these people are related. They’re all distant cousins to each other. At any rate. Yeah. Edward’s mom is a Neville, isn’t she?

Michelle:  One of the things he’s doing that is annoying Warwick is refusing him to marry off his daughters, to cement his own relationship. So you may be right about him wanting to get out from under Warwick’s thumb, but this does not help, right? 

He’s got these two daughters, Isabel and Anne, who are coming up to marriageable age, by 1470, and he wants to marry them off to create alliances. And Edward keeps saying “No no no.” So Edward’s brother, George, makes an alliance with Warwick to marry his daughter Isabel, secretly. Without Edward knowing, they run off to France and get married in secret.

Anne:  You would think that Edward would have some sympathy for the secret marriage part, given the piece of the story that we’ve just heard.

Michelle:  Apparently it’s not as cool when your brother does it in an alliance with somebody who used to be on your side but is increasingly not. 

His brother Richard is only, like, twelve when Edward comes to the throne, so he’s not even a problem yet, or much of a force in any way. But one of the things of course that Warwick does – sorry I keep popping back in here – one of the things he does with the other daughter is marry her to Henry VI’s son, who was also called Edward I’m pretty sure.

Anne:  Yeah, he was, that’s the one who died at the battle of Tewksbury.

Michelle:  But because things are a mess she ends up married to Richard, Edward’s younger brother, after he signs a pre-nup because his brother George says “Oh Hell no am I sharing the sisters’ inheritance, I’m not sharing that with you,” so he has to sign a pre-nup. Richard does, to…

Anne:  I’d forgotten that part.

Michelle:  … agree to let his brother have all of the Warwick stuff that they would be inheriting.

Anne:  One of the outcomes of Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was that the Rivers’ became more and more powerful. So that was true, they were edging Warwick out, and they had more and more offices and lands and estates. This will be important later, that part of the story.

Michelle:  And one of the ways they’re using that is her children, from her first marriage, become old enough to marry and Edward arranges good marriages for both of those boys.

Anne:  That’s right. Yeah, it was a good move. It was a really, really good move for the Rivers’, but it becomes very sad. Hence, the podcast of The Princes in the Tower.

Edward was the second-born. He had an older sister Anne, then it was Edward. He had a brother Edmund, who was going to be killed at the Battle of Wakefield. There were two sisters after that, Elizabeth and Margaret, and then there was George, George was seven years younger than Edward, and Richard, the youngest child, was ten years younger.

When Warwick deserted Edward, George went with him, so deserting his brother and the king. He reconciled with Edward later when it became clear that Warwick was not actually going to make George, king. Again, it’s not just Edward who makes really stupid decisions in this family. I mean, we’ve had all this civil war and so here, you’re a younger son, your older brother is king and honestly, you think that you’re gonna get to just take this on over? Although stuff is changing so much these days.

Warwick was killed in 1471 and at that point George was made Great Chamberlain. His wife died in 1476 and from then on George seems to have lost whatever kind of rudder he had to begin with, which wasn’t a really good rudder in the first place. He believed his wife was poisoned – she’s not going to be showing up on our True Crime podcast because she wasn’t, she died either of consumption or childbed fever, but there’s really no reason to think she was poisoned – although George believed she was and managed to get one of her servants judicially killed, although Edward later pardoned her.

 He later got involved, maybe just peripherally but he got involved in a plot to kill Edward by witchcraft. It didn’t work, Edward didn’t die by witchcraft, but he was arrested, tried, convicted and then privately executed in the Tower in 1478. Probably not in a butt of malmsey, I’m sorry to tell you, because the butt of malmsey, we love that, it’s nice, great, but probably not. It was just a rumor. But what had happened was that Edward had continued to let him back into favor, to give him power, and George just simply kept abusing it, so that’s that brother.

The youngest brother had been extremely faithful. When their father and brother were killed at the Battle of Wakefield, in 1460, Richard and George were sent to Holland. Richard was only nine years old when he came back into England, after the Battle of Towton, and at that point he lived with Warwick. He lived with Warwick for years and Warwick gave him his training and his tutelage. He remained faithful to Edward, though, when Warwick deserted him, and indeed fled with Edward to Flanders.

After Tewkesbury he married Warwick’s daughter Anne, as we mentioned earlier. Under Edward he gained estates, lordships, he was the Great Chamberlain, he was the Lord High Admiral, he was a very important soldier for Edward and when Edward died he was named Lord Protector of the Realm. That was the ninth of April, what was the year? Remind me again when Edward died?

Michelle:  1483

Anne:  1483. Yeah, when Edward died, in 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector of the Realm. That was the ninth of April. 

On the 29^th of April, Richard and the Duke of Buckingham met Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, who was the Queen’s brother, who was escorting the young king down to London. They had two thousand men, Richard had six hundred. He met them and they sent the king, the young king, further south and Richard arrested Earl Rivers, his nephew Richard Grey and their associate Thomas Vaughn. They would be executed on the 25^th of June on a charge of treason against the Lord Protector, and this is simply a power move. This is a consolidation of power. They were not stealing the king, they were taking the king on down to London because his mother sent for him. Have you got anything to add in there?

Michelle:  Sure, when you have a minor king you’re going to have uncles who are fighting. I mean, essentially, the Rivers’ and Richard are fighting over who is actually going to be the boss of the child king.

Anne:  Fair enough.

Michelle:  And Richard wins this round.

Anne:  Fair enough. Edward had asked Richard to be the Lord Protector and to be the regent for the young king. The Queen obviously is wanting her brother to do it. Yeah. Richard wins. 

