74. Dafydd Gam ap Llewelyn ap Hywel kills his kinsman Richard Fawr ap Dafydd, Brecon High Street, Wales late 14th Century

Davy Gam was born in Penywaun, near Brecon, where later he would kill a kinsman in the High Street. His father, Llewelyn ap Hywel, had bought an estate there. Here’s Penywaun! It looks different now.

Before Davy Gam got famous amongst the English for helping out at Agincourt and getting knighted, and being in general an acceptable Welshman on account of helping out the English and fighting Welshmen, he had killed a kinsman in Brecon, had fought under John of Gaunt, and had fought against Owain Glyndŵr, the leader of the last great Welsh rebellion and the last Welsh Prince of Wales. As you can imagine, a Welshman famous amongst the English for bravely serving them and fighting at Agincourt is not necessarily a Welsh hero. But! He gives Anne an excuse for talking about Owain Glyndŵr, and Michelle an excuse for explaining why John Powys is not as good an author as Tolkien. Also, we discuss how it is that families in an occupied country might well find themselves on different sides of a conflict. 

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73. Special Holiday Edition: The Cursed Carolers, Saxony 10th Century

Not at Christmas, not in Saxony, not in the 10th century, BUT here are people dancing a carole. One of them is Lancelot. (Evrard d’Espinques from ‘Lancelot du Lac’ c. 1470. Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr.115 f475.)

Once upon a time, a group of parishioners in a village in Saxony danced in the churchyard during Christmas Mass, and so the priest cursed them and then they danced without ceasing for a year. This story was told, with variations, throughout Europe, from the 10th century (at least) through the 16th century. And! It really happened! Ok, not the dancing without ceasing for a year part, but the dancing without being able to stop? That really happened. From the 14th through the 17th century, groups of people throughout Europe would start dancing maniacally, and be unable to stop. Sometimes they did this till they died. And we still don’t know why this occurred, though it is recognized as a Thing That Really Happened. We discuss dancing mania, the cursed carolers legends, and try to make sense of it all. 
 Happy Holidays!

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72. The Jews of York are Massacred, York, England 1190

Clifford’s Tower wasn’t there when the Jews of York were massacred, but it stands there now, and the mound has been planted with daffodils in remembrance and honor of the dead. The flowers have six petals, reminiscent of the Star of David, and bloom in March, near the anniversary of the atrocity.

A wave of anti-Semitism and atrocities against the Jews swept England starting in 1189, when Richard Lionheart was crowned, and mobs in London attacked the Jews in that city. The worst of the atrocities happened in York, when the local mobs burnt and pillaged Jewish homes; when the Jews retreated to the castle keep (they were, theoretically and legally, under the protection of the king), the York mob besieged the wooden keep with  stones, and murdered some of the Jews, having lured them out of the keep with the promise of safety if they converted. The Jews of York committed suicide, and burnt down the keep. Lately, work has been done to create an honorable, respectful, and informative permanent exhibit, making sure that this piece of York history is known and remembered. Michelle, having found no operas and novels featuring this atrocity, explains the history of York castle. And also Henry III’s toilet.

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71.Special Episode: Guy Fawkes Attempts to Blow Up King James and Parliament, London, England November 5, 1605

This is one of the illustrations made by George Cruikshank for the 1840 edition of William Harrison Ainsworth’s Guy Fawkes, or The Gunpowder Treason, an historical novel that made Edgar Allan Poe very upset indeed. Here, Guy is in Ordsall Cave, philosophically pondering how best to commit domestic terrorism. (Did Guy and his cohorts plan the Gunpowder Plot in Ordsall? No. Ainsworth made that up.

Special Episode! It’s the third birthday of True Crime Medieval, but, more importantly really, it’s the 417th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot not actually coming off; if it had, not only King James and all of Parliament would have been destroyed, but also several blocks around, including Westminster Abbey.  We discuss the Plot, why it didn’t work, what’s been going on with November 5th celebrations since then, and, because Michelle finds this stuff, Edgar Allan Poe and his hatred for William Harrison Ainsworth’s historical novel about the whole affair. 

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70.King Alboin is Murdered, Verona, Italy 572

Oh, how often do our illustrations illustrate things that didn’t happen! Here’s another. The most famous part of the murder of Alboin is that time he forced his wife Rosamund to drink out of the skull of her father, thereby precipitating the murder. Didn’t happen. But this is a very fine picture of it, since it was made by Pietro della Vecchia (c. 1655). (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lons-le-Saunier)

King Alboin was a very successful king of the Lombards, and conquered the Gepids, and took Rosamund, the daughter of the king of the Gepids, as his wife, and everything was great, but then Rosamund murdered him, with the help of her lover. She was probably not very happy about the marriage, since she was still mourning the deaths of her father and her grandfather and her brother, so probably being married to the guy that killed them wasn’t fun. The story got embellished pretty quickly; Alboin made Rosamund drink out of the skull of her father, for instance — nice detail but your hosts don’t believe it happened. As time went on, the story stopped being about Alboin and started being about Rosamund. Michelle watched an entire  movie from 1961, and says we should not do that, but she gives us a link anyway. Just in case.

