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.
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.
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!
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.
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.)
Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel got into lots of legal trouble in 1443, 1451, 1452, and might or might not have done the things he got accused of, but he did indeed enter into a plot, along with Richard Neville, to overthrow King Edward IV, for which he ended up in prison. Too bad for him! But lucky for us, because that’s when he wrote The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of The Rounde Table, which got published, after his death, by William Caxton, which is why we know it. Caxton, by the way, made a bunch of editing decisions, one of which was to shorten the title to Le Morte d’Arthur . Your hosts explain lots of things — Malory’s legal troubles, where Le Morte d’Arthur fits into Arthurian literature, Malory’s feud with the Duke of Buckingham — and include some holy oil given to Becket by the Virgin Mary herself, and Dickens’ connection to Marshalsea prison. It’s all connected. Really.
Happy New Year! An episode without any deaths! The “chief treasure of the western world” (as the Annals of Ulster reported) was stolen from the Abbey of Kells in 1006, surprisingly, not by Vikings. The thieves tore off the cover, which was encrusted with gold and jewels, we figure, and threw away the manuscript itself, which was found 2 months and 20 days afterwards, “under a sod.” Besides the book itself, and some other book which was like it in being thrown in a bog, and Kells, why we want to go there, Michelle also tells us about finding relatives in Meath, and a high cross in the river at Kells which might be there but if so it’s impossible to find. Fun times! And we repeat: Vikings were not at fault!
It’s a Special Episode! Peter Konieczny joins us, to share his knowledge and stories about frauds in medieval London. A fake Earl’s son, who needs you to help a lot, really, no kidding. Fake government inspectors who need you to hand over the ale so they can test it, bye-bye. Bakers who steal bits of your dough so as to make extra loaves and shortchange you. Merchants who put dirt in cinnamon. London’s a scary place. Many thanks to Peter and medievalists.net.
After years of annoying each other, and fighting about the boundaries between church power and royal power, Henry II of England lost his temper with Thomas Becket, at Christmas, and said something (we don’t actually know what, exactly) which caused four knights who didn’t know him very well (and hence didn’t realize that he lost his temper all the time and would be getting over it in a while) to go down to Canterbury and murder the Archbishop. Bad career move, really. And Thomas Becket, who was then after all a martyr, started healing people and performing miracles pretty much immediately. Henry was very sorry. Or, at least, he said so. In this episode, we explain it all for you, and Michelle has a lot to say about drama. Not surprisingly.
Once the Latin Church figured out how to justify slaughtering people who weren’t believing the things they were supposed to believe, according to the Latin Church, it was a short leap from slaughtering them in the Holy Land to slaughtering them in Europe. The Cathars were being very wrong, very wrong indeed, on account of being dualists and not believing in things like baptism and the resurrection. So the Pope called a crusade against them. And the French monarchy was glad to help, since the Languedoc — where most of the Cathars were hanging out — was rich and enticing territory to annex. To France. Which is why, in the Languedoc today, they mostly speak French rather than Occitan. Even though “languedoc” is from “langue d’oc“– “language of òc.” That’s one way languages get endangered.