At that point, the Queen fled to Westminster Abbey and claimed sanctuary there. She was going to be there for quite some time. She took her four daughters, Thomas Grey who was one of her sons by her first marriage, and Richard, Duke of York, her youngest son. The Queen handed Richard over to his uncle Richard on the 16^th of June – her brother wasn’t dead yet – so that he could go to his brother’s coronation. At this point, whether Richard was actually planning to have the young king crowned or whether he was not, is unknown. He said he was planning to have the young king crowned and he wanted his brother there at the coronation, and the Queen handed over that child.

So that was the 16^th of June. On the 22^nd of June a sermon was preached outside of St. Paul’s declaring Edward’s children illegitimate. Now what this is about was that before this wonderful love story that is so charming and wonderful, before Edward met Elizabeth Woodville, he had had many affairs. He was known for catting around. And it was also believed, whether or not this is true, it was believed that he and Eleanor Butler had been promised to each other, which at this time would have made any marriage to anyone else illegal. The charge is that he had a union with Eleanor Butler before his marriage to Elizabeth, and that Richard and the young king Edward are illegitimate, and so this sermon is preached on the 22^nd of June.

The citizens of London petitioned Richard to take the throne. He accepted that on the 26^th of June. At this point Earl Rivers had just been executed the day before, and he was crowned on the 6^th of July. The little princes were in the Tower and they were never seen after that summer.

Michelle:  By the time the charge of bigamy comes out, both Edward and Eleanor are dead…

Anne:  Right.

Michelle:  …which makes it very hard to disprove.

Anne:  There had been a lot of rumors before this. It was not the first time that anyone had said that those children were illegitimate. That had been kind of like a little gossipy thing since their marriage, but yeah, it had never been dealt with. Edward had never squashed it during his lifetime.

Michelle:  So, you know, I would really prefer to think that Richard did not kill his nephews, I really would. But, you know, this part’s hard, right? He doesn’t have the boy crowned. There is kind of a gulf between putting him in the Tower, because people go into the Tower and come back out, you know, it’s kind of a thing that happens, but they disappear. It’s not a prison, exactly, at this point, and people go in and they come back out, but they don’t ever come back out and Richard…. I would prefer to think that he didn’t whack his nephews, but you know he only has the one son at this point who is known to be sickly. He actually ends up dying, Richard’s only child dies in 1484 and his wife dies not too long after that.

Anne:  It’s hard to say, you know, when you step back and you look at it as a whole picture, Richard was very faithful to his brother Edward, and that is something, that’s really clear, over decades. While his other brother defects and comes back and defects, Richard was loyal. 

That arresting of Earl Rivers, that’s a problem for me. You now, it isn’t like he just shows up and goes “Hi, glad you brought the kid this far, we’ll take him, no problem, do you want to come for lunch?” You know, that’s not what happens. That’s a serious escalation of the family and political problems to arrest Earl Rivers because he’s bringing his nephew down into London. 

And then everything happens so quickly. The Declaration of Illegitimacy, the citizens sending the petition, “Oh please be our king!” The “OK, yes I will, I guess I will since that’s what you want.” Not mentioning the now illegitimate children who are just hanging out in the Tower, just kind of not mentioning them, so it’s a while before people go “Wait wait wait where are the kids?”

Michelle:  George R.R. Martin’s been pretty open about using this series of conflicts as a source for what he’s doing with Game of Thrones, and Richard is kind of the closest character we have to Ned Stark, who’s getting dragged into this and just can’t navigate it. And the declaration of the king’s heirs as illegitimate of course is something that he picks up on. 

But the problem, as we’ll talk about next, the problem with trying to assess anything about Richard is the sources. We have very little in the way of a source that is coming down to us in some sort of unbiased fashion. Everything is post-Tudor, which is influenced by the time period in which it’s being written.

Anne:  Yeah, because the Tudors have a very tenuous bloodline to the thrown, through Margaret Beaufort, and they need to make it really clear that it was absolutely God’s will that Richard III ended up in the car park.

Michelle:  He’s the last English king to die in battle.

Anne:  Is he then? I didn’t realize that. So we’ll get to that next time. 

Check in with us next time for the second half of the Princes in the Tower, where we discuss what happened to them, what might have happened to them, what people said happened to them, what probably didn’t happen to them, but we don’t know, and take it on down to the end of the Cousins’ War.

 Anything else you’ve got to say, Michelle?

Michelle:  Nope, I want to talk about Shakespeare next week. And the obligations of historical fiction.

Anne:  You go, girl. You get to do that. 

We’re signing off, then. This is True Crime Medieval, all about the crimes that are just like the crimes nowadays except with less technology.

Michelle:  Bye!

Anne:  So is that okay for a tag line? You like that?

Michelle:  Oh yes, I like that.

2. The Bloodfeast of Roskilde, Roskilde 1157

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval where we discuss one thousand years of people behaving badly. I’m your host Anne Brannen recording from Albuquerque …

Michelle:  …and I’m Michelle Butler, I’m in the DC suburbs. 

Anne:  And today we are discussing the Bloodfeast of Roskilde. The perpetrator is Sweyn III of Denmark.

Michelle:  On August 9^th, 1159, Sweyn met his rivals for the Danish throne, Cnut and Valdemar, for what was supposed to be a peace banquet, which by the way was kind of like a peace party, it went on for days, celebrating their agreement…

Anne:  Oh did it?

Michelle:  It did! There wasn’t murder until the third day which, you know, when you’re dealing with extended family kind of seems not bad, really.

Anne:  Making it three days before you start offing your nephews and uncles, that’s pretty good.

Michelle:  I’ve got a lot of cousins, I sympathize, man. But it was supposed to be a peace banquet, right? Celebrating the agreement to divide Denmark into three parts and everybody was going to get along, which totally happens when you have a throne on the line. So what actually happened of course…

Anne:  History is full of examples of shared countries with all kinds of happy people forever, none of them come to my mind though.

Michelle:  Ambitious, well-armed claimants just settle down and divide the kingdom and everyone behaves properly, I mean it’s everywhere, the chronicles are loaded with such things.