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69. King Olaf Kills Klerkon in the Market Place, Novgorod, Russia 10th Century

Long after Olaf Tryggvason killed Klerkon in the Novgorod marketplace, he became king of Norway, and did things like found Trondheim. Which would be why there is this giant statue of him in the city center of Trondheim. He is holding, in this depiction of him, both a sword and a cross-topped globe. And at his feet lies the head of…well, maybe the head of Thor, who has been vanquished by Christianity. Or, maybe, the head of the servant who killed Haakon Jarl, and then tried to ingratiate himself with Olaf, who would rather have killed Haakon himself, and didn’t admire treachery. One of those guys, at any rate; accounts differ. (But it’s Thor.)

Blanca, the rescue Goffin’s Cockatoo, is a guest cohost on this episode, about that time that Olaf, before he was king of anything, whacked Klerkon, the viking who had enslaved him when he was a toddler. We discuss the Kyivan Rus, Novgorod, Vikings, blood money, the sagas, and, to Anne’s surprise, Longfellow.  Blanca the Cockatoo has a lot to say. We don’t know why. Also we don’t know what she was saying.

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68.Llewelyn the Great Hangs William de Braose, Aber Garth Celyn , Wales May 2, 1230

William de Braose was hung from a tree — one of the chronicles says it was at Crogen, in Corwen. So, maybe one of the ancestors of one of the trees you see here. (Clearly, the castle that was here has been rebuilt; the building there now is much more recent. However! You can rent it, if you would like!

So, one day in 1230, William de Braose was over at Llewelyn the Great’s castle, and he was found in Llewelyn’s private chambers with Joan, who was Llewelyn’s wife. As well as the daughter of the King of England. Now, according to Welsh law, Llewelyn would then have been in his rights to beat William up, but instead, there was a trial, and William ended up being hung from some tree or other; two are in the running for being The Tree, but who knows. At any rate, messing around with the Queen did not carry the death penalty in Wales, but Llewelyn hung him anyway, and then wrote to his widow to see if she still wanted their children to get married. And she did, so they were. And what scandalizes Michelle most about all this is that the de Braoses and the relatives of Llewelyn were so intermarried that you don’t know what to call their various relations. Also, that William and Joan and Llewelyn were all middle aged and not teenagers and really there is no excuse for all this.

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67. Peter von Hagenbach is Convicted of War Crimes, Breisach, Germany 1474

The trial of Peter von Hagenbach, as depicted by Deibold Schilling the Elder (1485), Berner Chronik des Diebold Schilling des Älteren. This is a very careful and calm trial, and everybody is thinking hard and making careful judgements. That von Hagenbach had been tortured to the point that he had to be carried around in a wheelbarrow would have ruined the mood.

Laws regulating war crimes have existed since ancient times, and trials of people who have committed them have existed as well; the trial of Peter von Hagenbach wasn’t unusual for being a trial to judge whether he has violated laws of war when he was holding down Breisach for Charles the Bold; it was unusual because it was an international trial, and because part of the judgement included the decree that if soldiers are given orders they know to be wrong, they are culpable if they follow those orders. The trial would be cited as precedent for the Nuremberg trials after World War II. We discuss the trial, we discuss war crimes, and Michelle presents a children’s book which posits von Hagenbach as a hero to be emulated. We are both scandalized.

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66. Henry of Trastámara Massacres the Jews of Toledo, Toledo Spain, 1355

The Calle de Samuel Leví, in the medieval Jewish quarter of Toledo. Photograph by José Luis Filpo Cabana (Creative Commons, through Wikimedia).

Henry of Trastámara, of Henry of Castile, the Fratricidal, was not as friendly with the Jews of Spain as his half-brother, Pedro the Cruel, or Pedro the Just (depending on your interpretation of him) had been. He’s “The Fratricidal,” by the way, because he murdered his half-brother Pedro the Cruel or Just.  Henry wasn’t yet king in 1355 — that is, he hadn’t murdered his half-brother yet — but was at war with him, and wherever Henry took some power, Jews were murdered.  The massacre at Toledo was the beginning of his crimes against the Jews; Toledo was important as a center of Jewish intellectual and religious life in Spain. So we explain this, and the background, of course. And Michelle found a recipe for medieval Challah. So there’s that.

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65. King Lambert is Assassinated (or not), Marengo, Italy 898

Here, Lambert is the second from the left, in this illustration from the Chronicon Casauriense, a collection of chronicles, from the late 12th century. Lambert is here because he was one of the four kings who protected the Abbey of San Clemente, in Casauria. There’s a pretty small window when he could have done this, since he was only king for 4 years on his own, after his dad died. And his dad isn’t one of the four kings. Anyway. That’s what he looked like! Now you know.

After a short (he was 18 when he died) but eventful and busy life, Lambert, King of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor, was assassinated during a boar hunt. That’s one rumor. The other rumor is that he fell off his horse and died. Evidence? Witnesses? Nah, not really. But we both have an opinion on this, which is that a story that has a king sleeping on the ground during a boar hunt is fundamentally flawed, and we don’t buy it.  On the other hand, Michelle found two translations of the chronicle which tells us these rumors, so she had a very good time.

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