After King James I stabbed William Douglas 26 times, at Stirling Castle, he got thrown out the window. This is, we gather, the window. Now it has a stained glass Douglas coat-of-arms. The place where the body landed is covered with paving tiles and has a monument. You can go see these things, if you go to Stirling.
If you are an Earl, and you are sent a safe conduct pass to go talk to the King, you’re safe, right? You can go meet them, and calmly discuss that alliance you made with a couple of other noblemen, one that is not in favor of the king and his kingly position. Calmly, yes, and then you can go home. Unless it’s 1452, and you’re in Scotland, and you’re one of the Douglases, and the king is known for having a very bad temper. In which case you might get stabbed 26 times and thrown out a window. Really, given Scots history before that, one might have been able to predict that; noblemen getting stabbed despite their safe conduct passes is sort of a theme.
The Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, holds the Cathach of St. Columba (RIA MS 12 R 33), which might be the book that St. Columba copied secretly, which might be the reason that the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne started, which was probably why St. Columba was exiled from Ireland and ended up in Scotland. We can ask ourselves, what might have happened if he’d actually asked permission to copy the book? And we will never know.
It’s very rude to copy books secretly whilst staying with one of your old teachers, even if you are very careful not to harm the books, and don’t use cheese sandwiches as bookmarks. That’s what we learn from this episode. Also that the ancient kings of Ireland liked to use cattle as examples of just about everything. And that the O’Neills were willing to go to war with the High King over a book. Michelle and Anne discuss the meaning of copyright law, which really has nothing to do with copying a manuscript in 6th century Ireland. Though to every cow belongs her calf, and to every book its copy. We guess. In good news, there’s no torture. Though there are some deaths — about 3,000, at the Battle of the Book. Darn.
The famous portrait of Christopher Marlowe might not be him at all. Of course. It was found under some rubble at the Master’s Lodge at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where Marlowe was a student, and it has an inscription saying that it’s 1525 and the sitter is 21, and Marlowe was that age at that time. The incredible sumptuousness of the clothing is an issue, though; Marlowe, theoretically, could not have afforded that outfit. Nor would he have been technically allowed it, since it would have denoted someone of higher class than he. But Marlowe was already working for the government, and Marlowe never minded silly things like rules. And lord knows he had attitude.
At the end of May 1593, the most important and influential playwright in England died at the age of 29. Rumor and gossip and a great many history books and literature collections would say, over the centuries, that he died in a tavern brawl. To be fair, his earlier history with drunken brawl involvement makes this plausible. But the evidence — or rather, the lack of evidence — given at the inquest makes it clear that he was being got rid of. Oh, besides being a writer, he was involved in Walsingham’s Elizabethan espionage net. There’s that. In this special episode, stepping out of the middle ages and into the early modern era, we discuss the evidence. Also Michelle has found some musicals. Yikes.
Maybe you loved her, maybe you hated her, but everybody agreed that Joanna of Naples was quite lovely. In this fresco she is being both lovely and pious. And well she might be; the fresco, by Niccolò di Tommaso, is in the Carthusisan monastery of San Giacomo — and she had donated the land for it.
Joanna of Naples had a hell of a life. There were unhappy marriages, there were murders, there were invasions, there was the Black Death, there was the Papal Schism, and there was a tangled ball of plots and tussles over the inheritance of the Neapolitan throne. At the end of it all, she was murdered and thrown into a well. And then she enjoyed hundreds of years of a Very Bad Reputation. But recently, scholarship has turned the tide! She was an excellent leader, who was beleaguered by a whole lot of men across Europe, though mostly in her bedchamber, who thought that really, women shouldn’t be rulers! Michelle gets quite passionate about this. And manages to convince Anne as well, though for Anne the jury is still out on whether or not she was in on the plot to throw her first husband through a window.
Here we have a quiet little moment; undergraduates at the University of Paris are studiously paying close attention to their philosophy teacher, whilst following along in the text books that they have copied out from rented texts. Right now, this minute, they are behaving. Later, when they are drunkenly demolishing the local tavern, the townspeople will know they are university students, because of their tonsures, their clerical robes, all that Latin, and the fact that they are about 15 years old. This illustration is from the late 14th century (Castres, bibliothèque municipale, ms. 3, f. 277r), but things were pretty much the same 200 years earlier.
First some undergraduates got drunk over in a tavern, and then they didn’t pay, and so the townspeople beat them up. That was Shrove Tuesday. Fair enough. On Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, when they were supposed to be repenting and thinking about their sinful lives, the students got some buddies together and went and trashed the pub, beat up the taverner, and looted and trashed the nearby businesses. But the townspeople couldn’t do anything about it, cause the local law couldn’t do anything to the students, and the church wouldn’t. So the townspeople went to the Queen, who said the students should be punished. Which the town guards interpreted as a command to kill whatever random students they came across. Which they then did. And then the whole university got very mad and disbanded and everybody left town, and the townspeople had lots fewer customers than they had earlier. Well! That was Lent, 1229, Paris. A very holy time, as you can see. Oh, and by the way. The strike wasn’t the crime. All that Lenten hoohah was.