Anne:  Yeah, it’s the history of humans really.

Michelle:  Well, totally shockingly, totally shockingly, one of them ended up dead, that was Cnut. Sweyn ended up having to flee the country and Valdemar was wounded. So you know, nothing good. 

Sweyn claims “I totally got word that they were planning on murdering me so I have to do this pre-emptive strike”, kind of like proactive self-defense is the claim he makes. And Valdemar claims no no no, it was an unprovoked attack to get rid of the others and rule Denmark alone. So the question of course on the table is, is this a justified pre-emptive strike or was it actually premeditated murder?

Anne:  And I have another question which will never be answered which is at what point, in the three-day party, did it become clear that some people needed to die? I mean, was this beforehand, afterwards, two days in? Somebody ate all the excellent White Mash, the recipe for which I will share later..

Michelle:  There are many great medieval recipes but that is not one of them.

Anne:  Yeah, no, Brie tarts are way better than White Mash, I’m just saying. 

So the background of all this is that all these people are related. Their great-grandfather is Sweyn II, who we will hear about later in the podcast, and amongst other children he had, by different mothers, Niels, who was the father of Magnus, the King of Sweden, who was the father of Cnut, who is one of our protagonists.

And Erik I, also called Erik the Good, who had, again by different mothers, Saint Cnut, who was the father of Valdemar, the fifteen-year-old who is one of our protagonists, and Erik II, the Memorable, who is the father of Sweyn III, the person who gave the lovely feast, as far as we know.

Erik and Cnut had a sister, Ragnhild, Erik’s daughter, who was the mother of Erik III, also called the Lamb, who was elected king. He was the nephew of Erik II (the Memorable) and he abdicated in 1146 and went into an abbey and died soon after and this led to this period of civil war.

Sweyn III was elected King in Zealand and Cnut V was elected King in Jutland and Valdemar I who would later become Valdemar the Great but at this point is only fifteen years old, helped Sweyn in the civil war and then was given Schleswig in Jutland.

Those are our protagonists and they had a lot of help from outside parties. Cnut had help from his father-in-law, Sverker I of Sweden, and Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Sweyn and Cnut both tried to get Conrad III of Germany to support them but then Frederick I of Germany became King and he brokered a deal between them.

Sweyn was later then supported by Henry the Lion, a duke in Germany, who brokered this deal where the country was divided into Jutland, Zealand and Scania and that’s where we are now. So that’s the lovely thing that we are now celebrating with the three-day feast that leads to sadness. That’s our three-day celebration: “Yay, Henry the Lion has brokered a deal!”

Michelle:  God, I wonder how long it was planned to go? I mean, murder broke out on the third day.

Anne:  The third day. It lasted three days before anybody died. This is not going to be the same as one of the later medieval feasts which really do take months of planning but still, it takes a while to put together a three-day party, you would think.

Michelle:  I’m still curious as to how long it was planned to go on. I suppose it depends…. if no murder had broken out, was it going to be all week? Week and a half? Or had Sweyn only bought provisions for the three days because he knew he was planning on whacking them on the third day?

Anne:  That’s a much better question. Not how long did they plan for it, but how long did they think it was going to take? Oh I would love to know that. I wish we knew. Because really that would answer a lot. If the provisions… if it was three days of provisions, that pretty much answers who planned it.

Michelle:  “He said it’s going to go for a week, but he only bought groceries for three days”. That kind of tips his hand. So what we really need are some good household records from him.

Anne:  No we don’t have any.

Michelle:  So he’s the oldest right? Sweyn is the oldest of the bunch and should, from that, have had an advantage. As you mentioned, Valdemar is only fifteen when Erik the Lamb, the least scary Viking in history, in terms of his nickname. So he’s the oldest. Cnut is the next because he’s born in 1129, and Valdemar is only fifteen which means that Cnut’s only seventeen, so they’re all very young which tends to happen if everybody’s getting killed. How many people die a natural death? Not bloody many. So course what happens depends on…

Anne:  Well, Erik the Lamb! Erik the Lamb, we think that was a natural death.

Michelle:  If by natural we’re talking about disease, I suppose. Not very many of these guys die, you know, old in their beds surrounded by their great-grandchildren and patting them on the head.

Anne:  No. No.

Michelle:  It’s almost like, if you arm people and then put a country up for grabs that violence will happen. Amazing.

Anne:  It’s so odd really, isn’t it? It just seems so counter to humans and their innate goodness and sweetness.

Michelle:  So much good behavior at all times. 

So one of my favorite pieces of this example was that we actually have sources. When literacy shows up in Scandinavia they get so excited about it and they’re writing stuff down all the time, it’s great. So we have four primary sources, which I was completely jazzed about.

We have Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum which is really cool, and             these are also written in Latin, which is really awesome, and kind of interesting. So that one’s thirteenth century. In this one, Sweyn is obviously the villain. He planned the peace banquet, he’s, you know, twirling the mustache, chortling bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha, and planning to get the rivals within his reach so he could murder them. 

The hardest one to pronounce is Óláfr Þórðarson’s Knýtlinga saga which also has Sweyn being wholly, wholly treacherous. Cnut and Valdemar didn’t suspect a thing which means they’re stupid, by the way, because it’s not like…

Anne:  Yeah, I’m not impressed. I’m really not impressed if Cnut and Valdemar had no idea that they were in danger.

Michelle:  “They show up like the trusting souls”… no, come on, everybody was showing up with a knife in their beard.

Anne:  It’s dinner with our cousins!

Michelle:  What could possibly go wrong? I mean, even now people are skeptical about showing up for Thanksgiving because you know there’s going to be fights. Most of the time nobody’s armed now. 

Sven Aggesen’s A Short History of the Kings of Denmark is actually fairly close to, because it’s written circa 1187 so that’s reasonably close…

Anne:  That’s not too bad.

Michelle:  Within a generation. He also paints him as unambiguously wicked but of course Valdemar has only been dead for five years, by this point, in 1187, and his kid is on the throne so you’re gonna be careful what you say, right? 

So this is one of the problems with our sources is that they’re being written either under the reign of Valdemar or under the reign of one of the sons who followed him so of course you’re not gonna do something to annoy the king.

And the last one of course is Helmold’s Chronicle of the Slavs, also in the 1180s. This one surprisingly is a little bit more sympathetic, or a little bit judicious, toward Sweyn but the furthest he manages to go is he suggests the banquet was planned in good faith but that Sweyn, due to his innate cruelty, barely sat at the table and as he saw the kings feast without any suspicion or anger he began to look for a good opportunity for an ambush. So I guess it’s marginally better, like the difference between second degree and first degree murder, to be shown as an opportunistic jerk as opposed to planning the whole thing ahead of time, but it’s not what we would call heroic.

Anne:  I like also the idea that Sweyn is basically projecting his inner self onto his cousins and then killing them. Because believing that of course they must be like him, so really, no, this is not very flattering.

Michelle:  So those are our four sources. I’m so happy to have primary sources. But of course, it just amuses me so much how much the Scandinavians embraced literacy once it finally gets there, you know and you’re not having to carve everything in runes? They really, really take to it, much like the Irish do, and everything is getting written down, it’s great.

So one of the sources that we read, I can handle the first name its Lars…

Anne:  Kjær

Michelle:  Kjær, OK. So we will list this in our thing of sources. His chapter is about the obligation of hospitality and how it creates unintentional consequences, but he talks about how, from the beginning, there’s argument about what actually happened that night, right? 

So Sweyn shows up before the people of Roskilde the next morning, “Hey look, here’s my cloak, look what they did to me, I’ve got damage!” But apparently nobody was buying that, and then Valdemar also goes over to Jutland and shows up in a public assembly, shows everybody “Hey, look what they did to me, I’m wounded”, tells a tragic tale, and he’s believed. So of course they get together, the two parties meet in battle again on October 23, 1157, which of course is the day we’re recording! 

Anne:  It’s an anniversary!

Michelle:  It totally matters that it’s the 867^thanniversary. It’s a meaningful anniversary of Sweyn’s death.

The analysis by Matt Firth I thought was really interesting because he points out in his blog post about this, the other historian does as well, Valdemar either has engineered this as a master politician, that he’s kind of entrapped Sweyn into behaving this way and then has a plan for what he’s going to do, or he thinks on his feet really quickly because he steps up his PR game immediately. “I got attacked, here’s what happened, you need to support me now”.

Saxo and one of the other sources talks about this as a divine miracle, that he’s escaped, and that when Sweyn is killed that is divine retribution, but either this has been…

I don’t know that I want to put it beyond his possibility, he ends up ruling until 1182 which is, for the twelfth century, a really long… he manages to hold on to the throne for a really long time, you know, 1157-1182 is a nice long period of stability which suggests that he’s got good political skills and ability to keep other people from killing him. And Sweyn has come down to us as a thoroughgoing villain who planned with malice aforethought, to murder his cousins at what was supposed to be a peace banquet.

Anne:  He has no nickname, does he?

Michelle:  The only thing I’ve seen attached to him is Grathe, the name of the battlefield.

Anne:  Right, that’s just where he died.

Michelle:  Because they all need nicknames since there’s like six names that they share among themselves every generation.

Anne: The same thing happens in Welsh, so you have nicknames. So he’s Sweyn Where He Died. That’s sad.

Michelle:  And one of the stories that is just sort of a masterstroke of slandering the dead is that he was trying to run away after the battle, right? When he knew that all was lost, that he was trying to escape and the horse gets stuck in a bog and so he’s killed by peasants.

Anne:  I don’t know why I find that so hilarious.

Michelle:  Well it kind of adds insult to injury doesn’t it?

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  That, you know, he’s not only lost, he didn’t get killed by the proper people.

Anne:  And it also is kind of… whether it’s a made-up story or not it’s a kind of picture of the problems not being just at the level of whose ruling, that the peasants themselves have something to say about this. They’re being oppressed.

Michelle:  Yeah, that’s a good point. That implies that Valdemar goes forward with the consent of the governed. It’s like an echo of the election from the earls.

So we don’t really have a good way of assessing whether Sweyn actually planned to murder his cousins, but we do know that that’s how his rep gets established, that’s how he comes down, and you have to dig a little bit into the sources to find out that there was any question at all about it.

Anne:  And we do know that there was a banquet, a three-day party, a three-day family reunion party and two of the cousins were attacked, one died, and one was wounded. He had something to do with it. The extent to which it was justified or not justified we don’t know, but he had something to do with it.

Michelle:  I know that whoever Valdemar had doing his PR, I hope that dude got a bonus, because that was some amazing public relations. By the time of the battle, he was fifteen when Erik the Lamb abdicated, so now he’s in his mid-twenties which is still, you know, really young, but I guess he’s been schooled in the hard-knock sort of situation, and he manages to not die, which is impressive.

Anne:  He’ll always be a fifteen-year-old to me. The whole not dying at fifteen in the civil war, I’m just so impressed by this.

Michelle:  I’m impressed with him. He probably is not as naïve as Saxo presents him. “They had no idea! They weren’t suspicious at all! They just showed up!” That seems highly improbable. “Let’s go have dinner with the guys we’re fighting with, it’ll be fine.”

Anne:  Yeah. It seems unlikely.

Michelle:  But it is a nice lead-in to Richard III and the little princes because Sweyn and Richard end up with very similar reputations and trying to assess whether they deserve them is really complicated. 

Anne:  Yeah, because so much of what we know of them comes from the generations that are directly affected by their having lost.