Boy oh boy, was the 19th century obsessed with imagining scenes of lords exercising their right to the bride on the night of her wedding! Obesessed, I tell you. Here, in an interpretation of the myth from 1872 by Jules Arsene Garnier, we have the reluctant bride, the obedient but mournful groom, the monks from some nearby abbey, come to enforce the rules, a bunch of overdressed nobles hanging out and watching the fun, the obligatory medieval beggar — is he actually asking the bride for a handout? cause I think that’s not happening — and the lord himself. Note the feather on the lord’s cap, which, unlike feathers of this sort usually, is standing up. Note also his shoes, the absolute worst example of an interpretation of medieval footwear that your hosts have ever seen. Anyway. You’ll be glad to know this never happened.
Everybody knows that the Droit de Seigneur (the right of a feudal lord to sleep with a bride on her wedding night) existed. Except it didn’t. Why, then, did Ferdinand II of Aragon abolish it in 1486? Why indeed. We discuss this. Also we discuss the history of the first night myth. And Michelle explains why you should buy books when you see them, instead of waiting till later.
19th C. artists loved the death of William Rufus, as a subject. Here, Alexander Davis Cooper gives us all the best embellishments of the tale: the fallen King gets ready to pull the arrow out of his own breast; Tyrell is escaping on his way to France; and the stag seems to be not anywhere near. Additions are the two horrified companions and the distraught hunting dog. Some versions of the New Forest, though, have lots more trees.
One day the King of England went out hunting, and did not come back, on account of having been shot by one of his hunting companions. Henry, his younger brother, became King in just a few days, and there was no inquest. Nobody at the time thought anything of this, really, because dying whilst hunting in the New Forest was pretty common, but later, lots of people Got Suspicious. We discuss this. Also the fact that the Face of Lucca doesn’t really have anything to do with the Face of Bo.
“Launching the Currach” (Paul Henry, c1911, National Gallery of Ireland) shows us why, when the Irish pirates captured the young man who would become St. Patrick, they were not using currachs. Later, some currachs would have masts and sails and be somewhat bigger. But in the late 5ch century, really, you needed ships, if you were going to go kidnap hundreds of people from Roman Britain and take them back to Ireland.
In honor of St. Patrick’s day, we have no snakes, no druids. We talk about Irish pirates capturing young Patricius, which was a crime, and then St. Patrick being all remorseful about something which was some sort of crime but nobody knows what it was, and then, having done all that, we talk a whole lot about St. Patrick movies, including a silent film from 1920 with which we are totally impressed, and another from 2000, which involves David Tennant and has us bemused. Also there is information about currachs, which have nothing to do with St. Patrick being kidnapped. Happy St. Patrick day!
A reconstruction of what Klaus Störtebeker, the most famous of the Victual Brothers, might have looked like, built on the skull which is probably his. You can go see it at the Hamburg Museum, Hamburg being the place where he and several of his comrades were executed. You might think that, since he was a pirate, that he’s reviled. Nope. He’s both famous and beloved. Go figure.
After being hired to help run victuals into Stockholm through Queen Margaret of Denmark’s blockade, the Victual Brothers turned to piracy, decimating the herring trade and annoying the Hanseatic League. Anne explains all that stuff, and Michelle waxes poetic about the medieval cog, which was apparently an awesome sort of ship. And as a special treat, we append the recording we made wherein we figured out why our sound issues hadn’t been solved.
Here we see the remains of Troarn Abbaye St Martin, where Mabel de Bellême was buried after Hugh Bunel and his brothers cut her head off. The Abbey was doing pretty well until the French Revolution. Hugh and his brothers burnt the bridge over the Dives behind them, whilst escaping. After it got rebuilt, the bridge did pretty well, too, until the 3rd Parachute Squadron destroyed it on D-Day. Normandy has seen a lot of destruction over the centuries. The Abbey is now an historical site, but Mabel’s tomb is gone.
Mabel de Bellême, wealthy Norman landowner, belonged to the de Bellême family. They were infamous for cruelty and general wickedness. Mabel exercised her share of the wickedness and cruelty; eventually one of the many Normans she impoverished gathered his brothers and murdered her. We discuss the de Bellêmes, when we’re not discussing Orderic Vitalis, the monk who chronicled their history. (For those of you who have forgotten, it’s Orderic who thought that the White Ship crashed on account of sodomy, rather than the rock in the harbor and everybody being drunk in the middle of the night.)