Michelle:  And things hadn’t gotten any less violent, so it’s not like it was safe to have a minority opinion, at that point. 

So I don’t think you have told us about White Mash.

Anne:  No I haven’t.

Michelle:  I was promised a description of White Mash.

Anne:  Yeah, you were promised. 

This has to do with hospitality and the reason this is all so treacherous is that, for whatever reasons Sweyn killed and attempted to kill cousins, he was doing it at a feast and they were his guests and this is a deep violation of, basically, the laws of hospitality across time, certainly in Scandinavia where the necessity of being a generous and gracious host is crucial to reputation and to really kind of keeping the culture, the society together.

It’s a place where towns and villages and farms, there’s distances between them, the traveling is hard, and you offer hospitality to people that come by, and especially if you invite them over it’s really important that you treat them well which, killing them, or attempting to kill them, is just, it’s just not on.

And there’s this lovely example, we have this evidence all through the sagas of how important hospitality is and what it means to reputation and how seriously rulers take this and one of the examples is from Sweyn’s great-grandfather, Auðunof the Westfjords. Auðunarrives at Sweyn’s place where he’s a valued guest, Sweyn gives him a ship, a purse of silver and one of the gold bands off his arm saying “If anything happens to you, if there’s a shipwreck and you lose everything, you can show people this gold band and they will know that you met me”.

So it’s obviously crucial, this hospitality is a way of sending reputation on out through time and space, and Sweyn III, his great-grandson, really didn’t do well at that. It’s bad, it’s just really bad, I don’t care about the politics of your cousins, it’s really bad to try to kill them at the dinner table. It’s just not on. Especially at a peace feast.

But I promised you a recipe. I went looking for what were people eating. This is not going to be the elaborate feast of later Middle Ages with the marzipan sculptures and whatnot, but still there’ll be meat, there’ll be porridge, there’ll be vegetables. And we have an actual recipe, it’s from a thirteenth-century Danish manuscript, I think we can date it on back. It’s for what translates as White Mash.

Here’s the translation of it, it’s written in Latin, here’s the translation:

Take fresh milk and crushed wheat bread and a beaten egg and saffron and cook it until it is thick and put it on a dish and add butter and powdered cinnamon.

Doesn’t that sound good, Michelle?

Michelle:  So this sounds like bread pudding, kind of?

Anne:  It will evolve into bread pudding.

Michelle:  That’s not as horrible as I was expecting.

Anne:  It’s fairly horrible. The modernization of it that I’ve seen adds sugar to make it more like bread pudding, but there’s no sugar in this. 

I want to point out something though, the wheat bread is specified. This means that this is very high quality, very high end. Rye is what’s eaten in Denmark at that time. Wheat, throughout Europe, in the Middle Ages, wheat is the grain of the nobility and this is specified wheatbread. This is why it’s White Mash, because otherwise it would             be grey. Mmmm. Rye custard. Mmm. And it’s not sweet. 

Michelle:  Oh god!

Anne:  I know, that was bad. Let’s go away from that picture really quickly, 

It’s been flavored with saffron and nowadays saffron is very expensive but it wasn’t then. Saffron is expensive now because it’s labor-            intensive, but it was cheap then because it’s labor-intensive, you know, it’s like peasants are taking all the little things off the orchids, and it wasn’t just grown in Spain, England had… Saffron Walden is named because it was growing saffron. So Saffron’s not the big deal. But that powdered cinnamon is. And you notice that it’s been put on at the last, so that it’s very visible, it’s not, like, throughout the dish. That cinnamon’s expensive. And that wheat’s expensive. 

As far as I can tell this is a side dish for feast and if you’d like to cook it you can cook it yourself. The crushed wheat bread will be like stale bread crumbs.

Michelle:  Yum yum.

Anne:  Yum yum. It might actually be enough to make you kill your cousins. I don’t know.

Michelle:  We should consider having recipes at the end of each podcast, just for the people who really like both crime and cooking. Cooking weird medieval crap.

Anne:  It’s one of the things I’m fascinated with. I don’t mind trying to find them. We can add this to the show notes. We’ll add the recipe for White Mash to the show notes so that you can eat it yourself and you can let us know on the Facebook page if you liked it.

Michelle:  There probably are some amazing crimes about spices, you know, because that shit was worth a lot.

Anne:  It really was.

Michelle:  There probably are people who got killed for spices.

Anne:  So yeah, so that’s the Bloodfeast of Roskilde. It’s not nearly as exciting as some of the bloodfeasts which Martin was thinking about when he wrote the “Red Wedding”. There will be bloodier ones coming later. But, you know, it’s a nice little start, as a beginning, for bloodfeasts, and talking about bloodfeasts, you know, just one dead person, although do we know if there were any servants that also died? Retainers? I don’t’ know why I think that maybe we do.

Michelle:  If so they didn’t make the mention, but I mean there must have been. Surely not every single guard was like “Yeah, go ahead, I don’t care”.

Anne:  Yeah. You have a picture of everybody sitting around… you know your boss gets stabbed and you’re just like, “Oh whatever”, I think not. I think possibly there’s a melee. But the main dead were one king and then a wounded king. In the thigh I believe it was.

Michelle:  Valdemar, yeah. What’s really cool about this is that it gets this awesome name, you know, the Bloodfeast of Roskilde, which makes you really think that there’s gonna be some serious body count…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  And really what you have going on is this amazing act of public relations, like Valdemar does, so it’s kind of fitting, actually, in that way, that it gets this great name, like he manages to accomplish. “My reputation! God wanted me to be king, that’s why I’m still alive”.

Anne:  He’s good at surviving. He’s good at PR. These are the very beginning. Sweyn, on the other hand, does a whole lot of conniving and just sort of does not get far and really it’s just, it’s sort of humiliating that the legacy of his great-grandfather has come down into this kind of anti-hospitality. So yeah. Not good. Not good.

Michelle:  I don’t have any cool last words here.

Anne:  So are we doing the Little Princes next?

Michelle:  Oh lets. Lets do. Lets do that. Yeah. Richard.

Anne:  I forget what order we said we would do things in, but we like the Princes in the Tower…

So that’s it for us, for the Bloodfeast of Roskilde. You can check out our show notes and the transcript and let us know on the Facebook page if indeed you enjoyed making and eating the White Mash. We’re not going to do that. But especially if you make it with rye bread we totally want to hear about that.

Michelle:  Oh god, if they make it with rye bread I want pictures. Bonus points if somebody’s actually eating it.

Anne:  Yeah. But if you put sugar in it, we’re not interested. We want the real thing. Saffron, cinnamon, that’s it.

Anne:  Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval where we discuss one thousand years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen.

Michelle:  And I’m Michelle Butler.

Anne:  And today we’re discussing a death by foxglove poisoning in fourteenth-century Italy. 

Michelle:  On July 18, 1329, Cangrande della Scala (boy that one’s hard!) made his triumphant entry into Treviso. The city had just surrendered to his army, which had been besieging it since July 2. On July 22, just four days later, Cangrande was dead. Natural causes? Or oh-so-convenient murder?

Anne:  Of which there was a lot in those days, actually.

Michelle:  Oh my god. Like, nobody, nobody lives to a ripe old age.

Anne: No. His father had been murdered and later his heirs got murdered. 

He was the ruler of Verona at the time of his death and he was a Ghibelline. The wars between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines started in the 12^th and 13^th centuries. It was originally a struggle of power between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, but that actual controversy had ended, theoretically, in 1122, with the Concordat of             Worms, but the rivalry between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines continued for centuries, through the rest of the Italian medieval period, long past the death we’re talking about, and it didn’t actually end until the 16^th century because some other thing entirely happened. 

The Guelphs had supported the Pope, the Ghibellines had supported the Holy Roman Emperor, and indeed the factions at the time were called the Church Party and the Imperial Party, the names that we’re using weren’t invented until after. Cangrande had inherited his Ghibelline allegiance in a city, Verona, that had shifted allegiances back and forth throughout the period, and he was also married to Giovanna, a descendant of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. He didn’t have any legitimate heirs through her, although he had a bunch of illegitimate children.

Michelle: He had eight of them!

Anne:  Was it eight? I didn’t count them.

Michelle:  Eight!

Anne: By how many people? Do you know?

Michelle:  I don’t know that.

Anne:  You see, that would be nice to know, like eight different people? Four? One? You know?

Michelle:  Just sprinkling ‘em everywhere.

Anne:  But none of them inherited. The rivalry between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines affected the city-states of Northern and Central Italy for hundreds of years, allegiances shifting town to town, city-state to city-state, city to city, in the cities to guild to guild, and then the city’s allegiances, everything shifting. It just was a very fluid and changeable and deadly mixture of forces for hundreds of years. It affected the rest of Europe, since the Pope ruled over the West European Christians and the Holy Roman Empire boundaries, which moved all around, and there was trade, and there was the relationship with the Eastern Christians, the Byzantines were supporting the Ghibellines. And then Dante gets involved with this, although oddly Dante was a Guelph. I want to know about Dante because Cangrande, besides being a war hero and all that, was also a patron of the arts, not just Dante but Petrarch and Giotto.

Michelle:  And he gets mentioned by Boccaccio in the Decameron.

Anne:  Oh does he? I didn’t realize that. How did I miss that? But I’m confused about Dante because Dante got thrown out of Florence, yeah? For being on the wrong side of a particular Guelph faction?

Michelle:  And he ends up living in Cangrande’s household for six years, from 1312 to 1318. And Cangrande himself is not actually very old at that point. In 1312 he’s only 20, 21 years old. He’s born in 1291. But of course he’s gotta get out of the gate early since he’s only going to live to be, like, 39. 

So Cangrande is really, really interesting. So he’s born in 1291. He’s the third son but ends up in charge kind of early in life, which is really interesting, right? The older brothers, Bartolomeo dies in 1304 and Alboino dies in 1311. And the dad, and we talked about this before, the dad knights him when he’s only ten years old. Knighthood now, like, you can be part of the Beatles or something and get knighted but in the 13^th century it’s still very much an actual military thing, so knighting him when he’s ten years old, I just can’t imagine what people thought. But he lives up to the dad’s confidence. I mean, basically, as soon as he’s the equivalent of a middle-schooler they’re sending his butt off to war. You know I can’t trust mine to mow the yard. 

The oldest brother, Bartomeo, and the dad both die in 1304, leaving, if you’re doing the math at home, a 12-year-old going on 13 as the joint             ruler of Verona with the surviving older brother Alboino. And basically from then on he’s getting hands-on political experience, real-life military experience.

Anne:  A great deal of it since there were so many battles.

Michelle:  He’s all the time all over the place, fighting all over, just trying to take over as much of Northern Italy as they can get a hold of and what I was finding is that people thought he was basically a decent human being, you know, for a scary and effective warlord. The standard: devoted to the Virgin Mary, merciful to defeated enemies. Yeah, that’s what they say. But on the other hand you’re not really gonna, if you have a bad thought about him, gonna write it down. Not until after he’s safely dead.

So one of my favorite things about him is he’s got this fancy-sounding name, you know, Cangrande, right? And it’s a nickname, it just means Big Dog, which cracks me up. He sounds like a street thug. The whole family had a dog theme going on even though it was basically an unofficial second emblem. They had a coat of arms but then they also stuck dog images all over things. And then the remaining older brother dies in 1311…

Anne:  And he’s the Big Dog…

Michelle:  …leaving him, at the ripe old age of 20, the Big Dog, in charge of it all. And he seizes his chance with both hands, oh yeah. He really does well.

Anne:  He was pretty successful, yeah?

Michelle:  You know there’s setbacks, it’s not like he never has issues, but he adds territory, he adds quite a lot of territory over the next 20 years, roughly.

Anne:  So how does Dante fit into all this?

Michelle:  Cangrande actually now is best known as the patron, the supporter of Dante, right? Because Dante dedicates the third part of the Divine Comedy to him. Rally you’d think it would be sort of a back-handed compliment to have Inferno dedicated to you. I wrote this and thought of you. No. 

So I’m embarrassed, I’m embarrassed for Dante about this, okay, because patronage relationships absolutely involve a certain amount of sucking up, it’s just the nature of the thing. If somebody else is paying your way, you’re going to be nice to them about it. Very few people, just like now, in the Middle Ages make their living as a writer directly.

Anne:  Yes.

Michelle:  But, even with all of that, Dante’s sucking up is tremendous and over the top. I have a representative couple of quotes that are just spectacular. 

“The outstanding praise of your magnificence, which watchful fame spreads abroad on flying wing, pulls different people in different             directions so that it brings some to hope in their prosperity, casts others down in fear of destruction. The report of such fame, exceeding by far that of any present day person as somewhat beyond the truth I judged to be somewhat exaggerated.”

So I’m gonna lay a little bit of comparing him to famous people out…

“And there I saw your great works” (having come to Verona), “I saw your beneficences and touched them and just as I had earlier             suspected excess on part of your praisers, now I know to be the excess of the deeds themselves.”

So basically I’m saying oh, before I got there I figured your reputation             had to be overblown but now that I see everything you’ve done I know they were actually understating it. I’m just embarrassed.

Anne:  You are even bigger than exaggerated things!

Michelle:  This letter from Dante is just the master-class in kissing ass. I mean, he gives evidence! It’s footnoted, as to why he thinks this guy is spectacular. There are scholars who want to dispute the authenticity of Dante’s letter and they have a number of reasons but honestly I think they’re mostly just embarrassed for him too.

Anne:  Oh Dante!

Michelle:  I mean Chaucer, right? Chaucer has to suck up to a number of people but it’s never quite this obsequious.

Anne:  No. No. No it isn’t. And there’s always this little bite to Chaucer where you’re thinking you don’t mean this do you? 

Dante had ended up in Verona because he had had to flee Florence because he had been on the wrong side of a division between the Guelphs and I was like, well, if he’s a Guelph why is he going in with the entire other party but he was on the side of the Guelphs that was more in league with the other party than the other side… it’s just too complicated. So that’s why he had to leave Florence, so he was out of Florence and taken in by Verona which, I guess if you are a Guelph would prove that he was just not behaving, so there’s that.

So what happened with Big Dog was how we come to the True Crime part of the podcast. He was 38 years old in 1329 when he left Verona for Treviso, which he conquered on the 18^th of July, and so he entered the city in triumph. He was already extremely ill and that’s according to contemporary accounts –  the whole business about where the information comes from and when we get it seems important to me. So he was ill when he got to Treviso and contemporary accounts say that he was ill from drinking from a polluted spring. So let us remember this. And he died on the 22nd of July so that’s from the 18^th to the 22^nd…

Michelle:  So he knows he’s not well. The city surrenders on the 18^th and then he does his victory lap through the city on the 22^nd but he’s already sick. 

Anne:  His body was taken to Verona and he was buried in the church of Santa Maria Antiqua. He had no legitimate heirs so his nephews Mastino and Alberto della Scala inherited the titles. So that’s the brief account of it, which doesn’t actually look like true crime, it just looks like somebody got sick because they drank out of a polluted spring.

Michelle:  Well, the polluted water story is floating around pretty quickly, but Mastino has Cangrande’s doctor executed, which I think is really interesting. Because there’s a lot of water-borne diseases in the Middle Ages, just like any other time and place without good sanitation and/or water purification techniques, so, you know, go with the illness story, why are you adding poison into the mix? Then he has him hanged, Mastino does, which just looks fishy.

Anne:  Yeah, well that doesn’t actually show up in the accounts until later so that I think there’s some doubt as to whether it actually happened or it got added in as part of a story.

Michelle:  There’s not a lot of good information and what I was finding is not well documented. So there’s a story that not only did he bump off this uncle, he bumped off another one in 1338. He gets mad as his other uncle, the Bishop of Verona, who is actually a real person, I was able to find that this guy is real. 

Bartolomeo was in fact the Bishop of Verona from 1336 to 1338. The story that he, that Mastino, is the one that stabbed him to death in the             street because he was mad at a perceived disloyalty, is only on tourist websites and in a 1907 book called The Story of Verona and a novel published in 1846 called The Lady of Milan. So this is not well documented. But what’s really interesting about those two sources is that they ascribe this murder to him, but not Cangrande’s, which then makes you start to wonder whether you have some slippage going on in terms of the stories, that he’s being ascribed two murders when he actually is really only suspected of one, or possibly committed none. I’m going to be real honest, I think Mastino is guilty. It’s really super convenient for him that Cangrande bites it right then. Mastino was 21, he had married the year before, the wife was expecting, his first son is             coming…

Anne:  Yeah.

Michelle:  He ends up with four more sons but they’re born after Cangrande dies. And it’s just the sort of time a guy might be thinking about a little bit of self-promotion by selectively pruning the family tree. And we know from his life that he has a lot of ambition, he ends up basically pushing his brother out, Alberto, and ruling by himself.

Anne:  Fair enough. It seems to me that it’s highly likely that Cangrande was murdered but I still wonder about it. But at any rate we do actually have scientific evidence. We dug him up, we have scientific evidence. We know what he died of. You want to talk about hat?

Michelle:  This time they actually dug him up and we know for sure that he died of poison. They found quite a lot of foxglove in his stomach. More than enough to kill somebody.

Anne:  Along with a couple of other things which would have been legitimate medicines at the time. I forget what they are. It wasn’t just foxglove so it does look like it could have been part of a medicinal dose, in other words that a physician could well have been bribed to do it and then hung later to get him out of the way.

Michelle:  There’s that. We know that historically people use things as medicines that are also poisonous. Mercury, I’m looking at you.

Anne:  Right. That’s true. But not foxglove. Until the 18^th century the only thing we know that foxglove was used for medicinally, that shows up in any of the texts, is as part of a poultice for wounds in battle. I think it’s a stupid choice.

Michelle:  That does not seem likely to make you better.

Anne:  No. But then I don’t know that we would know that people died necessarily of the foxglove since, you know, the poultices didn’t look very useful. It wouldn’t have been used naturally, that we know of, as part of a medicinal dose to try and help him get over whatever illness             he had gotten by drinking from the polluted spring. And he was ill, he was ill when he went into the city.

Michelle:  It is, I mean, it’s theoretically possible that he got it on accident in the water, because it does look like comfrey. The timing is what I keep coming back to, right? It’s so super convenient for Mastino, after this big old victory and a whole city of mad, conquered inhabitants to conveniently blame, that this is when Cangrande goes down.

Anne:  That’s true. And although I really liked the idea that what had made him ill in the polluted spring was foxglove, and foxglove can grow by ponds and whatnot. Foxglove is dangerous, every single piece of the foxglove plant is deadly, to humans, to livestock, to cats and dogs, it’s just deadly deadly deadly. But it takes a lot to actually kill a grown human. Children have apparently died from drinking the water that foxglove plants are standing in, but children don’t need as much of a dose in order to die. So I think you might be right. I was hoping that I could conveniently argue that it was actually not true crime but I think maybe it is.

Michelle:  It’s nice though to have the actual evidence that he was poisoned because I’ve done some other reading about historic poisonings and ultimately we don’t actually know. Because it’s also really convenient, there’s somebody you don’t like, and somebody else dies just at the right moment you can say hey, I bet this guy poisoned him. That’s a very hard accusation to refute. I will say a whole bunch of these dudes are dying young so it looks very sketchy.

Anne:  Yeah I was really delighted with the whole foxglove thing though. Foxglove is this gorgeous plant. It’s really really beautiful and it’s deathly deathly, I wanted to know if it could grow by ponds, specifically, because I wanted to know if it could have gotten into the water and I found all these British sites that say these are native plants, our beautiful native foxglove, but don’t plant it by the fish pond because it’s going to kill the fish. So I have that as evidence. But it’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous and it’s completely dangerous and people can buy it and put it in their yards. It’s like oleander. You know like why? Why put this in your yard? It’s a death plant. I don’t know. 

At any rate. Until recently foxglove has been used for heart issues, although lately they’re not using digitalis as much anymore but it was also, in the 19^th century, being used in order to cure seizures which is why Vincent Van Gogh was being given it when he was in the asylum. One of the symptoms that it causes is yellow auras around everything which you can actually see in Starry Night. It causes nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, yellow auras around everything, delirium, hallucinations, convulsion and heart failure. It’s not a nice death.

Michelle:  At least it didn’t last a week.

Anne:  No, or even four days as I had thought.

Michelle:  And he has a truly awesome tomb. Where he’s buried Mastino, out of love or guilt, you pick, made sure he had a great tomb. It’s actually not there now, there’s a replica that is over the archway, his effigy, his horseback effigy is over this tremendous archway in the church where he’s buried. Up in the air, not at ground level. It’s really cool.

Anne:  So is that the tomb that he was in in 2004 when they dug him out to see..

Michelle:  He’s buried, of course, in the crypt, but the effigy is up there, above the doorway, so everybody ahs to look up to him as they come into the church.

Anne:  And they put the body back, I hope. 

Michelle:  Yeah, the pictures look pretty good for 700 years old. He even still has some of his clothing. I don’t know, you know, how long does it have to be before grave robbing becomes archeology? 700 years appears to be OK.

Anne:  But if they put him back that’s especially good. And it wasn’t just archeology, it was forensics. It was, you know, true crime. A police             investigation of really really dead people that you can’t do anything to             anyway.

Michelle:  It’s not that nobody in his own time thought that Mastino… you know people suspected him even in his own time but they couldn’t prove anything, of course, and one of his sons is named Cangrande.

Anne:  If he hung the physician, though, that is kind of so suspicious. I couldn’t even find what there was that the physician was accused of when he got hung. I mean, there’ surely some kind of, like, supposedly reason but all I could find was reference to the physician being hung, not for what. You have anything else you want to add?

Michelle:  I don’t know. I was really intrigued by him showing up in this other story that I cannot verify at all about stabbing the Bishop in the street. Which I cannot find a single decent piece of information to suggest that that’s true or suggest it’s… you know, it’s probably an urban legend that’s continuing to be passed along. But I think it’s interesting that that exists.

Anne:  Yeah, and why it got invented in the first place. Why? Why invent that at all? Just that there seems to be some kind of aura of suspicion on him, in general.

Michelle:  He’s apparently as aggressive and abrasive as Cangrande himself without his charm. And the son, Cangrande II, is even worse. So it’s possible that Mastino is catching blowback from the dislike of his kid. 

Anne:  But Cangrande remains a revered or honored figure.

Michelle:  Probably in comparison, he’s awesome.

Anne:  Thank you for listening to True Crime Medieval. One thousand years of people behaving badly. Check with us next time and we’ll cover Sweyn III of Denmark who, in 1157, hosted the Blood Feast of Roskilde.

Michelle:  Oh awesome! I’m excited about that. I’ve been to Roskilde.